"the world,The beauty and the wonder and the power,The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,Changes, surprises,"A
"the world,
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,"A
A:Fra Lippo Lippi.
A:Fra Lippo Lippi.
lead him back to God, who made it all.
He is essentially a witness to the divine element in the world.
It is the rediscovery of this divine element, after its expulsion by the age of Deism and doubt, that has given to this century its poetic grandeur. Unless we regard Burke as the herald of the new era, we may say that England first felt the breath of the returning spirit in the poems of Shelley and Wordsworth.
"The One remains, the many change and pass;Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of eternity,Until death tramples it to fragments."B
"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments."B
B:Adonais.
B:Adonais.
"And I have felt," says Wordsworth,
"A presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things."C
"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."C
C:Tintern Abbey.
C:Tintern Abbey.
Such notes as these could not be struck by Pope, nor be understood by the age of prose. Still they are only the prelude of the fuller song of Browning. Whether he be a greater poet than these or not,—a question whose answer can benefit nothing, for each poet has his own worth, and reflects by his own facet the universal truth—his poetry contains in it larger elements, and the promise of a deeper harmony from the harsher discords of his more stubborn material. Even where their spheres touch, Browning held by the artistic truth in a different manner. To Shelley, perhaps the most intensely spiritual of all our poets,
"That light whose smile kindles the universe,That beauty in which all things work and move,"
"That light whose smile kindles the universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,"
was an impassioned sentiment, a glorious intoxication; to Browning it was a conviction, reasoned and willed, possessing the whole man, and held in the sober moments when the heart is silent. "The heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world" was lightened for Wordsworth, only when he was far from the haunts of men, and free from the "dreary intercourse of daily life"; but Browning weaved his song of hope right amidst the wail and woe of man's sin and wretchedness. For Wordsworth "sensations sweet, felt in the blood and felt along the heart, passed into his purer mind with tranquil restoration," and issued "in a serene and blessed mood"; but Browning's poetry is not merely the poetry of the emotions however sublimated.He starts with the hard repellent fact, crushes by sheer force of thought its stubborn rind, presses into it, and brings forth the truth at its heart. The greatness of Browning's poetry is in its perceptive grip: and in nothing is he more original than in the manner in which he takes up his task, and assumes his artistic function. In his postponement of feeling to thought we recognize a new poetic method, the significance of which we cannot estimate as yet. But, although we may fail to apprehend the meaning of the new method he employs, we cannot fail to perceive the fact, which is not less striking, that the region from which he quarries his material is new.
And yet he does not break away abruptly from his predecessors. His kinship with them, in that he recognizes the presence of God in nature, is everywhere evident. We quote one passage, scarcely to be surpassed by any of our poets, as indicative of his power of dealing with the supernaturalism of nature.
"The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,And the earth changes like a human face;The molten ore burst up among the rocks,Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches brightIn hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask—God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edgedWith foam, white as the bitter lip of hate,When, in the solitary waste, strange groupsOf young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,Staring together with their eyes on flame—God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride.Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passesOver its breast to waken it, rare verdureBuds tenderly upon rough banks, betweenThe withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face."Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the larkSoars up and up, shivering for very joy;Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gullsFlit where the strand is purple with its tribeOf nested limpets; savage creatures seekTheir loves in wood and plain—and God renewsHis ancient rapture. Thus He dwells in all,From life's minute beginnings, up at lastTo man—the consummation of this schemeOf being, the completion of this sphere of life."A
"The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
The molten ore burst up among the rocks,
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright
In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask—
God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged
With foam, white as the bitter lip of hate,
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups
Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,
Staring together with their eyes on flame—
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride.
Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face.
"Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews
His ancient rapture. Thus He dwells in all,
From life's minute beginnings, up at last
To man—the consummation of this scheme
Of being, the completion of this sphere of life."A
A:Paracelsus.
A:Paracelsus.
Such passages as these contain neither the rapt, reflective calm of Wordsworth's solemn tones, nor the ethereal intoxication of Shelley's spirit-music; but there is in them the same consciousness of the infinite meaning of natural facts. And beyond this, there is also, in the closing lines, a hint of a new region for art. Shelley and Wordsworth were the poets of Nature, as all truly say; Browning was the poet of the human soul. For Shelley, the beauty in which all things work and move was well-nigh "quenched by the eclipsing curse of the birth of man"; and Wordsworth lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains, meadows, hills and groves, while he kept grave watch o'er man's mortality, and saw the shades of the prison-house gather round him. From the life of man they garnered nought but mad indignation, or mellowed sadness. It was a foolish and furious strife withunknown powers fought in the dark, from which the poet kept aloof, for he could not see that God dwelt amidst the chaos. But Browning found "harmony in immortal souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay." He found nature crowned in man, though man was mean and miserable. At the heart of the most wretched abortion of wickedness there was the mark of the loving touch of God. Shelley turned away from man; Wordsworth paid him rare visits, like those of a being from a strange world, made wise and sad with looking at him from afar; Browning dwelt with him. He was a comrade in the fight, and ever in the van of man's endeavour bidding him be of good cheer. He was a witness for God in the midmost dark, where meet in deathless struggle the elemental powers of right and wrong. For God is present for him, not only in the order and beauty of nature, but in the world of will and thought. Beneath the caprice and wilful lawlessness of individual action, he saw a beneficent purpose which cannot fail, but "has its way with man, not he with it."
Now this was a new world for poetry to enter into; a new depth to penetrate with hope; and Browning was the first of modern poets to
"StoopInto the vast and unexplored abyss,Strenuously beatingThe silent boundless regions of the sky."
"Stoop
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
Strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky."
It is also a new world for religion and morality;and to understand it demands a deeper insight into the fundamental elements of human life.
To show this in a proximately adequate manner, we should be obliged, as already hinted, to connect the poet's work, not merely with that of his English predecessors, but with the deeper and more comprehensive movement of the thought of Germany since the time of Kant. It would be necessary to indicate how, by breaking a way through the narrow creeds and equally narrow scepticism of the previous age, the new spirit extended the horizon of man's active and contemplative life, and made him free of the universe, and the repository of the past conquests of his race. It proposed to man the great task of solving the problem of humanity, but it strengthened him with its past achievement, and inspired him with the conviction of its boundless progress. It is not that the significance of the individual or the meaning of his endeavour is lost. Under this new view, man has still to fight for his own hand, and it is still recognized that spirit is always burdened with its own fate and cannot share its responsibility. Morality does not give way to religion or pass into it, and there is a sense in which the individual is always alone in the sphere of duty.
But from this new point of view the individual is re-explained for us, and we begin to understand that he is the focus of a light which is universal, "one more incarnation of the mind of God." His moral task is no longer to seek his own in the old sense, but to elevate humanity; for it is only bytaking this circuit that he can come to his own. Such a task as this is a sufficiently great one to occupy all time; but it is to humanity in him that the task belongs, and it will therefore be achieved. This is no new one-sidedness. It does not mean, to those who comprehend it, the supplanting of the individual thought by the collective thought, or the substitution of humanity for man. The universal isinthe particular, the factisthe law. There is no collision between the whole and the part, for the whole lives in the part. As each individual plant has its own life and beauty and worth, although the universe has conspired to bring it into being; so also, and in a far higher degree, man has his own duty and his own dignity, although he is but the embodiment of forces, natural and spiritual, which have come from the endless past. Like a letter in a word, or a word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context;but the sentence is meaningless without him. "Rays from all round converge in him," and he has no power except that which has been lent to him; but all the same, nay, all the more, he must
"Think as if man never thought before!Act as if all creation hung attentOn the acting of such faculty as his."A
"Think as if man never thought before!
Act as if all creation hung attent
On the acting of such faculty as his."A
A:Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.
A:Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.
His responsibility, his individuality, is not less, but greater, in that he can, in his thought and moral action, command the forces that the race has stored for him. The great man speaks the thought of hispeople, and his invocations as their priest are just the expression of their dumb yearnings. And even the mean and insignificant man is what he is, in virtue of the humanity which is blurred and distorted within him; and he can shed his insignificance and meanness, only by becoming a truer vehicle for that humanity.
Thus, when spirit is spiritually discerned, it is seen that man is bound to man in a union closer than any physical organism can show; while "the individual," in the old sense of a beingopposedto society andopposedto the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought, not discoverable anywhere, because not real. And, on the other hand, society is no longer "collective," but so organic that the whole is potentially in every part—an organismoforganisms.
The influence of this organic idea in every department of thought which concerns itself with man is not to be measured. It is already fast changing all the practical sciences of man—economics, politics, ethics and religion. The material, being newly interpreted, is wrought into a new purpose, and revelation is once more bringing about a reformation. But human action in its ethical aspect is, above all, charged with a new significance. The idea of duty has received an expansion almost illimitable, and man himself has thereby attained new worth and dignity—for what is duty except a dignity and opportunity, man's chance of being good? When we contrast this view of the life of man as the life of humanity in him, with the oldindividualism, we may say that morality also has at last, in Bacon's phrase, passed from the narrow seas into the open ocean. And after all, the greatest achievement of our age may be not that it has established the sciences of nature, but that it has made possible the science of man. We have, at length, reached a point of view from which we may hope to understand ourselves. Law, order, continuity, in human action—the essential pre-conditions of a moral science—were beyond the reach of an individualistic theory. It left to ethical writers no choice but that of either sacrificing man to law, or law to man; of denying either the particular or the universal element in his nature. Naturalism did the first. Intuitionism, the second. The former made human action thereaction of a natural agent on the incitement of natural forces. It made man a mere object, athingcapable of being affected by other things through his faculty of being pained or pleased; an object acting in obedience to motives that had an external origin, just like any other object. The latter theory cut man free from the world and his fellows, endowed him with a will that had no law, and a conscience that was dogmatic; and thereby succeeded in stultifying both law and morality.
But this new consciousness of the relation of man to mankind and the world takes him out of his isolation and still leaves him free. It relates men to one another in a humanity, which is incarnated anew in each of them. It elevates the individual above thedistinctions of time; it treasures up the past in him as the active energy of his knowledge and morality in the present, and also as the potency of the ideal life of the future. On this view, the individual and the race are possible only through each other.
This fundamental change in our way of looking at the life of man is bound to abolish the ancient landmarks and bring confusion for a time. Out of the new conception,i.e.,out of the idea of evolution, has sprung the tumult as well as the strength of our time. The present age is moved with thoughts beyond the reach of its powers: great aspirations for the well-being of the people and high ideals of social welfare flash across its mind, to be followed again by thicker darkness. There is hardly any limit to its despair or hope. It has a far larger faith in the destiny of man than any of its predecessors, and yet it issureof hardly anything—except that the ancient rules of human life are false. Individualism is now detected as scepticism and moral chaos in disguise. We know that the old methods are no longer of use. We cannot now cut ourselves free of the fate of others. The confused cries for help that are heard on every hand are recognized as the voices of our brethren; and we now know that our fate is involved in theirs, and that the problem of their welfare is also ours. We grapple with social questions at last, and recognize that the issues of life and death lie in the solution of these enigmas. Legislators and economists, teachers of religion and socialists, are all alike social reformers.Philanthropy has taken a deeper meaning; and all sects bear its banner. But their forces are beaten back by the social wretchedness, for they have not found the sovereign remedy of a great idea; and the result is in many ways sad enough. Our social remedies often work mischief; for we degrade those whom we would elevate, and in our charity forget justice. We insist on the rights of the people and the duties of the privileged classes, and thereby tend to teach greed to those for whom we labour, and goodness to those whom we condemn. The task that lies before us is plain: we want the welfare of the people as a whole. But we fail to grasp the complex social elements together, and our very remedies tend to sunder them. We know that the public good will not be obtained by separating man from man, securing each unit in a charmed circle of personal rights, and protecting it from others by isolation. We must find a place for the individual within the social organism, and we know now that this organism has not, as our fathers seemed to think, the simple constitution of a wooden doll. Society is not put together mechanically, and the individual cannot be outwardly attached to it, if he is to be helped, He must rather share its life, be the heir of the wealth it has garnered for him in the past, and participate in its onward movement. Between this new social ideal and our attainment, between the magnitude of our social duties and the resources of intellect and will at our command, there lies a chasm which we despair of bridging over.
The characteristics of this epoch faithfully reflect themselves in the pages of Carlyle, with whose thoughts those of Browning are immediately connected. It was Carlyle who first effectively revealed to England the continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual action. Seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, and, amidst much smoke and din, showed his English readers something of the greatness of the moral world. He gave us a philosophy of clothes, penetrated through symbols to the immortal ideas, condemned all shibboleths, and revealed the soul of humanity behind the external modes of man's activity. He showed us, in a word, that the world is spiritual, that loyalty to duty is the foundation of all human good, and that national welfare rests on character. After reading him, it is impossible for any one who reflects on the nature of duty to ask, "Am I my brother's keeper?" He not only imagined, but knew, how "all things the minutest that man does, minutely influence all men, and the very look of his face blesses or curses whom-so it lights on, and so generates ever new blessing or new cursing. I say, there is not a Red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipeg, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical factthat the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe." Carlyle dealt the deathblow to the "laissez-faire" theory rampant in his day, and made each individual responsible for the race. He has demonstrated that the sphere of duty does not terminate with ourselves and our next-door neighbours. There will be no pure air for the correctest Levite to breathe, till the laws of sanitation have been applied to the moral slums. "Ye are my brethren," said he, and he adds, as if conscious of his too denunciatory way of dealing with them, "hence my rage and sorrow."
But his consciousness of brotherhood with all men brought only despair for him. He saw clearly the responsibility of man, but not the dignity which that implies; he felt the weight of the burden of humanity upon his own soul, and it crushed him, for he forgot that all the good of the world was there to help him bear it, and that "One with God is a majority." He taught only the half-truth, that all men are united on the side of duty, and that the spiritual life of each is conditional on striving to save all. But he neglected the complement of this truth, and forgot the greatness of the beings on whom so great a duty could be laid. He therefore dignifies humanity only to degrade it again. The "twenty millions" each must try to save "are mostly fools." But how fools, when they can have such a task? Is it not true, on the contrary, that no man ever saw a duty beyond his strength, and that "man can because heought" and ought only because he can? The evils an individual cannot overcome are the moral opportunities of his fellows. The good are not lone workers of God's purposes, and there is no need of despair. Carlyle, like the ancient prophet, was too conscious of his own mission, and too forgetful of that of others. "I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts; because the children of Israel have forgotten Thy covenant, thrown down Thine alters, and slain Thy prophets, and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away." He needed, beside the consciousness of his prophetic function, a consciousness of brotherhood with humbler workers. "Yet I have left Me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him." It would have helped him had he remembered, that there were on all sides other workers engaged on the temple not made with hands, although he could not hear the sound of their hammers for the din he made himself. It would have changed his despair into joy, and his pity into a higher moral quality, had he been able to believe that, amidst all the millions against whom he hurled his anathemas, there is no one who, let him do what he will, is not constrained to illustrate either the folly and wretchedness of sin, or the glory of goodness. It is not given to any one, least of all to the wicked, to hold back the onward movement of the race, or to destroy the impulse for good which is planted within it.
But Carlyle saw only one side of the truth about man's moral nature and destiny. He knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. That morality is the essence of things, that wrongmustprove its weakness, that right is the only might, is reiterated and illustrated on all his pages; they are now commonplaces of speculation on matters of history, if not conscious practical principles which guide its makers. But Carlyle never inquired into the character of this moral necessity, and he overlooked the beneficence which places death at the heart of sin. He never saw wrong except on its way to execution, or in the death throes; but he did not look in the face of the gentle power that led it on to death. He saw the necessity which rules history, but not the beneficent character of that necessity.
The same limitations marred his view of duty, which was his greatest revelation to his age. He felt its categorical authority and its binding force. But the power which imposed the duty was an alien power, awful in majesty, infinite in might, a "great task-master"; and the duty itself was an outer law, written in letters of flame across the high heavens, in comparison with which man's action at its best sank into failure. His only virtue is obedience, and his last rendering even of himself is"unprofitable servant." In this he has much of the combined strength and weakness of the old Scottish Calvinism. "He stands between the individual and the Infinite without hope or guide. He has a constant disposition to crush the human being by comparing him with God," said Mazzini, with marvellous penetration. "From his lips, at times so daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the Breton Mariner—'My God protect me! My bark is so small, and Thy ocean so vast.'" His reconciliation of God and man was incomplete: God seemed to him to have manifested Himselftoman but notinman. He did not see that "the Eternity which is before and behind us is also within us."
But the moral law which commands is just the reflection of the aspirations of progressive man, who always creates his own horizon. The extension of duty is the objective counterpart of man's growth; a proof of victory and not of failure, a sign that man is mounting upwards. And, if so, it is irrational to infer the impossibility of success from the magnitude of the demands of a moral law, which is itself the promise of a better future. The hard problems set for us by our social environment are recognized as set by ourselves; for, in matters of morality, the eye sees only what the heart prompts. The very statement of the difficulty contains the potency of its solution; for evil, when understood, is on the way towards being overcome, and the good, when seen, contains the promise of its own fulfilment. It is ignorance which is ruinous, as when the cries ofhumanity beat against a deaf ear; and we can take a comfort, denied to Carlyle, from the fact that he has made us awake to our social duties. He has let loose the confusion upon us, and it is only natural that we should at first be overcome by a sense of bewildered helplessness. But this very sense contains the germ of hope, and England is struggling to its feet to wrestle with its wrongs. Carlyle has brought us within sight of our future, and we are now taking a step into it. He has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there, and was denied the view from Pisgah.
Now, this view was given to Robert Browning, and he broke out into a song of victory, whose strains will give strength and comfort to many in the coming time. That his solution of the evils of life is not final, may at once be admitted. There are elements in the problem of which he has taken no account, and which will force those who seek light on the deeper mysteries of man's moral nature, to go beyond anything that the poet has to say. Even the poet himself grows, at least in some directions, less confident of the completeness of his triumph as he grows older. His faith in the good does not fail, but it is the faith of one who confesses to ignorance, and links himself to his finitude. Still, so thorough is his conviction of the moral purpose of life, of the certainty of the good towards which man is moving, and of the beneficence of the power which is at work everywhere in the world, that many of his poems ring like the triumphant songs of Luther.
"Gladness be with thee, Helper of the World!I think this is the authentic sign and sealOf Godship, that it ever waxes glad,And more glad, until gladness blossoms, burstsInto a rage to suffer for mankind,And recommence at sorrow."A
"Gladness be with thee, Helper of the World!
I think this is the authentic sign and seal
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
And recommence at sorrow."A
A:Balaustion's Adventure.
A:Balaustion's Adventure.
I have tried to show that one of the distinctive features of the present era is the stress it lays on the worth of the moral life of man, and the new significance it has given to that life by its view of the continuity of history. This view finds expression, on its social and ethical side, in the pages of Carlyle and Browning: both of whom are interested exclusively, one may almost say, in the evolution of human character; and both of whom, too, regard that evolution as the realization by man of the purposes, greater than man's, which rule in the world. And, although neither of them developed the organic view of humanity, which is implied in their doctrines, into an explicit philosophy, still the moral life of the individual is for each of them the infinite life in the finite. The meaning of the universe ismoral, its last might is rightness; and the task of man is to catch up that meaning, convert it into his own motive, and thereby make it the source of his actions, the inmost principle of his life. This, fully grasped, will bring the finite and the infinite, morality and religion, together, and reconcile them.
But the reconciliation which Carlyle sought to effect was incomplete on every side—even within the sphere of duty, with which alone, as moralist, he specially concerned himself. The moral law was imposed upon man by a higher power, in the presence of whom man was awed and crushed; for that power had stinted man's endowment, and set him to fight a hopeless battle against endless evil. God was everywhere around man, and the universe was just the expression of His will—a will inexorably bent on the good, so that evil could not prevail; but God was notwithinman, except as a voice of conscience issuing imperatives and threats. An infinite duty was laid upon a finite being, and its weight made him break out into a cry of despair.
Browning, however, not only sought to bring about the reconciliation, but succeeded, in so far as that is possiblein terms of mere feeling. His poetry contains suggestions that the moral will without is also a force within man; that the power which makes for righteousness in the world has penetrated into, or rather manifests itselfas, man. Intelligence and will, the reason which apprehends the nature of things, and the original impulse of self-conscious life which issues in action, are God's power in man;so that God is realizing Himself in the deeds of man, and human history is just His return to Himself. Outer law and inner motive are, for the poet, manifestations of the same beneficent purpose; and instead of duty in the sense of an autocratic imperative, or beneficent tyranny, he finds, deep beneath man's foolishness and sin, a constant tendency towards the good which is bound up with the very nature of man's reason and will. If man could only understand himself he would find without him no limiting necessity, but the manifestation of a law which is one with his own essential being. A beneficent power has loaded the dice, according to the epigram, so that the chances of failure and victory are not even; for man's nature is itself a divine endowment, one with the power that rules his life, and man must finally reach through error to truth, and through sin to holiness. In the language of theology, it may be said that the moral process is the spiritual incarnation of God; it is God's goodness as love, effecting itself in human action. Hence Carlyle's cry of despair is turned by Browning into a song of victory. While the former regards the struggle between good and evil as a fixed battle, in which the forces are immovably interlocked, the latter has the consciousness of battling against a retreating foe; and the conviction of coming triumph gives joyous vigour to every stroke. Browning lifted morality into an optimism, and translated its battle into song. This was the distinctive mark and mission which give to him such power of moral inspiration.
In order, however, to estimate the value of this feature of the poet's work, it is necessary to look more closely into the character of his faith in the good. Merely to attribute to him an optimistic creed is to say very little; for the worth, or worthlessness, of such a creed depends upon its content—upon its fidelity to the facts of human life, the clearness of its consciousness of the evils it confronts, and the intensity of its realism.
There is a sense, and that a true one, in which it may be said that all men are optimists; for such a faith is implied in every conscious and deliberate action of man. There is no deed which is not an attempt to realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously he may misunderstand its nature. Final and absolute disbelief in an ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an impossibility in fact. The one stultifies action, and asserts an effect without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other stultifies intellectual activity: and both views imply that the critic has so escaped the conditions of human life, as to be able to pass a condemnatory judgment upon them. The belief that a harmonious relation between the self-conscious agent and the supreme good is possible, underlies the practical activity of man; just as the belief in the unity of thought and being underlies his intellectual activity. A moral order—that is, an order of rational ends—is postulated in all humanactions, and we act at all only in virtue of it,—just as truly as we move and work only in virtue of the forces which make the spheres revolve, or think by help of the meaning which presses upon us from the thought-woven world, through all the pores of sense. A true ethics, like a true psychology, or a true science of nature, must lean upon metaphysics, and it cannot pretend to startab initio. We live in the Copernican age, which puts the individual in a system, in obedience to whose laws he finds his welfare. And this is simply the assertion of an optimistic creed, for it implies a harmonious world.
But, though this is true, it must be remembered that this faith is a prophetic anticipation, rather than acquired knowledge. We are only on the way towards reconstructing in thought the fact which we are, or towards bringing into clear knowledge the elemental power which manifests itself within us as thought, desire, and deed. And, until this is achieved, we have no full right to an optimistic creed. The revelation of the unity which pervades all things, even in the natural world, will be the last attainment of science; and the reconciliation of nature and man and God is still further in the future, and will be the last triumph of philosophy. During all the interval the world will be a scene of warring elements; and poetry, religion, and philosophy can only hold forth a promise, and give to man a foretaste of ultimate victory. And in this state of things eventheirassurance oftenfalters. Faith lapses into doubt, poetry becomes a wail for a lost god, and its votary exhibits, "through Europe to the AEtolian shore, the pageant of his bleeding heart." The optimistic faith is, as a rule, only a hope and a desire, a "Grand Perhaps," which knows no defence against the critical understanding, and sinks dumb when questioned. If, in the form of a religious conviction, its assurance is more confident, then, too often, it rests upon the treacherous foundations of authoritative ignorance, which crumble into dust beneath the blows of awakened and liberated reason. Nay, if by the aid of philosophy we turn our optimism into a faith held by reason, a fact before which the intellect, as well as the heart, worships and grows glad, it still is for most of us only a general hypothesis, a mere leap to God which spurns the intermediate steps, a universal without content, a bare form that lacks reality.
Such an optimism, such a plunge into the pure blue and away from facts, was Emerson's. Caroline Fox tells a story of him and Carlyle which reveals this very pointedly. It seems that Carlyle once led the serene philosopher through the abominations of the streets of London at midnight, asking him with grim humour at every few steps, "Do you believe in the devilnow?" Emerson replied that the more he saw of the English people the greater and better he thought them. This little incident lays bare the limits of both these great men. Where the one saw, the other was blind. To theone there was the misery and the universal mirk; to the other, the pure white beam was scarcely broken. Carlyle believed in the good, beyond all doubt: he fought his great battle in its strength and won, but "he was sorely wounded." Emerson was Sir Galahad, blind to all but the Holy Grail, his armour spotless-white, his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and heat. But his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory. His victory was not won in the enemy's citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos, but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination. And, in consequence, Emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along which burthened humanity meanly toils.
But Browning's optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher, protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an invisible garment of contemplative holiness. It is a conviction which has sustained shocks of criticism and the test of facts; and it therefore, both for the poet and his readers, fulfils a mission beyond the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good. Its power will be felt and its value recognized by those who have themselves confronted the contradictions of human life and known their depths.
No lover of Browning's poetry can miss the vigorous manliness of the poet's own bearing, or failto recognize the strength that flows from his joyous, fearless personality, and the might of his intellect and heart. "When British literature," said Carlyle of Scott and Cobbett, "lay all puking and sprawling in Wertherism, Byronism and other Sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us two healthy men." And he breaks out into a eulogy of mere health, of "the just balance of faculties that radiates a glad light outwards, enlightening and embellishing all things." But he finds it easy to account for the health of these men: they had never faced the mystery of existence. Such healthiness we find in Browning, although he wrote with Carlyle at his side, and within earshot of the infinite wail of this moral fatalist. And yet, the word health is inadequate to convey the depth of the joyous meaning which the poet found in the world. His optimism was not a constitutional and irreflective hopefulness, to be accounted for on the ground that "the great mystery of existence was not great to him: did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish." There are, indeed, certain rash and foolish persons who pretend to trace Browning's optimism to his mixed descent; but there is a "pause in the leading and the light" of those wiseacres, who pretend to trace moral and mental characteristics to physiological antecedents. They cannot quite catch a great man in the making, nor, even by the help of evolution, say anything wiser about genius than that "thewind bloweth where it listeth." No doubt the poet's optimism indicates a native sturdiness of head and heart. He had the invaluable endowment of a pre-disposition to see the sunny side of life, and a native tendency to revolt against that subjectivity, which is the root of our misery in all its forms. He had little respect for theWelt-schmerz,and can scarcely be civil to the hero of the bleeding heart.
"Sinning, sorrowing, despairing,Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked—Should I give my woes an airing,—Where's one plague that claims respect?"Have you found your life distasteful?My life did, and does, smack sweet.Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?Mine I saved and hold complete.Do your joys with age diminish?When mine fail me I'll complain.Must in death your daylight finish?My sun sets to rise again."I find earth not grey but rosy,Heaven not grim but fair of hue.Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.Do I stand and stare? All's blue."A
"Sinning, sorrowing, despairing,Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked—Should I give my woes an airing,—Where's one plague that claims respect?
"Sinning, sorrowing, despairing,
Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked—
Should I give my woes an airing,—
Where's one plague that claims respect?
"Have you found your life distasteful?My life did, and does, smack sweet.Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?Mine I saved and hold complete.Do your joys with age diminish?When mine fail me I'll complain.Must in death your daylight finish?My sun sets to rise again."I find earth not grey but rosy,Heaven not grim but fair of hue.Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.Do I stand and stare? All's blue."A
"Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.
"I find earth not grey but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."A
A:At the Mermaid.
A:At the Mermaid.
Browning was no doubt least of all men inclined to pout at his "plain bun"; on the contrary, he was awake to the grandeur of his inheritance, and valued most highly "his life-rent of God's universe with the tasks it offered and the tools to do them with." But his optimism sent its roots deeper than any "disposition"; it penetrated beyond mere health of body andmind, as it did beyond a mere sentiment of God's goodness. Optimisms resting on these bases are always weak; for the former leaves man naked and sensitive to the evils that crowd round him when the powers of body and mind decay, and the latter is, at best, useful only for the individual who possesses it, and it breaks down under the stress of criticism and doubt. Browning's optimism is a great element in English literature, because it opposes with such strength the shocks that come from both these quarters. His joyousness is the reflectionin feelingof a conviction as to the nature of things, which he had verified in the darkest details of human life, and established for himself in the face of the gravest objections that his intellect was able to call forth. In fact, its value lies, above all, in this,—that it comes after criticism, after the condemnation which Byron and Carlyle had passed, each from his own point of view, on the world and on man.
The need of an optimism is one of the penalties which reflection brings. Natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world. The fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man; he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force Nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now first felt. Optimism is the expression of man's new reconciliation with his world; as the opposite doctrine of pessimism is the consciousness of an unresolved contradiction.Both are a judgment passed upon the world, from the point of view of its adequacy or inadequacy to meet demands, arising from needs which the individual has discovered in himself.
Now, as I have tried to show, one of the main characteristics of the opening years of the present era was its deeper intuition of the significance of human life, and, therefore, by implication, of its wants and claims. The spiritual nature of man, lost sight of during the preceding age, was re-discovered; and the first and immediate consequence was that man, as man, attained infinite worth. "Man was born free," cried Rousseau, with a conviction which swept all before it; "he has original, inalienable, and supreme rights against all things which can set themselves against him." And Rousseau's countrymen believed him. There was not aSans-culotteamongst them all but held his head high, being creation's lord; and history can scarcely show a parallel to their great burst of joy and hope, as they ran riot in their new-found inheritance, from which they had so long been excluded. They flung themselves upon the world, as if they would "glut their sense" upon it.
"ExpendEternity upon its shows,Flung them as freely as one roseOut of a summer's opulence."A
"Expend
Eternity upon its shows,
Flung them as freely as one rose
Out of a summer's opulence."A
A:Easter Day.
A:Easter Day.
But the very discovery that man is spirit, which is the source of all his rights, is also an implicitdiscovery that he has outgrown the resources of the natural world. The infinite hunger of a soul cannot be satisfied with the things of sense. The natural world is too limited even for Carlyle's shoe-black; nor is it surprising that Byron should find it a waste, and dolefully proclaim his disappointment to much-admiring mankind. Now, both Carlyle and Browning apprehended the cause of the discontent, and both endured the Byronic utterance of it with considerable impatience. "Art thou nothing other than a vulture, then," asks the former, "that fliest through the universe seeking after somewhatto eat,and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe."
"Huntsman Common SenseCame to the rescue, bade prompt thwack of thong dispenseQuiet i' the kennel: taught that ocean might be blue,And rolling and much more, and yet the soul have, too,Its touch of God's own flame, which He may so expand'Who measured the waters i' the hollow of His hand'That ocean's self shall dry, turn dew-drop in respectOf all-triumphant fire, matter with intellectOnce fairly matched."A
"Huntsman Common Sense
Came to the rescue, bade prompt thwack of thong dispense
Quiet i' the kennel: taught that ocean might be blue,
And rolling and much more, and yet the soul have, too,
Its touch of God's own flame, which He may so expand
'Who measured the waters i' the hollow of His hand'
That ocean's self shall dry, turn dew-drop in respect
Of all-triumphant fire, matter with intellect
Once fairly matched."A