BROWNING'S OPTIMISM.
"Gladness be with thee, Helper of the World!
I think this is the authentic sign and seal
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
And recommence at sorrow."[A]
[Footnote A: _Balaustion's Adventure_.]
I have tried to show that one of the distinctive features of the present
era is the stress it lays on the worth of the moral life of man, and the
new significance it has given to that life by its view of the continuity
of history. This view finds expression, on its social and ethical side,
in the pages of Carlyle and Browning: both of whom are interested
exclusively, one may almost say, in the evolution of human character;
and both of whom, too, regard that evolution as the realization by man
of the purposes, greater than man's, which rule in the world. And,
although neither of them developed the organic view of humanity, which
is implied in their doctrines, into an explicit philosophy, still the
moral life of the individual is for each of them the infinite life in
the finite. The meaning of the universe is moral, its last might is
rightness; and the task of man is to catch up that meaning, convert it
into his own motive, and thereby make it the source of his actions, the
inmost principle of his life. This, fully grasped, will bring the finite
and the infinite, morality and religion, together, and reconcile them.
But the reconciliation which Carlyle sought to effect was incomplete on
every side--even within the sphere of duty, with which alone, as
moralist, he specially concerned himself. The moral law was imposed upon
man by a higher power, in the presence of whom man was awed and crushed;
for that power had stinted man's endowment, and set him to fight a
hopeless battle against endless evil. God was everywhere around man, and
the universe was just the expression of His will--a will inexorably bent
on the good, so that evil could not prevail; but God was not _within_
man, except as a voice of conscience issuing imperatives and threats. An
infinite duty was laid upon a finite being, and its weight made him
break out into a cry of despair.
Browning, however, not only sought to bring about the reconciliation,
but succeeded, in so far as that is possible _in terms of mere feeling_.
His poetry contains suggestions that the moral will without is also a
force within man; that the power which makes for righteousness in the
world has penetrated into, or rather manifests itself _as_, man.
Intelligence and will, the reason which apprehends the nature of things,
and the original impulse of self-conscious life which issues in action,
are God's power in man; so that God is realizing Himself in the deeds of
man, and human history is just His return to Himself. Outer law and
inner motive are, for the poet, manifestations of the same beneficent
purpose; and instead of duty in the sense of an autocratic imperative,
or beneficent tyranny, he finds, deep beneath man's foolishness and sin,
a constant tendency towards the good which is bound up with the very
nature of man's reason and will. If man could only understand himself he
would find without him no limiting necessity, but the manifestation of a
law which is one with his own essential being. A beneficent power has
loaded the dice, according to the epigram, so that the chances of
failure and victory are not even; for man's nature is itself a divine
endowment, one with the power that rules his life, and man must finally
reach through error to truth, and through sin to holiness. In the
language of theology, it may be said that the moral process is the
spiritual incarnation of God; it is God's goodness as love, effecting
itself in human action. Hence Carlyle's cry of despair is turned by
Browning into a song of victory. While the former regards the struggle
between good and evil as a fixed battle, in which the forces are
immovably interlocked, the latter has the consciousness of battling
against a retreating foe; and the conviction of coming triumph gives
joyous vigour to every stroke. Browning lifted morality into an
optimism, and translated its battle into song. This was the distinctive
mark and mission which give to him such power of moral inspiration.
In order, however, to estimate the value of this feature of the poet's
work, it is necessary to look more closely into the character of his
faith in the good. Merely to attribute to him an optimistic creed is to
say very little; for the worth, or worthlessness, of such a creed
depends upon its content--upon its fidelity to the facts of human life,
the clearness of its consciousness of the evils it confronts, and the
intensity of its realism.
There is a sense, and that a true one, in which it may be said that all
men are optimists; for such a faith is implied in every conscious and
deliberate action of man. There is no deed which is not an attempt to
realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously
he may misunderstand its nature. Final and absolute disbelief in an
ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the
sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an
impossibility in fact. The one stultifies action, and asserts an effect
without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other stultifies
intellectual activity: and both views imply that the critic has so
escaped the conditions of human life, as to be able to pass a
condemnatory judgment upon them. The belief that a harmonious relation
between the self-conscious agent and the supreme good is possible,
underlies the practical activity of man; just as the belief in the unity
of thought and being underlies his intellectual activity. A moral
order--that is, an order of rational ends--is postulated in all human
actions, and we act at all only in virtue of it,--just as truly as we
move and work only in virtue of the forces which make the spheres
revolve, or think by help of the meaning which presses upon us from the
thought-woven world, through all the pores of sense. A true ethics, like
a true psychology, or a true science of nature, must lean upon
metaphysics, and it cannot pretend to start _ab initio_. We live in the
Copernican age, which puts the individual in a system, in obedience to
whose laws he finds his welfare. And this is simply the assertion of an
optimistic creed, for it implies a harmonious world.
But, though this is true, it must be remembered that this faith is a
prophetic anticipation, rather than acquired knowledge. We are only on
the way towards reconstructing in thought the fact which we are, or
towards bringing into clear knowledge the elemental power which
manifests itself within us as thought, desire, and deed. And, until this
is achieved, we have no full right to an optimistic creed. The
revelation of the unity which pervades all things, even in the natural
world, will be the last attainment of science; and the reconciliation of
nature and man and God is still further in the future, and will be the
last triumph of philosophy. During all the interval the world will be a
scene of warring elements; and poetry, religion, and philosophy can only
hold forth a promise, and give to man a foretaste of ultimate victory.
And in this state of things even _their_ assurance often falters. Faith
lapses into doubt, poetry becomes a wail for a lost god, and its votary
exhibits, "through Europe to the AEtolian shore, the pageant of his
bleeding heart." The optimistic faith is, as a rule, only a hope and a
desire, a "Grand Perhaps," which knows no defence against the critical
understanding, and sinks dumb when questioned. If, in the form of a
religious conviction, its assurance is more confident, then, too often,
it rests upon the treacherous foundations of authoritative ignorance,
which crumble into dust beneath the blows of awakened and liberated
reason. Nay, if by the aid of philosophy we turn our optimism into a
faith held by reason, a fact before which the intellect, as well as the
heart, worships and grows glad, it still is for most of us only a
general hypothesis, a mere leap to God which spurns the intermediate
steps, a universal without content, a bare form that lacks reality.
Such an optimism, such a plunge into the pure blue and away from facts,
was Emerson's. Caroline Fox tells a story of him and Carlyle which
reveals this very pointedly. It seems that Carlyle once led the serene
philosopher through the abominations of the streets of London at
midnight, asking him with grim humour at every few steps, "Do you
believe in the devil _now_?" Emerson replied that the more he saw of the
English people the greater and better he thought them. This little
incident lays bare the limits of both these great men. Where the one
saw, the other was blind. To the one there was the misery and the
universal mirk; to the other, the pure white beam was scarcely broken.
Carlyle believed in the good, beyond all doubt: he fought his great
battle in its strength and won, but "he was sorely wounded." Emerson was
Sir Galahad, blind to all but the Holy Grail, his armour spotless-white,
his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and
heat. But his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory. His victory was
not won in the enemy's citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos,
but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination. And, in consequence,
Emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in
the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along
which burthened humanity meanly toils.
But Browning's optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or
dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher,
protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an
invisible garment of contemplative holiness. It is a conviction which
has sustained shocks of criticism and the test of facts; and it
therefore, both for the poet and his readers, fulfils a mission beyond
the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good. Its power will be felt and
its value recognized by those who have themselves confronted the
contradictions of human life and known their depths.
No lover of Browning's poetry can miss the vigorous manliness of the
poet's own bearing, or fail to recognize the strength that flows from
his joyous, fearless personality, and the might of his intellect and
heart. "When British literature," said Carlyle of Scott and Cobbett,
"lay all puking and sprawling in Wertherism, Byronism and other
Sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us two healthy men." And
he breaks out into a eulogy of mere health, of "the just balance of
faculties that radiates a glad light outwards, enlightening and
embellishing all things." But he finds it easy to account for the health
of these men: they had never faced the mystery of existence. Such
healthiness we find in Browning, although he wrote with Carlyle at his
side, and within earshot of the infinite wail of this moral fatalist.
And yet, the word health is inadequate to convey the depth of the joyous
meaning which the poet found in the world. His optimism was not a
constitutional and irreflective hopefulness, to be accounted for on the
ground that "the great mystery of existence was not great to him: did
not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to
be answered or to perish." There are, indeed, certain rash and foolish
persons who pretend to trace Browning's optimism to his mixed descent;
but there is a "pause in the leading and the light" of those wiseacres,
who pretend to trace moral and mental characteristics to physiological
antecedents. They cannot quite catch a great man in the making, nor,
even by the help of evolution, say anything wiser about genius than that
"the wind bloweth where it listeth." No doubt the poet's optimism
indicates a native sturdiness of head and heart. He had the invaluable
endowment of a pre-disposition to see the sunny side of life, and a
native tendency to revolt against that subjectivity, which is the root
of our misery in all its forms. He had little respect for the
_Welt-schmerz,_ and can scarcely be civil to the hero of the bleeding
heart.
"Sinning, sorrowing, despairing,
Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked--
Should I give my woes an airing,--
Where's one plague that claims respect?
"Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.
* * * * *
"I find earth not grey but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."[A]
[Footnote A: _At the Mermaid_.]
Browning was no doubt least of all men inclined to pout at his "plain
bun"; on the contrary, he was awake to the grandeur of his inheritance,
and valued most highly "his life-rent of God's universe with the tasks
it offered and the tools to do them with." But his optimism sent its
roots deeper than any "disposition"; it penetrated beyond mere health
of body and mind, as it did beyond a mere sentiment of God's goodness.
Optimisms resting on these bases are always weak; for the former leaves
man naked and sensitive to the evils that crowd round him when the
powers of body and mind decay, and the latter is, at best, useful only
for the individual who possesses it, and it breaks down under the stress
of criticism and doubt. Browning's optimism is a great element in
English literature, because it opposes with such strength the shocks
that come from both these quarters. His joyousness is the reflection _in
feeling_ of a conviction as to the nature of things, which he had
verified in the darkest details of human life, and established for
himself in the face of the gravest objections that his intellect was
able to call forth. In fact, its value lies, above all, in this,--that
it comes after criticism, after the condemnation which Byron and Carlyle
had passed, each from his own point of view, on the world and on man.
The need of an optimism is one of the penalties which reflection brings.
Natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection
disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world.
The fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man;
he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force
Nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now
first felt. Optimism is the expression of man's new reconciliation with
his world; as the opposite doctrine of pessimism is the consciousness of
an unresolved contradiction. Both are a judgment passed upon the world,
from the point of view of its adequacy or inadequacy to meet demands,
arising from needs which the individual has discovered in himself.
Now, as I have tried to show, one of the main characteristics of the
opening years of the present era was its deeper intuition of the
significance of human life, and, therefore, by implication, of its wants
and claims. The spiritual nature of man, lost sight of during the
preceding age, was re-discovered; and the first and immediate
consequence was that man, as man, attained infinite worth. "Man was born
free," cried Rousseau, with a conviction which swept all before it; "he
has original, inalienable, and supreme rights against all things which
can set themselves against him." And Rousseau's countrymen believed him.
There was not a _Sans-culotte_ amongst them all but held his head high,
being creation's lord; and history can scarcely show a parallel to their
great burst of joy and hope, as they ran riot in their new-found
inheritance, from which they had so long been excluded. They flung
themselves upon the world, as if they would "glut their sense" upon it.
"Expend
Eternity upon its shows,
Flung them as freely as one rose
Out of a summer's opulence."[A]
[Footnote A:_Easter Day_.]
But the very discovery that man is spirit, which is the source of all
his rights, is also an implicit discovery that he has outgrown the
resources of the natural world. The infinite hunger of a soul cannot be
satisfied with the things of sense. The natural world is too limited
even for Carlyle's shoe-black; nor is it surprising that Byron should
find it a waste, and dolefully proclaim his disappointment to
much-admiring mankind. Now, both Carlyle and Browning apprehended the
cause of the discontent, and both endured the Byronic utterance of it
with considerable impatience. "Art thou nothing other than a vulture,
then," asks the former, "that fliest through the universe seeking after
somewhat _to eat,_ and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not
given thee? Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe."
"Huntsman Common Sense
Came to the rescue, bade prompt thwack of thong dispense
Quiet i' the kennel: taught that ocean might be blue,
And rolling and much more, and yet the soul have, too,
Its touch of God's own flame, which He may so expand
'Who measured the waters i' the hollow of His hand'
That ocean's self shall dry, turn dew-drop in respect
Of all-triumphant fire, matter with intellect
Once fairly matched."[A]
[Footnote A:_Fifine at the Fair_, lxvii.]
But Carlyle was always more able to detect the disease than to suggest
the remedy. He had, indeed, "a glimpse of it." "There is in man a Higher
than love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof
find Blessedness." But the glimpse was misleading, for it penetrated no
further than the first negative step. The "Everlasting Yea" was, after
all, only a deeper "No!" only _Entsagung_, renunciation: "the fraction
of life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your
numerator as by lessening your denominator." Blessed alone is he that
expecteth nothing. The holy of holies, where man hears whispered the
mystery of life, is "the sanctuary of sorrow." "What Act of Legislature
was there that _thou_ shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst
no right to _be_ at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to
be Happy, but to be Unhappy? Nay, is not 'life itself a disease,
knowledge the symptom of derangement'? Have not the poets sung 'Hymns to
the Night' as if Night were nobler than Day; as if Day were but a small
motley-coloured veil spread transiently over the infinite bosom of
Night, and did but deform and hide from us its pure transparent eternal
deeps." "We, the whole species of Mankind, and our whole existence and
history, are but a floating speck in the illimitable ocean of the All
... borne this way and that way by its deep-swelling tides, and grand
ocean currents, of which what faintest chance is there that we should
ever exhaust the significance, ascertain the goings and comings? A
region of Doubt, therefore, hovers for ever in the back-ground.... Only
on a canvas of Darkness, such is man's way of being, could the
many-coloured picture of our Life paint itself and shine."
In such passages as these, there is far deeper pessimism than in
anything which Byron could experience or express. Scepticism is directed
by Carlyle, not against the natural elements of life--the mere sensuous
outworks, but against the citadel of thought itself. Self-consciousness,
or the reflecting interpretation by man of himself and his world, the
very activity that lifts him above animal existence and makes him man,
instead of being a divine endowment, is declared to be a disease, a
poisonous subjectivity destructive of all good. The discovery that man
is spirit and no vulture, which was due to Carlyle himself more than to
any other English writer of his age, seemed, after all, to be a great
calamity; for it led to the renunciation of happiness, and filled man
with yearnings after a better than happiness, but left him nothing
wherewith they might be satisfied, except "the duty next to hand." And
the duty next to hand, as interpreted by Carlyle, is a means of
suppressing by action, not idle speech only, but thought itself. But, if
this be true, the highest in man is set against itself. And what kind of
action remains possible to a "speck on the illimitable ocean, borne this
way and that way by its deep-swelling tides"? "Here on earth we are
soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of
the campaign, and have no need to understand it, seeing what is at our
hand to be done." But there is one element of still deeper gloom in this
blind fighting; it is fought for a foreign cause. It is God's cause and
not ours, or ours only in so far as it has been despotically imposed
upon us; and it is hard to discover from Carlyle what interest we can
have in the victory. Duty is to him a menace--like the duty of a slave,
were that possible. It lacks the element which alone can make it
imperative to a free being, namely, that it be recognized as _his_ good,
and that the outer law become his inner motive. The moral law is rarely
looked at by Carlyle as a beneficent revelation, and still more rarely
as the condition which, if fulfilled, will reconcile man with nature and
with God. And consequently, he can draw little strength from religion;
for it is only love that can cast out fear.
To sum up all in a word, Carlyle regarded evil as having penetrated into
the inmost recesses of man's being. Thought was disease; morality was
blind obedience to a foreign authority; religion was awe of an
Unknowable, with whom man can claim no kinship. Man's nature was
discovered to be spiritual, only on the side of its Wants. It was an
endowment of a hunger which nothing could satisfy--not the infinite,
because it is too great, not the finite, because it is too little; not
God, because He is too far above man, not nature, because it is too far
beneath him. We are unable to satisfy ourselves with the things of
sense, and are also "shut out of the heaven of spirit." What have been
called, "the three great terms of thought"--the World, Self, and
God--have fallen asunder in his teaching. It is the difficulty of
reconciling these which brings despair, while optimism is evidently the
consciousness of their harmony.
Now, these evils which reflection has revealed, and which are so much
deeper than those of mere sensuous disappointment, can only be removed
by deeper reflection. The harmony of the world of man's experience,
which has been broken by "the comprehensive curse of sceptical despair,"
can, as Goethe teaches us, be restored only by thought--
"In thine own soul, build it up again."
The complete refutation of Carlyle's pessimistic view can only come, by
reinterpreting each of the contradicting terms in the light of a higher
conception. We must have a deeper grasp and a new view of the Self, the
World, and God. And such a view can be given adequately only by
philosophy. Reason alone can justify the faith that has been disturbed
by reflection, and re-establish its authority.
How, then, it may be asked, can a poet be expected to turn back the
forces of a scepticism, which have been thus armed with the weapons of
dialectic? Can anything avail in this region except explicit
demonstration? A poet never demonstrates, but perceives; art is not a
process, but a result; truth for it is immediate, and it neither admits
nor demands any logical connection of ideas. The standard-bearers and
the trumpeters may be necessary to kindle the courage of the army and to
lead it on to victory, but the fight must be won by the thrust of sword
and pike. Man needs more than the intuitions of the great poets, if he
is to maintain solid possession of the truth.
Now, I am prepared to admit the force of this objection, and I shall
endeavour in the sequel to prove that, in order to establish optimism,
more is needed than Browning can give, even when interpreted in the most
sympathetic way. His doctrine is offered in terms of art, and it cannot
have any demonstrative force without violating the limits of art. In
some of his poems, however,--for instance, in _La Saisiaz, Ferishtatis
Fancies_ and the _Parleyings_, Browning sought to advance definite
proofs of the theories which he held. He appears before us at times
armed _cap-à-pie,_ like a philosopher. Still, it is not when he argues
that Browning proves: it is when he sees, as a poet sees. It is not by
means of logical demonstrations that he helps us to meet the despair of
Carlyle, or contributes to the establishment of a better faith.
Browning's proofs are least convincing when he was most aware of his
philosophical presuppositions; and a philosophical critic could well
afford to agree with the critic of art, in relegating the demonstrating
portions of his poems to the chaotic limbo lying between philosophy and
poetry.
When, however, he forgets his philosophy, and speaks as poet and
religious man, when he is dominated by that sovereign thought which gave
unity to his life-work, and which, therefore, seemed to lie deeper in
him than the necessities of his art and to determine his poetic
function, his utterances have a far higher significance. For he so lifts
the artistic object into the region of pure thought, and makes sense and
reason so to interpenetrate, that the old metaphors of "the noble lie"
and "the truth beneath the veil" seem no longer to help. He seems to
show us the truth so vividly and simply, that we are less willing to
make art and philosophy mutually exclusive, although their methods
differ. Like some of the greatest philosophers, and notably Plato and
Hegel, he constrains us to doubt, whether the distinction penetrates low
beneath the surface; for philosophy, too, when at its best, is a
thinking of things together. In their light we begin to ask, whether it
is not possible that the interpretation of the world in terms of spirit,
which is the common feature of both Hegel's philosophy and Browning's
poetry, does not necessarily bring with it a settlement of the ancient
feud between these two modes of thought.
But, in any case, Browning's utterances, especially those which he makes
when he is most poet and least philosopher, have something of the
convincing impressiveness of a reasoned system of optimism. And this
comes, as already suggested, from his loyalty to a single idea, which
gives unity to all his work. That idea we may, in the end, be obliged to
treat not only as a hypothesis--for all principles of reconciliation,
even those of the sciences, as long as knowledge is incomplete, must be
regarded as hypotheses--but also as a hypothesis which he had no right
to assume. It may be that in the end we shall be obliged to say of him,
as of so many others--
"See the sage, with the hunger for the truth,
And see his system that's all true, except
The one weak place, that's stanchioned by a lie!"[A]
[Footnote A: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]
It may be that the religious form, through which he generally reaches
his convictions, is not freed from a dogmatic element, which so
penetrates his thought as to vitiate it as a philosophy. Nevertheless,
it answered for the poet all the uses of a philosophy, and it may do the
same for many who are distrustful of the systems of the schools, and who
are "neither able to find a faith nor to do without one." It contains
far-reaching hints of a reconciliation of the elements of discord in our
lives, and a suggestion of a way in which it may be demonstrated, that
an optimistic theory is truer to facts than any scepticism or
agnosticism, with the despair that they necessarily bring.
For Browning not only advanced a principle, whereby, as he conceived,
man might again be reconciled to the world and God, and all things be
viewed as the manifestation of a power that is benevolent; he also
sought to apply his principle to the facts of life. He illustrates his
fundamental hypothesis by means of these facts; and he tests its
validity with the persistence and impressive candour of a scientific
investigator. His optimism is not that of an eclectic, who can ignore
inconvenient difficulties. It is not an attempt to justify the whole by
neglecting details, or to make wrong seem right by reference to a
far-off result, in which the steps of the process are forgotten. He
stakes the value of his view of life on its power to meet _all_ facts;
one fact, ultimately irreconcilable with his hypothesis, will, he knows,
destroy it.
"All the same,
Of absolute and irretrievable black,--black's soul of black
Beyond white's power to disintensify,--
Of that I saw no sample: such may wreck
My life and ruin my philosophy
Tomorrow, doubtless."[A]
[Footnote A: _A Bean Stripe_--_Ferishtah's Fancies_.]
He knew that, to justify God, he had to justify _all_ His ways to man;
that if the good rules at all, it rules absolutely; and that a single
exception would confute his optimism.
"So, gazing up, in my youth, at love
As seen through power, ever above
All modes which make it manifest,
My soul brought all to a single test--
That He, the Eternal First and Last,
Who, in His power, had so surpassed
All man conceives of what is might,--
Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite,
--Would prove as infinitely good;
Would never, (my soul understood,)
With power to work all love desires,
Bestow e'en less than man requires."[B]
[Footnote B: _Christmas Eve_.]
"No: love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,
Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,
The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,
Shall arise, made perfect, from death's repose of it.
And I shall behold Thee, face to face,
O God, and in Thy light retrace
How in all I loved here, still wast Thou!"[C]
[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]
We can scarcely miss the emphasis of the poet's own conviction in these
passages, or in the assertion that,--
"The acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise."[A]
[Footnote A: _A Death in the Desert_.]
Consequently, there is a defiant and aggressive element in his attitude.
Strengthened with an unfaltering faith in the supreme Good, this knight
of the Holy Spirit goes forth over all the world seeking out wrongs. "He
has," said Dr. Westcott, "dared to look on the darkest and meanest forms
of action and passion, from which we commonly and rightly turn our eyes,
and he has brought back for us from this universal survey a conviction
of hope." I believe, further, that it was in order to justify this
conviction that he set out on his quest. His interest in vice--in
malice, cruelty, ignorance, brutishness, meanness, the irrational
perversity of a corrupt disposition, and the subtleties of philosophic
and aesthetic falsehood--was no morbid curiosity. Browning was no
"painter of dirt"; no artist can portray filth for filth's sake, and
remain an artist. He crowds his pages with criminals, because he sees
deeper than their crimes. He describes evil without "palliation or
reserve," and allows it to put forth all its might, in order that he
may, in the end, show it to be subjected to God's purposes. He confronts
evil in order to force it to give up the good, which is all the reality
that is in it. He conceives it as his mission to prove that evil is
"stuff for transmuting," and that there is nought in the world.
"But, touched aright, prompt yields each particle its tongue
Of elemental flame--no matter whence flame sprung,
From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness."
All we want is--
"The power to make them burn, express
What lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind,
Howe'er the chance."[A]
[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_.]
He had Pompilia's faith.
"And still, as the day wore, the trouble grew,
Whereby I guessed there would be born a star."
He goes forth in the might of his faith in the power of good, as if he
wished once for all to try the resources of evil at their uttermost, and
pass upon it a complete and final condemnation. With this view, he seeks
evil in its own haunts. He creates Guido, the subtlest and most powerful
compound of vice in our literature--except Iago, perhaps--merely in
order that we may see evil at its worst; and he places him in an
environment suited to his nature, as if he was carrying out an
_experimentum crucis_. The
"Midmost blotch of black
Discernible in the group of clustered crimes
Huddling together in the cave they call
Their palace."[B]
[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 869-872.]
Beside him are his brothers, each with his own "tint of hell"; his
mistress, on whose face even Pompilia saw the glow of the nether pit
"flash and fade"; and his mother--
"The gaunt grey nightmare in the furthest smoke,
The hag that gave these three abortions birth,
Unmotherly mother and unwomanly
Woman, that near turns motherhood to shame,
Womanliness to loathing"[A]
[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 911-915.]
Such "denizens o' the cave now cluster round Pompilia and heat the
furnace sevenfold." While she
"Sent prayer like incense up
To God the strong, God the beneficent,
God ever mindful in all strife and strait,
Who, for our own good, makes the need extreme,
Till at the last He puts forth might and saves."[B]
[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book_--_Pompilia_, 1384-1388.]
In these lines we feel the poet's purpose, constant throughout the whole
poem. We know all the while that with him at our side we can travel
safely through the depths of the Inferno--for the flames bend back from
him; and it is only what we expect as the result of it all, that there
should come
"A bolt from heaven to cleave roof and clear place,
. . . . then flood
And purify the scene with outside day--
Which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark,
Ne'er wants its witness, some stray beauty-beam
To the despair of hell."[C]
[Footnote C: _The Ring and the Book_--_The Pope_, 996-1003.]
The superabundant strength of Browning's conviction in the supremacy of
the good, which led him in _The Ring and the Book_ to depict criminals
at their worst, forced him later on in his life to exhibit evil in
another form. The real meaning and value of such poems as _Fifine at the
Fair, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Nightcap Country,
Ferishtah's Francies_, and others, can only be determined by a careful
and complete analysis of each of them. But they have one characteristic
so prominent, and so new in poetry, that the most careless reader cannot
fail to detect it. Action and dramatic treatment give place to a
discussion which is metaphysical; instead of the conflict of motives
within a character, the stress and strain of passion and will in
collision with circumstances, there is reflection on action after it has
passed, and the conflict of subtle arguments on the ethical value of
motives and ways of conduct, which the ordinary moral consciousness
condemns without hesitation. All agree that these poems represent a new
departure in poetry, and some consider that in them the poet, in thus
dealing with metaphysical abstractions, has overleapt the boundaries of
the poetic art. To such critics, this later period seems the period of
his decadence, in which the casuistical tendencies, which had already
appeared in _Bishop Blougram's Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium_, and
other poems, have overwhelmed his art, and his intellect, in its pride
of strength, has grown wanton. _Fifine at the Fair is_ said to be "a
defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love." Its
hero, who is "a modern gentleman, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic
and philosophic person, of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong
emotions, and capricious will," produces arguments "wide in range, of
profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify
immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the
speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and
sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and
with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation
of character. _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ is spoken of in a similar
manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of
morality, of compromise, hypocrisy, lying, and a selfishness that
betrays every cause to the individual's meanest welfare. The object of
the poet is "by no means to prove black white, or white black, or to
make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster
and perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how
it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less
self-delusion reconcile itself to itself."
I am not able to accept this as a complete explanation of the intention
of the poet, except with reference to _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._ The
_Prince_ is a psychological study, like _Mr. Sludge the Medium,_ and
_Bishop Blougram_. No doubt he had the interest of a dramatist in the
hero of _Fifine at the Fair_ and in the hero of _Red Cotton Nightcap
Country;_ but, in these poems, his dramatic interest is itself
determined by an ethical purpose, which is equally profound. His meeting
with the gipsy at Pornic, and the spectacle of her unscrupulous audacity
in vice, not only "sent his fancy roaming," but opened out before him
the fundamental problems of life. What I would find, therefore, in
_Fifine at the Fair_ is not the casuistic defence of an artistic and
speculative libertine, but an earnest attempt on the part of the poet to
prove,
"That, through the outward sign, the inward grace allures,
And sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures,--
All by demonstrating the value of Fifine."[A]
[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_, xxviii.]
Within his scheme of the universal good he seeks to find a place even
for this gipsy creature, who traffics "in just what we most pique us
that we keep." Having, in the _Ring and the Book_, challenged evil at
its worst as it manifests itself practically in concrete characters and
external action, and having wrung from it the victory of the good, in
_Fifine_ and in his other later poems he meets it again in the region of
dialectic. In this sphere of metaphysical ethics, evil has assumed a
more dangerous form, especially for an artist. His optimistic faith has
driven the poet into a realm into which poetry never ventured before.
His battle is now, not with flesh and blood, but with the subtler powers
of darkness grown vocal and argumentative, and threatening to turn the
poet's faith in good into a defence of immorality, and to justify the
worst evil by what is highest of all. Having indicated in outward fact
"the need," as well as the "transiency of sin and death," he seeks here
to prove that need, and seems, thereby, to degrade the highest truth of
religion into a defence of the worst wickedness.
No doubt the result is sufficiently repulsive to the abstract moralist,
who is apt to find in _Fifine_ nothing but a casuistical and shameless
justification of evil, which is blasphemy against goodness itself. We
are made to "discover," for instance, that
"There was just
Enough and not too much of hate, love, greed and lust,
Could one discerningly but hold the balance, shift
The weight from scale to scale, do justice to the drift
Of nature, and explain the glories by the shames
Mixed up in man, one stuff miscalled by different names."[A]
[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_, cviii.]
We are told that--
"Force, guile were arms which earned
My praise, not blame at all."
Confronted with such utterances as these, it is only natural that,
rather than entangle the poet in them, we should regard them as the
sophistries of a philosophical Don Juan, powerful enough, under the
stress of self-defence, to confuse the distinctions of right and wrong.
But, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, such an apparent
justification of evil cannot be avoided by a reflective optimist; and it
is implicitly contained even in those religious utterances of _Rabbi Ben
Ezra, Christmas Eve_, and _A Death in the Desert_, with which we not
only identify the poet but ourselves, in so far as we share his faith
that
"God's in His heaven,--
All's right with the world."
The poet had far too much speculative acumen to be ignorant of this, and
too much boldness and strength of conviction in the might of the good,
to refuse to confront the issues that sprang from it. In his later
poems, as in his earlier ones, he is endeavouring to justify the ways of
God to man; and the difficulties which surround him are not those of a
casuist, but the stubborn questionings of a spirit, whose religious
faith is thoroughly earnest and fearless. To a spirit so loyal to the
truth, and so bold to follow its leading, the suppression of such
problems is impossible; and, consequently, it was inevitable that he
should use the whole strength of his dialectic to try those fundamental
principles, on which the moral life of man is based. And it is this, I
believe, which we find in _Fifine_, as in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and the
_Parleyings_; not an exhibition of the argumentative subtlety of a mind
whose strength has become lawless, and which spends itself in
intellectual gymnastics, that have no place within the realm of either
the beautiful or the true.