It may be said that all this is the romantic love about which the poets

have always sung, and has as much existence in real life as the ideal of

disinterested helpfulness to lovelorn damsels sung about in the days of

chivalry. True, others have sung of the exaltation and the immortality of

love, and few have been those who have found it, but nowhere has the

distinctively human side been touched with such reverence as in Browning.

It is not Beatrice translated into a divine personage to be adored by a

worshipping devotee, but a wholly human woman who loves and is loved, who

touches divinity in Browning's mind. Human love is then not an impossible

ideal of which he writes in poetic language existing only in the realm of

fancy; it is a living religion, bringing those who love nearer to God

through the exaltation of their feeling than any other revelation of the

human soul. Other states of consciousness reveal to humanity the existence

of the absolute, but this gives a premonition of what divine love may have

in store for the aspiring soul.

In holding to such an ideal of love as this Browning has ranged himself

entirely apart from the main tendencies of thought of the century, on the

relations of men and women, which have, on the one hand, been wholly

conventional, marriage being a contract under the law binding for life

except in cases of definite breaches of conduct, and under the Church of

affection which is binding only for life; and have, on the other hand,

gone extreme lengths in the advocacy of entire freedom in the relations

of the sexes. The first degrades love by making it too much a matter of

law, the second by making it an ephemeral passion from which almost

everything truly beautiful in the relationship of two human beings is, of

necessity, eliminated.

To either of these extreme factions Browning's attitude is equally

incomprehensible. The first cries out against his liberalness, the second,

declaring that human emotion should be untrammeled by either Church, law

or God, would find him a pernicious influence against freedom; there are,

however, many shades of opinion between the two extremes which would feel

sympathy with his ideals in one or more directions.

The chief difficulty in the acceptance of the ideal for most people is

that they have not yet developed to the plane where feeling comes to them

with the intensity, the concentration, the depth or the constancy that

brings with it the sense of revelation. For many people law or the Church

is absolutely necessary to preserve such feeling as they are capable of

from dissipating itself in shallow sentimentalism; while one or the other

will always be necessary in some form because love has its social as well

as its personal aspect.

Yet the law and the Church should both allow sufficient freedom for the

breaking of relations from which all sincerity has departed, even though

humanity as a whole has not yet and probably will not for many ages arrive

at Browning's conception of human love.

Truth to one's own highest vision in love being a cardinal principle with

Browning, it follows that truth to one's nature in any direction is

desirable. He even carries this doctrine of truth to the individual nature

so far as to base upon it an apology for the most unmitigated villain he

has portrayed, Guido, and to put this apology into the mouth of the person

he had most deeply wronged, Pompilia. With exquisite vision she, even, can

say:

"But where will God be absent! In his face

Is light, but in his shadow healing too:

Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!

And as my presence was unfortunate,--

My earthly good, temptation and a snare,--

Nothing about me but drew somehow down

His hate upon me,--somewhat so excused

Therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,--

May my evanishment for evermore

Help further to relieve the heart that cast

Such object of its natural loathing forth!

So he was made; he nowise made himself:

I could not love him, but his mother did."

It is this notion that every nature must express its own truth which

underlies a poem like "Fifine at the Fair." Through expressing the truth

of itself, and so grasping at half truths, even at the false, it finally

reaches a higher truth. A nature like Guido's was not born with a faculty

for development. He simply had to live out his own hate. The man in

"Fifine" had the power of perceiving an ideal, but not the power of living

up to it without experimentation upon lower planes of living, probably the

most common type of man to-day. There are others like Norbert or Mertoun,

in whom the ideal truth is the real truth of their natures and for whom

life means the constant expansion of this ideal truth within them. In many

of the varying types of men and women portrayed by Browning there is the

recognition of the possibility of psychic development either by means of

experience or by sudden intuitions, and if, as in the case of Guido, there

is no development in this life, there is hope in a future existence in a

universe ruled by a God of love.

In his views upon human character and its possibilities of development

Browning is, of course, in touch with the scientific views on the subject

which filled the air in all later nineteenth-century thought, changing the

orthodox ideal of a static humanity born in sin and only to be saved by

belief in certain dogmas to that of a humanity born to develop; changing

the notion that sin was a terrible and absolutely defined entity, against

which every soul had ceaselessly to war, into the notion that sin is a

relative evil, consequent upon lack of development, which, as the human

soul advances on its path, led by its inborn consciousness of the divine

to be attained, will gradually disappear.

But the evil which results from this lack of development in individuals to

other individuals, and to society at large, brings a problem which as we

have already seen in the first chapter is not so easy of solution. Yet

Browning solves it, for is it not through the combat with this evil that

the soul is given its real opportunity for development? Pain and suffering

give rise to the thirst for happiness and joy, and through the arousing of

sympathy and pity, the desire that others shall have happiness and joy,

therefore to be despairing and pessimistic about evil or to wish for its

immediate annihilation would really be suicidal to the best interests of

the human race; nay, he even goes farther than this, as is hinted in one

of his last poems, "Rephan," and imagines that any other state than one

of flux between good and evil would be monotonous:

"Startle me up, by an Infinite

Discovered above and below me--height

And depth alike to attract my flight,

"Repel my descent: by hate taught love.

Oh, gain were indeed to see above

Supremacy ever--to move, remove,

"Not reach--aspire yet never attain

To the object aimed at! Scarce in vain,--

As each stage I left nor touched again.

"To suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss,

Wring knowledge from ignorance:--just for this--

To add one drop to a love--abyss!

"Enough: for you doubt, you hope, O men,

You fear, you agonize, die: what then?

Is an end to your life's work out of ken?

"Have you no assurance that, earth at end,

Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend

In the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?"

In his attitude toward the existence of evil Browning takes issue with

Carlyle, as already noted in the second chapter. Carlyle, as Browning

represents him, cannot reconcile the existence of evil with beneficent and

omniscient power. He makes the opponent, who is an echo of Carlyle in the

argument in "Bernard de Mandeville," exclaim:

"Where's

Knowledge, where power and will in evidence

'Tis Man's-play merely! Craft foils rectitude,

Malignity defeats beneficence,

And grant, at very last of all, the feud

'Twixt good and evil ends, strange thoughts intrude

Though good be garnered safely and good's foe

Bundled for burning. Thoughts steal even so--

Why grant tares leave to thus o'ertop, o'ertower

Their field-mate, boast the stalk and flaunt the flower,

Triumph one sunny minute?"

No attempt must be made to show God's reason for allowing evil. Any such

attempt will fail. This passage comes as near as any in Browning to a

plunge into the larger social questions which during the nineteenth

century have come more and more to the front, and is an index of just

where the poet stood in relation to the social movements of the century's

end. His gaze was so centered upon the individual and the power of the

individual to work out his own salvation and the need of evil in the

process that his philosophical attitude toward evil quite overtops the

militant interest in overcoming it.

Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the immense evil of the social conditions

in England, and raged and stormed against them, but could see no light by

which evil could be turned into good. He little realized that his own

storming at the ineptitude, the imbecility, the fool-ness of society, and

his own despair over the, to him, unaccountable evils of existence, were

in themselves a positive good growing out of the evil. Though he was not

to suggest practical means for leading the masses out of bondage, he was

to call attention in trumpet tones to the fact that the bondage existed.

By so doing he was taking a first step or rather drawing aside the curtain

and revealing the dire necessity that steps should be taken and taken

soon. While Carlyle was militantly shouting against evil to some purpose

which would later mean militant action against it, Browning was settling

in his own mind just what relation evil should hold to good in the scheme

of the universe, and writing a poem to tell why he was a liberal. In fine,

Carlyle was opening the way toward the socialism of the latter part of the

century, while Browning was still found in the camp of what the socialist

of to-day calls the middle-class individualist.

Liberalism, which had taken on social conditions to the point through

legislation where every man was free to be a property holder if he could

manage to become one, and to amass wealth, left out of consideration the

fact that he never could be free as long as he had to compete with

every other man in the state to get these things. Hence the movement of

the working classes to gain freedom by substituting for a competitive form

of society a cooperative form. Great names in literature and art have

helped toward the on-coming of this movement. Carlyle had railed at the

millions of the English nation, "mostly fools;" Ruskin had bemoaned the

enthronement of ugliness as the result of the industrial conditions;

Matthew Arnold had proposed a panacea for the ills of the social condition

in the bringing about of social equality through culture, and, best of

all, William Morris had not only talked but acted.

[Illustration: WILLIAM MORRIS]

To any student of social movements to-day, whether he has been drawn into

the swirl of socialistic propaganda or whether he is still comfortably

sitting in his parlor feeling an intellectual sympathy but no emotional

call to leave his parlor and be up and doing, Morris appears as the most

interesting figure of the century. The pioneers in the nineteenth-century

movement toward socialism in England, unless we except the social

enthusiasm of a Shelley or a Blake, were Owen and Maurice. Owen was that

remarkable anomaly, a self-made man who had gained his wealth because of

the new industrial order inaugurated by the invention of machinery, who

yet could look at the circumstances so fortuitous for him in an impersonal

manner, and realize that what had put a silver spoon into his own mouth

was taking away even pewter spoons from other men's mouths. Although he

was really in love with the new order of machine production, he realized

what many to-day fail to see, that machine production organized for the

benefit of private persons would most assuredly mean the poverty and the

degradation of the workers. He did not stop here, however, but spent his

vast fortune in trying to make the conditions of the workingmen better. In

the estimation of socialists to-day his work was of a very high order,

"not mere utopianism." It bore no similarity to the romantic dreams of

poets who saw visions of a perfect society regardless of the fact that a

perfect society cannot suddenly blossom from conditions of appalling

misery and degradation. Owen was a practical business man. He knew all the

ins and outs of the industrial regime, and consequently he had a practical

program, not a dream, which he wished to see carried out. Accounts of the

conditions of the workers at that time are heartrending. Everywhere the

same tale of abject poverty, ignorance, and oppression in field and

factory, long hours of labor and dear food. To bring help to these

downtrodden people was the burning desire of Robert Owen and his

followers. His efforts were not rewarded by that success which they

deserved, his failure being a necessary concomitant of the fact that even

a practical program for betterment cannot suddenly take effect owing to

the inevitable inertia of any long-established conditions. In showing the

causes which kept him from the full accomplishment of his ideals, in spite

of his genuine practicalness, Brougham Villiers, the recent historian of

the socialist movement in England, says he attempted too much "to

influence the workers from without, trying, of course vainly, to induce

the governing classes to interest themselves in the work of social reform.

Yet it is difficult to see what else he could have done at the time. We

have already shown how utterly disorganized the working classes were, how

incapable, indeed, of any organization. They were also destitute of

political power, and miserably underpaid. What could they do to help

themselves? Help, if it was to come at all, must come from the only people

who then had the power, if they only had the will, to accord it, and to

them, at first, Robert Owen appealed. Later, he turned to the people,

and for them indeed his work was not utterly wasted, though generations

were to pass before the full effect of it could be seen."

However abortive his attempts to gain political sympathy for his socialist

program, and in spite of the fact that socialist agitation came to a

standstill in England with the defeat of the somewhat chaotic socialism of

the Chartists, it cannot be doubted that his efforts influenced the

political reformers who were to take up one injustice after another and

fight for its melioration until the working classes were at least brought

to a plane where they could begin to organize and develop toward the still

higher plane where they could themselves take their own salvation in hand.

Another man who did much to bring the workingman's cause into prominence

was Maurice, who emphasized the Christian aspect of the movement. He was

an excellent supplement to Owen, whose liberal views on religion militated

in some quarters against an acceptance of his humane views in regard to

workingmen.

Notwithstanding the personal strength of these two men they failed not

only in the practical attainment of their object, but their ideas on

socialism did not even wedge itself into the thought consciousness of the

Englishmen.

The men who did more than any one else to awaken the sleeping English

consciousness were Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold and Morris. Of these Morris

held a position midway between the old-fashioned dreamer of dreams and the

new-fashioned hustling political socialist, who now sends his

representatives to Parliament and has his "say" in the national affairs of

the country.

Being a poet, he could, of course, dream dreams, and one of these, "The

Dream of John Ball," puts the case of the toilers in a form at once so

convincing and so full of divine pity that it does not seem possible it

could be read even by the most hardened of trust magnates without making

him see how unjust has been the distribution of this world's goods through

the making of one man do the work of many: "In days to come one man shall

do the work of a hundred men--yea, of a thousand or more: and this is the

shift of mastership that shall make many masters and many rich men." This

is a riddle which John Ball cannot grasp at once, and when it is explained

to him he is still more mystified at the result.

"Thou hast seen the weaver at his loom: think how it should be if he sit

no longer before the web and cast the shuttle and draw home the sley, but

if the shed open of itself, speed through it as swift as the eye can

follow, and the sley come home of itself, and the weaver standing by ...

looking to half a dozen looms and bidding them what to do. And as with the

weaver so with the potter, and the smith, and every worker in metals, and

all other crafts, that it shall be for them looking on and tending, as

with the man that sitteth in the cart while the horse draws. Yea, at last

so shall it be even with those who are mere husbandmen; and no longer

shall the reaper fare afield in the morning with his hook over his

shoulder, and smite and bind and smite again till the sun is down and the

moon is up; but he shall draw a thing made by men into the field with one

or two horses, and shall say the word and the horses shall go up and down,

and the thing shall reap and gather and bind, and do the work of many men.

Imagine all this in thy mind if thou canst, at least as ye may imagine a

tale of enchantment told by a minstrel, and then tell me what shouldst

thou deem that the life of men would be amidst all this, men such as these

of the township here, or the men of the Canterbury guilds."

And John Ball's conclusion is that things in that day to come will be not

as they are but as they ought to be. With irresistible logic he declares:

"I say that if men still abide men as I have known them, and unless these

folk of England change as the land changeth--and forsooth of the men, for

good and for evil, I can think no other than I think now, or behold them

other than I have known them and loved them--I say if the men be still

men, what will happen except that there should be all plenty in the land,

and not one poor man therein ... for there would then be such abundance of

good things, that, as greedy as the lords might be, there would be enough

to satisfy their greed and yet leave good living for all who labored with

their hands; so that these should labor for less than now, and they would

have time to learn knowledge," and he goes on, "take part in the making of

laws."

But Morris was not the man to dream, merely. Though he did not trouble

himself about the doctrinaire side of socialism, he preached it constantly

from the human side and from the artistic side. While some socialist

writers make us feel that socialism might possibly only be Gradgrind in

another guise, he makes us feel that peace and plenty and loveliness

would attend upon the sons and daughters of socialism. As one of his many

admirers says of him: "He was an out-and-out Communist because of the

essential sanity of a mind incapable of the desire to monopolize anything

he could not use."

The authoritarianism of the Marxian socialists was distasteful to him,

for, to quote from the same admirer, his "conception of socialism was that

of a free society, based on the simple rights of all to use the earth and

anything in it, and the consequent abolition of all competition for the

means of life." His attitude of mind on these points led him to break away

from the Social Democratic Federation, which, with its political program,

was distasteful to Morris's more purely social feeling, and found the

Socialist League. This emphasized more particularly the artistic side of

socialism. Morris and his followers were bent upon making life a beautiful

thing as well as a comfortable thing.

According to all accounts, the League was not as great a force in the

development of socialist ideals as was Morris himself, who inspired such

men as Burne-Jones and Walter Crane with a sympathy in the new ideals, as

well as multitudes of lesser men in the crowds that gathered to listen to

him in Waltham Green or in some other like open place of a Sunday.

Morris's chief contribution to the growth of the cause was perhaps his own

business plant, into which he put as many of his ideals for the betterment

of the workingmen's conditions as he was able to do under existing

conditions. Who has not gloated over his exquisite editions of Chaucer and

the like--books in which even the punctuation marks are a delight to the

eye, and the illustrations as far beyond ordinary illustrations as the

punctuation marks are beyond ordinary periods. If anything could add to

the richness of the interior it is the contrasting simplicity of the white

vellum bindings, and, again, if there is another possible touch of

grace--a gilding of the lily--what could better fulfil that purpose than

the outer boxing covered with a Morris cotton print! The critical may

object that these Morris editions are so expensive that none but

millionaire bibliophiles can have many of them. How many of us have even

seen them except in such collections! And how many of his workmen are able

to share in this product of their labor to any greater extent than the

product of labor is usually shared in by its producers, may be asked.

Though we are obliged to answer that the workmen probably do not have the

Morris books in their own libraries, they yet have the joy of making these

beautiful books under conditions of happy workmanship--that is, they are

skilled craftsmen, who have been trained in an apprenticeship, who are

asked to work only eight hours a day, who receive higher wages than other

workmen and, above all, who have the stimulation of the presence of

Morris, himself, working among them.

Morris's enthusiasm for a more universally happy and beautiful society

combined with the object lesson of his own methods in conducting a

business upon genuinely artistic principles has done an incalculable

amount in spreading the gospel of socialism. Still there was too much of

the _laissez faire_ atmosphere about his attitude for it to bring about

any marked degree of progress.

The opinion of Mr. William Clarke who had many conversations with Morris

on the subject reveals that, after all, there was too much of the poet

about him for him to be a really practical force in the movement. He

writes:

"It is not easy to understand how Morris proposes to bring about the

condition of things he looks forward to. No parliamentary or municipal

methods, no reliance upon lawmaking machinery, an abhorrence of everything

that smacks of 'politics': it all seems very impracticable to the average

man, and certainly suggests the poet rather than the man of affairs. What

Morris thinks will really happen is, I should say, judging from numerous

conversations I have had with him, something like this: Existing society

is, he thinks, gradually, but with increasing momentum, disintegrating

through its own rottenness. The capitalist system of production is

breaking down fast and is compelled to exploit new regions in Africa and

other parts, where he thinks its term will be short. Economically,

socially, morally, politically, religiously, civilization is becoming

bankrupt. Meanwhile it is for the socialist to take advantage of this

disintegration by spreading discontent, by preaching economic truths, and

by any kind of demonstration which may harass the authorities and develop

among the people an _esprit de corps_. By these means the people will, in

some way or other, be ready to take up the industry of the world when the

capitalist class is no longer able to direct or control it. Morris

believes less in a violent revolution than he did and thinks that

workmen's associations and labor unions form a kind of means between

brute force on the one hand and a parliamentary policy on the other. He

does not, however, share the sanguine views of John Burns as to the

wonders to be accomplished by the 'new' trades unionism."

The practical ineffectiveness of the Morris socialism in spite of its

having taken some steps in the direction of vital activity was overcome by

the next socialist body which came into prominence--the Fabian Society, in

which Bernard Shaw has been so conspicuous a figure.

As already mentioned, the Fabians are not a fighting body, but a solidly

educational body. To them is due the bringing of socialism into the realm

of political economy, and in so doing they have striven to harmonize it

with English practical political methods. Besides this, they have done a

vast amount of work in educating public opinion, not with the view to

immediately converting the English nation to a belief in the changing of

the present order into one wholly socialistic, but with a view to

introducing socialistic treatment of the individual problems which arise

in contemporary politics.

[Illustration: JOHN BURNS]

Their campaign of education was conducted so well that its effects were

soon visible, not only in the modification of public opinion, but upon

the workingmen themselves. The method was simple enough: "If any public,

especially any social, question came to the front, the Fabian method was

to make a careful independent study of the matter, and present to the

public, in a penny pamphlet, a thoughtful statement of the case and some

common sense, and incidentally socialistic, suggestions for a solution."

Fabian ideas were thus introduced into the consciousness of the awakening

trades unionists.

It has been objected that the gain was much more for the trades unionists

than for the Fabians. Their one-time eager pupils have, it is said,

progressed beyond their masters, as a review of recent socialistic

tendencies would divulge had we the time to follow them in this place.

However that may be, the great fact remains that the Fabians have done

more than any other branch of socialists to bridge over the distance

between what the English writers call the middle-class idealist and the

proletarian, with the result that the proletarian has begun to think for

himself and to translate middle-class idealism into proletarian realism.

Socialism, from being the watch word of the enthusiastic revolutionary,

began to be discussed in every intelligent household and in every

debating society. This enormous growth in public sentiment occurred during

the session of the Unionist Parliament, 1886-92. When this Parliament

opened there was hardly any socialist literature, and when it closed

everybody was reading Bellamy and the "Fabian Essays," and Sir William

Harcourt had made his memorable remark: "We are all socialists now."

The gesticulating and bemoaning idealists, the Carlyles and the Ruskins,

the revolutionary but _laissez faire_ prophets like Morris, who believed

in a complete change but not in using any of the means at hand to bring

about that change, had given place to men like Keir Hardie and John Burns,

who had sprung into leadership from the ranks of the workingmen

themselves, and who were to be later their representatives in Parliament

when the Independent Labor Party came into existence. All this had been

done by that group of progressive men, long-headed enough to see that the

ideal of a better and more beautiful social life could not be gained

except by a long and toilsome process of education and of action which

would consciously follow the principles of growth discovered by scientists

to obtain in all unconscious cosmic and physical development, the very

principle which as we have seen, Browning declared should have guided his

hero Sordello long before the Fabian socialists came into

existence--namely, the principle of evolution. That their methods should

have peacefully brought about the conditions where it was possible to form

an Independent Labor Party, which would have the power to speak and act

for itself instead of working as the Fabians themselves do through the

parties already in power, shouts aloud for the wisdom of their policy. And

is there not still plenty of work for them to do in the still further

educating of all parties toward the flowering of genuine democracy, when

the dreams of the dreamer shall have become actualities, because true and

not spurious ways of making them actual shall have been worked out by

experience?

This remarkable growth in social ideals was taking place during the ninth

decade of the century and the last decade of Browning's life. Is there any

indication in his later work that he was conscious of it? There is

certainly no direct evidence in his work that he progressed any farther in

the development of democratic ideals than we find in the liberalism of

such a parliamentary leader as Mr. Gladstone, while in that poem in which

he considers more especially than in any other the subject of better

conditions for the people, "Sordello," he distinctly expresses a mood of

doubt as to the advisability of making conditions too easy for the human

being, who needs the hardships and ills of life to bring his soul to

perfection, a far more important thing in Browning's eyes than to live

comfortably and beautifully. All he wishes for the human being is the fine

chance to make the most of himself spiritually. The socialist would say

that he could not secure the chance to do this except in a society where

the murderous principle of competition should give way to that of

cooperation. With this Browning might agree. Indeed, may this not have

been the very principle Sordello had in mind as something revealed to him

which neither Guelf nor Ghibelline could see, or was this only the more

obvious principle of republican as opposed to monarchical principle and

still falling under an individualistic conception of society?

While his work is instinct with sympathy for all classes and conditions of

men, Browning does not feel the ills of life with the intensity of a

Carlyle, nor its ugliness with the grief of a Ruskin, nor yet its lack of

culture with the priggishness of an Arnold, nor would he stand in open

spaces and preach discontent to the masses like Morris. Why? Because he

from the first was made wise to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success,

to be proud of men's fallacies, their half reasons, their faint aspirings,

upward tending all though weak, the lesson learned after weary experiences

of life by Paracelsus. His thought was centered upon the worth of every

human being to himself and for God. Earth is after all only a place to

grow in and prepare one's self for lives to come, and failure here, so

long as the fight has been bravely fought, is to be regarded with anything

but regret, for it is through the failure that the vision of the future is

made more sure.

What he finds true, as we saw, in the religious or philosophical world, he

finds true in the moral world. Lack in human knowledge points the way to

God; lack in human success points the way to immortality.

The meaning of this life in relation to a future life being so much more

important than this life in itself, and man's individual development being

so much more important than his social development, Browning naturally

would not turn his attention upon those practical, social or governmental

means by which even the chance for individual development must be

secured. He is too much occupied with the larger questions. He is not even

a middle-class idealist, dreaming dreams of future earthly bliss; he is

the prophet of future existences.

Does his practical influence upon the social development of the century

amount to nothing then? Not at all. He started out on his voyage through

the century toward the democratic ideal in the good ship

Individualism--the banner ship indeed. What he has emphasized upon this

voyage is first the paramount worth of each and every human being, whether

good or bad. Second, the possibility in every human being of conceiving an

ideal, toward which by the exertion of his will power he should aspire,

battling steadfastly against every obstruction that life throws in his

course. Third, that even those who are incapable of formulating an ideal

must be regarded as living out the truth of their natures and must

therefore be treated with compassion. Fourth, that the highest function of

the human soul is love, which expresses itself in many ways, but attains

its full flowering only in the love of man and woman on a plane of

spiritual exaltation, and that through this power of human love some

glimpse of the divine is caught; therefore to this function of the soul

it is of the utmost importance that human beings should be loyal and true,

even if that loyalty and truth conflict with conventional ways of looking

at life. Sailing in this good ship he also expresses his sympathy

indirectly in his dramas and directly upon several occasions with the

ideals of political freedom which during the century have been making

progress toward democracy in the English Parliament through the

legislation of the liberals, whose laws have brought a greater and greater

measure of freedom to the middle classes and some measure of freedom to

the working classes.

But it seems as if when nearing the end of the century Browning landed

from his ship upon some high island and straining his eyes toward the

horizon of the dawn of another life did not fully realize that there was

another good ship, Socialism, struggling to reach the ideal of democracy,

and now become the banner ship whose work is to sail out into the unknown,

turbulent seas of the future, finding the path to another high island in

order that the way may be made clear for the ship Individualism to

continue her course to another stage in the voyage toward a perfect

democracy. And as the new ship, Socialism, passes on its way it will do

well to heed the vision of the poet seer, straining his eyes toward the

dawn of other lives in other spheres, lest in the struggle and strain to

bring about a more comfortable and beautiful life upon earth, the

important truth be slighted that humanity has a higher destiny to fulfil

than can be realized in the most Utopian dreams of an earthly democracy.

This truth is in fact not only forgotten but is absolutely denied by many

of the latter-day social reformers.

To sum up, I think one is justified in concluding that as a sympathizer

with the liberal political tendencies of the nineteenth century Browning

is of his age. In his quiescence upon the proletarian movement of the

latter part of the nineteenth century he seems to have been left behind by

his age. In his insistence upon the worth of the individual to himself and

to God he is both of his age and beyond it. As has been said of

philosophy, "It cannot give us bread but it can give us God, soul and

immortality," so we may say of Browning, that though he did not raise up

his voice in the cry of the proletarian for bread, he has insisted upon

the truths of God, the soul and immortality.

V

ART SHIBBOLETHS

In the foregoing chapters the relations of the poet to the philosophical,

religious, political, and social movements of the nineteenth century have

been pointed out. In this and the next chapter some account of his

relation to the artistic and literary ideals of the century will be

attempted.

Browning's relation to the art of the century is, of course, twofold,

dealing as it must with his own conceptions and criticisms of art as well

as with the position of his own art in the poetic development of the

century.

In order to understand more fully his own contribution to the developing

literary standards of the century it may be well first to consider the

fundamental principles of art laid down by him in various poems wherein he

has deliberately dealt with the subject.

The poem in which he has most clearly formulated the general principles

underlying the growth of art is the "Parleying" with Charles Avison.

Though music is the special art under consideration, the rules of growth

obtaining in that are equally applicable to other arts. They are found to

be, as we should expect in Browning, a combination of the ideas of

evolution and conservation. Though the standards of art change and

develop, because as man's soul evolves, more complex forms are needed to

express his deeper experiences, his wider vision, yet in each stage of the

development there is an element of permanent beauty which by the aid of

the historical sense man may continue to enjoy. That element of permanence

exists when genuine feeling and aspiration find expression in forms of

art. The element of change grows out of the fact that both the thought

expressed and the form in which it is expressed are partial manifestations

of the beauty or truth toward which feeling aspires; hence the need of

fresh attempts to reach the infinite. The permanence of feeling,

expressing itself in ever new forms, is brought out finely in this

passage:

"Truths escape

Time's insufficient garniture: they fade,

They fall--those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid

Was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine

And free through march frost: May dews crystalline

Nourish truth merely,--does June boast the fruit

As--not new vesture merely but, to boot,

Novel creation? Soon shall fade and fall

Myth after myth--the husk-like lies I call

New truth's Corolla-safeguard."

In another passage is shown how the permanence of feeling conserves even

the form, if we will bring ourselves into touch with it:

"Never dream

That what once lived shall ever die! They seem

Dead--do they? lapsed things lost in limbo? Bring

Our life to kindle theirs, and straight each king

Starts, you shall see, stands up."

This kindling of an old form with our own life is more difficult in the

case of music than it is in painting or poetry, for in these we have a

concrete form to deal with--a form which reflects the thought with much

more definiteness than music is able to do. The strength and weakness, at

once, of music is that it gives expression to subtler regions of thought

and feeling than the other arts, at the same time that the form is more

evanescent, because fashioned out of elements infinitely less related to

nature than those of other art forms. In his poems on music, the poet

always emphasizes these aspects of music. Its supremacy as a means of

giving expression to the subtlest regions of feeling is dwelt upon in

"Abt Vogler" and "Fifine at the Fair." The Abbe, from the standpoint of

the creator of music, feels so strongly from the inside its power for

expressing infinite aspiration that in his ecstasy he exclaims: "The rest

may reason and welcome. 'Tis we musicians know." Upon the evanescence of

the form peculiar emphasis is also laid in this poem, through the fact

that the music is improvised. Yet even this fact does not mean the entire

annihilation of the form. In the tenth stanza of the poem the idea of the

permanence of the art form as well as of the feeling is expanded into a

symbol of the immortality of all good:

"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist

When eternity confirms the conception of an hour,

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,

Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;

Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by."

The sophistical arguer in "Fifine" feels this same power of music to

express thoughts not to be made palpable in any other manner.

"Words struggle with the weight

So feebly of the False, thick element between

Our soul, the True, and Truth! which, but that intervene

False shows of things, were reached as easily by thought

Reducible to word, and now by yearnings wrought

Up with thy fine free force, oh Music, that canst thrill,

Electrically win a passage through the lid

Of earthly sepulchre, our words may push against,

Hardly transpierce as thou."

And again, in another passage, he gives to music the power of conserving a

mood of feeling, which in this case is not an exalted one, since it is one

that chimes in with his own rather questionable feeling for Fifine, the

fiz-gig. It is found in Schumann's "Carnival":

"Thought hankers after speech, while no speech may evince

Feeling like music,--mine, o'er-burthened with each gift

From every visitant, at last resolved to shift

Its burthen to the back of some musician dead

And gone, who feeling once what I feel now, instead

Of words, sought sounds, and saved forever, in the same,

Truth that escapes prose,--nay, puts poetry to shame.

I read the note, I strike the Key, I bid _record_

The instrument--thanks greet the veritable word!

And not in vain I urge: 'O dead and gone away,

Assist who struggles yet, thy strength becomes my stay,

Thy record serve as well to register--I felt

And knew thus much of truth! With me, must knowledge melt

Into surmise and doubt and disbelief unless

Thy music reassure--I gave no idle guess,

But gained a certitude I yet may hardly keep!

What care? since round is piled a monumental heap

Of music that conserves the assurance, thou as well

Was certain of the same! thou, master of the spell,

Mad'st moonbeams marble, didst _record_ what other men

Feel only to forget!'"

The man in the case is merely an appreciator, not a creator, yet he

experiences with equal force music's power as a recorder of feeling. He

notes also that the feeling must appear from time to time in a new dress,

"the stuff that's made

To furnish man with thought and feeling is purveyed

Substantially the same from age to age, with change

Of the outside only for successive feasters."

In this case, the old tunes have actually been worked over by the more

modern composer whose form has not yet sufficiently gone by to fail of an

immediate appeal to this person with feelings kindled by similar

experiences. What the speaker in the poem perceives is not merely the fact

of the feelings experienced but the power of the music to take him off

upon a long train of more or less philosophical reasoning born of that

very element of change. In this power of suggestiveness lies music's

greater range of spiritual force even when the feeling expressed is not of

the deepest.

If we look at his poems on painting, the same principles of art are

insisted upon except that more emphasis is laid upon the positive value of

the incompleteness of the form. In so far as painting or sculpture reaches

a perfect unity of thought and form it loses its power of suggesting an

infinite beauty beyond any that our earth-born race may express.

This in Browning's opinion is the limitation of Greek art. It touches

perfection or completion in expression and in so doing limits its range to

the brief passion of a day. The effect of such art is to arouse a sort of

despair, for it so far transcends merely human beauty that there seems

nothing left to accomplish:

"So, testing your weakness by their strength,

Your meagre charms by their rounded beauty

Measured by Art in your breadth and length,

You learned--to submit is a mortal's duty."

When such a deadlock as this is reached through the stultifying effect of

an art expression which seems to have embodied all there is of passion and

physical beauty, the one way out is to turn away from the abject

contemplation of such art and go back again to humanity itself, in whose

widening nature may be discovered the promise of an eternity of

progression. Therefore, "To cries of Greek art and what more wish you?"

the poet would have it that the early painters replied:

"To become now self-acquainters,

And paint man, whatever the issue!

Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,

New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:

To bring the invisible full into play!

Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?"

The revolution in art started by these early worthies had more of

spiritual promise in it than the past perfection--"The first of the new,

in our race's story, beats the last of the old."

His emphasis here upon the return to humanity in order to gain a new

source of inspiration in art is further illustrated in his attitude toward

the two painters which he portrays so splendidly: Fra Lippo Lippi, the

realist, whose Madonnas looked like real women, and who has scandalized

some critics on this account, and Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter,

who exclaims in despair as he gazes upon a picture by Raphael, in which he

sees a fault to pardon in the drawing's line, an error that he could alter

for the better, "But all the play, the insight and the stretch," beyond

him.

The importance of basing art upon the study of the human body is later

insisted upon in Francis Furini, not as an end in itself, but as the

dwelling place of the soul. "Let my pictures prove I know," says Furini,

"Somewhat of what this fleshly frame of ours

Or is or should be, how the soul empowers

The body to reveal its every mood

Of love and hate, pour forth its plenitude

Of passion."

The evolutionary ideal appears again in his utterances upon poetry, though

when speaking of poetry it is the value of the subject matter and its

intimate relation to the form upon which he dwells.

The little poem "Popularity" shows as clearly as any the importance which

he attaches to a new departure in poetic expression, besides giving vent

to his scorn of the multitude which sees nothing in the work of the

innovator but which is ready at a later date to laud his imitators. Any

minor poet, for that matter, any Nokes or Stokes who merely prints blue

according to the poetic conventions of the past, possessing not a

suspicion of the true inspiration which goes to the making of a poet of

the new order, is more acceptable to an unseeing public than him with

power to fish "the murex up" that contains the precious drop of royal

blue.

More than one significant hint may be gleaned from his verse in regard to

his opinion upon the formal side of the poet's art. In "Transcendentalism"

he has his fling at the didactic poet who pleases to speak naked thoughts

instead of draping them in sights and sounds, for "song" is the art of the

poet. Some stout mage like him of Halberstadt has his admiration, who with

a

"'Look you!' vents a brace of rhymes,

And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,

Over us, under, round us every side,

Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs

And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all,--

Buries us with a glory young once more,

Pouring heaven into this shut house of life."

He was equally averse to an ornate classical embellishment of a latter day

subject or to a looking at nature through mythopoeic Greek eyes. This is

driven home in the splendid fooling in "Gerard de Lairesse" where the poet

himself indulges by way of a joke in some high-flown classical imagery in

derision of the style of Lairesse and hints covertly probably at the

nineteenth-century masters of classical resuscitation, in subject matter

and allusion, Swinburne and Morris. Reacting to soberer mood, he

reiterates his belief in the utter deadness of Greek ideals of art,

speaking with a strength of conviction so profound as to make one feel

that here at least Browning suffered from a decided limitation, all the

more strange, too, when one considers his own masterly treatment of Greek

subjects. To the poets whose poetic creed is

"Dream afresh old godlike shapes,

Recapture ancient fable that escapes,

Push back reality, repeople earth

With vanished falseness, recognize no worth

In fact new-born unless 'tis rendered back

Pallid by fancy, as the western rack

Of fading cloud bequeaths the lake some gleam

Of its gone glory!"

he would reply,

"Let things be--not seem,

I counsel rather,--do, and nowise dream!

Earth's young significance is all to learn;

The dead Greek lore lies buried in the urn

Where who seeks fire finds ashes. Ghost, forsooth!

What was the best Greece babbled of as truth?

A shade, a wretched nothing,--sad, thin, drear,

* * * * *

Sad school

Was Hades! Gladly,--might the dead but slink

To life back,--to the dregs once more would drink

Each interloper, drain the humblest cup

Fate mixes for humanity."

The rush onward to the supreme is uppermost in the poet's mind in this

poem. Though he does indulge in the refrain that there shall never be one

lost good echoing the thought in "Charles Avison," the climax of his mood

is in the contemplation of the evolutionary force of the soul which must

leave Greek art behind and find new avenues of beauty:

"The Past indeed

Is past, gives way before Life's best and last

The all-including Future! What were life

Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife

Through the ambiguous Present to the goal

Of some all-reconciling Future? Soul,

Nothing has been which shall not bettered be

Hereafter,--leave the root, by law's decree

Whence springs the ultimate and perfect tree!

Busy thee with unearthing root? Nay, climb--

Quit trunk, branch, leaf and flower--reach, rest sublime

Where fruitage ripens in the blaze of day."

When it comes to the subject matter of poetry, Browning constantly insists

that it should be the study of the human soul. A definite statement as to

the range of subjects under this general material of poetry is put forth

very early in his poetical career in "Paracelsus" and it is all-inclusive.

It is the passage where Aprile describes how universal he wished to make

his sympathy as a poet. No one is to be left out of his all-embracing

democracy.

Such, then, are his general principles in regard to poetic development and

subject matter. These do not touch upon the question so often discussed of

the relative value of the subjective as against the objective poet. This

point the poet considers in "Sordello," where he throws in his weight on

the side of the objective poet. In the passage in the third book the poet,

speaking in person, gives illustrations of three sorts of poetic

composition: the dramatic, the descriptive and the meditative; the first

belongs to the objective, the second, not distinctively to either, and the

third to the subjective manner of writing. The dramatic method is the most

forceful, for it imparts the gift of seeing to others, while the

descriptive and meditative merely tell what they saw, or, worse still,

talk about it.

Further indications of his allegiance to the dramatic form of poetry as

the supreme one are found in his poems inspired by Shakespeare, "House"

and "Shop," but we must turn to a pregnant bit of his prose in order to

find his exact feeling upon the relations of the subjective and objective

poet, together with a clear conception of what he meant by a dramatic

poet, which was something more than Shakespeare's "holding the mirror up

to nature." In his view the dramatic poet must have the vision of the seer

as well as the penetration of a psychologist. He must hold the mirror up

not only to nature, regarded as phenomena, but to the human soul, and he

must perceive the relation of that human soul to the universal. He must in

fact plunge beneath the surface of actions and events and bring forth to

the light the psychic and cosmic causes of these things. The passage

referred to in the "Introduction to the Shelley Letters" points out how in

the evolution of poetry there will be the play and interplay of the

subjective and the objective faculties upon each other, with the probable

result of the arising of poets who will combine the two sorts of faculty.

While Browning's own sympathy with the dramatic poet is as fully evident

here as in the passage in "Sordello," he realizes, as perhaps he did not

at that time, when he was himself breaking away from Shelley's influence,

the value of the subjective method in carrying on the process of poetic

evolution:

"It would be idle to inquire, of these two kinds of poetic faculty in

operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. If the

subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age,

the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original

value. For it is with this word, as starting-point and basis alike,

that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be

learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. The spiritual

comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it

operates upon must remain. There may be no end of the poets who

communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their

own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the

aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever. Nor is

there any reason why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue

hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works, examples of

which, according to what are now considered the exigencies of art, we

have hitherto possessed in distinct individuals only. A mere running

in of the one faculty upon the other is, of course, the ordinary

circumstance. Far more rarely it happens that either is found so

decidedly prominent and superior as to be pronounced comparatively

pure: while of the perfect shield, with the gold and the silver side

set up for all comers to challenge, there has yet been no instance. A

tribe of successors (Homerides), working more or less in the same

spirit, dwell on his discoveries and reinforce his doctrine; till, at

unawares, the world is found to be subsisting wholly on the shadow of

a reality, on sentiments diluted from passions, on the tradition of a

fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year's harvest.

Then is the imperative call for the appearance of another sort of

poet, who shall at once replace this intellectual rumination of food

swallowed long ago, by a supply of the fresh and living swathe;

getting at new substance by breaking up the assumed wholes into parts

of independent and unclassed value, careless of the unknown laws for

recombining them (it will be the business of yet another poet to

suggest those hereafter), prodigal of objects for men's outer and not

inner sight; shaping for their uses a new and different creation from

the last, which it displaces by the right of life over death,--to

endure until, in the inevitable process, its very sufficiency to

itself shall require, at length, an exposition of its affinity to

something higher--when the positive yet conflicting facts shall again

precipitate themselves under a harmonizing law, and one more degree

will be apparent for a poet to climb in that mighty ladder, of which,

however cloud-involved and undefined may glimmer the topmost step, the

world dares no longer doubt that its gradations ascend."

If we measure Browning's own work by the poetic standards which he has

himself set up in the course of that work, it is quite evident that he has

on the whole lived up to them. He has shown himself to be an illustration

of the evolutionary principles in which he believes by breaking away from

all previous standards of taste in poetry. The history of poetry in

England has shown this to be a distinctive characteristic of all the

greatest English poets. From Shakespeare down they have one and all run

afoul of the critics whose special province seems to be to set up literary

shibboleths which every genius is bent upon disregarding. When Spenser was

inventing his stanza, verse critics were abject in their worship of

hexameters, and their hatred of bald rhymes. Though these sticklers for

classical forms could see clearly enough that Spenser was possessed of

genius, they yet lamented the blindness of one, who might have written

hexameters, perversely exclaiming "Why a God's name may not we as else the

Greeks have the kingdom of our own language, and measure our accents by

the sound, reserving quantity to the verse?" When Milton appears and finds

blank verse the medium best suited to his subject, he comes up against the

rhyming standards of his day and is forced to submit to the indignity of

having his "Paradise Lost" "tagged with rhymes," as he expresses it, by

Dryden, who graciously devoted his powers of rhyme to an improved version

of the poem. Milton was actually obliged to defend himself in his preface

to "Paradise Lost" for using blank verse, as Browning defends himself in

the Epilogue to "Pacchiarotto and How We Worked in Distemper" for writing

"strong" verse instead of the "sweet" verse the critics demand of him.

By the time the nineteenth century dawns the critics are safely intrenched

in the editorial den, from which, shielded by any sort of shibboleth they

can get hold of, they may hurl forth their projectiles upon the

unoffending head of the genius, who, with no chance of firing back in the

open arena of the magazine, must either suffer in silence or take refuge

in sarcastic slurs upon his critics in his poetry, for here lies the only

chance of getting even without waiting for the whirligig of time to bring

the public round to a recognition of the fact that he is the one who has

in very truth, "fished the murex up."

The caliber of man who could speak of "The Ode to Immortality" as "a most

illegible and unintelligible poem," or who wonders that any man in his

senses could put his name to such a rhapsody as "Endymion," or who

dismissed "Prometheus Unbound" with the remark that it was a _melange_ of

nonsense, cockneyism, poverty and pedantry, would hardly be expected to

welcome "Sordello" with effusion. Even very intelligent people cracked

unseemly jokes upon the appearance of "Sordello," and what wonder, for

Browning's British instinct for freedom carried him in this poem to the

most extreme lengths. In "Pauline" he had allied himself with things

familiar to the English reader of poetry. Many of the allusions are

classical and introduced with a rich musicalness that Shelley himself

might have envied. The reminiscences of Shelley would also come within the

intellectual acreage of most of the cultured people of the time. And even

in "Paracelsus," despite the unfamiliarity of the subject, there was

music and imagery such as to link the art with the admired poetic art of

the day, but in "Sordello" all bounds are broken.

No one but a delver in the byways of literature could, at that time, have

been expected to know anything about Sordello; no one but a historian

could have been expected to know about the complicated struggles of the

Guelfs and the Ghibellines; no one but a philosopher about the tendencies,

both political and literary, manifesting themselves in the direction of

the awakening of democratic ideals in these pre-Dantean days; no one but a

psychologist about the tortuous windings of Sordello's mind.

Only by special searching into all these regions of knowledge can one

to-day gain a complete grasp of the situation. He must patiently tread all

the paths that Browning trod before he can enter into sympathy with the

poet. Then he will crack no more jokes, but he will marvel at the mind

which could wield all this knowledge with such consummate familiarity; he

will grow ecstatic over the splendors of the poem, and will regret its

redundancy not of diction so much but of detail and its amazing lack of

organic unity.

No one but a fanatic could claim that "Sordello" is a success as an

organic work of art. While the poet had a mastery of knowledge, thought

and feeling, he did not have sufficient mastery of his own form to weld

these together into a harmonious and convincing whole, such mastery as he,

for example, shows in "The Ring and the Book," though even in that there

is some survival of the old redundancy.

One feels when considering "Sordello" as a whole as if gazing upon a

picture in which the perspective and the high lights and the shadows are

not well related to each other. As great an abundance of detail is

expended upon the less important as upon the more important fact, and

while the details may be interesting enough in themselves, they dislodge

more important affairs from the center of consciousness. It is, not to be

too flippant, something like Alice's game of croquet in "Through the

Looking Glass." When the hedgehog ball is nicely rolled up ready to be

struck, the flamingo mallet walks off somewhere else.

There, then, in "Sordello" is perhaps the most remarkable departure from

the accepted in poetic art that an Englishman has ever attempted. In its

elements of failure, however, it gave "a triumph's evidence," to use the

poet's own phrase, "of the fulness of the days." In this poem he had

thrown down the gauntlet. His subject matter was not to be like that of

any other poet, nor was his form to be like that of any other poet. He

discarded the flowing music of "Pauline" and of "Paracelsus." His

allusions were no longer to be classic, but to be directly related to

whatever subject he had in hand; his style was also to be forth-right and

related to his subject, strong, idiomatic, rugged, even jolting if need

be, or noble, sweeping along in large rhythms or couched in rare forms of

symbolism, but, whatever it was to be, always different from what had

been.

All he required at the time when "Sordello" appeared was to find that form

in which he could so unify his powers that his poems would gain the

organic completeness necessary to a work of art. No matter what new

regions an artist may push into he must discover the law of being of this

new region. Unless he does, his art will not convince, but the moment he

does, all that was not convincing falls into its right place. He becomes

the master of his art, and relates the new elements in such a way that

their rightness and their beauty, if not immediately recognized, are sure

sooner or later to be recognized by the evolving appreciator, who is the

necessary complement, by the way, of the evolving artist. Before

"Sordello" Browning had tried three other forms; the subjective narrative

in "Pauline," the dramatic poem in "Paracelsus," a regular drama in

"Strafford," which however runs partly parallel with "Sordello" in

composition. He had also done two or three short dramatic monologues.

He evidently hoped that the regular drama would prove to be the form most

congenial to him, for he kept on persistently in that form for nearly ten

years, wrote much magnificent poetry in it and at times attained a

grandeur of dramatic utterance hardly surpassed except in the master of

all dramatists, Shakespeare. But while he has attained a very genuine

success in this form, it is not the success of the popular acting drama.

His dramas are to-day probably being left farther and farther aside every

moment in the present exaggerated demands for characters in action, or

perhaps it might be nearer the truth to say clothes horses in action.

Besides, the drama of action in character, which is the type of drama

introduced into English literature by Browning, has reached a more perfect

development in other hands. Ibsen's dramas are preeminently dramas of

action in character, but the action moves with such rapidity that the

audience is almost cheated into thinking they are the old thing over

again--that is, dramas of characters in action.

Browning's characters in his dramas are presented with a completeness of

psychological analysis which makes them of paramount interest to those few

who can and like to listen to people holding forth to any length on the

stage, and with superb actors, who can give every subtlest change of mood,

a Browning drama furnishes an opportunity for the utmost intensity of

pleasure. Still, one cannot help but feel that the impressionistic

psychology of Ibsen reaches a pinnacle of dramatic art not attained by

Browning in his plays, delightful in character portrayal as they are, and

not upon any account to have been missed from dramatic literature.

In the dramatic monologue Browning found just that form which would focus

his forces, bringing them into the sort of relationship needed to reveal

the true law of being for his new region of poetic art.

If we inquire just why this form was the true medium for the most perfect

expression of his genius, I think we may answer that in it, as he has

developed it, is given an opportunity for the legitimate exercise of his

mental subtlety. Through the voice of one speaker he can portray not only

the speaker but one or more other characters, and at the same time show

the scene setting, and all without any direct description. On the other

hand, his tendency to redundancy, so marked when he is making a character

reveal only his own personality, is held in check by the necessity of

using just those words and turns of expression and dwelling upon just

those details which will make each character stand out distinctly, and at

the same time bring the scene before the reader.

The people in his dramatic monologues live before us by means of a

psychology as impressionistic as that of Ibsen's in his plays. The effect

is the same as that in a really great impressionistic painting. Nature is

revealed far more distinctly--the thing of lights and shadows, space and

movement--than in pictures bent upon endless details of form. "My Last

Duchess" is one among many fine examples of his method in monologue. In

that short poem we are made to see what manner of man is the duke, what

manner of woman the duchess. We see what has been the duke's past, what is

to be his future, also the present scene, as the duke stands in the hall

of his palace talking to an ambassador from the count who has come to

arrange a marriage with the duke for the count's daughter. Besides all

this a glimpse of the ambassador's attitude of mind is given. This is done

by an absolutely telling choice of words and by an organic relationing of

the different elements. The law of his genius asserts itself.

Browning's own ideal of the poet who makes others see was not completely

realized until he had perfected a form which would lend itself most

perfectly to the manner of thing which he desired to make others

see--namely, the human soul in all its possible manifestations of feeling

and mood, good, bad, and indifferent, from the uninspired organist who

struggles with a mountainous fugue to the inspired improvisor whose soul

ascends to God on the wings of his music, from the unknown sensitive

painter who cannot bear to have his pictures the subject of criticism or

commerce to the jolly life-loving Fra Lippo, from the jealous, vindictive

woman of "The Laboratory" to the vision-seeing Pompilia, from Ned Bratts

to Bishop Blougram, and so on--so many and wonderful that custom cannot

state their infinite variety.

Consistent, so far, with his own theories we find the work of Browning to

be. He also follows his ideal in the discarding of classical allusion

and illustration. Part of his dictum that the form should express the

thought is shown in his habitual fitting of his allusions to the subject

he is treating. By this means he produces his atmosphere and brings the

scene clearly before us; witness his constant references to Molinos and

his influence in "The Ring and the Book," an influence which was making

itself felt in all classes of society at the time when the actual tragedy

portrayed in the poem occurred. This habit, of course, brings into his

poetry a far wider range of allusions unfamiliar to his contemporaries

than is to be found in other Victorian poets, and makes it necessary that

these should be "looked up" before an adequate enjoyment of their fitness

is possible. Hence the Browning societies, so often held up to ridicule by

the critics, who blindly prefer to show their superior attitude of mind in

regard to everything they do not know, and growl about his obscurity, to

welcoming any movement which means an increase of general culture. The

Browning societies have not only done much to make Browning's unusual

allusions common matters of knowledge, but they have helped to keep alive

a taste for all poetry in an age when poetry has needed all the friendly

support it could get.

All great poets lead the ordinary mind to unfamiliar regions of knowledge

and thereby to fresh planes of enjoyment. That Browning has outdone all

other poets in this particular should be to his honor, not to his

dispraise.

In one very marked direction, however, he is not a perfect exemplar of his

own theories--that is, he is not always consistently dramatic. He belongs

to that order of poets described by himself in the Shelley Introduction as

neither completely subjective nor completely objective, but with the two

faculties at times running in upon each other. He is often absolutely

objective in his expression of a mood or a feeling, but the moment the

mood takes upon it the tinge of thought we begin to feel Browning himself.

The fundamental principles upon which he bases his own solution of the

problems of existence are seen to crop out, colored, it is true, by the

personality of the speaker, but yet traceable to their source in the

mental make up of Browning himself. It may well be that Browning has come

so near to the ultimate truth discoverable by man in his fundamental

principles that they are actually universal truths, to be found lying deep

down at the roots of all more partial expressions, just as gravitation,

conservation of energy, evolution underlie every phenomena of nature,

and therefore when a Pope in "The Ring and the Book," a Prince

Hohenstiel-Swangau, a Bishop Blougram, a Cleon or a John in "The Death in

the Desert," give utterance to their views upon life, they are bound to

touch from one or another angle the basic principles of life common to all

humanity as well as to the poet--the center within us all where "truth

abides in fulness."

This would seem an even more complete fusing of the two faculties in one

poet than that spoken of by Browning, where a poet would issue successive

works, in some of them the one faculty and in some of them the other

faculty being supreme.

That Browning was, to a certain extent, a poet of this third order of

which he prophesied is true, for he has written a number of poems like "La

Saisiaz," "Reverie," various of his prologues and epilogues which are

purely subjective in content. There are also subjective passages in the

midst of other poems, like those in "Sordello," "Prince Hohenstiel," the

"Parleyings," etc. If we place such a poem as "Reverie" side by side with

"Fra Lippo Lippi" we see well-nigh perfect illustrations of the two

faculties as they existed in the one poet, Browning. On the other hand,

in those poems where the thought, as I have said, suggests Browning, in

the speech of his characters he has something of the quality of what

Browning calls the subjective poet of modern classification. "Gifted like

the objective poet, with the fuller perception of nature and man, he is

impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to

the many below as to the One above him, the supreme intelligence which

apprehends all things in their absolute truth, an ultimate view ever

aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's soul."

Browning may be said to have carried to its flood tide the "Liberal

Movement in English Literature," as Courthope calls it, inaugurated at the

dawn of the century by the Lake School, which reacted against the correct

school of Dryden and Pope. Along with the earlier poets of the century he

shared lack of appreciation at the hands of critics in general. The

critics had been bred in the school of the eighteenth century, and

naturally would be incapable of understanding a man whose thought was

permeated with the doctrines of evolution, then an unknown quantity except

to the elect in scientific circles, and not to become the possession of

the thinking world at large until beyond the middle of the century;

whose soul was full of the ardor of democracy, shown not only in his

choice and treatment of subjects, but in his reckless independence of all

the shibboleths of the past; and whose liberalness in the treatment of

moral and religious problems was such as to scandalize many in an age when

the law forbade that a man should marry his deceased wife's sister, and

when the Higher Criticism of the Bible had not yet migrated to England

from Germany; and, finally, whose style was everything that was atrocious

because entirely different from anything they had seen before.

The century had to grow up to him. It is needless to say that it did so.

Just as out of the turmoil of conflicting scientific and religious thought

has emerged a serene belief in man's spiritual destiny, so out of the

turmoil of conflicting schools of criticism has arisen a perception of the

value of the new, the original, the different in art. Critics begin to

apply the principles of evolution to their criticism as Browning applied

it to his art, with the result that they no longer measure by past

standards of art but by relating the art to the life of the time in its

various manifestations, not forgetting that the poet or the dramatist may

have a further vision of what is to come than any other man of his age.

The people first, for the most part, found out that here in Browning's

work was a new force, and calmly formed themselves into groups to study

what manner of force it might be, regardless of the sneers of newspaperdom

and conventional academies. And gradually to the few appreciative critics

of the early days have been added one authoritative voice after another

until the chorus of praise has become a large one, and Browning, though

later than any great poet of the century, is coming into his own.

In a certain chart of English literature with which I am acquainted,

wherein the poets are graphically represented in mountain ranges with

peaks of various heights, Tennyson is shown as the towering peak of the

Victorian Era, while Browning is a sturdy but much lower peak with a

blunted top. This is quite symbolic of the general attitude toward

Browning at the end of the century, for, with all the appreciation, there

has been on the part of authority a disinclination to assign to him the

chief place among the poets of the Victorian Era. Courthope, who most of

the time preserves a remarkable reticence upon Browning, voices this

general attitude in a remark ventured upon in one of his lectures in

1900. He says:

"No one who is capable of appreciating genius will refuse to admire the

powers of this poet, the extent of his sympathy and interest in external

things, the boldness of his invention, the energy of his analysis, the

audacity of his experiments. But so absolutely does he exclude all

consideration for the reader from his choice of subject, so arbitrarily,

in his treatment of his themes, does he compel his audience to place

themselves at his own point of view, that the life of his art depends

entirely upon his own individuality. Should future generations be less

inclined than our own to surrender their imagination to his guidance, he

will not be able to appeal to them through that element of life which lies

in the Universal."

To the present writer this seems simply like a confession on Courthope's

part that he was unable to perceive in Browning the elements of the

Universal which are most assuredly there, and which were fully recognized

by a Scotch writer, Dawson, at the same time that Courthope was

questioning his power to hold coming generations.

"The fashions of the world may change," writes Dawson, "and the old doubts

may wear themselves out and sink like shadows out of sight in the

morning of a stronger faith; but even so the world will still turn to the

finer poems of Browning for intellectual stimulus, for the purification of

pity and of pathos, for the exaltation of hope.

"Or if the darkness still thickens, all the more will men turn to this

strong man of the race, who has wrestled and prevailed; who has illumined

with imaginative insight the deepest problems of the ages; who has made

his poetry not merely the vehicle of pathos, passion, tenderness, fancy,

and imagination, but also of the most robust and masculine thought. He has

written lyrics which must charm all who love, epics which must move all

who act, songs which must cheer all who suffer, poems which must fascinate

all who think; and when 'Time hath sundered shell from pearl,' however

stern may be the scrutiny, it may be said that there will remain enough of

Robert Browning to give him rank among the greatest of poets, and secure

for him the sure reward of fame."

But it is to France we must go for the surest authoritative note--that

land of the Academy and correct taste which _hums_ and _hahs_ over its own

Immortals in proverbially unpenetrating conclave. No less a man than

Taine declares that Browning stands first among English poets--"the most

excellent where excellence is greatness, the most gifted where genius is a

common dower."

While there can be no doubt that Browning outdid all the other great poets

of his time in "azure feats," in developing an absolutely self-centered

ideal of art, which is yet so true to the ultimate tendencies of the

century, indeed to those of all time, for evolution and democracy are

henceforth the torch-bearers of the human soul--each of the other

half-dozen or so greatest poets had distinct and independent

individualities which were more nearly the outcome of the current

tendencies of the time than Browning's.

[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON]

Tennyson was equally familiar with the thought and much more familiar with

the politics of the day, but there is an infinite difference in their

attitude. Browning, if I may be excused for quoting one of Shakespeare's

most abused phrases, rides over the century like a "naked new-born babe

striding the blast." Tennyson ambles through it on a palfrey which has a

tendency to flounder into every slough of despond it comes to. This may

seem to be putting it rather too strongly, but is it not true? Browning

has the vision belonging to the latest child of time. He never follows; he

leads. With his eyes fixed upon a far-off future where man shall be _man_

at last, he faces every problem with the intrepidity of an Oedipus

confronting the Sphynx. The mystery of its riddles has no terrors for him.

It is given to him as to few others to see the ineffable beauty of life's

mystery, the promise it holds out of eternal joy. While he frequently

discourses upon the existence of evil, he never for a moment admits any

doubt into his own utmost soul of the beneficent part evil is meant to

play in the molding of human destinies. Mr. Santayana has called him a

barbarous poet. In a certain sense he is, if to be born among the first on

a new plane of psychic perception where of no account become the endless

metaphysical meanderings of the intellect, which cry "proof, proof, where

there can be no proof," is barbarous. It was doubtless largely owing to

this power of vision reminding us again somewhat of the child's in

Maeterlinck's "Les Aveugles" which kept Browning from tinkering in the

half-measures of the political leaders of his time. His plane is not

unlike that of his own Lazarus, about whom the Arab physician says:

"The man is witless of the size, the sum,

The value in proportion of all things,

Or whether it be little or be much.

Discourse to him of prodigious armament

Assembled to besiege his city now,

And of the passing of a mule with gourds--

'Tis one! Then take it on the other side,

Speak of some trifling fact,--he will gaze rapt

With stupor at its very littleness,

(For as I see) as if in that indeed

He caught prodigious import, whole results;

And so will turn to us the bystanders

In ever the same stupor (note this point)

That we, too, see not with his opened eyes."

The import of an event is everything. Large imports may lurk more surely

in the awakening of some obscure soul than in the pageantry of law

bringing a tardy and wholly inadequate measure of justice to humanity.

Though Tennyson talks of the "far-off divine event" he has no burning

conviction of it and does not ride toward it with triumph in his eye and

flaming joy in his soul. As he ambles along, steeping himself in the

science of the time, its revelations make him nervous; he falls into doubt

from which he can only extricate himself by holding on to belief, a very

different thing from Browning's vision.

Thus it happens that Tennyson voices the feelings of an immense class of

cultured people, who have gone through the century in the same ambling

fashion, a prey to its fears, intellectual enough to see the truths of

science, but not spiritual enough to see the import of the dawn of the new

day.

Tennyson, then, quite of and in his time, would desire above all things to

appeal to it as it appealed to him. He waxes enthusiastic over

conventional politics, he treats his social problems so entirely in

accordance with the conventions of the day that they are not problems at

all, and he is quite in love with the beauty of aristocratic society,

though he occasionally descends to the people for a subject. These are all

entirely sufficient reasons for his popularity as a poet during his life,

further emphasized by the added fact that having no subject matter (that

is thought-content) wherewith to startle the world by strangeness, he took

the wiser part of delighting them with his exquisite music.

Though so satisfactory a representative of his times, he did outrage one

of the shibboleths of the critics in his efforts to find a new and richer

music than poets had before used by bringing scientific imagery into his

verse. Of all the absurd controversies indulged in by critics, the most

absurd is that fought out around the contention that science and poetry

cannot be made to harmonize. Wordsworth was keen enough to see this before

the rest of the world and prophesied in the preface to his "Lyrical

Ballads" that science would one day become the closest of allies to

poetry, and Tennyson was brilliant enough to seize the new possibilities

in scientific language with a realization that nature imagery might almost

be made over by the use in describing it of scientific epithets. A famous

illustration of the happy effects he produced by these means is in the

lines "Move eastward happy Earth and round again to-night." His

observation of Nature, moreover, had a scientific accuracy, which made

possible far more delicate and individual descriptions of Nature's aspects

than had been produced before. It was also a happy thought for him to

weave so much of his poetry around the Arthurian legends. Beautiful in

themselves, they came nearer home than classical or Italian legends, and,

when made symbolic of an ideal which must appeal to the heart of every

cultured Englishman, who regarded himself as a sort of prototype of the

blameless King Arthur, and whose grief at the failure of the social fabric

planned by him would be as poignant as that of the King himself, they

carried with them a romantic and irresistible attraction.

The reasons why Tennyson should appeal especially to the nineteenth

century cultured and highly respectable Englishman far outweighed any

criticisms that might be made by critics on his departure from poetic

customs of the past. He pleased the highest powers in the land, became

Laureate and later Lord Tennyson. He will therefore always remain the poet

most thoroughly representative of that especial sort of beauty belonging

to a social order which has reached a climax of refinement and

intelligence, but which, through its very self-satisfaction, cuts itself

off from a perception of the true value of the new forces coming into play

in the on-rushing stream of social development.

The other poets who divide with Browning and Tennyson the highest honors

of the Victorian Era are Landor, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Mrs.

Browning, George Meredith.

Landor and Arnold preserved more than any of the others a genuine

classical aroma in their verse, and on this account have always been

delighted in by a few. After all, the people may not immediately accept a

poet of too great independence, but they are least of all likely to grow

enthusiastic over anything reactionary either in style or thought.

Romantic elements of not too startling a character win the favor of most

readers.

Though classic in style both these poets reflected phases of the century's

thought. Landor differed from Browning in the fact that he frequently

expressed himself vigorously upon the subject of current politics. His

political principles were not of the most advanced type, however. He

believed in the notion of a free society, but seems to have thought the

best way of attaining it would be a commonwealth in which the wise should

rule, and see that the interests of all should be secured. Still his

insistence upon liberty, however old-fashioned his ideas of the means by

which it should be maintained, puts him in the line of the democratic

march of the century.

Swinburne calls him his master, and represents himself in verse as having

learned many wise and gracious things of him, but his thought was not

sufficiently progressive to triumph over the classicism of his style in an

age of romantic poetry, though there will always be those who hold on to

the shibboleth that, after all, the classic is the real thing in poetry,

never realizing that where the romantic is old enough, it, too, becomes

classic.

Matthew Arnold stands in poetry where men like Huxley and Clifford stood

in science, who, Childe-Roland like, came to the dark tower, calmly put

the slug horn to their lips and blew a blast of courage. Science had

undermined their belief in a future life as well as destroying the

revealed basis of moral action. In such a man the intellectual nature

overbalances the intuitional, and when inherited belief based on authority

is destroyed, there is nothing but the habit of morality left.

Arnold has had the sympathy of those who could no longer believe in their

revealed religion, but who loved it and regretted its passing away from

them. He gives expression to this feeling in lines like these:

"The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world."

The regret for something beautiful that is gone is capable of exquisite

poetic treatment, but it is not an abiding note of the century. It

represents only one phase of its thought, and that a transcient one,

because it could be felt with poignancy only by those whose lives were

rudely shaken by the destruction of the ideal in which they had been bred

and in which they devoutly believed. Arnold's sympathetic treatment of

this phase of doubt seems, however, to have been of incalculable service

to those who felt as he did. It softened the anguish of the shock to have

not only the beauty of the past dwelt upon, but to have the beauty of

courage in the face of a destroyed ideal erected into a new ideal for

living brave and noble lives. In "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" is a

fine example of the beauty which may be imparted to a mood as melancholy

as could well be imagined:

"Not as their friend, or child, I speak!

But as, on some far northern strand,

Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek

In pity and mournful awe might stand

Before some fallen Runic stone--

For both were faiths, and both are gone.

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head,

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn,

Their faith, my tears, the world deride--

I come to shed them at their side."

Such hope as he has to offer comes out in stanzas like the following,

but all is dependent upon strenuous living:

"No, no! the energy of life may be

Kept on after the grave, but not begun;

And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing--only he,

His soul well-knit, and all his battle won,

Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life."

Nor shall better days on earth come without struggle since life

"Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high

Uno'erleaped Mountains of Necessity,

Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

Nor will that day dawn at a human nod,

When, bursting through the network, superposed

By selfish occupation--plot and plan,

Lust, avarice, envy-liberated man,

All difference with his fellow-mortal closed,

Shall be left standing face to face with God."

Though Arnold was sternly criticised he had before the end of the century

been accorded his proper place as a poet, which was that of the chief poet

between the greatest lights of the century, Browning and Tennyson and the

pre-Raphaelite group. Gosse, with more penetration than can always be

accorded to him, declares that "His devotion to beauty, the composure,

simplicity and dignity of his temper, and his deep moral sincerity gave

to his poetry a singular charm which may prove as durable as any element

in modern verse."

The phase of romanticism carried to its climax by the pre-Raphaelite poets

Rossetti and his sister, Morris and Swinburne had, like the work of

Tennyson, its full recognition, in its own time, because these poets, like

him, have put into exquisite music romantic subjects derived both from the

classics and from mediaeval legend. The new note of sensuousness, due

largely to the Italian influence of Rossetti, with his sensuous

temperament, his intensity of passion and his love of art, and also in

Morris and Swinburne to their pagan feeling, one of the elements

inaugurated by the general breaking down of orthodox religious ideals

through the encroachments of science, does not seem to have affected their

popularity.

As there were those who would sympathize with the Tennysonian attitude

toward doubt, and those who would sympathize with Matthew Arnold's, there

were others to feel like Swinburne, pantheistic, and, like Morris, utterly

hopeless of a future, while others again might criticise the pagan

feeling, but, with their inheritance of beauty from Tennyson and his

predecessors of the dawn of the century, would delight in these new

developments of the romantic spirit.

[Illustration: A. C. SWINBURNE]

Ruskin is said to have been the original inspirer of these four poets,

though Fitz-Gerald's "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam was not without its

influence. But as Edmund Gosse says, "The attraction of the French

romances of chivalry for William Morris, of Tuscan painting for D. G.

Rossetti, of the spirit of English Gothic architecture for Christina

Rossetti, of the combination of all these with Greek and Elizabethan

elements for Swinburne, were to be traced back to start--words given by

the prophetic author of the 'Seven Lamps of Architecture.'"

Though the first books of this group of poets, the "Defence of Guenevere"

(1858), "Goblin Market," "Early Italian Poets," "Queen Mother and

Rosamond" (1861), did not make any impression on the public, with the

publication of Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" an interest was awakened

which reached a climax with the publication of Rossetti's poems in 1870.

Rossetti had thrown these poems into his wife's grave, as the world knows,

but was prevailed upon to have them recovered and published.

In the success of this group was vindicated at last the principles of the

naturalists of the dawn of the century. Here was a mixture of color, of

melody, of mysticism, of sensuousness, of elaboration of form which

carried originality and independence as far as it could well go in a

direction which painted life primarily from the outside. But when this

brilliant culminating flash of the early school of Coleridge and Keats

began to burn itself out, there was Tennyson, who might be called the

conservative wing of the romantic movement, dominant as ever, and

Browning, the militant wing, advanced from his mid-century obscurity into

a flood-tide of appreciation which was to bear him far onward toward

literary pre-eminence, placing him among the few greatest names in

literature.

The originality of the pre-Raphaelites grew out of their welding of

romantic, classical, and mediaeval elements, tempered in each case by the

special mental attitude of the poet.

Rossetti and his brother artists, Millais and Holman Hunt, who founded the

pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of painters, pledged themselves to the

fundamental principle laid down by Rossetti in the little magazine they

started called the _Germ_. This new creed was simple enough and ran: "The

endeavor held in view throughout the writings on art will be to

encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of Nature."

In their interpretation and development of this simple principle, artists

and the poets who joined them differentiated from one another often to a

wide extent. In Rossetti, it becomes an adoration of the beauty of woman

expressed in ultra-sensuous though not in sensual imagery, combined with

an atmosphere of religious wonder such as one finds in mediaeval poets, of

which "The Blessed Damozel" stands as a typical example. In it, as one

appreciator has said, all the qualities of Rossetti's poetry are found.

"He speaks alternately like a seer and an artist; one who is now bewitched

with the vision of beauty, and now is caught up into Paradise, where he

hears unutterable things. To him the spiritual world is an intense

reality. He hears the voices, he sees the presences of the supernatural.

As he mourns beside the river of his sorrow, like Ezekiel, he has his

visions of winged and wheeling glory, and leaning over the ramparts of the

world his gaze is fixed on the uncovered mysteries of a world to come.

There is no poet to whom the supernatural has been so much alive.

Religious doubt he seems never to have felt. But the temper of religious

wonder, the old, childlike, monkish attitude of awe and faith in the

presence of the unseen, is never absent in him. The artistic force of his

temperament drives him to the worship of beauty; the poetic and religious

forces to the adoration of mystery."

To Swinburne the simplicity of nature included the utmost lengths to which

eroticism could go. Upon this ground he has been severely censured and he

has had an unfortunate influence upon scores and scores of younger writers

who have seemed to think that the province of the poet is to decry the

existence of sincere affection, and who in their turn have exercised

actual mischief in lowering social standards.

This is not all of Swinburne, however. His superb metrical power is his

chief contribution to the originality of this group, and when he developed

away from his nauseating eroticism, he could charm as no one else with his

delicious music, though it often be conspicuous for its lack of richness

in thought.

His fate has been somewhat different from that of most poets. When his

"Atalanta in Calydon" was published it was received with enthusiasm, but

the volumes overweighted with eroticism which followed caused a fierce

controversy, and many have not even yet discovered that this was only one

phase of Swinburne's art, and that, unfortunate as it is in many

respects, it was a phase of the century's life which must find its

expression in art if that life is to be completely given, and that it was

a passing phase Swinburne himself proved in the development of other

phases shown in his interest in current political situations, his

enthusiasm for Italy and his later expressions of high moral ideals, as

well as in a quasi-religious attitude of mind, not so far from that of

Emerson, himself, in which strong emphasis is placed upon the importance

of the individual, and upon the unity of God and man.

There is moral courage and optimism in the face of doubt of a high order

in the following lines:

--"Are ye not weary and faint not by the way

Seeing night by night devoured of day by day,

Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire?

Sleepless; and ye too, when shall ye, too sleep?

--We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet,

And surely more than all things sleep were sweet,

Than all things save the inexorable desire

Which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep.

"Is this so sweet that one were fain to follow?

Is this so sure when all men's hopes are hollow,

Even this your dream, that by much tribulation

Ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight?

--Nay though our life were blind, our death were fruitless,

Not therefore were the whole world's high hope rootless;

But man to man, nation would turn to nation,

And the old life live, and the old great word be great."

But Swinburne in his farthest reaches of pantheistic aspiration is to be

seen in a poem like "Hertha":

"I am that which began;

Out of me the years roll;

Out of me God and man;

I am equal and whole;

God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.

"The tree many-rooted

That swells to the sky

With frondage red-fruited

The life-tree am I;

In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves; ye shall live and not

die.

"But the Gods of your fashion

That take and that give,

In their pity and passion

That scourge and forgive,

They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die

and not live.

"My own blood is what stanches

The wounds in my bark:

Stars caught in my branches

Make day of the dark,

And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires

as a spark."

Morris's interpretation of pre-Raphaelite tenets took him into mediaeval

legend and the classics for his subject matter. In his first volume, "The

Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," he came into competition with

Tennyson, who was at the same time issuing his Arthurian legends. The

polish of Tennyson's verse, as well as its symbolical meaning for the

time, was more acceptable than the actual return to the nature of the

fifteenth century, and this the first volume from a pre-Raphaelite was

hardly noticed by the critics. Morris sulked within his literary tents for

ten years before he again appeared, this time with "The Life and Death of

Jason" (1867), which immediately became popular. Later came the "Earthly

Paradise." These tales, in verse noble and simple, in style recalling the

tales of Chaucer, yet with a charm all their own, in which the real men

and women of Chaucer give place to types, have been the delight of those

who like to find in poetry a dreamland of romance where they may enjoy

themselves far from the problems and toils of everyday life. He differs

from all the other poets of this group in his lack of religious hope. His

mind was of the type that could not stand up against the undermining

influences of the age: hence world-weariness and despair are the

constantly recurring notes.

[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI]

Mrs. Browning far outdistanced her husband in the early days in

popularity. She pleased the people by her social enthusiasm, a

characteristic more marked in her verse than in that of any of the poets

mentioned. The critics have found many faults in her style, mainly those

growing out of an impassioned nature which carried her at times beyond the

realm of perfectly balanced art. But even an English critic of the

conservatism of Edmund Gosse could at last admit that "In some of her

lyrics and more rarely in her sonnets she rose to heights of passionate

humanity which place her only just below the great poets of her country."

Contemporary criticism of "Aurora Leigh," which was certainly a departure

both in form and matter from the accepted standards, was, on the whole,

just. _The Quarterly Review_ in 1862 said of it: "This 'Aurora Leigh' is a

great poem. It is a wonder of art. It will live. No large audience will it

have, but it will have audience; and that is more than most poems have. To

those who know what poetry is and in what struggles it is born--how the

great thoughts justify themselves--this work will be looked upon as one of

the wonders of the age." Mrs. Browning resembles her husband in the fact

that she does not fit into the main line of evolution of the romantic

school, but is an individual manifestation of the romantic spirit, showing

almost as great freedom from the trammels of accepted romanticism as

Browning does.

The writer of the century whose experience as a novelist almost paralleled

that of Browning as poet was Meredith. Because of his psychological

analysis and the so-called obscurity of his style, he waited many years

for recognition and finally was accepted as one of the most remarkable

novelists of the age. His poetry, showing similar tendencies, and

overshadowed by his novels, has not yet emerged into the light of

universal appreciation. One finds it even ignored altogether in the most

recent books of English literature, yet he is the author of one of the

most remarkable series of sonnets in the English language, "Modern Love,"

presenting, as it does, a vivid picture of domestic decadence which forms

a strange contrast to Rossetti's sonnets, "The House of Life," indicating

how many and various have been the forces at work during the nineteenth

century in the disintegrating and molding of social ideals. Meredith

writes of "Hiding the Skeleton".

"At dinner she is hostess, I am host.

Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps

The topic over intellectual deeps

In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.

With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:

It is in truth a most contagious game;

_Hiding the Skeleton_ shall be its name.

Such play as this the devils might appall,

But here's the greater wonder; in that we,

Enamor'd of our acting and our wits,

Admire each other like true hypocrites.

Warm-lighted glances, Love's Ephemeral,

Shoot gayly o'er the dishes and the wine.

We waken envy of our happy lot.

Fast sweet, and golden, shows our marriage-knot.

Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine!"

Rossetti writes "Lovesight":

"When do I see thee most, beloved one?

When in the light the spirits of mine eyes

Before thy face, their altar, solemnize

The worship of that Love through thee made known?

Or when, in the dusk hours (we two alone),

Close-kiss'd and eloquent of still replies

Thy twilight--hidden glimmering visage lies,

And my soul only sees thy soul its own?

O love, my love! if I no more should see

Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,

Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,--

How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope,

The ground-whirl of the perish'd leaves of Hope,

The wind of Death's imperishable wing?"

Browning's criticism of painting was evidently much influenced by the

pre-Raphaelites. Their admiration for the painters who preceded Raphael,

revealing as it did to them an art not satisfied with itself, but reaching

after higher things, and earnestly seeking to interpret nature and human

life, is echoed in his "Old Pictures in Florence," which was written but

six years after Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti formed their brotherhood. In

poetry, they did not eschew classical subjects, as Browning did for the

most part, but they treated these subjects in a romantic spirit, and so

removed them from the sort of strictures that Browning made upon the

perfection of Greek art.

From this summary of the chief lines of literary development in the

nineteenth century it will be seen, not only what a marvelous age it has

been for the flowering of individualism in literary invention, but how

Browning has surpassed all the other poets of note in the wideness of his

departure from accepted standards, and how helpless the earlier critics

were in the face of this departure, because of their dependence always

upon critical shibboleths--in other words, of principles not sufficiently

universal--as their means of measuring a poet's greatness. Tennyson and

the pre-Raphaelites won their popularity sooner among critics because

they followed logically in the line of development inaugurated by the

earlier poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, etc., whose poetry had already

done some good work in breaking down the school of Dryden and Pope, though

it succeeded only in erecting another standard not sufficiently universal

to include Browning. The evolution of art forms, a principle so clearly

understood, as we have shown by Browning, has never become a guiding one

with critics, though Mr. Gosse in his "Modern English Literature" has

expressed a wish that the principle of evolution might be adapted to

criticism. He has evidently felt how hopeless is the task of appraising

poets by the old individualistic method, which, as he says, has been in

favor for at least a century. It possesses, he declares, considerable

effectiveness in adroit hands, but is, after all, an adaptation of the old

theory of the unalterable type, merely substituting for the one authority

of the ancients an equal rigidity in a multitude of isolated modern

instances. For this inflexible style of criticism he proposes that a

scientific theory shall be adopted which shall enable us at once to take

an intelligent pleasure in Pope and in Wordsworth, in Spenser and in

Swift. He writes:

"Herbert Spencer has, with infinite courage, opened the entire world of

phenomena to the principles of evolution, but we seem slow to admit them

into the little province of aesthetics. We cling to the individualist

manner, to that intense eulogy which concentrates its rays on the

particular object of notice and relegates all others to proportional

obscurity. There are critics of considerable acumen and energy who seem to

know no other mode of nourishing a talent or a taste than that which is

pursued by the cultivators of gigantic gooseberries. They do their best to

nip off all other buds, that the juices of the tree of fame may be

concentrated on their favorite fruit. Such a plan may be convenient for

the purposes of malevolence, and in earlier times our general ignorance of

the principles of growth might well excuse it. But it is surely time that

we should recognize only two criteria of literary judgment. The first is

primitive, and merely clears the ground of rubbish; it is, Does the work

before us, or the author, perform what he sets out to perform with a

distinguished skill in the direction in which his powers are exercised? If

not, he interests the higher criticism not at all; but if yes, then

follows the second test: Where, in the vast and ever-shifting scheme of

literary evolution, does he take his place, and in what relation does he

stand, not to those who are least like him, but to those who are of his

own kith and kin?"

[Illustration: GEORGE MEREDITH]

With such principles of criticism as this, the public would sooner be

brought to an appreciation of all that is best worth while in literature,

instead of being taken, as it too often is, upon a wrong scent to worship

at the shrine of the Nokes and Stokes, who simply print blue and eat the

turtles.

If Mr. Gosse had himself been fully imbued with such principles would he

have made the statement quoted in chapter two in regard to Browning's

later books? And should we have such senseless criticism as a remark which

has become popular lately, and which I believe emanated from a university

in the South--namely, that Browning never said anything that Tennyson had

not said better? As an illustration of this a recent critic may be quoted

who is entirely scornful of the person who prefers Browning's

"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world"

to Tennyson's

"And hear at times a sentinel

Who moves about from place to place,

And whispers to the worlds of space

In the deep night that all is well."

One might reply to this that it is a matter of taste had not Courthope

shown conclusively that Matthew Arnold's criterion of criticism--namely,

that a taste which is born of culture is the only certain possession by

which the critic can measure the beauty of a poet's line--is a fallacy.

His argument is worth quoting:

"You have stated strongly one side of the truth, but you have ignored,

completely ignored, the other. You have asserted the claims of

individual liberty, and up to a certain point I agree with you. I do

not deny that spiritual liberty is founded on consciousness, and hence

the self-consciousness of the age is part of the problem we are

considering. I do not deny that the prevailing rage for novelty must

also be taken into account. Liberty, variety, novelty, are all

necessary to the development of Art. Without novelty there can be no

invention, without variety there can be no character, without liberty

there can be no life. Life, character, invention, these are of the

essence of Poetry. But while you have defended with energy the freedom

of the Individual, you have said nothing of the authority of society.

And yet the conviction of the existence of this authority is a belief

perhaps even more firmly founded in the human mind than the sentiment

as to the rights of individual liberty....

The great majority of the professors of poetry, however various their

opinions, however opposite their tastes, have felt sure that there was

in taste, as in science, a theory of false and true; in art, as in

conduct, a rule of right and wrong. And even among those who have

asserted most strongly the inward and relative nature of poetry, do

you think there was one so completely a skeptic as to imagine that he

was the sole proprietor of the perception he sought to embody in

words; one who doubted his power, by means of accepted symbols, to

communicate to his audience his own ideas and feelings about external

things? Yet until some man shall have been found bold enough to defend

a thesis so preposterous, we must continue to believe that there is a

positive standard, by which those at least who speak a common language

may reason about questions of taste."

Armed with this gracious permission on the part of a professor of poetry,

we may venture to reason a little upon the foregoing quotations from

Tennyson and Browning to the effect that the person of really good taste

might like each of them in its place. While Tennyson's mystical quatrain

is beautiful and quite appropriate in such a poem as "In Memoriam," it

would not be in the least appropriate from the lips of a little

silk-winding girl as she wanders through the streets of Asolo on a sunny

morning singing her little songs. She is certainly a more lifelike child

speaking Browningese, as she has often been criticised for doing, than she

would be if upon this occasion she spoke in a Tennysonian manner. That her

song has touched the hearts of the twentieth century, if it was not

altogether appreciated in the nineteenth, is proved by the fact that it is

one of the most popular songs of the day as set by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach,

and that the line is heard upon the lips of people to-day who do not even

know whose it is, and herein lies the ultimate test of greatness.

VI

CLASSIC SURVIVALS

Before passing in review Browning's treatment of classical subjects as

compared with the other great poets of the nineteenth century, it will be

interesting to take a glimpse at his choice of subject-matter in general.

To compare Browning's choice of subject-matter with that of other English

poets is to strike at the very root of his position in the chain of

literary development. Subject-matter is by no means simple in its nature,

but as a musical sound is composed of vibrations within vibrations, so it

is made up of the complex relations of body and spirit--the mere external

facts of the story are blended with such philosophical undercurrent, or

dramatic _motif_, or unfolding of the hidden springs of action as the poet

is able to insinuate into it.

However far back one penetrates in the history of poetry, poets will be

found depending largely upon previous sources, rather than upon their own

creative genius, for the body of their subject-matter, until the

question presents itself with considerable force as to who could have been

the mysterious first poet who supplied plots to the rest of mankind.

Conjecture is obliged to play a part here, as it does wherever human

origins are in question. Doubtless, this first poet was no separate

individual, but simply the elements man and nature, through whose action

and reaction upon each other grew up story-forms, evidently compounded of

human customs, and observed natural phenomena such as those we find in the

great Hindu, Greek, and Teutonic classics, and which thus crystallized

became great well-springs of inspiration for future generations of poets.

Each new poet, however, who is worthy of the name, sets up his own

particular interplay with man and nature; and however much he may be

indebted for his inspiration to past products of this universal law of

action and reaction, he is bound to use them or interpret them in a manner

colored by his own personal and peculiar relations with the universe.

In so doing he supplies the more important spiritual side of

subject-matter and becomes in very truth the poet or maker, to that extent

at least which Browning himself lays down as the province of art--namely,

to arrange,

"Dissociate, redistribute, interchange

Part with part: lengthen, broaden

... simply what lay loose

At first lies firmly after, what design

Was faintly traced in hesitating line

Once on a time grows firmly resolute

Henceforth and evermore."

Sometimes the poet's power of arranging and redistributing and

interchanging carries him upward into the realm of ideas alone, among

which his imagination plays in absolute freedom; he throws over the

results of man's past dallyings with Nature and makes his own terms with

her, and the result is an approach to absolute creation.

Except in the case of lyric poetry the instances where there have been no

suggestions as to subject-matter are rare in comparison with those where

the subject-matter has been derived from some source.

Look, for instance, at the father of English poetry, Chaucer, how he

ransacked French, Italian and Latin literature for his subject-matter,

most conscientiously carrying out his own saying, that

"Out of olde feldys as men sey

Comyth all this newe corn from yere to yere,

And out of olde books in good fey

Cometh all this new science that men alere."