BROWNING'S PLACE IN ENGLISH POETRY.
"But there's a great contrast between him and me. He seems
very content with life, and takes much satisfaction in the
world. It's a very strange and curious spectacle to behold
a man in these days so confidently cheerful." (_Carlyle_.)
It has been said of Carlyle, who may for many reasons be considered as
our poet's twin figure, that he laid the foundations of his world of
thought in _Sartor Resartus_, and never enlarged them. His _Orientirung_
was over before he was forty years old--as is, indeed, the case with
most men. After that period there was no fundamental change in his view
of the world; nothing which can be called a new idea disturbed his
outline sketch of the universe. He lived afterwards only to fill it in,
showing with ever greater detail the relations of man to man in history,
and emphasizing with greater grimness the war of good and evil in human
action. There is evidence, it is true, that the formulae from which he
more or less consciously set forth, ultimately proved too narrow for
him, and we find him beating himself in vain against their limitations;
still, on the whole, Carlyle speculated within the range and influence
of principles adopted early in life, and never abandoned for higher or
richer ideas, or substantially changed.
In these respects, there is considerable resemblance between Carlyle and
Browning. Browning, indeed, fixed his point of view and chose his
battleground still earlier; and he held it resolutely to his life's
close. In his _Pauline_ and in his Epilogue to _Asolando_ we catch the
triumphant tone of a single idea, which, during all the long interval,
had never sunk into silence. Like
"The wise thrush, he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!"[A]
[Footnote A: _Home Thoughts from Abroad_.]
Moreover, these two poets, if I may be permitted to call Carlyle a poet,
taught the same truth. They were both witnesses to the presence of God
in the spirit of man, and looked at this life in the light of another
and a higher; or rather, they penetrated through the husk of time and
saw that eternity is even here, a tranquil element underlying the noisy
antagonisms of man's earthly life. Both of them, like Plato's
philosopher, made their home in the sunlight of ideal truth: they were
not denizens of the cave taking the things of sense for those of
thought, shadows for realities, echoes for the voices of men.
But, while Carlyle fought his way into this region, Browning found
himself in it from the first; while Carlyle bought his freedom with a
great sum, the poet "was free born." Carlyle saw the old world faith
break up around him, and its fragments never ceased to embarrass his
path. He was _at_ the point of transition, present at the collision of
the old and new, and in the midst of the confusion. He, more than any
other English writer, was the instrument of the change from the Deism of
the eighteenth century and the despair which followed it, into the
larger faith of our own. But, for Browning, there was a new heaven and a
new earth, and old things had passed away. This notable contrast between
the two men, arising at once from their disposition and their moral
environment, had far-reaching effects on their lives and their writings.
But their affinity was deeper than the difference, for they are
essentially heirs and exponents of the same movement in English thought.
The main characteristic of that movement is that it is both moral and
religious, a devotion to God and the active service of man, a
recognition at once of the rights of nature and of spirit. It does not,
on the one hand, raise the individual as a natural being to the throne
of the universe, and make all forces social, political, and spiritual
stoop to his rights; nor does it, on the other hand, deny these rights,
or make the individual a mere instrument of society. It at least
attempts to reconcile the fundamental facts of human nature, without
compromising any of them. It cannot be called either individualistic or
socialistic; but it strives to be both at once, so that both man and
society mean more to this age than they ever did before. The narrow
formulae that cramped the thought of the period which preceded ours have
been broken through. No one can pass from the hedonists and
individualists to Carlyle and Browning without feeling that these two
men are representatives of new forces in politics, in religion, and in
literature,--forces which will undoubtedly effect momentous changes
before they are caught again and fixed in creeds.
That a new epoch in English thought was veritably opened by them is
indicated by the surprise and bewilderment they occasioned at their
first appearance. Carlyle had Emerson to break his loneliness and
Browning had Rossetti; but, to most other men at that day, _Sartor_ and
_Pauline_ were all but unintelligible. The general English reader could
make little of the strange figures that had broken into the realm of
literature; and the value and significance of their work, as well as its
originality, will be recognized better by ourselves if we take a hurried
glance at the times which lay behind them. Its main worth will be found
to lie in the fact that they strove to bring together again certain
fundamental elements, on which the moral life of man must always rest,
and which had fallen asunder in the ages which preceded their own.
The whole-hearted, instinctive life of the Elizabethan age was narrowed
and deepened into the severe one-sidedness of Puritanism, which cast on
the bright earth the sombre shadow of a life to come. England was given
up for a time to a magnificent half-truth. It did not
"Wait
The slow and sober uprise all around
O' the building,"
but
"Ran up right to roof
A sudden marvel, piece of perfectness."[A]
[Footnote A:_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]
After Puritanism came Charles the Second and the rights of the flesh,
which rights were gradually clarified, till they contradicted themselves
in the benevolent self-seeking of altruistic hedonism. David Hume led
the world out of the shadow of eternity, and showed that it was only an
object of the five senses; or of six, if we add that of "hunger." The
divine element was explained away, and the proper study of mankind was,
not man, as that age thought, but man reduced to his beggarly
elements--a being animated solely by the sensuous springs of pleasure
and pain, which should properly, as Carlyle thought, go on all fours,
and not lay claim to the dignity of being moral. All things were reduced
to what they seemed, robbed of their suggestiveness, changed into
definite, sharp-edged, mutually exclusive particulars. The world was an
aggregate of isolated facts, or, at the best, a mechanism into which
particulars were fitted by force; and society was a gathering of mere
individuals, repelling each other by their needs and greed, with a ring
of natural necessity to bind them together. It was a fit time for
political economy to supplant ethics. There was nowhere an ideal which
could lift man above his natural self, and teach him, by losing it, to
find a higher life. And, as a necessary consequence, religion gave way
to naturalism and poetry to prose.
After this age of prose came our own day. The new light first flushed
the modern world in the writings of the philosopher-poets of Germany:
Kant and Lessing, Fichte and Schiller, Goethe and Hegel. They brought
about the Copernican change. For them this world of the five senses, of
space and time and natural cause, instead of being the fixed centre
around which all things revolved, was explicable only in its relation to
a system which was spiritual; and man found his meaning in his
connection with society, the life of which stretched endlessly far back
into the past and forward into the future. Psychology gave way to
metaphysics. The universal element in the thought of man was revealed.
Instead of mechanism there was life. A new spirit of poetry and
philosophy brought God back into the world, revealed his incarnation in
the mind of man, and changed nature into a pellucid garment within which
throbbed the love divine. The antagonism of hard alternatives was at an
end; the universe was spirit-woven and every smallest object was "filled
full of magical music, as they freight a star with light." There were no
longer two worlds, but one; for "the other" world penetrated this, and
was revealed in it: thought and sense, spirit and nature, were
reconciled. These thinkers made room for man, as against the Puritans,
and for God, as against their successors. Instead of the hopeless
struggle of ascetic morality, which divides man against himself, they
awakened him to that sense of his reconciliation with his ideal which
religion gives: "Psyche drinks its stream and forgets her sorrows."
Now, this is just the soil where art blooms. For what is beauty but the
harmony of thought and sense, a universal meaning caught and tamed in
the particular? To the poet each little flower that blooms has endless
worth, and is regarded as perfect and complete; for he sees that the
spirit of the whole dwells in it. It whispers to him the mystery of the
infinite; it is a pulse in which beats the universal heart. The true
poet finds God everywhere; for the ideal is actual wherever beauty
dwells. And there is the closest affinity between art and religion, as
its history proves, from Job and Isaiah, Homer and Aeschylus, to our own
poet; for both art and religion lift us, each in its own way, above
one-sidedness and limitation, to the region of the universal. The one
draws God to man, brings perfection _here_, and reaches its highest form
in the joyous life of Greece, where the natural world was clothed with
almost supernatural beauty; the other lifts man to God, and finds this
life good because it reflects and suggests the greater life that is to
be. Both poetry and religion are a reconciliation and a satisfaction;
both lift man above the contradictions of limited existence, and place
him in the region of peace--where,
"with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
He sees into the life of things."[A]
[Footnote A: _Tintern Abbey._]
In this sense, it will be always true of the poet, as it is of the
religious man, that
"the world,
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,"[A]
[Footnote A: _Fra Lippo Lippi_.]
lead him back to God, who made it all.
He is essentially a witness to the divine element in the world.
It is the rediscovery of this divine element, after its expulsion by the
age of Deism and doubt, that has given to this century its poetic
grandeur. Unless we regard Burke as the herald of the new era, we may
say that England first felt the breath of the returning spirit in the
poems of Shelley and Wordsworth.
"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments."[B]
[Footnote B: _Adonais_.]
"And I have felt," says Wordsworth,
"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."[C]
[Footnote C: _Tintern Abbey_.]
Such notes as these could not be struck by Pope, nor be understood by
the age of prose. Still they are only the prelude of the fuller song of
Browning. Whether he be a greater poet than these or not,--a question
whose answer can benefit nothing, for each poet has his own worth, and
reflects by his own facet the universal truth--his poetry contains in it
larger elements, and the promise of a deeper harmony from the harsher
discords of his more stubborn material. Even where their spheres touch,
Browning held by the artistic truth in a different manner. To Shelley,
perhaps the most intensely spiritual of all our poets,
"That light whose smile kindles the universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,"
was an impassioned sentiment, a glorious intoxication; to Browning it
was a conviction, reasoned and willed, possessing the whole man, and
held in the sober moments when the heart is silent. "The heavy and the
weary weight of all this unintelligible world" was lightened for
Wordsworth, only when he was far from the haunts of men, and free from
the "dreary intercourse of daily life"; but Browning weaved his song of
hope right amidst the wail and woe of man's sin and wretchedness. For
Wordsworth "sensations sweet, felt in the blood and felt along the
heart, passed into his purer mind with tranquil restoration," and issued
"in a serene and blessed mood"; but Browning's poetry is not merely the
poetry of the emotions however sublimated. He starts with the hard
repellent fact, crushes by sheer force of thought its stubborn rind,
presses into it, and brings forth the truth at its heart. The greatness
of Browning's poetry is in its perceptive grip: and in nothing is he
more original than in the manner in which he takes up his task, and
assumes his artistic function. In his postponement of feeling to thought
we recognize a new poetic method, the significance of which we cannot
estimate as yet. But, although we may fail to apprehend the meaning of
the new method he employs, we cannot fail to perceive the fact, which is
not less striking, that the region from which he quarries his material
is new.
And yet he does not break away abruptly from his predecessors. His
kinship with them, in that he recognizes the presence of God in nature,
is everywhere evident. We quote one passage, scarcely to be surpassed by
any of our poets, as indicative of his power of dealing with the
supernaturalism of nature.
"The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
The molten ore burst up among the rocks,
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright
In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask--
God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged
With foam, white as the bitter lip of hate,
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups
Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,
Staring together with their eyes on flame--
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride.
Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face.
* * * * *
"Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain--and God renews
His ancient rapture. Thus He dwells in all,
From life's minute beginnings, up at last
To man--the consummation of this scheme
Of being, the completion of this sphere of life."[A]
[Footnote A: _Paracelsus._]
Such passages as these contain neither the rapt, reflective calm of
Wordsworth's solemn tones, nor the ethereal intoxication of Shelley's
spirit-music; but there is in them the same consciousness of the
infinite meaning of natural facts. And beyond this, there is also, in
the closing lines, a hint of a new region for art. Shelley and
Wordsworth were the poets of Nature, as all truly say; Browning was the
poet of the human soul. For Shelley, the beauty in which all things work
and move was well-nigh "quenched by the eclipsing curse of the birth of
man"; and Wordsworth lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains,
meadows, hills and groves, while he kept grave watch o'er man's
mortality, and saw the shades of the prison-house gather round him. From
the life of man they garnered nought but mad indignation, or mellowed
sadness. It was a foolish and furious strife with unknown powers fought
in the dark, from which the poet kept aloof, for he could not see that
God dwelt amidst the chaos. But Browning found "harmony in immortal
souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay." He found nature crowned in
man, though man was mean and miserable. At the heart of the most
wretched abortion of wickedness there was the mark of the loving touch
of God. Shelley turned away from man; Wordsworth paid him rare visits,
like those of a being from a strange world, made wise and sad with
looking at him from afar; Browning dwelt with him. He was a comrade in
the fight, and ever in the van of man's endeavour bidding him be of good
cheer. He was a witness for God in the midmost dark, where meet in
deathless struggle the elemental powers of right and wrong. For God is
present for him, not only in the order and beauty of nature, but in the
world of will and thought. Beneath the caprice and wilful lawlessness of
individual action, he saw a beneficent purpose which cannot fail, but
"has its way with man, not he with it."
Now this was a new world for poetry to enter into; a new depth to
penetrate with hope; and Browning was the first of modern poets to
"Stoop
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
Strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky."
It is also a new world for religion and morality; and to understand it
demands a deeper insight into the fundamental elements of human life.
To show this in a proximately adequate manner, we should be obliged, as
already hinted, to connect the poet's work, not merely with that of his
English predecessors, but with the deeper and more comprehensive
movement of the thought of Germany since the time of Kant. It would be
necessary to indicate how, by breaking a way through the narrow creeds
and equally narrow scepticism of the previous age, the new spirit
extended the horizon of man's active and contemplative life, and made
him free of the universe, and the repository of the past conquests of
his race. It proposed to man the great task of solving the problem of
humanity, but it strengthened him with its past achievement, and
inspired him with the conviction of its boundless progress. It is not
that the significance of the individual or the meaning of his endeavour
is lost. Under this new view, man has still to fight for his own hand,
and it is still recognized that spirit is always burdened with its own
fate and cannot share its responsibility. Morality does not give way to
religion or pass into it, and there is a sense in which the individual
is always alone in the sphere of duty.
But from this new point of view the individual is re-explained for us,
and we begin to understand that he is the focus of a light which is
universal, "one more incarnation of the mind of God." His moral task is
no longer to seek his own in the old sense, but to elevate humanity; for
it is only by taking this circuit that he can come to his own. Such a
task as this is a sufficiently great one to occupy all time; but it is
to humanity in him that the task belongs, and it will therefore be
achieved. This is no new one-sidedness. It does not mean, to those who
comprehend it, the supplanting of the individual thought by the
collective thought, or the substitution of humanity for man. The
universal is _in_ the particular, the fact _is_ the law. There is no
collision between the whole and the part, for the whole lives in the
part. As each individual plant has its own life and beauty and worth,
although the universe has conspired to bring it into being; so also, and
in a far higher degree, man has his own duty and his own dignity,
although he is but the embodiment of forces, natural and spiritual,
which have come from the endless past. Like a letter in a word, or a
word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; _but the
sentence is meaningless without him_. "Rays from all round converge in
him," and he has no power except that which has been lent to him; but
all the same, nay, all the more, he must
"Think as if man never thought before!
Act as if all creation hung attent
On the acting of such faculty as his."[A]
[Footnote A: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]
His responsibility, his individuality, is not less, but greater, in that
he can, in his thought and moral action, command the forces that the
race has stored for him. The great man speaks the thought of his people,
and his invocations as their priest are just the expression of their
dumb yearnings. And even the mean and insignificant man is what he is,
in virtue of the humanity which is blurred and distorted within him; and
he can shed his insignificance and meanness, only by becoming a truer
vehicle for that humanity.
Thus, when spirit is spiritually discerned, it is seen that man is bound
to man in a union closer than any physical organism can show; while "the
individual," in the old sense of a being _opposed_ to society and
_opposed_ to the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought,
not discoverable anywhere, because not real. And, on the other hand,
society is no longer "collective," but so organic that the whole is
potentially in every part--an organism _of_ organisms.
The influence of this organic idea in every department of thought which
concerns itself with man is not to be measured. It is already fast
changing all the practical sciences of man--economics, politics, ethics
and religion. The material, being newly interpreted, is wrought into a
new purpose, and revelation is once more bringing about a reformation.
But human action in its ethical aspect is, above all, charged with a new
significance. The idea of duty has received an expansion almost
illimitable, and man himself has thereby attained new worth and
dignity--for what is duty except a dignity and opportunity, man's chance
of being good? When we contrast this view of the life of man as the life
of humanity in him, with the old individualism, we may say that morality
also has at last, in Bacon's phrase, passed from the narrow seas into
the open ocean. And after all, the greatest achievement of our age may
be not that it has established the sciences of nature, but that it has
made possible the science of man. We have, at length, reached a point of
view from which we may hope to understand ourselves. Law, order,
continuity, in human action--the essential pre-conditions of a moral
science--were beyond the reach of an individualistic theory. It left to
ethical writers no choice but that of either sacrificing man to law, or
law to man; of denying either the particular or the universal element in
his nature. Naturalism did the first. Intuitionism, the second. The
former made human action the _re_action of a natural agent on the
incitement of natural forces. It made man a mere object, a _thing_
capable of being affected by other things through his faculty of being
pained or pleased; an object acting in obedience to motives that had an
external origin, just like any other object. The latter theory cut man
free from the world and his fellows, endowed him with a will that had no
law, and a conscience that was dogmatic; and thereby succeeded in
stultifying both law and morality.
But this new consciousness of the relation of man to mankind and the
world takes him out of his isolation and still leaves him free. It
relates men to one another in a humanity, which is incarnated anew in
each of them. It elevates the individual above the distinctions of time;
it treasures up the past in him as the active energy of his knowledge
and morality in the present, and also as the potency of the ideal life
of the future. On this view, the individual and the race are possible
only through each other.
This fundamental change in our way of looking at the life of man is
bound to abolish the ancient landmarks and bring confusion for a time.
Out of the new conception, _i.e.,_ out of the idea of evolution, has
sprung the tumult as well as the strength of our time. The present age
is moved with thoughts beyond the reach of its powers: great aspirations
for the well-being of the people and high ideals of social welfare flash
across its mind, to be followed again by thicker darkness. There is
hardly any limit to its despair or hope. It has a far larger faith in
the destiny of man than any of its predecessors, and yet it is _sure_ of
hardly anything--except that the ancient rules of human life are false.
Individualism is now detected as scepticism and moral chaos in disguise.
We know that the old methods are no longer of use. We cannot now cut
ourselves free of the fate of others. The confused cries for help that
are heard on every hand are recognized as the voices of our brethren;
and we now know that our fate is involved in theirs, and that the
problem of their welfare is also ours. We grapple with social questions
at last, and recognize that the issues of life and death lie in the
solution of these enigmas. Legislators and economists, teachers of
religion and socialists, are all alike social reformers. Philanthropy
has taken a deeper meaning; and all sects bear its banner. But their
forces are beaten back by the social wretchedness, for they have not
found the sovereign remedy of a great idea; and the result is in many
ways sad enough. Our social remedies often work mischief; for we degrade
those whom we would elevate, and in our charity forget justice. We
insist on the rights of the people and the duties of the privileged
classes, and thereby tend to teach greed to those for whom we labour,
and goodness to those whom we condemn. The task that lies before us is
plain: we want the welfare of the people as a whole. But we fail to
grasp the complex social elements together, and our very remedies tend
to sunder them. We know that the public good will not be obtained by
separating man from man, securing each unit in a charmed circle of
personal rights, and protecting it from others by isolation. We must
find a place for the individual within the social organism, and we know
now that this organism has not, as our fathers seemed to think, the
simple constitution of a wooden doll. Society is not put together
mechanically, and the individual cannot be outwardly attached to it, if
he is to be helped, He must rather share its life, be the heir of the
wealth it has garnered for him in the past, and participate in its
onward movement. Between this new social ideal and our attainment,
between the magnitude of our social duties and the resources of
intellect and will at our command, there lies a chasm which we despair
of bridging over.
The characteristics of this epoch faithfully reflect themselves in the
pages of Carlyle, with whose thoughts those of Browning are immediately
connected. It was Carlyle who first effectively revealed to England the
continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual
action. Seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued
sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations
amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his
day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, and, amidst
much smoke and din, showed his English readers something of the
greatness of the moral world. He gave us a philosophy of clothes,
penetrated through symbols to the immortal ideas, condemned all
shibboleths, and revealed the soul of humanity behind the external modes
of man's activity. He showed us, in a word, that the world is spiritual,
that loyalty to duty is the foundation of all human good, and that
national welfare rests on character. After reading him, it is impossible
for any one who reflects on the nature of duty to ask, "Am I my
brother's keeper?" He not only imagined, but knew, how "all things the
minutest that man does, minutely influence all men, and the very look of
his face blesses or curses whom-so it lights on, and so generates ever
new blessing or new cursing. I say, there is not a Red Indian, hunting
by Lake Winnipeg, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must
smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical
fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of
gravity of the universe." Carlyle dealt the deathblow to the
"laissez-faire" theory rampant in his day, and made each individual
responsible for the race. He has demonstrated that the sphere of duty
does not terminate with ourselves and our next-door neighbours. There
will be no pure air for the correctest Levite to breathe, till the laws
of sanitation have been applied to the moral slums. "Ye are my
brethren," said he, and he adds, as if conscious of his too denunciatory
way of dealing with them, "hence my rage and sorrow."
But his consciousness of brotherhood with all men brought only despair
for him. He saw clearly the responsibility of man, but not the dignity
which that implies; he felt the weight of the burden of humanity upon
his own soul, and it crushed him, for he forgot that all the good of the
world was there to help him bear it, and that "One with God is a
majority." He taught only the half-truth, that all men are united on the
side of duty, and that the spiritual life of each is conditional on
striving to save all. But he neglected the complement of this truth, and
forgot the greatness of the beings on whom so great a duty could be
laid. He therefore dignifies humanity only to degrade it again. The
"twenty millions" each must try to save "are mostly fools." But how
fools, when they can have such a task? Is it not true, on the contrary,
that no man ever saw a duty beyond his strength, and that "man can
because he ought" and ought only because he can? The evils an individual
cannot overcome are the moral opportunities of his fellows. The good are
not lone workers of God's purposes, and there is no need of despair.
Carlyle, like the ancient prophet, was too conscious of his own mission,
and too forgetful of that of others. "I have been very jealous for the
Lord God of hosts; because the children of Israel have forgotten Thy
covenant, thrown down Thine alters, and slain Thy prophets, and I, even
I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away." He needed,
beside the consciousness of his prophetic function, a consciousness of
brotherhood with humbler workers. "Yet I have left Me seven thousand in
Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth
which hath not kissed him." It would have helped him had he remembered,
that there were on all sides other workers engaged on the temple not
made with hands, although he could not hear the sound of their hammers
for the din he made himself. It would have changed his despair into joy,
and his pity into a higher moral quality, had he been able to believe
that, amidst all the millions against whom he hurled his anathemas,
there is no one who, let him do what he will, is not constrained to
illustrate either the folly and wretchedness of sin, or the glory of
goodness. It is not given to any one, least of all to the wicked, to
hold back the onward movement of the race, or to destroy the impulse for
good which is planted within it.
But Carlyle saw only one side of the truth about man's moral nature and
destiny. He knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential
wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how
wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and
self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. That
morality is the essence of things, that wrong _must_ prove its
weakness, that right is the only might, is reiterated and illustrated on
all his pages; they are now commonplaces of speculation on matters of
history, if not conscious practical principles which guide its makers.
But Carlyle never inquired into the character of this moral necessity,
and he overlooked the beneficence which places death at the heart of
sin. He never saw wrong except on its way to execution, or in the death
throes; but he did not look in the face of the gentle power that led it
on to death. He saw the necessity which rules history, but not the
beneficent character of that necessity.
The same limitations marred his view of duty, which was his greatest
revelation to his age. He felt its categorical authority and its binding
force. But the power which imposed the duty was an alien power, awful in
majesty, infinite in might, a "great task-master"; and the duty itself
was an outer law, written in letters of flame across the high heavens,
in comparison with which man's action at its best sank into failure. His
only virtue is obedience, and his last rendering even of himself is
"unprofitable servant." In this he has much of the combined strength and
weakness of the old Scottish Calvinism. "He stands between the
individual and the Infinite without hope or guide. He has a constant
disposition to crush the human being by comparing him with God," said
Mazzini, with marvellous penetration. "From his lips, at times so
daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the Breton Mariner--'My
God protect me! My bark is so small, and Thy ocean so vast.'" His
reconciliation of God and man was incomplete: God seemed to him to have
manifested Himself _to_ man but not _in_ man. He did not see that "the
Eternity which is before and behind us is also within us."
But the moral law which commands is just the reflection of the
aspirations of progressive man, who always creates his own horizon. The
extension of duty is the objective counterpart of man's growth; a proof
of victory and not of failure, a sign that man is mounting upwards. And,
if so, it is irrational to infer the impossibility of success from the
magnitude of the demands of a moral law, which is itself the promise of
a better future. The hard problems set for us by our social environment
are recognized as set by ourselves; for, in matters of morality, the eye
sees only what the heart prompts. The very statement of the difficulty
contains the potency of its solution; for evil, when understood, is on
the way towards being overcome, and the good, when seen, contains the
promise of its own fulfilment. It is ignorance which is ruinous, as when
the cries of humanity beat against a deaf ear; and we can take a
comfort, denied to Carlyle, from the fact that he has made us awake to
our social duties. He has let loose the confusion upon us, and it is
only natural that we should at first be overcome by a sense of
bewildered helplessness. But this very sense contains the germ of hope,
and England is struggling to its feet to wrestle with its wrongs.
Carlyle has brought us within sight of our future, and we are now taking
a step into it. He has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died
there, and was denied the view from Pisgah.
Now, this view was given to Robert Browning, and he broke out into a
song of victory, whose strains will give strength and comfort to many in
the coming time. That his solution of the evils of life is not final,
may at once be admitted. There are elements in the problem of which he
has taken no account, and which will force those who seek light on the
deeper mysteries of man's moral nature, to go beyond anything that the
poet has to say. Even the poet himself grows, at least in some
directions, less confident of the completeness of his triumph as he
grows older. His faith in the good does not fail, but it is the faith of
one who confesses to ignorance, and links himself to his finitude.
Still, so thorough is his conviction of the moral purpose of life, of
the certainty of the good towards which man is moving, and of the
beneficence of the power which is at work everywhere in the world, that
many of his poems ring like the triumphant songs of Luther.