CHAPTER VII

PROPHETIC VISIONS 342

ILLUSTRATIONS

Browning at 23 (London 1835) _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Paracelsus 38

Herbert Spencer 94

David Strauss 112

Cardinal Wiseman 120

William Ewart Gladstone 160

William Morris 196

John Burns 208

Alfred Tennyson 250

A. C. Swinburne 260

Dante Gabriel Rossetti 266

George Meredith 272

Euripides 296

Aristophanes 306

Walter Savage Landor 330

Browning at 77 (1889) 360

BROWNING AND HIS CENTURY

PROLOGUE

TO ROBERT BROWNING

"Say not we know but rather that we love,

And so we know enough." Thus deeply spoke

The Sage; and in men's stunted hearts awoke

A haunting fear, for fain are they to prove

Their life, their God, with yeas and nays that move

The mind's uncertain flow. Then fierce outbroke,--

Knowledge, the child of pain shall we revoke?

The guide wherewith men climb to things above?

Nay, calm your fears! 'Tis but the mere mind's knowing,

The soul's alone the poet worthy deeming.

Let mind up-build its entities of seeming

With toil and tears! The toil is but for showing

How much there lacks of truth. But 'tis no dreaming

When sky throbs back to heart, with God's love beaming.

I

THE BATTLE OF MIND AND SPIRIT

During the nineteenth century, which has already receded far enough into

the perspective of the past for us to be able to take a comprehensive view

of it, the advance guard of the human race found itself in a position

entirely different from that ever before occupied by it. Through the

knowledge of cosmic, animal, and social evolution gradually accumulated by

the laborious and careful studies of special students in every department

of historical research and scientific experiment, a broader and higher

state of self-consciousness was attained. Mankind, on its most perceptive

plane, no longer pinned its faith to inherited traditions, whether of

religion, art, or morals. Every conceivable fact and every conceivable

myth was to be tested in the laboratory of the intellect, even the

intellect itself was to undergo dissection, with the result that, once for

all, it has been decided what particular range of human knowledge lies

within the reach of mental perception, and what particular range of human

knowledge can be grasped only through spiritual perception.

Such a momentous decision as this in the history of thought has not been

reached without a long and protracted struggle extending back into the

early days of Christianity, nor, it may be said, is the harmony as yet

complete, for there are to-day, and perhaps always will be, human beings

whose consciousness is not fully orbed and who either seek their point of

equilibrium too entirely in the plane of mind or too entirely in the plane

of spirit.

In the early days, before Christianity came to bring its "sword upon

earth," there seems to have been little or no consciousness of such a

struggle. The ancient Hindu, observing Nature and meditating upon the

universe, arrived intuitively at a perception of life and its processes

wonderfully akin to that later experimentally proved by the nineteenth

century scientist, nor did he have a suspicion that such truth was in any

way antagonistic to religious truth. On the contrary, he considered that,

by it, the beauty and mystery of religion was immeasurably enhanced, and,

letting his imagination play upon his intuition, he brought forth a theory

of spiritual evolution in which the world to-day is bound to recognize

many elements of beauty and power necessary to any complete conception of

religion in the future.

Even the Babylonians made their guesses at an evolutionary theory of the

universe. Greek philosophy, later, was permeated with the idea, it having

been derived by them perhaps from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians,

or if the theories of Aryan migrations be correct, perhaps through

inheritance from a remote Aryan ancestry.

When Christian thought gained its hold upon the world, the account of

creation given in Genesis became so thoroughly impressed upon the minds of

men that it was regarded as the orthodox view, rooted in divine

revelation, and to question it was to incur the danger of being called an

atheist, with its possibly uncomfortable consequences of being martyred.

Strangely enough, the early Church adopted into its fold many pagan

superstitions, such as a belief in witchcraft and in signs and wonders, as

well as some myths, but this great truth upon which the pagan mind had

stumbled, it would have none of.

These two circumstances--the adoption on the part of Christianity of pagan

superstitions and its utter repudiation of the pagan guesses upon

evolution, carrying within it the germs of truth, later to be unearthed by

scientific research--furnished exactly the right conditions for the

throwing down of the gauntlet between the mind and the spirit. The former,

following intellectual guidance, found itself coming more and more into

antagonism with the spirit, not yet freed from the trammels of

imagination. The latter, guided by imagination, continued to exercise a

mythopoeic faculty, which not only brought it more and more into

antagonism with the mind, but set up within its own realm an internecine

warfare which has blackened the pages of religious history with crimes and

martyrdoms so terrible as to force the conviction that the true devil in

antagonism to spiritual development has been the imagination of mankind,

masquerading as verity, and not yet having found its true function in art.

Regarded from the point of view of the student of intellectual

development, this conflict of two thousand years has the fascination of a

great drama of which the protagonist is the mind struggling to free the

spirit from its subjection to the evil aspects of the imagination. Great

thinkers in the field of science, philosophy, and religion are the

_dramatis personae_, and in the onward rush of this world-drama the

sufferings of those who have fallen by the way seem insignificant.

But when the student of history takes his more intimate survey of the

purely human aspects of the struggle, heartrending, indeed, become the

tragedies resulting from the exercise of human bigotry and stupidity.

Indignation and sorrow take possession of us when we think upon such a

spectacle as that of Roger Bacon, making ready to perform a few scientific

experiments before a small audience at Oxford, confronted by an uproar in

which monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments streaming

in the wind, crying out, "Down with the magician!" And this was only the

beginning of a persecution which ended in his teaching being solemnly

condemned by the authorities of the Franciscan order and himself thrown

for fourteen years into prison, whence he issued an old and broken man of

eighty.

More barbarous still was the treatment of Giordano Bruno, a strange sort

of man who developed his philosophy in about twenty-five works, some

prose, some poetry, some dialogues, some comedies, with such enticing

titles as "The Book of the Great Key," "The Explanation of the Thirty

Seals," "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast," "The Threefold

Minimum," "The Composition of Images," "The Innumerable, the Immense and

the Unfigurable." His utterances were vague, especially to the intellects

of his time, yet not so vague that theology, whether Catholic or

Calvinistic, did not at once take fright.

He held that the investigation of nature in the unbiased light of reason

is our only guide to truth. He rejected antiquity, tradition, faith, and

authority; he exclaimed, "Let us begin by doubt. Let us doubt till we

know." Acting upon these principles, he began to unfold again that current

of Greek thought which the system imposed by the Church had intercepted

for more than a thousand years, and arrived at a conception of evolution

prefiguring the modern theories.

He conceived the law of the universe to be unceasing change. "Each

individual," he declared, "is the resultant of innumerable individuals;

each species is the starting point for the next." Furthermore, he

maintained that the perfecting of the individual soul is the aim of all

progress.

Tenets so opposite to the orthodox view of special creation and the fall

of man could not be allowed to go unchallenged. It is to be remembered

that he was a priest in holy orders in the Convent of St. Dominic, and in

the year 1576 he was accused by the Provincial of his order of heresy on

one hundred and thirty counts. He did not await his trial, but fled to

Rome, thence to northern Italy, and became for some years a wanderer. He

was imprisoned at Geneva; at Toulouse he spent a year lecturing on

Aristotle; in Paris, two years as professor extraordinary in the Sorbonne;

three years in London, where he became the friend of Sir Philip Sidney,

and influenced the philosophy of both Bacon and Shakespeare. Oxford,

however, was unfriendly to his teachings and he was obliged to flee from

England also. Then he wandered for five years from city to city in

Germany--at one time warned to leave the town, at another excommunicated,

at another not even permitted to lodge within the gates. Finally, he

accepted the invitation of a noble Venetian, Zuane Mocenigo, to visit

Venice and teach him the higher and secret learning. The two men soon

quarreled, and Bruno was betrayed by the count into the hands of the

Inquisition. He was convicted of heresy in Venice and delivered to the

Inquisition in Rome. He spent seven years in its dungeons, and was again

tried and convicted, and called upon to recant, which he stoutly refused

to do. Sentence of death was then passed upon him and he was burned at the

stake on February 17, 1600, on the Campo de' Fiori, where there now stands

a statue erected by Progressive Italy in his honor.

His last words were, "I die a martyr, and willingly." Then they cast his

ashes into the Tiber and placed his name among the accused on the rolls of

the Church. And there it probably still remains, for no longer ago than

1889, when his statue was unveiled on the ninth of June, on the site of

his burning, in full view of the Vatican, Pope Leo XIII, it is said,

refused food and spent hours in an agony of prayer at the foot of the

statue of St. Peter. Catholic, and even Protestant, denunciation of Bruno

at this time showed that the smoke from this particular battle in the war

of mind with spirit was still far from being laid.

With the fate of Giordano Bruno still fresh in his mind, Galileo succumbed

to the demands of the Inquisition and recanted, saying that he no longer

believed what he, himself, with his telescope had proved to be true.

"I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my

knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy

Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the

error and the heresy of the movement of the earth."

If this recantation had brought any comfort or peace into his life it

might have been hard to forgive Galileo's perjury of himself. His

persecution, however, continued to the end. He was exiled from his family

and friends, and, even when he had become blind and wasted by sorrow and

disease, he was still closely watched lest he might utter the awful heresy

that the earth moved.

A hundred years later than this, when Buffon attempted to teach the simple

truths of geology, he was deposed from his high position and made to

recant by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne. The man who promulgated

geological principles, as firmly established to-day as that of the

rotation of the earth upon its axis, was forced to write: "I declare that

I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe

most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of

time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the

formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the

narrative of Moses."

Such are the more heinous examples of the persecution of the men who

discovered the truths of science. To these should be added the wholesale

persecution of witches and magicians, for unusual knowledge of any sort

ran the chance of being regarded as contrary to biblical teaching and of

being attributed to the machinations of the Prince of Darkness.

Every new step made in the direction of scientific truth has had thus to

face the most determined opposition. Persecution by torture and death died

out, but up to the nineteenth century, and well on through it,

denunciation, excommunication, suppression, the loss of honorable

positions have all been used as weapons by church or university in the

attempt to stamp out whatever it considered dangerous and subverting

doctrines of science.

The decisive battle was not to be inaugurated until the latter half of the

nineteenth century, with the advent in the field of such names in science

as Spencer, Darwin, Tyndall and Huxley, and such names in biblical

criticism as Strauss and Renan.

The outposts, it is true, had been won by advancing scientific thought,

for step by step the Church had compromised, and had admitted one

scientific doctrine after another as not incompatible with biblical truth.

But now, not only theology, the imperfect armor in which the spirit had

been clothed, was attacked, but the very existence of spirit itself was to

be questioned. The thinking world was to be divided into materialists and

supernaturalists. Now, at last, mind and spirit, who in the ages long gone

had been brothers, were to stand face to face as enemies. Was this mortal

combat to end in the annihilation of either, or would this, too, end in a

compromise leading to harmony?

At the dawn of this century, in 1812, came into the world its master

poetic mind. I say this to-day without hesitation, for no other English

poet of the century has been so thoroughly aware of the intellectual

tendencies of his century, and has so emotionalized them and brought them

before us under the humanly real conditions of dramatic utterance.

It is not surprising, considering this fact, that in his second poem,

written in 1835, Browning ventures into the arena and at once tackles the

supreme problem of the age, what is to be the relation of mind and spirit?

It is characteristic of the poetic methods, which dominated his work, that

he should have presented this problem through the personality of a

historical figure who played no inconsiderable part in the intellectual

development of his time, though not a man to whom general historians have

been in the habit of assigning much space in their pages. Browning,

however, as Hall Griffin informs us, had been familiar with the name of

Paracelsus from his childhood, of whom he had read anecdotes in a queer

book, Wanley's "Wonders of the Little World." Besides, his father's

library, wherein as a boy he was wont to browse constantly, contained the

_Opera Omnia_ of Paracelsus.

With the confidence of youth and of genius the poet attempts in this poem

a solution of the problem. To mind he gives the attribute of knowledge, to

spirit the attribute of love.

The poem as a whole does not concern us here except as a background for

its final thoughts. In order, however, to put the situation clearly before

readers not already familiar with it, I venture to transcribe a portion of

a former analysis of my own.

Paracelsus aspires to the acquisition of absolute knowledge and feels born

within him the capabilities for attaining this end, and, when attained, it

is to be devoted to enlarging the possibilities of man's life. The whole

race is to be elevated at once. Man may not be doomed to cope with

seraphs, yet by the exercise of human strength alone he hopes man may one

day beat God's angels.

He is a revolter, however, against the magical and alchemistic methods of

his age, which seek for the welfare of men through the elixir of youth or

the philosopher's stone. He especially disclaims such puerile schemes in

the passionate moment when he has realized how futile all his lifelong

efforts have been. He stands, indeed, at the threshold of a new world. He

has a glimmering of the true scientific methods which would discover first

the secrets of life's laws, and then use these natural laws to bring about

life's betterment, instead of hoping for salvation through the discovery

of some magic secret by means of which life's laws might be overcome. Yet

he is sufficiently of his own superstitious age to desire and expect

fairly magical results from the laws he hopes to discover. The creed which

spurs him to his quest is his belief that truth is inborn in the soul, but

to set this truth free and make it of use to mankind correspondences in

outer nature must be found. An intuitive mind like Paracelsus's will

recognize these natural corollaries of the intuition wherever it finds

them; and these are what Paracelsus goes forth over the earth to seek

and find, sure he will "arrive." One illustration of the results so

obtained is seen in the doctrine of the signatures of plants according to

which the flowers, leaves, and fruits of plants indicate by their color or

markings, etc., the particular diseases they are intended to cure. The

real Paracelsus practised medicine upon this theory.

Though such methods are a long distance from those of the modern

scientist, who deduces his laws from careful and patient observation of

nature, they go a step toward his in seeking laws in nature to correspond

to hypotheses born of intuition.

Browning's presentation of the attitude of mind and the place held by

Paracelsus in the development of science is exactly in line with the most

recent criticisms of this extraordinary man's life. According to these he

fluctuated between the systems of magic then prevalent and scientific

observation, but always finally threw in the balance of his opinion on the

side of scientific ways of working; and above all made the great step from

a belief in the influence of nature upon man to that of the existence of

parallelisms between nature processes and human processes.

Though he thus opened up new vistas for the benefit of man, he must

necessarily be a failure, from his own point of view, with his "India" not

found, his absolute truth unattained; and it is upon this side that the

poet dwells. For a moment he is somewhat reassured by the apparition of

Aprile, scarcely a creature of flesh and blood, more the spirit of art who

aspires to love infinitely and has found the attainment of such love as

impossible as Paracelsus has found the attainment of knowledge. Both have

desired to help men, but Paracelsus has desired to help them rather

through the perfecting, even immortalizing, of their physical being;

Aprile, through giving man, as he is, infinite sympathy and through

creating forms of beauty which would show him his own thoughts and hopes

glorified by the all-seeing touch of the artist.

Paracelsus recognizes his deficient sympathy for mankind, and tries to

make up for it in his own way by giving out of the fulness of his

knowledge to men. The scornful and proud reformer has not, however, truly

learned the lesson of love, and verily has his reward when he is turned

against by those whom he would teach. Then the old ideal seizes upon him

again, and still under the influence of Aprile he seeks in human

experience the loves and passions of mankind which he learns through

Aprile he had neglected for the ever-illusive secret, but neither does

success attend him here, and only on his deathbed does his vision clear

up, and he is made to indulge in a prophetic utterance quite beyond the

reach of the original Paracelsus.

In this passage is to be found Browning's first contribution to a solution

of the great problem. That it is instinct with the idea of evolution has

become a commonplace of Browning criticism, a fact which was at least

independently or, as far as I know, first pointed out by myself in an

early essay upon Browning. At the time, I was reading both Browning and

Spencer, and could not but be impressed by the parallelisms in thought

between the two, especially those in this seer-like passage and "The Data

of Ethics."

Writers whose appreciation of a poet is in direct ratio to the number of

exact historical facts to be found in a poem like to emphasize this fact

that the doctrine of evolution can be found in the works of Paracelsus.

Why not? Since, as we have seen it had been floating about in

philosophical thought in one form or another for some thousands of years.

Indeed, it has been stated upon good authority that the idea of a gradual

evolution according to law and of a God from whom all being emanates,

from whom all power proceeds, is an inherent necessity of the Aryan mind

as opposed to the Semitic idea of an outdwelling God and of

supernaturalism. Thus, all down the ages the Aryan mind has revolted from

time to time against the religious ideas superimposed upon it by the

Semitic mind. This accounts for the numerous heresies within the bosom of

the Church as well as for the scientific advance against the superstitions

of the Church.

Generalizations of this sweeping order are apt to contain only partial

truth. It would probably be nearer the whole truth, as we are enabled

to-day to trace historical development, to say that, starting with

opposite conceptions, these two orders of mind have worked toward each

other and the harmonization of their respective points of view, and,

furthermore, that this difference in mind belongs to a period prior even

to the emergence of the Aryan or the Semitic. Researches in mythology and

folklore seem to indicate that no matter how far back one may go in the

records of human thought there will be found these two orders of mind--one

which naturally thinks of the universe as the outcome of law, and one

which naturally thinks of it as the outcome of creation. There are

primitive myths in which mankind is supposed to be descended from a

primitive ancestor, which may range all the way from a serpent to an oak

tree, or, as in a certain Zulu myth, a bed of reeds growing on the back of

a small animal. And there are equally primitive myths in which mankind is

created out of the trees or the earth by an external agent, varying in

importance from a grasshopper to a more or less spiritual being.

Browning did not need to depend upon Paracelsus for his knowledge of

evolution. He may not have known that the ancient Hindu in the dim mists

of the past had an intuition of the cosmic egg from which all life had

evolved, and that he did not know of the theory as it is developed in the

great German philosophers we are certain, because he, himself, asseverated

that he had never read the German philosophers, but it is hardly possible

that he did not know something of it as it appears in the writings of the

Greek philosophers, for Greek literature was among the earliest of his

studies. He might, for instance, have taken a hint from the speculations

of that half mythical marvel of a man, Empedocles, with which the

Paracelsus theory of the universe, as it appears in the passage under

discussion, has many points of contact.

According to Empedocles, the four primal elements, earth, air, fire and

water, are worked upon by the forces of love and discord. By means of

these forces, out of the primal elements are evolved various and horrible

monstrosities before the final form of perfection is reached. It is true

he did not correctly imagine the stages in the processes of evolution, for

instead of a gradual development of one form from another, he describes

the process as a haphazard and chaotic one. "Many heads sprouted up

without necks, and naked arms went wandering forlorn of shoulders, and

solitary eyes were straying destitute of foreheads." These detached

portions of bodies coming together by haphazard produced the earlier

monstrous forms. "Many came forth with double faces and two breasts, some

shaped like oxen with a human front, others, again, of human race with a

bull's head." However, the latter part of the evolutionary process as

described by Empedocles, when Love takes command, seems especially

pertinent as a possible source of Browning's thought:

"When strife has reached the very bottom of the seething mass, and

love assumes her station in the center of the ball, then everything

begins to come together, and to form one whole--not instantaneously,

but different substances come forth, according to a steady process of

development. Now, when these elements are mingling, countless kinds of

things issue from their union. Much, however, remains unmixed, in

opposition to the mingling elements, and these, malignant strife still

holds within his grasp. For he has not yet withdrawn himself

altogether to the extremities of the globe; but part of his limbs

still remain within its bounds, and part have passed beyond. As

strife, however, step by step retreats, mild and innocent love pursues

him with her force divine; things which had been immortal instantly

assume mortality; the simple elements become confused by interchange

of influences. When these are mingled, then the countless kinds of

mortal beings issue forth, furnished with every sort of form--a sight

of wonder."

Though evolution was no new idea, it had been only a hypothesis arrived at

intuitionally or suggested by crude observations of nature until by

perfected methods of historical study and of scientific experimentation

proof was furnished of its truth as a scientific verity.

Let us glance at the situation at the time when Paracelsus was published.

In 1835 science had made great strides in the direction of proving the

correctness of the hypothesis. Laplace had lived and died and had given to

the world in mathematical reasoning of remarkable power proof of the

nebular hypothesis, which was later to be verified by Fraunhofer's

discoveries in spectrum analysis. Lamarck had lived and died and had

given to the world his theory of animal evolution. Lyall in England had

shown that geological formations were evolutionary rather than

cataclysmal. In fact, greater and lesser scientific lights in England and

on the continent were every day adding fresh facts to the burden of proof

in favor of the hypothesis. It was in the air, and denunciations of it

were in the air.

Most interesting of all, however, in connection with our present theme is

the fact that Herbert Spencer was still a lad of fifteen, who was

independently of Darwin to work out a complete philosophy of evolution,

which was to be applied in every department of cosmic, geologic, plant,

animal and human activity, but (and this is of special interest) he was

not to give to the world his plan for a synthetic philosophy until 1860,

and not to publish his "First Principles" until 1862, nor the first

instalment of the "Data of Ethics," the fruit of his whole system, until

1879.

Besides being familiar with the idea as it crops out in Greek thought, it

is impossible that the young Browning was not cognizant of the scientific

attitude of the time. In fact, he tells us as much himself, for when

Doctor Wonivall asked him some questions as to his attitude toward Darwin,

Browning responded in a letter: "In reality all that seems proved in

Darwin's scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning."

Entirely familiar with the evolutionary idea, then, however he may have

derived it, it is just what might be expected that he should have worked

it into Paracelsus's final theory of life. The remarkable thing is that he

should have applied its principles in so masterly a fashion--namely, that

he should have made a complete philosophical synthesis by bringing the

idea of evolution to bear upon all natural, human and spiritual processes

of growth twenty-five years before Herbert Spencer, who is regarded on

this particular ground as the master mind of the century, gave his

synthetic philosophy of evolution to the world.

A momentary glance at the passage in question will make this clear.

Paracelsus traces first development as illustrated in geological forms:

"The center-fire heaves underneath the earth,

And the earth changes like a human face;

The molten one bursts 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."

Next he touches upon plant life and animal life. The grass grows bright,

the boughs are swollen with blooms, ants make their ado, birds fly in

merry flocks, the strand is purple with its tribe of nested limpets,

savage creatures seek their loves in wood and plain. Then he shows how in

all this animal life are scattered attributes foreshadowing a being that

will combine them. Then appears primitive man, only half enlightened, who

gains knowledge through the slow, uncertain fruit of toil, whose love is

not serenely pure, but strong from weakness, a love which endures and

doubts and is oppressed. And out of the travail of the human soul as it

proceeds from lower to higher forms is finally evolved self-conscious

man--man who consciously looks back upon all that has preceded him and

interprets nature by means of his own human perceptions. The winds are

henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, a querulous mutter or a quick, gay

laugh, never a senseless gust, now man is born.

But development does not end with the attainment of this

self-consciousness. After this stage has been reached there continues an

evolution which is distinctively spiritual, a tendency to God. Browning

was not content with the evolution of man, he was prophetic of the final

flowering of man in the superman, although he had never heard of

Nietszche.

The corollary to this progressive theory of life, a view held by

scientific thinkers, is that sin is not depravity, but is merely a lack of

development. Paracelsus is therefore made wise to know even hate is but a

mask of love, to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success, to sympathize,

even be proud of man's half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim struggles for

truth--all with a touch of nobleness despite their error, upward tending

all, though weak.

Though there are points of contact between the thought of the true

Paracelsus and of Browning, the points of contact between Spencer and

Browning are far more significant, for Browning seems intuitively to have

perceived the fundamental truths of social and psychic evolution at the

early age of twenty-three--truths which the philosopher worked out only

after years of laborious study.

We, who, to-day, are familiar with the application of the theory of

evolution to every object from a dustpan to a flying machine, can hardly

throw ourselves into the atmosphere of the first half of the last century

when this dynamic ideal was flung into a world with static ideals. The

Christian world knew little and cared less about the guesses of Greek

philosophers, whom they regarded when they did know about them as

unregenerate pagans. German thought was caviare to the general, and what

new thought of a historical or scientific nature made its way into the

strongholds of conservatism filled people with suspicion and dread. Such a

sweeping synthesis, therefore, as Browning gives of dawning scientific

theories in Paracelsus was truly phenomenal. That it did not prove a bone

of contention and arouse controversies as hot as those which were waged

later around such scientific leaders as Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and

Clifford was probably due to the circumstance that the poem was little

read and less understood, and also to the fact that it contained other

elements which overlaid the bare presentation of the doctrines of

evolution.

So far I have spoken only of the form of the Paracelsus theory of life,

but a theory of life to be complete must have soul as well as form. Only

in adding the soul side to his theory of life does Browning really give

his solution of the problem, what is to be the relation of mind and

spirit?

One other point of resemblance is to be noted between the thought of

Browning's Paracelsus and Herbert Spencer. They agree that ultimate

knowledge is beyond the grasp of the intellect. Neither was this a new

idea; but up to the time of Spencer it was taken simply as a negative

conclusion. Spencer, however, having found this negation makes it the body

of his philosophy--a body so shadowy that many of his critics consider it

too ghostly to stand as a substantial basis for philosophical thought. He

regards the failure of the intellect to picture the nature of the absolute

as the most certain proof that our intuitions of its existence are

trustworthy, and upon this he bases all religious aspiration. Like the

psalmist, he exclaims, "Who by searching can find out God?"

The attitude of Paracelsus is identical as far as the intellect is

concerned. His life, spent in the search for knowledge, had proved it to

him. But he does not, like Spencer, make it the body of his philosophy.

Through the influence of Aprile he is led to a definite conception of the

Infinite as a Being whose especial characteristic is that he feels!--feels

unbounded joy in his own creations. This is eminently an artist's or

poet's perception of the relation of God to his universe. As Aprile in one

place says, "God is the perfect poet, who in his person acts his own

creations."

As I have already pointed out, the evil of pain, of decay, of degeneration

is taken no account of.

There is the constant passing onward from joy to joy. All the processes of

nature from the simplest to the most complex bring, in their turn, a

delight to their Creator until man appears, and is not only a joy to his

Creator, but is the first in the order of creation to share in the joy of

existence, the first to arrive at the full consciousness of beauty. So

overwhelming is this consciousness of beauty that man perceives it

struggling for expression in the hates and fallacies of undeveloped

natures.

All this is characteristic of the artistic way of looking at life. The

artist is prone either to ignore the ugly or to transmute it by art into

something possessing beauty of power if not of loveliness. What are plays

like "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," "Brand" and "Peer Gynt," music like "Tristan

and Isolde" or the "Pathetic Symphony," Rodin's statues, but actual,

palpable realizations of the fact that hate is but a mask of love, or that

human fallacies and human passions have within them the seeds of immense

beauty if only there appear the artist who can bring them forth. If this

is true of the human artist, how much more is it true of the divine

artist in whose shadow, as Pompilia says, even a Guido may find healing.

The optimism of such a theory of existence is intoxicating. Not only does

this artist-man look backward and rejoice in all the beauty of past phases

of creation, but he looks forward to endless progression in the enjoyment

of fresh phases of beauty--"a flying point of bliss remote." This is a

universe in which the Prometheus of the old myths is indeed unbound.

Mankind is literally free to progress forever upward. If there are some

men in darkness, they are like plants in mines struggling to break out

into the sunlight they see beyond.

The interesting question arises here, was Browning, himself, entirely

responsible for the soul of his Paracelsus theory of life or was there

some source beyond him from which he drew inspiration?

It has frequently been suggested that Aprile in this poem is a sort of

symbolic representation of Shelley. Why not rather a composite of both

Shelley and Keats, the poet of love and the poet of beauty? An examination

of the greatest poems of these two writers, "Prometheus Unbound" and

"Hyperion," will bring out the elements in both which I believe entered

into Browning's conception.

In the exalted symbolism of the "Prometheus Unbound" Shelley shows that,

in his view, evil and suffering were not inherent in the nature of things,

the tyranny of evil having gained its ascendancy through the persistence

of out-worn ideals, such as that of Power or Force symbolized in the Greek

idea of Jupiter. Prometheus is the revolting mind of mankind, enslaved by

the tyranny of Jupiter, hating the tyrant, yet determined to endure all

the tyrant can inflict upon him rather than admit his right to rule. The

freeing of Prometheus and the dethronement of Jupiter come through the

awakening in the heart of Prometheus of pity for the tyrant--that is,

Prometheus has learned to love his enemies as he loves his friends. The

remainder of the poem is occupied with showing the effects upon humanity

of this universal awakening of love.

In the fine passage where the Spirit of the Earth hears the trumpet of the

Spirit of the Hour sound in a great city, it beholds all ugly human shapes

and visages which had caused it pain pass floating through the air, and

fading still

"Into the winds that scattered them, and those

From whom they passed seemed mild and lovely forms

After some foul disguise had fallen, and all

Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise

And greetings of delighted wonder, all

Went to their sleep again."

And the Spirit of the Hour relates:

"Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled

The abysses of the sky and the wide earth,

There was a change: the impalpable thin air

And the all-circling sunlight were transformed

As if the sense of love dissolved in them

Had folded itself around the sphered world."

In the meantime, the over-souls of humanity--Prometheus, symbolic of

thought or knowledge, is reunited to Asia, his spouse, symbolic of Nature

or emotion, from whom he has long been separated and together with Asia's

sisters, Panthea and Ione--retire to the wonderful cave where they are

henceforth to dwell and where their occupations are inspired by the most

childlike and exalted moods of the soul.

Before considering the bearing of their life of love and art in the cave

upon the character of Aprile let us turn our attention for a moment to a

remarkable passage in "Hyperion," which poem was written as far back as

1820. Keats, like Shelley, deals with the dethronement of gods, but it

is the older dynasty of Titans--Saturn and Hyperion usurped by Jupiter and

Apollo. Shelley's thought in the "Prometheus" is strongly influenced by

Christian ideals, but Keats's is thoroughly Greek.

The passing of one series of gods and the coming into power of another

series of gods was a familiar idea in Greek mythology. It reflected at

once the literal fact that ever higher and higher forces of nature had

been deified by them, beginning with crude Nature gods and ending with

symbols of the most ideal human attributes, and at the same time that

their thought leaned in the direction of interpreting nature as an

evolutionary process. Seizing upon this, Keats has presented in the words

of the old Titan Oceanus a theory of the evolution of beauty quite as

startling as a prophecy of psychological theories upon this subject as

Browning's is of cosmic and social theories. Addressing Saturn, Oceanus

says:

"We fall by course of Nature's law, not force

Of thunder, or of love....

... As thou wast not the first of powers

So art thou not the last; it cannot be:

From chaos and parental darkness came

Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil,

That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends

Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came

And with it light, and light, engendering

Upon its own producer, forthwith touched,

The whole enormous matter into life.

Upon that very hour, our parentage

The Heavens and the Earth were manifest;

Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race,

Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms

* * * * *

As Heaven and Earth are fairer far

Than chaos and blank darkness, though once chiefs,

And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth

In form and shape compact and beautiful,

In will, in action free, companionship

And thousand other signs of purer life,

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,

A power more strong in beauty, born of us

And fated to excel us, as we pass

In glory that old darkness: nor are we

Thereby more conquered than by us the rule

Of shapeless chaos. For 'tis the eternal law

That first in beauty should be first in might.

Yea, by that law, another race may drive

Our conquerors to mourn as we do now."

There is in the attitude of Oceanus a magnificent acceptance of this

ruthless course of nature reminding one of that taken by such men as

Huxley and Clifford in the face of their own scientific discoveries, but

one is immediately struck by the absence of love in the idea. An Apollo,

no matter what new beauty he may have, himself, to offer, who yet

disregards the beauty of Hyperion and calmly accepts the throne of the sun

in his stead, does not satisfy us. What unreason it is that so splendid a

being as Hyperion should be deposed! As a matter of fact, he was not

deposed. He is left standing forever in our memories in splendor like the

morn, for Keats did not finish the poem and no picture of the enthroned

Apollo is given. Perhaps Keats remembered his earlier utterance, "A thing

of beauty is a joy forever," and cared for his own Hyperion too much to

banish him for the sake of Apollo.

Be that as it may, the points in relation to our subject are that

Shelley's emphasis is upon the conservation of beauty, while Keats's

emphasis is upon the evolution of new beauty.

In the cave where Prometheus and Asia dwell--the cave of universal

spirit--is given forth the inspiration to humanity for painting, poetry

and arts, yet to be born, and all these arts return to delight them,

fashioned into form by human artists. Love is the ruling principle.

Therefore all forms of beautiful art are immortal. Aprile,[1] as he

first appears, is an elaboration upon this idea. He would love all

humanity with such intensity that he would immortalize in all forms of

art--painting, poetry, music--every thought and emotion of which the human

soul is capable, and this done he would say:

"His spirits created--

God grants to each a sphere to be its world,

Appointed with the various objects needed

To satisfy its own peculiar want;

So, I create a world for these my shapes

Fit to sustain their beauty and their strength."

In short, he would found a universal art museum exactly like the cave in

which Prometheus dwelt. The stress is no more than it is in Shelley upon a

search for new beauty, and there is not a hint that a coming beauty shall

blot out the old until Aprile recognizes Paracelsus as his king. Then he

awakes to the fact that his own ideal has been partial, because he has

not been a seeker after knowledge, or new beauty, and in much the same

spirit as Oceanus, he exclaims:

"Lo, I forget my ruin, and rejoice

In thy success, as thou! Let our God's praise

Go bravely through the world at last! What care

Through me or thee?"

But Paracelsus had learned a lesson through Aprile which the Apollo of

Keats had not learned. He does not accept kingship at the expense of

Aprile as Apollo would do at the expense of Hyperion. He includes in his

final theory of life all that is beautiful in Aprile's or Shelley's ideal

and adds to it all that is beautiful of the Keats ideal. The form of his

philosophy is evolutionary, and up to the time of his meeting with Aprile

had expressed itself as the search for knowledge. Through Aprile his

philosophy becomes imbued with soul, the attributes of which are the

spirit of love and the spirit of beauty, one of which conserves and

immortalizes beauty, the other of which searches out new beauty.

So, working hand in hand, they become one, while the search for knowledge,

thus spiritualized, becomes the search for beauty always inspired by love.

The aim of the evolutionary process thus becomes the unfolding of ever

new phases of beauty in which God takes endless delight, and to the final

enjoyment of which mankind shall attain.

To sum up, Browning's solution of the problem in the Paracelsus theory of

life is reached not only through a synthesis of the doctrines of evolution

as applied to universal activities, cosmic and human, prophetic, on the

one hand, of the most advanced scientific thought of the century, but it

is a synthesis of these and of the art-spirit in its twofold aspect of

love and beauty as already expressed in the poetry of Shelley and Keats.

It is not in the least probable that Browning set to work consciously to

piece together these ideals. That is not the method of the artist! But

being familiar to him in the two best beloved poets of his youth, they had

sunk into his very being, and welled forth from his own subconsciousness,

charged with personal emotion, partly dramatic, partly the expression of

his own true feeling at the time, and the result be it said is one of the

most inspiring and beautiful passages in English poetry.

[Illustration: PARACELSUS]

At the end of his life and the end of the century Herbert Spencer, who had

spent years of labor to prove the fallacies in all religious dogmas, and

who had insisted upon religion's being entirely relegated to

intellectually unknowable regions of thought, spoke in his autobiography

of the mysteries inherent in life, in the evolution of human beings, in

consciousness, in human destiny--mysteries that the very advance of

science makes more and more evident, exhibits as more and more profound

and impenetrable, adding:

"Thus religious creeds, which in one way or other occupy the sphere

that rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the

more, the more it seeks, I have come to regard with a sympathy based

on community of need: feeling that dissent from them results from

inability to accept the solutions offered, joined with the wish that

solutions could be found."

Loyal to the last to his determination to accept as knowledge only what

the intellect could prove, he never permitted himself to come under the

awakening influence of an Aprile, yet like Browning's ancient Greek,

Cleon, he longed for a solution of the mystery.

At the dawn of the century, and in his youth, Browning ventured upon a

solution. In the remainder of this and the next chapter I shall attempt to

show what elements in this solution the poet retained to the end of his

life, how his thought became modified, and what relation his final

solution bears to the final thought of the century.

In this first attempt at a synthesis of life in which the attributes

peculiar to the mind and to the spirit are brought into harmonious

relationship, Browning is more the intuitionalist than the scientist. His

convictions well forth with all the force of an inborn revelation, just as

kindred though much less rational views of nature's processes sprang up in

the mind of the ancient Hindu or the ancient Greek.

The philosophy of life herein flashed out by the poet was later to be

elaborated fully on its objective or observational side by Spencer--the

philosopher par excellence of evolution--and finally, also, of course, on

the objective side, to become an assured fact of science through the

publication in 1859 of Darwin's epoch-making book, "The Origin of

Species," wherein the laws, so disturbing to many at the time, of natural

selection and the survival of the fittest were fully set forth.

While the genetic view of nature, as the phraseology of to-day goes, had

been anticipated in writers on cosmology like Leibnitz and Laplace, in

geology by such men as Hutton and Lyall, and had entered into the domain

of embryology through the researches of Von Baer, and while Spencer had

already formulated a philosophy of evolution, Darwin went out into the

open and studied the actual facts in the domain of living beings. His

studies made evolution a certainty. They revealed the means by which its

processes were accomplished, and in so doing pointed to an origin of man

entirely opposed to orthodox views upon this subject. Thus was inaugurated

the last great phase in the struggle between mind and spirit.

Henceforth, science stood completely revealed as the unflinching searcher

of truth. Intuition was but a handmaid whose duty was to formulate working

hypotheses, to become scientific law if provable by investigation or

experiment, to be discarded if not.

The aspects which this battle has assumed in the latter half of the

century have been many and various. Older sciences with a new lease of

life and sciences entirely new have advanced along the path pointed out by

the doctrines of evolution. Battalions of determined men have held aloft

the banner of uncompromising truth. Each battalion has stormed truth's

citadel only to find that about its inmost reality is an impregnable wall.

The utmost which has been attained in any case is a working hypothesis,

useful in bringing to light many new objective phenomena, it is true,

but, in the end, serving only to deepen the mystery inherent in the nature

of all things.

Such a working hypothesis was the earlier one of gravitation whose laws of

action were elaborated by Sir Isaac Newton, and by the great mind of

Laplace were still further developed with marvelous mathematical precision

in his "Mechanique Celeste."

Such another hypothesis is that of the atomic theory of the constitution

of matter usually associated with the name of Dalton, though it has

undergone many modifications from other scientific thinkers. Of this

hypothesis Theodore Merz writes in his history of nineteenth-century

scientific thought:

"As to the nature of the differences of the elements, the atomic view

gives no information; it simply asserts these differences, assumes

them as physical constants, and tries to describe them by number and

measurement. The atomic view is therefore at best only a provisional

basis, a convenient resting place, similar to that which Newton found

in physical astronomy, and on which has been established the

astronomical view of nature."

The vibratory theories of the ether, the theories of the conservation of

energy, the vitalistic view of life, the theory of parallelism of physical

and psychical phenomena are all such hypotheses. They have been of

incalculable value in helping to a larger knowledge of the appearances of

things, and in the formation of laws of action and reaction, but in no way

have they aided in revealing the inner or transcendent realities of the

myriad manifestations of nature and life!

During the last half of the century this truth has forced itself with ever

increasing power upon the minds of scientists, and has resulted in many

divisions among the ranks. Some rest upon phenomena as the final reality;

hence materialistic or mechanical views of life. Some believe that the

only genuine reality is the one undiscoverable by science; hence new

presentations of metaphysical views of life.

During these decades the solid phalanx of religious believers has

continued to watch from its heights with more or less of fear the advance

of science. Here, too, there has been division in the ranks. Many

denounced the scientists as the destroyers of religion; others like the

good Bishop Colenso could write such words as these in 1873: "Bless God

devoutly for the gift of modern science"; and who ten years earlier had

expressed satisfaction in the fact that superstitious belief in the letter

of the Bible was giving way to a true appreciation of the real value of

the ancient Hebrew Scriptures as containing the dawn of religious light.

From another quarter came the critical students of the Bible, who

subjected its contents to the keen tests of historical and archaeological

study. Serene, above all the turmoil, was the small band of genuine

philosophers who, like Browning's own musician, Abt Vogler, knew the very

truth. No matter what disturbing facts may be brought to light by science,

be it man's descent from Anthropoids or a mechanical view of sensation,

they continue to dwell unshaken in the light of a transcendent truth which

reaches them through some other avenue than that of the mind.

Browning belonged by nature in this last group. Already in "Sordello" his

attention is turned to the development of the soul, and from that time on

to the end of his career he is the champion of the soul-side of existence

with all that it implies of character development--"little else being

worth study," as he declared in his introduction to a second edition of

the poem written twenty years after its first appearance.

On this rock, the human soul, he takes his stand, and, though all the

complex waves of the tempest of nineteenth-century thought break against

his feet, he remains firm.

Beginning with "Sordello," it is no longer evolution as applied to every

aspect of the universe but evolution as applied to the human spirit which

has his chief interest. Problems growing out of the marvelous developments

of such sciences as astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry or biology do

not enter into the main body of the poet's thought, though there are

allusions many and exact which show his familiarity with the growth of

these various objective sciences during his life.

During all the middle years of his poetic career the relations of the mind

and the spirit seemed to fascinate Browning, especially upon the side of

the problems connected with the supernatural bases of religious

experience. These are the problems which grew out of that phase of

scholarly advance represented by biblical criticism.

Such a poem as "Saul," for example, though full of a humanity and

tenderness, as well as of a sheer poetic beauty, which endear it alike to

those who appreciate little more than the content of the poem, and to

those whose appreciation is that of the connoisseur in poetic art, is

nevertheless an interpretation of the origin of prophecy, especially of

the Messianic idea, which places Browning in the van of the thought of the

century on questions connected with biblical criticism.

At the time when "Saul" was written, 1845, modern biblical criticism had

certainly gained very little hearing in England, for even as late as 1862

Bishop Colenso's enlightened book on the Pentateuch was received, as one

writer expresses it, with "almost unanimous disapprobation and widespread

horror."

Critics of the Bible there had been since the seventeenth century, but

they had produced a confused mass of stuff in their attacks upon the

authenticity of the Bible against which the orthodox apologists had

succeeded in holding their own. At the end of the eighteenth and the dawn

of the nineteenth century came the more systematic criticism of German

scholars, echoes of whose theories found their way into England through

the studies of such men as Pusey. But these, though they gave full

consideration to the foremost of the German critics of the day, ranged

themselves, for the most part, on the side of orthodoxy.

Eichhorn, one of the first of the Germans to be studied in England, had

found a point of departure in the celebrated "Wolfenbuettel Fragments,"

which had been printed by Lessing from manuscripts by an unknown writer

Reimarus discovered in the Wolfenbuettel library. These fragments represent

criticism of the sweepingly destructive order, characteristic of what has

been called the naturalistic school. Although Eichhorn agreed with the

writer of the "Fragments" that the biblical narratives should be divested

of all their supernatural aspects, he did not interpret the supernatural

elements as simply frauds designed to deceive in order that personal ends

might be gained. He restored dignity to the narrative by insisting at once

upon its historical verity and upon a natural interpretation of the

supernatural--"a spontaneous illumination reflected from antiquity

itself," which might result from primitive misunderstanding of natural

phenomena, from the poetical embellishment of facts, or the symbolizing of

an idea.

Doctor Paulus, in his commentary on the Gospels (1800), carried the idea

still farther, and the rationalistic school of Bible criticism became an

assured fact, though Kant at this time developed an entirely different

theory of Bible interpretation, which in a sense harked back to the older

allegorical interpretation of the Bible.

He did not trouble himself at all about the historical accuracy of the

narratives. He was concerned only in discovering the idea underlying the

stories, the moral gist of them in relation to human development. With the

naturalists and the rationalists, he put aside any idea of Divine

revelation. It was the moral aspiration of the authors, themselves, which

threw a supernatural glamour over their accounts of old traditions and

turned them into symbols of life instead of merely records of bona fide

facts of history. The weakness of Kant's standpoint was later pointed out

by Strauss, whose opinion is well summed up in the following paragraph.

"Whilst Kant sought to educe moral thoughts from the biblical writings,

even in their historical part, and was even inclined to consider these

thoughts as the fundamental object of the history: on the other hand he

derived these thoughts only from himself and the cultivation of his age,

and therefore could seldom assume that they had actually been laid down by

the authors of these writings; and on the other hand, and for the same

reason, he omitted to show what was the relation between these thoughts

and those symbolic representations, and how it happened that the one came

to be expressed by the other."

The next development of biblical criticism was the mythical mode of

interpretation in which are prominent the names of Gabler, Schelling,

Bauer, Vater, De Wette, and others. These critics among them set

themselves the difficult task of classifying the Bible narratives under

the heads of three kinds of myths: historical myths, philosophical myths,

and poetical myths. The first were "narratives of real events colored by

the light of antiquity, which confounded the divine and the human, the

natural and the supernatural"; the second, "such as clothe in the garb of

historical narrative a simple thought, a precept, or an idea of the time";

the third, "historical and philosophical myths partly blended together and

partly embellished by the creations of the imagination, in which the

original fact or idea is almost obscured by the veil which the fancy of

the poet has woven around it."

This sort of interpretation, first applied to the Old Testament, was later

used in sifting history from myth to the New Testament.

It will be seen that it has something in common with both the previously

opposed views. The mythical interpretation agrees with the old allegorical

view in so far that they both relinquish historical reality in favor of

some inherent truth or religious conception of which the historical

semblance is merely the shell. On the other hand it agrees with the

rationalistic view in the fact that it really gives a natural explanation

of the process of the growth of myths and legends in human society.

Immediate divine agency controls in the allegorical view, the spirit of

individuals or of society controls in the mythical view.

Neither the out-and-out rationalists nor the orthodox students of the

Bible approved of this new mode of interpretation, which was more or less

the outcome of the study of the sacred books of other religions. In 1835,

however, appeared an epoch-making book which subjected the New Testament

to the most elaborate criticism based upon mythical and legendary

interpretation. This was the "Life of Jesus, Critically Examined," by Dr.

David Friedrich Strauss. This book caused a great stir in the theological

world of Germany. Strauss was dismissed from his professorship in the

University of Tuebingen in consequence of it. Not only this, but in 1839,

when he was appointed professor of Church History and Divinity at the

University of Zurich, he was compelled at once to resign, and the

administration which appointed him was overthrown. This veritable bomb

thrown into the world of theology was translated by George Eliot, and

published in England in 1846.

Through this translation the most advanced German thought must have become

familiar to many outside the pale of the professional scholar, and among

them was, doubtless, the poet Browning, if indeed he had not already

become familiar with it in the original. When the content and the thought

of Browning's poems upon religious subjects are examined, it becomes

certain that he was familiar with the whole trend of biblical criticism in

the first half of the century and of its effect upon certain of the

orthodox churchmen, and that with full consciousness he brought forward in

his religious poems, not didactically, but often by the subtlest

indirections, his own attitude toward the problems raised in this

department of scientific historical inquiry.

Some of the problems which occupied his attention, such as that in "The

Death in the Desert," are directly traceable to the influence of Strauss's

book. Whether he knew of Strauss's argument or not when he wrote "Saul,"

his treatment of the story of David and Saul is not only entirely in

sympathy with the creed of the German school of mythical interpreters, but

the poet himself becomes one of the myth makers in the series of

prophets--that is, he takes the idea, the Messianic idea, poetically

embellishes an old tradition, making it glow with humanness, throws into

that idea not only a content beyond that which David could have dreamed

of, but suggests a purely psychical origin of the Messianic idea itself in

keeping with his own thought on the subject.

The history of the origin and growth of the Messianic ideal as traced by

the most modern Jewish critics claims it to have been a slow evolution in

the minds of the prophets. In Genesis it appears as the prophecy of a time

to come of universal happiness promised to Abraham, through whose seed all

the peoples of the earth shall be blessed, because they had hearkened unto

the voice of God. From a family ideal in Abraham it passed on to being a

tribal ideal with Jacob, and with the prophets it became a national ideal,

an aspiration toward individual happiness and a noble national life. Not

until the time of Isaiah is a special agent mentioned who is to be the

instrument by means of which the blessing is to be fulfilled, and there we

read this prophecy: "There shall sprout forth a shoot from the stem of

Jesse, upon whom will rest the spirit of Yahveh, the spirit of wisdom

and understanding, of counsel and strength, of the knowledge and fear of

God. He will not judge according to appearance, nor will he according to

hearsay. He will govern in righteousness the poor, and judge with equity

the humble of the earth. He will smite the mighty with the rod of his

mouth, and the wicked with the breath of his lips."

The ideal expressed here of a great and wise national ruler who would

bring about the realization of liberty, justice and peace to the Hebrew

nation, and not only to them but to all mankind, becomes in the prophetic

vision of Daniel a mystic being. "I saw in the visions of night, and

behold, with the clouds of heaven came down as a likeness of the son of

man. He stepped forward to the ancient of days. To him was given dominion,

magnificence and rule. And all the peoples, nations and tongues did homage

to him. His empire is an eternal empire and his realm shall never cease."

In "Saul" Browning makes David the type of the prophetic faculty in its

complete development. His vision is of an ideal which was not fully

unfolded until the advent of Jesus himself--the ideal not merely of the

mythical political liberator but of the spiritual saviour, who through

infinite love would bring redemption and immortality to mankind. David

in the poem essays to cheer Saul with the thought of the greatness that

will live after him in the memory of others, but his own passionate desire

to give something better than this to Saul awakens in him the assurance

that God must be as full of love and compassion as he is. Thus Browning

explains the sudden awakening of David, not as a divine revelation from

without, but as a natural growth of the human spirit Godward. This new

perception of values produces the ecstasy during which David sees his

visions, the "witnesses, cohorts" about him, "angels, powers, the

unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware."

This whole conception was developed by Browning from the single phrase in

I Samuel: "And David came to Saul, and stood before him: and he loved him

greatly." In thus making David prophesy of an ideal which had not been

evolved at his time, Browning indulges in what the biblical critic would

call prophecy after the fact, and so throws himself in on the side of the

mythical interpreters of the Bible.

He has taken a historical narrative, embellished it poetically as in the

imaginary accounts of the songs sung by David to Saul, and given it a

philosophical content belonging on its objective side to the dawn of

Christianity in the coming of Jesus himself and on its subjective side to

his (the poet's) own time--that is, the idea of internal instead of

external revelation--one of the ideas about which has been waged the

so-called conflict of Science and Religion as it was understood by some of

the most prominent thinkers of the latter half of the century. In this,

again, it will be seen that Browning was in the van of the thought of the

century, and still more was he in the van in the psychological tinge which

he gives to David's experience. Professor William James himself could not

better have portrayed a case of religious ecstasy growing out of genuine

exaltation of thought than the poet has in David's experience.

This poem undoubtedly sheds many rays of light upon the feelings, at the

time, of its writer. While he was a profound believer in the spiritual

nature and needs of man, he was evidently not opposed to the contemporary

methods of biblical criticism as applied to the prophecies of the Old

Testament, for has he not himself worked in accord with the light such

criticism had thrown upon the origin of prophecy? Furthermore, the poem is

not only an instance of his belief in the supremacy of the human spirit,

but it distinctly repudiates the Comtian ideal of a religion of humanity,

and of an immortality existing only in the memory of others. The Comte

philosophy growing out of a material conception of the universe and a

product of scientific thought has been one of the strong influences

through the whole of the nineteenth century in sociology and religion.

While it has worked much good in developing a deeper interest in the

social life of man, it has proved altogether unsatisfactory and barren as

a religious ideal, though there are minds which seem to derive some sort

of forlorn comfort from this religion of positivism--from such hopes as

may be inspired by the worship of Humanity "as a continuity and solidarity

in time" without "any special existence, more largely composed of the dead

than of the living," by the thought of an immortality in which we shall be

reunited with the remembrance of our "grandsires" like Tyltyl and Mytyl in

Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird."

Here, as always, the poet throws in his weight on the side of the

paramount worth of the individual, and of a conception of life which

demands that the individual shall have a future world in which to overcome

the flaws and imperfections incident to earthly life.

Although, as I have tried to show, this poem undoubtedly bears witness to

Browning's awareness to the thought currents of the day, it is couched in

a form so dramatic, and in a language so poetic, that it seems like a

spontaneous outburst of belief in which feeling alone had played a part.

Certainly, whatever thoughts upon the subject may have been stowed away in

the subconscious regions of the poet's mind, they well up here in a

fountain of pure inspiration, carrying the thought forward on the wings of

the poet's own spirit.

Poems reflecting several phases of the turmoil of religious opinion rife

in mid-century England are "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day." Baffling they

are, even misleading to any one who is desirous of finding out the exact

attitude of the poet's mind, for example, upon the rival doctrines of a

Methodist parson and a German biblical critic.

The Methodist Chapel and the German University might be considered as

representative of the extremes of thought in the more or less prescribed

realm of theology, which largely through the influence of the filtering in

of scientific and philosophic thought had divided itself into many sects.

Within the Church of England itself there were high church and low

church, broad church and Latitudinarian, into whose different shades of

opinion it is not needful to enter here. Outside of the Established Church

were the numerous dissenters, including Congregationalists, Baptists,

Quakers, Methodists, Swedenborgians, Unitarians, and numerous others.

There was one broad line of division between the Established Church and

the dissenting bodies. In the first was inherent the ancient principle of

authority, while the principle of self-government in matters of faith

guided all the dissenters in their search for the light.

It is not surprising that with so many differing shades of opinion within

the bosom of the Anglican Church it should, in the earlier half of the

century, have lost its grip upon not only the people at large, but upon

many of its higher intellects. The principle of authority seemed to be

tottering to its fall. In this crisis the Roman Catholic Church exercised

a peculiar fascination upon men of intellectual endowment who, fearing the

direction in which their intellect might lead them, turned to that church

where the principle of authority kept itself firmly rooted by summarily

dismissing any one who might question it. It is of interest to remember

that at the date when this poem was written the Tractarian Movement, in

which was conspicuous the Oxford group of men, had succeeded in carrying

over four hundred clergymen and laity into the Catholic Church.

Those who were unafraid followed the lead of German criticism and French

materialism, but the large mass of common people found in Methodism the

sort of religious guidance which it craved.

To this sect has been attributed an unparalleled influence in the moral

development of England. By rescuing multitudes from ignorance and from

almost the degradation of beasts, and by fostering habits of industry and

thrift, Methodism became a chief factor in building up a great,

intelligent and industrious middle-class. Its influence has been felt even

in the Established Church, and as its enthusiastic historians have pointed

out, England might have suffered the political and religious convulsions

inaugurated by the French Revolution if it had not been for the saving

grace of Methodism.

Appealing at first to the poor and lowly, suffering wrong and persecution

with its founder, Wesley, it was so flexible in its constitution that

after the death of Wesley it broadened out and differentiated in a way

that made it adaptable to very varied human needs. In consequence of this

it finally became a genuine power in the Church and State of Great

Britain.

The poem "Christmas Eve" becomes much more understandable when these facts

about Methodism are borne in mind--facts which were evidently in the

poet's mind, although the poem itself has the character of a symbolic

rather than a personal utterance. The speaker might be regarded as a type

of the religious conscience of England. In spite of whatever direct

visions of the divine such a type of conscience may gain through the

contemplation of nature and the revelations of the human heart, its

relations to the past cause it to feel the need of some sectarian form of

religion--a sort of inherited need to be orthodox in one form or another.

This religious conscience has its artistic side; it can clothe its inborn

religious instincts in exquisite imaginative vision. Also, it has its

clear-sighted reasoning side. This is able unerringly to put its finger

upon any flaw of doctrine or reasoning in the forms of religion it

contemplates. Hence, Catholic doctrine, which was claiming the allegiance

of those who were willing to put their troublesome intellects to sleep

and accept authority where religion was concerned, does not satisfy this

keen analyzer. Nor yet is it able to see any religious reality in such a

myth of Christ rehabilitated as an ethical prophet as the Goettingen

professor constructs in a manner so reminiscent of a passage in Strauss's

"Life of Jesus," where he is describing the opinions of the rationalists'

school of criticism, that a comparison with that passage is enlightening.

Having swept away completely the supernatural basis of religion, the

rationalist is able still to conceive of Jesus as a divine Messenger, a

special favorite and charge of the Deity:

"He had implanted in him by God the natural conditions only of that

which he was ultimately to become, and his realization of this destiny

was the result of his own spontaneity. His admirable wisdom he

acquired by the judicious application of his intellectual powers and

the conscientious use of all the aids within his reach; his moral

greatness, by the zealous culture of his moral dispositions, the

restraint of his sensual inclinations and passions, and a scrupulous

obedience to the voice of his conscience; and on these alone rested

all that was exalted in his personality, all that was encouraging in

his example."

The difficulty to this order of mind of the direct personal revelation

lies in the fact that it is convincing only to those who experience it,

having no basis in authority, and may even for them lose its force.

What then is the conclusion forced upon this English religious conscience?

Simply this: that, though failing both from the intellectual and the

aesthetic standpoint, the dissenting view was the only religious view of

the time possessing any genuine vitality. It represented the progressive,

democratic religious force which was then in England bringing religion

into the lives of the people with a positiveness long lost to the Anglican

Church. The religious conscience of England was growing through this

Methodist movement. This is why the speaker of the poem chooses at last

that form of worship which he finds in the little chapel.

While no one can doubt that the exalted mysticism based upon feeling, and

the large tolerance of the poem, reflect most nearly the poet's personal

attitude, on the other hand it is made clear that in his opinion the

dissenting bodies possessed the forms of religious orthodoxy most potent

at the time for good.

In "Easter Day," the doubts and fears which have racked the hearts and

minds of hundreds and thousands of individuals, as the result of the

increase of scientific knowledge and biblical criticism are given more

personal expression. The discussion turns principally upon the relation of

the finite to the Infinite, a philosophical problem capable of much

hair-splitting controversy, solved here in keeping with the prevailing

thought of the century--namely, that the finite is relative and that this

relativity is the proof of the Infinite.

The boldness of this statement, one such as might be found in the pages of

Spencer, is by Browning elaborated with pictorial and emotional power.

Only by a marvelous vision is the truth brought home to the speaker that

the beauties and joys of earth are not all-sufficient, but that they are

in the poet's speech but partial beauty, though through this very

limitation they become "a pledge of beauty in its plenitude," gleams

"meant to sting with hunger for full light." It is not, however, until

this see-er of visions perceives the highest gleam of earth that he is

able to realize through the spiritual voice of his vision that the nature

of the Infinite is in its essence Love, the supreme manifestation of which

was symbolized in the death and resurrection of Christ.

This revelation is nevertheless rendered null by the man's conviction that

the vision was merely such "stuff as dreams are made on." At the end as

at the beginning he finds it hard to be a Christian.

His vision, which thus symbolizes his own course of emotionalized

reasoning, brings hope but not conviction. Like the type in "Christmas

Eve," conviction can come to him only through a belief in supernatural

revelation. He is evidently a man of broad intellectual endowment, who

cannot, as the Tractarians did, lay his mind asleep, and rest in the

authority of a church, nor yet can he be satisfied with the unconscious

anthropomorphism of the sectarian. He doubts his own reasoning attempts to

formulate religious doctrines, he doubts even the revelations of his own

mystic states of consciousness; hence there is nothing for him but to

flounder on through life as best he can, hoping, fearing, doubting, as

many a serious mind has done owing to the nineteenth-century reaction

against the supernatural dogmas of Christianity. Like others of his ilk,

he probably stayed in the Anglican Church and weakened it through his

latitudinarianisms.

A study in religious consciousness akin to this is that of Bishop

Blougram. Here we have not a generalized type as in "Christmas Eve," nor

an imaginary individual as in "Easter Day," but an actual study of a real

man, it being no secret that Cardinal Wiseman was the inspiration for the

poem.

Wiseman's influence as a Catholic in the Tractarian movement was a

powerful one, and in the poet's dissection of his psychology an attempt is

made to present the reasoning by means of which he made his appeal to less

independent thinkers. With faith as the basis of religion, doubt serves as

a moral spur, since the will must exercise itself in keeping doubt

underfoot. Browning, himself, might agree that aspiration toward faith was

one of the tests of its truth, he might also consider doubt as a spur to

greater aspiration, but these ideals would connote something different to

him from what he makes them mean to Blougram. The poet's aspiration would

be toward a belief in Omniscient Love and Power, his doubts would grow out

of his inability to make this ideal tally with the sin and evil he beholds

in life. Blougram's consciousness is on a lower plane. His aspiration is

to believe in the dogmas of the Church, his doubts arise from an

intellectual fear that the dogmas may not be true. Where Browning seems to

miss comprehension of such a nature as Blougram's is in failing to

recognize that on his own plane of consciousness genuine feeling and the

perception of beauty play at least as large a part in the basis of his

faith as utilitarian and instinctive reasoning do. While this poem shows

in its references to the scientific theories of the origin of morals and

its allusions to Strauss, as well as in the indirect portrayal of

Gigadibs, the man emancipated from the Church, how entirely familiar the

poet was with the currents of religious and scientific thought, it falls

short as a fair analysis of a man who is acknowledged to have wielded a

tremendous religious influence upon Englishmen of the caliber of Cardinal

Newman, Kingsley, Arnold, and others.

If we leave out of account its connection with a special individual, the

poem stands, however, as a delightful study of a type in which is depicted

in passingly clever fashion methods of reasoning compounded of tantalizing

gleams of truth and darkening sophistication.

The poem which shows most completely the effect of contemporary biblical

criticism on the poet is "A Death in the Desert." It has been said to be

an attempt to meet the destructive criticism of Strauss. The setting of

the poem is wonderfully beautiful, while the portrayal of the mystical

quality of John's reasoning is so instinct with religious feeling that it

must be a wary reader indeed who does not come from the reading of this

poem with the conviction that here, at least, Browning has declared

himself unflinchingly on the side of supernatural Christianity in the face

of the battering rams of criticism and the projectiles of science.

But if he be a wary reader, he will discover that the argument for

supernaturalism only amounts to this--and it is put in the mouth of John,

who had in his youth been contemporary with Christ--namely, that miracles

had been performed when only by means of them faith was possible, though

miracles were probably not what those who believed in them thought they

were. Here is the gist of his defence of the supernatural:

"I say, that as a babe, you feed awhile,

Becomes a boy and fit to feed himself,

So, minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth:

When they can eat, babes'-nurture is withdrawn.

I fed the babe whether it would or no:

I bid the boy or feed himself or starve.

I cried once, 'That ye may believe in Christ,

Behold this blind man shall receive his sight!'

I cry now, 'Urgest thou, _for I am shrewd

And smile at stories how John's word could cure--

Repeat that miracle and take my faith_?'

I say, that miracle was duly wrought

When save for it no faith was possible.

Whether a change were wrought in the shows o' the world,

Whether the change came from our minds which see

Of shows o' the world so much as and no more

Than God wills for his purpose,--(what do I

See now, suppose you, there where you see rock

Round us?)--I know not; such was the effect,

So faith grew, making void more miracles,

Because too much they would compel, not help.

I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ

Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee

All questions in the earth and out of it,

And has so far advanced thee to be wise.

Wouldst thou improve this to re-prove the proved?

In life's mere minute, with power to use the proof,

Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung?

Thou hast it; use it and forthwith, or die!"

The important truth as seen by John's dying eyes is that faith in a

beautiful ideal has been born in the human soul. Whether the accounts of

the exact means by which this faith arose were literally true is of little

importance, the faith itself is no less God-given, as another passage will

make clear:

"Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect

He could not, what he knows now, know at first;

What he considers that he knows to-day,

Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;

Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns

Because he lives, which is to be a man,

Set to instruct himself by his past self;

First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,

Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,

Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.

God's gift was that man should conceive of truth

And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake

As midway help till he reach fact indeed."

The defence of Christianity in this poem reminds one very strongly of the

theology of Schleiermacher, a resume of which the poet might have found in

Strauss's "Life of Jesus." Although Schleiermacher accepted and even went

beyond the negative criticism of the rationalists against the doctrines of

the Church, he sought to retain the essential aspects of positive

Christianity. He starts out from the consciousness of the Christian, "from

that internal experience resulting to the individual from his connection

with the Christian community, and he thus obtains a material which, as its

basis of feeling, is more flexible and to which it is easier to give

dialectically a form that satisfies science."

Again, "If we owe to him [Jesus] the continual strengthening of the

consciousness of God within us, this consciousness must have existed in

him in absolute strength, so that it or God in the form of the

consciousness was the only operative force within him." In other words, in

Jesus was the supreme manifestation of God in human consciousness. This

truth, first grasped by means which seemed miraculous, is finally

recognized in man's developing consciousness as a consummation brought

about by natural means. John's reasoning in the poem can lead to no other

conclusion than this.

Schleiermacher's theology has, of course, been objected to on the ground

that if this incarnation of God was possible in one man, there is no

reason why it should not frequently be possible. This is the orthodox

objection, and it is voiced in the comment added by "One" at the end of

the poem showing the weakness of John's argument from the strictly

orthodox point of view.

With regard to the miracles being natural events supernaturally

interpreted--that is an explanation familiar to the biblical critic, and

one which the psychologist of to-day is ready to support with numberless

proofs and analyses. How much this poem owes to hints derived from

Strauss's book is further illustrated by the "Glossa of Theotypas," which

is borrowed from Origen, whose theory is referred to by Strauss in his

Introduction as follows: "Origen attributes a threefold meaning to the

Scriptures, corresponding with his distribution of the human being into

three parts, the liberal sense answering to the body, the moral to the

soul, and the mystical to the spirit."

On the whole, the poem appears to be influenced more by the actual

contents of Strauss's book than to be deliberately directed against his

thought, for John's own reasoning when his feelings are in abeyance might

be deduced from more than one passage in this work wherein are passed in

review the conclusions of divers critics of the naturalist and rationalist

schools of thought.

The poem "An Epistle" purports to give a nearly contemporary opinion by an

Arab physician upon the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. We have here,

on the one hand, the Arab's natural explanation of the miracle as an

epileptic trance prolonged some three days, and Lazarus's interpretation

of his cure as a supernatural event. Though absolutely skeptical, the Arab

cannot but be impressed with the beliefs of Lazarus, because of their

revelation of God as a God of Love. Thus Browning brings out the power of

the truth in the underlying ideas of Christianity, whatever skepticism may

be felt as to the letter of it.

The effect of the trance upon the nature of Lazarus is paralleled to-day

by accounts, given by various persons, of their sensations when they

have sunk into unconsciousness nigh unto death. I remember reading of a

case in which a man described his feeling of entire indifference as to the

relations of life, his joy in a sense of freedom and ineffable beauty

toward which he seemed to be flying through space, and his disinclination

to be resuscitated, a process which his spirit was watching from its

heights with fear lest his friends should bring him back to earth. This

higher sort of consciousness seems to have evolved in some people to-day

without the intervention of such an experience as that of Lazarus or one

such as that of the above subject of the Society for Psychical Research.

In describing Lazarus to have reached such an outlook upon life, Browning

again ranges himself with the most advanced psychological thought of the

century. Hear William James: "The existence of mystical states absolutely

overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and

ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states

merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of

consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition,

gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before

us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our

active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything

that our senses have immediately seized. It is the rationalistic critic

rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials

have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new

meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more

enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether

mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows

through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive

world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical

windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider

world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of

this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal

regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and

its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider

world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and

subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary

naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet

the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing

with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in

our approach to the final fulness of the truth."

The vision of Lazarus belongs to the beatific realm, and the naturalistic

Arab has a longing for similar strange vision, though he calls it a

madman's, for--

"So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too--

So, through the thunder comes a human voice

Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,

But love I gave thee, with myself to love,

And thou must love me who have died for thee.'"

A survey of Browning's contributions to the theological differences of the

mid-century would not be complete without some reference to "Caliban" and

"Childe Roland." In the former, the absurdities of anthropomorphism, of

the God conceived in the likeness of man, are presented with dramatic and

ironical force, but, at the same time, is shown the aspiration to

something beyond, which has carried dogma through all the centuries,

forward to ever purer and more spiritual conceptions of the absolute. In

the second, though it be a purely romantic ballad, there seems to be

symbolized the scientific knight-errant of the century, who, with belief

and faith completely annihilated by the science which allows for no realm

of knowledge beyond its own experimental reach, yet considers life worth

living. Despite the complex interpretations which have issued from the

oracular tripods of Browning Societies, one cannot read the last lines of

this poem--

"Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

And blew, '_Childe Roland to the dark Tower came_'"--

without thinking of the splendid courage in the face of disillusionment of

such men of the century as Huxley, Tyndall or Clifford.

When we ask, where is Browning in all this diversity of theological

opinion? we can only answer that beyond an ever-present undercurrent of

religious aspiration there is no possibility of pinning the poet to any

given dogmas. Everywhere we feel the dramatic artist. In "Paracelsus" the

philosophy of life was that of the artist whose adoration finds its

completion in beauty and joy; now the poet himself is the artist

experiencing as Aprile did, this beauty and joy in a boundless sympathy

with many forms of mystical religious ecstasy. Every one of these poems

presents a conflict between the doubts born of some phase of theological

controversy and the exaltation of moments or periods of ecstatic vision,

and though nowhere is dogmatic truth asserted with positiveness,

everywhere we feel a mystic sympathy with the moving power of religious

aspiration, a sympathy which belongs to a form of consciousness perhaps

more inclusive than the religious--namely, a poetic consciousness, able at

once to sympathize with the content and to present the forms of mystic

vision belonging to various phases of human consciousness.

II

THE CENTURY'S END: PROMISE OF PEACE

Passing onward from this mid-century phase of Browning's interest in what

I have called the battle of the mind and the spirit, we find him in his

later poems taking up the subject in its broader aspects, more as he

treated it in "Paracelsus," yet with a marked difference in temper. God is

no longer conceived of merely as a divine creator, joying in the wonder

and beauty of his creations. The ideal of the artist has been modified by

the observation of the thinker and the feeling induced by human rather

than by artistic emotion. Life's experiences have shown to the more

humanly conscious Browning that the problem of evil is not one to be so

easily dismissed. The scientist may point out that evil is but lack of

development, and the lover and artist may exult when he sees the wonderful

processes of nature and mind carrying forward development until he can

picture a time when the evil shall become null and void, but the human,

feeling being sees the misery and the unloveliness of evil. It does not

satisfy him to know that it is lack of development or the outcome of lack

of development, nor yet that it will grow less as time goes on he ponders

the problem, "why is evil permitted, how is it to be harmonized with the

existence of a universe planned upon a scheme which he believes to be the

outcome of a source all-powerful and all-loving!"

About this problem and its corollary, the conception of the infinite,

Browning's latter-day thought revolves as it did in his middle years about

the basis of religious belief.

It is one of the strange freaks of criticism that many admirers of

Browning's earlier work have failed to see the importance of his later

poems, especially "Ferishtah's Fancies," and "The Parleyings," not only as

expressions of the poet's own spiritual growth, but as showing his mental

grasp of the problems which the advance of nineteenth-century scientific

thought brought to the fore in the last days of the century.

The date at which various critics have declared that Browning ceased to

write poetry might be considered an index of the time when that critic's

powers became atrophied. No less a person than Edmund Gosse is of the

opinion that since 1868 the poet's books were chiefly valuable as keeping

alive popular interest in him, and as leading fresh generations of readers

to what he had already published. Fortunately it has long been admitted

that Homer sometimes nods, though not with such awful effect as was said

to attend the nods of Jove. Hence, in spite of Mr. Gosse's undoubted

eminence as a critic, we may dare to assume that in this particular

instance he fell into the ancient and distinguished trick of nodding.

If Mr. Gosse were right, it would practically put on a par with a mere

advertising scheme many poems which have now become household favorites.

Take, for example, "Herve Riel." Think of the blue-eyed Breton hero whom

all the world has learned to love through Browning, tolerated simply as an

index finger to "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Take, too, such poems, as

"Donald." This man's dastardly sportsmanship is so vividly portrayed that

it has the power to arouse strong emotion in strong men, who have been

known literally to break down in the middle of it through excess of

feeling; "Ivan Ivanovitch," in which is embodied such fear and horror that

weak hearts cannot stand the strain of hearing it read; the story of the

dog Tray, who rescued a drowning doll with the same promptitude as he

did a drowning child--at the relation of whose noble deeds the eyes of

little children grow eager with excitement and sympathy. And where is

there in any poet's work a more vivid bit of tragedy than "A Forgiveness?"

And would not an unfillable gap be left in the ranks of our friends of the

imaginative world if Balaustion were blotted out?--the exquisite lyric

girl, brave, tender and with a mind in which wisdom and wit are fair play

fellows.

As Carlyle might say, "Verily, verily, Mr. Gosse, thou hast out-Homered

Homer, and thy nod hath taken upon itself very much the semblance of a

snore."

These and many others which might be mentioned since the date when Mr.

Gosse autocratically put up the bars to the poet's genius are now

universally accepted. There are others, however, such as "The Red Cotton

Night-cap Country," "The Inn Album," "Aristophanes' Apology," "Fifine at

the Fair," which are liable at any time to attacks from atrophied critics,

and among these are the groups of poems which are to form the center of

our present discussion.

Without particularizing either critics or criticism it may be said that

criticism of these poems divides itself into the usual three

branches--one which objects to their philosophy, one which objects to

their art, one which finds them difficult of comprehension at all. This

last criticism may easily be disposed of by admitting it is in part true.

The mind whose highest reaches of poetic inspiration are ministered unto

by such simple and easily understandable lyrics as "Twinkle, twinkle,

little star," might not at once grasp the significance of the Parleying

with George Bubb Dodington. Indeed, it may be surmised that some minds

might sing upon the starry heights with Hegel and fathom the equivalence

of being and non-being, and yet be led into a slough of despond by this

same cantankerous George.

But a poetical slough of despond may be transfigured in the twinkling of

an eye--after a proper amount of study and hard thinking--into an elevated

plateau with prospects upon every side, grand or terrible or smiling.

Are we never to feel spurred to any poetical pleasure more vigorous than

dilly-dallying with Keats while we feast our eyes upon the wideness of the

seas? or lazily floating in a lotus land with Tennyson, perhaps, among the

meadows of the Musketaquid, in canoes with silken cushions? Beauty and

peace are the reward of such poetical pleasures. They fall upon the spirit

like the "sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and

giving odor," but shall we never return from the land where it is always

afternoon? Is it only in such a land as this that we realize the true

power of emotion? Rather does it conduce to the slumber of emotion, for

progress is the law of feeling as it is the law of life, and many times we

feel--yes, feel--with tremendous rushes of enthusiasm like climbing

Matterhorns with great iron nails in our shoes, with historical and

archaeological and philosophical Alpen-stocks in our hands, and when we

reach the summit what unsuspected beauties become ours!

Then let us hear no more of the critic who wishes Browning had ceased to

write in 1868 or at any other date. It may be said of him, not as of

Whitman, "he who reads my book touches a man," but "he who reads my poems

from start to finish grasps the life and thought of a century."

There will be no exaggeration in claiming that these two series of poems

form the keystone to Browning's whole work. They are like a final

synthesis of the problems of existence which he has previously portrayed

and analyzed from myriad points of view in his dramatic presentation of

character and his dramatic interpretations of spiritual moods.

In "Pauline," before the poet's personality became more or less merged in

that of his characters, we obtain a direct glimpse of the poet's own

artistic temperament, and may literally acquaint ourselves with those

qualities which were to be a large influence in moulding his work.

As described by himself, the poet of "Pauline" was

"Made up of an intensest life,

Of a most clear idea of consciousness

Of self, distinct from all its qualities,

From all affections, passions, feelings, powers;

And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all:

But linked in me to self-supremacy,

Existing as a center to all things,

Most potent to create and rule and call

Upon all things to minister to it."

This sense of an over-consciousness is the mark of an objective poet--one

who sympathizes with all the emotions and aspirations of

humanity--interprets their actions through the light of this sympathy, and

at the same time keeps his own individuality distinct.

The poet of this poem discovers that he can no longer lose himself with

enthusiasm in any phase of life; but what does that mean to a soul

constituted as his? It means that the way has been cleared for the birth

of that greater, broader love of the fully developed artist soul which,

while entering into sympathy with all phases of life, finds its true

complement only in an ideal of absolute Love.

This picture of the artist aspiring toward the absolute by means of his

large human sympathy may be supplemented by the theory of man's relation

to the universe involved in "Paracelsus" as we have seen.

From this point in his work, Browning, like the Hindu Brahma, becomes

manifest not as himself, but in his creations. The poet whose portrait is

painted for us in "Pauline" is the same poet who sympathetically presents

a whole world of human experiences to us, and the philosopher whose

portrait is drawn in "Paracelsus" is the same who interprets these human

experiences in the light of the great life theories therein presented.

But as the creations of Brahma return into himself, so the human

experiences Browning has entered into artistic sympathy with return to

enrich his completed view of the problems of life, when, like his own

Rabbi Ben Ezra, he reaches the last of life for which the first was

planned in these "Fancies" and "Parleyings."

Though these two groups of poems undoubtedly express the poet's own mature

conclusions, they yet preserve the dramatic form. Several things are

gained in this way: First, the poems are saved from didacticism, for the

poet expresses his opinions as an individual, and not in his own person as

a seer, trying to implant his theories in the minds of disciples. Second,

variety is given and the mind stimulated by having opposite points of view

presented, while the thought is infused with a certain amount of emotional

force through the heat of argument.

It has frequently been objected, not only of these poems, but upon general

grounds, that philosophical and ethical problems are not fit subjects for

treatment in poetry. There is one point which the critic of aesthetics

seems in danger of never realizing--namely, that the law of evolution is

differentiation, in art as well as in cosmic, organic, and social life. It

is just as prejudiced and unforeseeing in these days to limit poetry to

this or that kind of a subject, or to say that nothing is dramatic which

does not deal with immediate action, as it would have been for Homer to

declare that no poem would ever be worthy the name that did not contain

a catalogue of ships.

These facts exist! We have dramas dealing merely with action, dramas in

which character development is of prime importance; dramas wherein action

and character are entirely synchronous; and those in which the action

means more than appears upon the surface, like Hauptmann's "Sunken Bell,"

or Ibsen's "Master Builder"; then why not dramas of thought and dramas of

mood when the brain and heart become the stage of action instead of an

actual stage.

Surely such an extension of the possibilities of dramatic art is a

development quite natural to the intellectual ferment of the nineteenth

century. As the man in "Half Rome" says, "Facts are facts and lie not, and

the question, 'How came that purse the poke o' you?' admits of no reply."

By using the dramatic form, the poet has furthermore been enabled to give

one a deep sense of the characteristics peculiar to the century. The

latter half of Victorian England in its thought phases lives just as

surely in these poems as Renaissance Italy in its art phases in "Fra Lippo

Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto," and the rest; and this is true though the

first series is cast in the form of Persian fables and the second in the

form of "Parleyings" with worthies of past centuries.

It may be worth while for the benefit of the reader not thoroughly

familiar with these later poems to pass quickly in review the problems in

them upon which Browning bends his poet's insight.

Nothing bears upon the grounds of moral action more disastrously than

blind fatalism, and while there have been many evil forms of this doctrine

in the past there has probably been none worse than the modern form,

because it seems to have sanction in the scientific doctrines of the

conservation of energy, the persistence of heredity, and the survival of

the fittest. Even the wise and the thoughtful with wills atrophied by

scientific phases of fatalism allow themselves to drift upon what they

call the laws of development, possessing evidently no realizing sense that

the will of man, whether it be in the last analysis absolutely free or

not, is a prime factor in the working of these laws. Such people will

hesitate, therefore, to throw in their voices upon either side in the

solution of great national problems, because, things being bound to follow

the laws of development, what matters a single voice! Such arguments were

frequently heard among the wise in our own country during the Cuban and

Philippine campaigns. Upon this attitude of mind the poet gives his

opinion in the first of "Ferishtah's Fancies," "The Eagle." It is a strong

plea for the exercise of those human impulses that lead to action. The

will to serve the world is the true force from God. Every man, though he

be the last link in a chain of causes over which he had no control, can,

at least, have a determining influence upon the direction in which the

next link shall be forged. Ferishtah appears upon the scene, himself, a

fatalist, leaving himself wholly in God's hands, until he is taught by the

dream God sent him that man's part is to act as he saw the eagle act,

succoring the helpless, not to play the part of the helpless birdlings.

Another phase of the same thought is brought out in "A Camel Driver,"

where the discussion turns upon punishment. The point is, if, as Ferishtah

declares, the sinner is not to be punished eternally, then why should man

trouble himself to punish him? Universalist doctrines are here put into

the mouth of Ferishtah, and not a few modern philanthropists would agree

with Ferishtah's questioners that punishment for sins (the manifestations

of inherited tendencies for which the sinners are not responsible) is no

longer admissible. Ferishtah's answer amounts to this. That no matter what

causes for beneficent ends may be visible to the Divine mind in the

allowance of the existence of sin, nor yet the fact that Divine love

demands that punishment shall not be eternal; man must regard sin simply

from the human point of view as absolute evil, and must will to work for

its annihilation. It follows then that the punishing of a sinner is the

means by which he may be taught to overcome the sin. There is the added

thought, also, that the suffering of the conscience over the subtler sins

which go unpunished is all the hell one needs.

Another doctrine upon which the nineteenth-century belief in progress as

the law of life has set its seal is that of the pursuit of happiness, or

the striving for the greatest good of the whole number in which oneself is

not to be excluded. With this doctrine Browning shows himself in full

sympathy in "Two Camels," wherein Ferishtah contends that only through the

development of individual happiness and the experiencing of many forms of

joyousness can one help others to happiness and joyousness, while in "Plot

Culture" the enjoyment of human emotion as a means of developing the soul

is emphasized.

The relation of good and evil in their broader aspects occupy the poet's

attention in others of this group. Nineteenth-century thought brought

about a readjustment of these relations. Good and evil as absolutely

definable entities gave place to the doctrine that good and evil are

relative terms, a phrase which we sometimes forget must be understood in

two ways: first, that good and evil are relative to the state of society

in which they exist. What may be good according to the ethics of a Fejee

Islander would not hold in the civilized society of to-day. This is the

evil of lack of development which in the long run becomes less. On the

other hand, there is the evil of suffering and pain which it is more

difficult to reconcile with the idea of omnipotent power. In "Mihrab

Shah," Browning gives a solution of this problem in consonance with the

idea that were it not for evil we should not have learned how to

appreciate the good, to work for it, and, in doing so, bring about

progress.

To his pupil, worried over this problem, Ferishtah points out that evil in

the form of bodily suffering has given rise to the beautiful sentiments of

pity and sympathy. Having proved in this way that good really grows out of

evil, there is still the query, shall evil be encouraged in order that

good may be evolved? "No!" Ferishtah declares, man bound by man's

conditions is obliged to estimate as "fair or foul right, wrong, good,

evil, what man's faculty adjudges as such," therefore the man will do all

he can to relieve the suffering or poor Mihrab Shah with a fig plaster.

The final answers, then, which Browning gives to the ethical problems

which grew out of the acceptance of modern scientific doctrines are, in

brief, that man shall use that will-power of which he feels himself

possessed--the power really distinguishing him from the brute creation--in

working against whatever appears to him to be evil; while that good for

which he shall work is the greatest happiness of all.

In the remaining poems of the group we have the poet's mature word upon

the philosophical doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, a doctrine

which received the most elaborate demonstration from Herbert Spencer in

many directions. It is insisted upon in "Cherries," "The Sun," in "A Bean

Stripe also Apple Eating," and especially in that remarkable poem, "A

Pillar at Sebzevar." That knowledge fails is the burden of these poems.

Knowledge the golden is but lacquered ignorance, as gain to be

mistrusted. Curiously enough, this contention of Browning's has been the

cause of most of the criticisms against him as a thinker, yet the deepest

thinkers of to-day as well as many in the past have held the opinion in

some form or another that the intellect was unable to solve the mysterious

problems of the universe. Even the metaphysicians who build their unstable

air castles on _a priori_ ideas declare these ideas cannot be matters of

mere intellectual perception, but must be intuitions of the higher reason.

Browning, however, does not rest in the mere assertion that the intellect

fails. From this truth, so disconcerting to many, he draws immense

comfort. Though intellectual knowledge be mistrusted as gain, it is not to

be mistrusted as means to gain, for through its very failure it becomes a

promise of greater things.

"Friend," quoth Ferishtah in "A Pillar of Sebzevar,"

"As gain--mistrust it! Nor as means to gain:

Lacquer we learn by: cast in firing-pot,

We learn--when what seemed ore assayed proves dross

Surelier true gold's worth, guess how purity

I' the lode were precious could one light on ore

Clarified up to test of crucible.

The prize is in the process: knowledge means

Ever-renewed assurance by defeat

That victory is somehow still to reach."

For men with minds of the type of Spencer's this negative assurance of the

Infinite is sufficient, but human beings as a rule will not rest satisfied

with such cold abstractions. Though Job said thousands of years ago, "Who

by searching can find out God," mankind still continues to search. They

long to know something of the nature of the divine as well as to be

assured of its existence. In this very act of searching Browning declares

the divine becomes most directly manifest.

From the earliest times of which we have any record man has been aspiring

toward God. Many times has he thought he had found him, but with enlarged

perceptions he discovered later that what he had found was only God's

image built up out of his own human experiences.

This search of man for the divine is described with great power and

originality in the Fancy called "The Sun," under the symbol of the man who

seeks the prime Giver that he may give thanks where it is due for a

palatable fig. This search for God, Browning calls love, meaning by that

the moving, aspiring force of the whole universe in its multifarious

manifestations, from the love that goes forth in thanks for benefits

received, through the aspiration of the artist toward beauty, of the

lover toward human sympathy, even of the scientist toward knowledge, to

the lover of humanity like Ferishtah, who declares, "I know nothing save

that love I can, boundlessly, endlessly."

The poet argues from this that if mankind has with ever-increasing fervor

aspired toward a God of Love, and has ever developed toward broader

conceptions of human love, it is only reasonable to infer that in his

nature God has some attribute which corresponds to human love, though it

transcend our most exalted imagining of it.

At the end of the century a book was written in America in which an

argument similar to this was used to prove the existence of God. This book

was "Through Nature to God," by John Fiske, whose earlier work, "Cosmic

Philosophy," did much to familiarize the American reading public with the

evolutionary philosophy of Spencer.

Fiske claimed that his theory was entirely original, yet no one familiar

with the thought of Browning could fail to see the similarity of their

points of view. Fiske based his proof upon analogies drawn from the

evolution of organic life in following out the law of the adjustment of

inner to outer relations. For example, since the eye has through aeons

of time gradually adjusted itself into harmony with light, why should not

man's search for God be the gradual adjustment of the soul into harmony

with the infinite spirit? This adjustment, as Browning expresses it, is

that of human love to divine love.