It might seem at first as if it were unfair to attempt any estimate of
the philosophic and religious teaching of a poet like Browning, whose
method we have already recognized as dramatic. Can we ascribe to the poet
himself the opinions which he puts into the mouths of his characters? Can
we hold him responsible for the sentiments which are expressed by the
actors on his stage?
Certainly this objection must be admitted as a restraint in the
interpretation of his poetry. We are not to take all that his characters
say, literally and directly, as his own belief, any more than we are to
read the speeches of Satan, and Eliphaz, and Bildad, and Zophar, in the
Book of Job, as utterances of the spirit of inspiration. But just as
that great dramatic Scripture, dealing with the problems of evil and
suffering and sovereignty, does contain a doctrine and convey a lesson,
so the poetry of Browning, taken as a whole, utters a distinct and
positive prophetic message.
In the first place, many of the poems are evidently subjective, written
without disguise in the first person. Among these we may consider _My
Star_; _By the Fireside_; _One Word More_; the Epilogues to _Dramatis
Personæ_ and _Pachiarrotto_ and _Ferishtah’s Fancies_; the introduction
and the close of _The Ring and the Book_; _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter
Day_; the ending of the poem called _Gold Hair_, and of _A Death in the
Desert_, and of _Bishop Blougram’s Apology_; _Prospice_ and _Reverie_.
In the second place we must remember Goethe’s dictum: “Every author in
some degree, pourtrays himself in his works, even be it against his
will.” Even when Browning is writing dramatically, he cannot conceal
his sympathy. The masks are thin. His eyes shine through. “His own
personality,” says Mr. Stedman, “is manifest in the speech and movement
of almost every character of each piece. His spirit is infused as if by
metempsychosis, within them all, and forces each to assume a strange
Pentecostal tone, which we discover to be that of the poet himself.” Thus
it is not impossible, nor even difficult, to reach a fair estimate of his
ethical and religious teaching and discover its principal elements.
1. First among these I would put a great confidence in God. Browning is
the most theological of modern poets. The epithet which was applied to
Spinoza might well be transferred to him. He is a “God-intoxicated” man.
But in a very different sense, for whereas the philosopher felt God as an
idea, the poet feels Him intensely as a person. The song which he puts
into the lips of the unconscious heroine in _Pippa Passes_,—
“God’s in his heaven
All’s right with the world,——”
is the recurrent theme of his poetry. He cries with Paracelsus,
“God thou art Love, I build my faith on that.”
Even when his music is broken and interrupted by discords, when it
seems to dissolve and fade away as all human work, in its outward form,
dissolves and fades, he turns, as Abt Vogler turns from his silent
organ, to God;
“Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?”
In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ he takes up the ancient figure of the potter and the
clay and uses it to express his boundless trust in God.
The characteristic mark of Browning’s view of God is that it is always
taken from the side of humanity. The Perfect Glory is the correlative of
the glory of the imperfect. The Divine Love is the answer to the human
longing. God is, because man needs Him. From this point of view it almost
seems, as a brilliant essayist has said, as if “In Browning, God is
adjective to man.”[18]
But it may be said in answer, that, at least for man, this is the only
point of view that is accessible. We can never leave our own needs
behind us, however high we may try to climb. Certainly if we succeed in
forgetting them for a moment, in that very moment we have passed out of
the region of poetry, which is the impassioned interpretation of man’s
heart.
2. The second element of power in Browning’s poetry is that he sees in
the personal Christ the very revelation of God that man’s heart most
needs and welcomes. Nowhere else in all the range of modern poetry has
this vision been expressed with such spiritual ardour, with such poignant
joy. We must turn back to the pages of Isaiah to find anything to equal
the Messianic rapture of the minstrel in _Saul_.
“He who did most shall bear most: the strongest shall stand the most
weak.
’Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be,
A Face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me,
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! see the Christ stand!”
We must look into the Christ-filled letters of St. Paul to find the
attractions of the Crucified One uttered as powerfully as they are in the
_Epistle of Karshish_.
“The very God! think Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-great, were the All-Loving too—
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!’”
It is idle to assert that these are only dramatic presentations of the
Christian faith. No poet could have imagined such utterances without
feeling their significance; and the piercing splendour of their
expression discloses his sympathy. He reveals it yet more unmistakably
in _Christmas Eve_, (strophe XVII) and in _Easter Day_, (strophe XXX.)
In the Epilogue to _Dramatis Personæ_ it flashes out clearly. The second
speaker, as Renan, has bewailed the vanishing of the face of Christ from
the sorrowful vision of the race. The third speaker, the poet himself,
answers:
“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose
Become my universe that feels and knows!”
“That face,” said Browning to a friend, “that face is the face of Christ:
that is how I feel Him.”
Surely this is the religious message that the world most needs to-day.
More and more everything in Christianity hangs upon the truth of the
Incarnation. The alternative declares itself. Either no God whom we can
know and love at all, or God personally manifest in Christ!
3. The third religious element in Browning’s poetry is his faith that
this life is a probation, a discipline for the future. He says, again and
again,
“I count life just a stuff
To try the soul’s strength on, educe the man.”
The glory of the imperfect lies in the power of progress, “man’s
distinctive mark.” And progress comes by conflict; conflict with
falsehood and ignorance,—
“Living here means nescience simply; ’tis next life that helps to learn—”
and conflict with evil,—
“Why comes temptation but for man to meet,
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestalled in triumph?”
The poet is always calling us to be glad we are engaged in such a noble
strife.
“Rejoice we are allied
To that which doth provide
And not partake, effect and not receive!
A spark disturbs our clod;
Nearer we hold of God
Who gives, than of his tribes that take, I must believe.
Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”
Now this is fine doctrine, lofty, strenuous, stimulating. It appeals
to the will, which is man’s central power. It proclaims the truth that
virtue must be active in its essence though it may also be passive in its
education, positive in its spirit and negative only by contrast.
But it is in the working out of this doctrine into an ethical system
that Browning enters upon dangerous ground, and arrives at results which
seem to obscure the clearness, and to threaten the stability of the moral
order, by which alone, if the world’s greatest teachers have been right,
the ultimate good of humanity can be attained. Here, it seems to me,
his teaching, especially in its latter utterances, is often confused,
turbulent, misleading. His light is mixed with darkness. He seems almost
to say that it matters little which way we go, provided only we go.
He overlooks the deep truth that there is an activity of the soul in
self-restraint as well as in self-assertion. It takes as much courage
to dare not to do evil as it does to dare to do good. The hero is
sometimes the man who stands still. Virtue is noblest when it is joined
to virility. But virility alone is not virtue nor does it always lead
to moral victory. Sometimes it leads straight towards moral paralysis,
death, extinction. Browning fails to see this, because his method is
dramatic and because he dramatizes through himself. He puts himself
into this or the other character, and works himself out through it,
preserving still in himself, though all unconsciously, the soul of
something good. Thus he does not touch that peculiar deadening of
spiritual power which is one result of the unrestrained following of
impulse and passion. It is this defect in his vision of life that leads
to the dubious and interrogatory moral of such a poem as _The Statue and
the Bust_.
Browning values the individual so much that he lays all his emphasis upon
the development of stronger passions and aspirations, the unfolding of a
more vivid and intense personality, and has comparatively little stress
to lay upon the larger thought of the progress of mankind in harmony
and order. Indeed he poetizes so vigorously against the conventional
judgments of society that he often seems to set himself against the
moral sentiments on which those conventional judgments, however warped,
ultimately rest. “Over and over again in Browning’s poetry,” says a
penetrating critic, “we meet with this insistence on the value of moments
of high excitement, of intense living, of full experience of pleasure,
even though such moments be of the essence of evil and fruitful in all
dark consequences.”
Take for example his treatment of love. He is right in saying “Love is
best.” But is he right in admitting, even by inference, that love has a
right to take its own way of realizing itself? Can love be at its best
unless it is obedient to law? Does it not make its truest music when
it keeps its place in the harmony of purity and peace and good living?
Surely the wild and reckless view of love as its own law which seems to
glimmer through the unconsumed smoke of Browning’s later poems, such as
_Fifine at the Fair_, _The Inn Album_, and _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_,
needs correction by a true flash of insight like that which we find in
two lines of _One Word More_:
“_Dante, who loved well because he hated,_
_Hated wickedness that hinders loving._”
Browning was at times misled by a perilous philosophy into a position
where the vital distinction between good and evil dissolved away in a
cloud of unreality. In _Ferishtah’s Fancies_ and _Parleyings with Certain
People of Importance_, any one who has the patience to read them will
find himself in a nebulous moral world. The supposed necessity of showing
that evil is always a means to good tempts to the assertion that it has
no other reality. Perhaps it is altogether an illusion, needed to sting
us into conflict, but really non-existent. Perhaps it is only the shadow
cast by the good,—or “the silence implying sound.” Perhaps it is good
in disguise, not yet developed from the crawling worm into the creature
with wings. After this fashion the whimsical dervish Ferishtah strews his
beans upon the table.
“This bean was white, this—black,
Set by itself,—but see if good and bad
Each following other in companionship,
Black have not grown less black and white less white,
Till blackish seems but dun, and whitish,—gray,
And the whole line turns—well, or black to thee
Or white alike to me—no matter which.”
Certainly if this were the essence of Browning’s poetry the best
safeguard against its falsehood would be its own weakness. Such a
message, if this were all, could never attract many hearers, nor inspire
those whom it attracted. Effort, struggle, noble conflict would be
impossible in a world where there were no moral certainties or realities,
but all men felt that they were playing at a stupid game like the Caucus
race in _Alice in Wonderland_, where everything went round in a circle
and every runner received a prize.
But in fact these elements of weakness in Browning’s work, as it seems to
me, do not belong to his true poetry. They are expressed, generally, in
his most obfuscated style, and at a prohibitory length. They are embodied
in poems which no one is likely to read for fun, and few are capable of
learning by heart.
But when we go back to his best work we find another spirit, we hear
another message. Clear, resonant, trumpet-like his voice calls to us
proclaiming the glorious possibilities of this imperfect life. Only do
not despair; only do not sink down into conventionality, indifference,
mockery, cynicism; only rise and hope and go forward out of the house of
bondage into the land of liberty. True, the prophecy is not complete. But
it is inspiring. He does not teach us how to live. But he does tell us
to live,—with courage, with love to man, with trust in God,—and he bids
us find life glorious, because it is still imperfect and therefore full
of promise.