LONDON. _DRAMATIS PERSONÆ._
Ah, Love! but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged.
--_James Lee's Wife_.
That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.
--_Epilogue_.
The catastrophe of June 29, 1861, closed with appalling suddenness the
fifteen years' married life of Browning. "I shall grow still, I hope,"
he wrote to Miss Haworth, a month later, "but my root is taken, and
remains." The words vividly express the valour in the midst of
desolation which animated one little tried hitherto by sorrow. The
Italian home was shattered, and no thought of even attempting a
patched-up existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred to him;
even the neighbourhood of the spot in which all that was mortal of her
had been laid had no power to detain him. But his departure was no mere
flight from scenes intolerably dear. He had their child to educate and
his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution to the
work, as one who had indeed _had everything_, but who was as little
inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it. After visiting
his father in Paris--the "dear _nonno_" of his wife's charming
letters[39]--he settled in London, at first in lodgings, then at the
house in Warwick Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his
home. Something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years
later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of
_Fifine_. Browning had been that "Householder," had gone through the
dragging days and nights,--
"All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights,
All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then
All the fancies,"--
perhaps, among them, that of the "knock, call, cry," and the pang and
rapture of the visionary meeting. Certainly one of the effects of his
loss was to accentuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked beneath
Browning's genial sociality. The world from which his saint had been
snatched looked very common, sordid, and mean, and he resented its
intrusiveness on occasion with startling violence. When proposals were
made in 1863 in various quarters to publish her life, he turned like a
wild beast upon the "blackguards" who "thrust their paws into his
bowels" by prying into his intimacies. To the last he dismissed similar
proposals by critics of the highest status with a cavalier bluntness
highly surprising to persons who only knew him as the man of punctilious
observance and fastidious good form. For the rest, London contained much
that was bound by degrees to temper the gloom and assuage the hostility.
Florence and Rome could furnish nothing like the circle of men of genius
and varied accomplishment, using like himself the language of
Shakespeare and Milton, in which he presently began to move as an
intimate. Thackeray, Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Rossetti, Leighton,
Woolner, Prinsep, and many more, added a kind of richness to his life
which during the last fifteen years he had only enjoyed at intervals.
And the flock of old friends who accepted Browning began to be
reinforced by a crowd of unknown readers who proclaimed him. Tennyson
was his loyal comrade; but the prestige of Tennyson's popularity had
certainly blocked many of the avenues of Browning's fame, appealing as
the Laureate largely did to tastes in poetry which Browning rudely
traversed or ignored. On the Tennysonian reader _pur sang_ Browning's
work was pretty sure to make the impression so frankly described by
Frederick Tennyson to his brother, of "Chinese puzzles, trackless
labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities." Even among these intimates of
his own generation were doubtless some who, with F. Tennyson again,
believed him to be "a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and
a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness," but who yet held "his
school of poetry" to be "the most grotesque conceivable." This was the
tone of the 'Fifties, when Tennyson's vogue was at its height. But with
the 'Sixties there began to emerge a critical disposition to look beyond
the trim pleasances of the Early Victorians to more daring romantic
adventure in search of the truth that lies in beauty, and more fearless
grip of the beauty that lies in truth. The genius of the pre-Raphaelites
began to find response. And so did the yet richer and more composite
genius of Browning. Moreover, the immense vogue won by the poetry of his
wife undoubtedly prepared the way for his more difficult but kindred
work. If _Pippa Passes_ counts for something in _Aurora Leigh, Aurora
Leigh_ in its turn trained the future readers of _The Ring and the
Book_.
[Footnote 39: His father beautifully said of Mrs Browning's portrait
that it was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible.]
The altered situation became apparent on the publication, in rapid
succession, in 1864, of Browning's _Dramatis Personæ_ and Mr Swinburne's
_Atalanta in Calydon_. Both volumes found their most enthusiastic
readers at the universities. "All my new cultivators are young men,"
Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious
humour, "more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't
like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober
and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which
they 'always meant to say,' and never did." The volume included
practically all that Browning had actually written since 1855,--less
than a score of pieces,--the somewhat slender harves of nine years. But
during these later years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little
at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in
projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar
letters as his "murder-poem," and was ultimately known as _The Ring and
the Book_. As a whole, the _Dramatis Personæ_ stands yet more clearly
apart from _Men and Women_ than that does from all that had gone before.
Both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is
full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and
poignant splendour of autumn. The sense of tragic loss broods over all
its music. In lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the
dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible
strength and easy poise of wing: falling back now upon the personal
convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life. _Rabbi
ben Ezra_ and _Abt Vogler, A Death in the Desert_, are as noble poetry
as _Andrea del Sarto_ or _The Grammarian's Funeral_; but it is a poetry
less charged with the "incidents" of any other soul than his own; and,
on the other hand, _Dis Aliter Visum_ and _Youth and Art_, and others,
effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose
than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief
glories of _Men and Women_. The world which is neither thrillingly
beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum,
finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered
too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned
upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife,
with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in _Too Late_, with her
thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in _Dis Aliter Visum_;
and they have homely names, like "Lee" or "Lamb" or "Brown," not
gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous
"Gigadibs." "Sludge" stands on a different footing; for it is
dramatically expressive, as these are not. The legend of the gold-haired
maiden of Pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism than was heard
in Galuppi's "chill" music of the vanished beauties of Venice. If we may
by no means say that the glory of humanity has faded for Browning, yet
its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,--a "grace not
theirs" brought by love "settling unawares" upon minds "level and low,
burnt and bare" in themselves. And he dwells now on desolate and desert
scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of
the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of
the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy. "This is a
wild little place in Brittany," he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863;
"close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may
walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.... If I could I
would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out of the very earth
sometimes as I sit here at the window." The wild coast scenery falls in
with the desolate mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the
Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban; the arid desert holds in
its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the
lips of the dying Apostle. In the poetry of _Men and Women_ we see the
ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in _Dramatis Personæ_, the processes
of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the
desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the
fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental
nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate.
Doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying John
and of the Third Speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by "the
happy prompt instinctive way of youth," and the way to it lay through
moods not unlike those of James Lee's wife, whose problem, like his own,
was how to live when the answering love was gone. His "fire," like hers,
was made "of shipwreck wood",[40] and her words "at the window" can only
be an echo of his--
"Ah, Love! but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky's deranged:
Summer has stopped."
[Footnote 40: The second section of _James Lee's Wife, By the Fireside_,
cannot have been written without a conscious, and therefore a purposed
and significant, reference to the like-named poem in _Men and Women_,
which so exquisitely plays with the intimate scenery of his home-life.]
As her problem is another life-setting of his, so she feels her way
towards its solution through processes which cannot have been strange to
him. She walks "along the Beach," or "on the Cliff," or "among the
rocks," and the voices of sea and wind ("Such a soft sea and such a
mournful wind!" he wrote to Miss Blagden) become speaking symbols in her
preoccupied mind. Not at all, however, in the fashion of the "pathetic
fallacy." She is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and Browning
puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early
stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion
interpreted the wailing of the wind.[41] If Nature has aught to teach,
it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that Love, like the
genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by
its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what seemed
mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and
barren spirit,--the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating
the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they
were.
[Footnote 41: Cf. _supra_, p. 16.]
_James Lee's Wife_ is a type of the other idyls of love which form so
large a part of the _Dramatis Personæ_. The note of dissonance, of loss,
which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the
same persistence and iteration. The _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Men and
Women_ are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is
touched lightly in "swallow flights of song," like the _Lost Mistress_,
that "dip their wings in tears and skim away." And the lovers are
spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a look, and seem to be
only irradiated, not scorched, by the tragic flame. But these lovers of
the 'Sixties are of less ætherial temper; they are more obviously,
familiarly human; the loss of what they love comes home to them, and
there is agony in the purifying fire. Such are the wronged husband in
_The Worst of It_, and the finally frustrated lover in _Too Late_. In
the group of "Might-have-been" lyrics the sense of loss is less poignant
and tragic but equally uncompensated. "You fool!" cries the homely
little heroine of _Dis Aliter Visum_ to the elderly scholar who ten
years before had failed to propose to her,--
"You fool for all your lore!...
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
You knew not? That I well believe;
Or you had saved two souls;--nay, four."
Nor is there much of the glory of failure in Kate Brown's bitter smile,
as she sums up the story of Youth and Art:--
"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy,
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy."
It is no accident that with the clearer recognition of sharp and
absolute loss Browning shows increasing preoccupation with the thought
of recovery after death. For himself death was now inseparably
intertwined with all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the
supreme reunion which death, as he believed, was to bring him, drew it
nearer to the core of his imagination and passion. Not that he looked
forward to it with the easy complacency of the hymn-writer. _Prospice_
would not be the great uplifting song it is were the note of struggle,
of heroic heart to bear the brunt and pay in one moment all "life's
arrears of pain, darkness, and cold," less clearly sounded; and were the
final cry less intense with the longing of bereavement. How near this
thought of rapturous reunion lay to the springs of Browning's
imagination at this time, how instantly it leapt into poetry, may be
seen from the _Eurydice to Orpheus_ which he fitly placed immediately
after these--
"But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!
Let them once more absorb me!"
But in two well-known poems of the _Dramatis Personæ_ Browning has
splendidly unfolded what is implicit in the strong simple clarion--note
of _Prospice_. _Abt Vogler_ and _Rabbi ben Ezra_ are among the surest
strongholds of his popular fame. _Rabbi ben Ezra_ is a great song of
life, bearing more fully perhaps than any other poem the burden of what
he had to say to his generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism
by the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its imaginative
splendour, indistinguishably blend. It is not for nothing that Browning
put this loftiest utterance of all that was most strenuous in his own
faith into the mouth of a member of the race which has beyond others
known how to suffer and how to transfigure its suffering. Ben Ezra's
thoughts are not all Hebraic, but they are conceived in the most exalted
temper of Hebrew prophecy; blending the calm of achieved wisdom with the
fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, imperious scorn for the
ignorance of fools, and heroic ardour, for the pangs and throes of the
fray. Ideals which, coolly analysed, seem antithetical, and which have
in reality inspired opposite ways of life, meet in the fusing flame of
the Rabbi's impassioned thought: the body is the soul's beguiling
sorceress, but also its helpful comrade; man is the passive clay which
the great Potter moulded and modelled upon the Wheel of Time, and yet is
bidden rage and strive, the adoring acquiescence of Eastern Fatalism
mingling with the Western gospel of individual energy. And all this
complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent
volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its
rhythm any suggestion that the acquiescence of the "clay" means
passivity.
In _Abt Vogler_ the prophetic strain is even more daring and assured;
only it springs not from "old experience," but from the lonely ecstasy
of artistic creation. Browning has put into the mouth of his old
Catholic musician the most impassioned and undoubting assertion to be
found in his work of his faith that nothing good is finally lost. The
Abbé's theology may have supplied the substance of the doctrine, but it
could not supply the beautiful, if daring, expansion of it by which the
immortality of men's souls is extended to "all we have willed or hoped
or dreamed of good." This was the work of music; and the poem is in
truth less remarkable for this rapturous statement of faith than for the
penetrating power with which the mystical and transcendental suggestions
of music are explored and unfolded,--the mysterious avenues which it
seems to open to kinds of experience more universal than ours, exempt
from the limitations of our narrow faculties, even from the limitations
of time and space themselves. All that is doctrinal and speculative in
_Abt Vogler_ is rooted in musical experience,--the musical experience,
no doubt, of a richly imaginative mind, for which every organ-note turns
into the symbol of a high romance, till he sees heaven itself yearning
down to meet his passion as it seeks the sky. Of the doctrine and
speculation we may think as we will; of the psychological force and
truth of the whole presentment there can be as little question as of its
splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry.
And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the
simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known
couplet--
"I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but
a star."
_A Death in the Desert_, though a poem of great beauty, must be set, in
intrinsic value, below these two. To attack Strauss through the mouth of
the dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device; but it gave his
otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang of theological disputation,
and did no manner of harm to Strauss, who had to be met on other ground
and with other weapons,--the weapons of history and comparative
religion--in which Browning's skill was that only of a brilliant
amateur. But the impulse which created it had deeper springs than this.
What is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the
exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative
fabric. Love, Browning's highest expression of spiritual vitality, was
the cardinal principle of his creed; God was vital to him only as a
loving God, and Christ only as the human embodiment and witness of God's
love. The traditional story of Christ was in this sense of profound
significance for him, while he turned away with indifference or disgust
from the whole doctrinal apparatus of the Atonement, which, however
closely bound up with the popular conception of God's love, had nothing
to do with his conception of it, and he could thus consistently decline
the name of Christian, as some witnesses aver that he did.[42] It was
thus in entire keeping with his way of approaching Christianity that he
imagined this moving episode,--the dying apostle whose genius had made
that way so singularly persuasive, the little remnant of doomed and
hunted fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the spiritual bond
of their love to him, as his own physical life is now a firebrand all
but extinct,--"all ashes save the tip that holds a spark," but that still
glowing with undiminished soul. The material fabric which enshrines this
fine essence of the Christian spirit is of the frailest; and the
contrast is carried out in the scenic setting,--the dim cool cavern,
with its shadowy depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices,
the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the passing saint
within; without, the hard dazzling glare of the desert noon, and the
burning blue, and the implacable and triumphant might of Rome.
[Footnote 42: Other testimony, it is true, equally strong, asserts that
he accepted the name; in any case he used it in a sense of his own.]
The discourse of the "aged friend" is full of subtle and vivid thinking,
and contains some of Browning's most memorable utterances about Love, in
particular the noble lines--
"For life with all it yields of joy and woe ...
Is just our chance of the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."
Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of
his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to
conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision
of the world did not uniformly bear out. Man loved, and God would not be
above man if He did not also love. The horrible spectre of a God who has
power without love never ceased to lurk in the background of Browning's
thought, and he strove with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to
exorcise it. And no wonder. For a loving God was the very keystone of
Browning's scheme of life and of the world, and its withdrawal would
have meant for him the collapse of the whole structure.
It is no accident that the _Death in the Desert_ is followed immediately
by a theological study in a very different key, _Caliban upon Setebos_.
For in this brilliantly original "dramatic monologue" Caliban--the
"savage man"--appears "mooting the point 'What is God?'" and
constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. It was quite in
Browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque
parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a
proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie
and his seriousness, which makes _Pacchiarotto_, for instance, closely
similar in effect to parts of _Christmas-Eve_. Browning is one of three
or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the
outlines, or to complete the half-told tale, of Shakespeare's
Caliban.[43] Kenan's hero is the quondam disciple of Stephano and
Trinculo, finished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of Europe; a
caustic symbol of democracy, as Renan saw it, alternately trampling on
and patronising culture. Browning's Caliban is far truer to
Shakespeare's conception; he is the Caliban of Shakespeare, not
followed into a new phase but observed in a different attitude,--Caliban
of the days before the Storm, an unsophisticated creature of the island,
inaccessible to the wisdom of Europe, and not yet the dupe of its vice.
His wisdom, his science, his arts, are all his own. He anticipates the
heady joy of Stephano's bottle with a mash of gourds of his own
invention. And his religion too is his own,--no decoction from any of
the recognised vintages of religious thought, but a home-made brew
cunningly distilled from the teeming animal and plant life of the
Island. It is a mistake to call Caliban's theology a study of primitive
religion; for primitive religion is inseparable from the primitive
tribe, and Caliban the savage, who has never known society, was a
conception as unhistorical as it was exquisitely adapted to the
individualist ways of Browning's imagination. Tradition and
prescription, which fetter the savage with iron bonds, exist for Caliban
only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which he puts aside in
the calm decisive way of a modern thinker, as one who has nothing to
fear from the penalties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation
of free thought:--
"His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so;
Who made them weak, made weakness He might vex."
[Footnote 43: It is characteristic that M. Maeterlinck found no place
for Caliban in his striking fantasia on the _Tempest, Joyzelle_.]
Caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of contact with
Browning's own. His god is that sheer Power which Browning from the
first recognised; it is because Setebos feels heat and cold, and is
therefore a weak creature with ungratified wants, that Caliban decides
there must be behind him a divinity that "all it hath a mind to, doth."
Caliban is one of Browning's most consummate realists; he has the
remorselessly vivid perceptions of a Lippo Lippi and a Sludge.
Browning's wealth of recondite animal and plant lore is nowhere else so
amazingly displayed; the very character of beast or bird will be hit off
in a line,--as the pie with the long tongue
"That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,"
or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called Caliban (an
admirable trait)--
"A bitter heart that bides its time and bites."
And all this curious scrutiny is reflected in Caliban's god. The sudden
catastrophe at the close
("What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!")
is one of Browning's most superb surprises, breaking in upon the
leisured ease of theory with the suddenness of a horrible practical
emergency, and compelling Caliban, in the act of repudiating his
theology, to provide its most vivid illustration.
Shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half-taught savage into
touch with the scum of modern civilisation, and made them conspire
together against its benignity and wisdom. The reader is apt to remember
this conjunction when he passes from _Caliban_ to _Mr Sludge._ Stephano
and Trinculo, almost alone among Shakespeare's rascals, are drawn
without geniality, and Sludge is the only one of Browning's "casuists"
whom he treats with open scorn. That some of the effects were palpably
fraudulent, and that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of
phenomena not easy to explain, were all irritating facts. Yet no one can
mistake _Sludge_ for an outflow of personal irritation, still less for
an act of literary vengeance upon the impostor who had beguiled the
lofty and ardent intelligence of his wife. The resentful husband is
possibly there, but so elementary an emotion could not possibly have
taken exclusive possession of Browning's complex literary faculty, or
baulked the eager speculative curiosity which he brought to all new and
problematic modes of mind. His attitude towards spiritualism was in fact
the product of strangely mingled conditions. Himself the most convinced
believer in spirit among the poets of his time, he regarded the bogus
demonstrations of the "spiritualist" somewhat as the intellectual
sceptic regards the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever proves
there is no God. But even this anger had no secure tenure in a nature so
rich in solvents for disdain. It is hard to say where scorn ends and
sympathy begins, or where the indignation of the believer who sees his
religion travestied passes over into the curious interest of the
believer who recognises its dim distorted reflection in the unlikeliest
quarters. But Sludge is clearly permitted, like Blougram before and
Juan and Hohenstiel-Schwangau after him, to assume in good faith
positions, or at least to use, with perfect sincerity, language, which
had points of contact with Browning's own. He has an eye for "spiritual
facts" none the less genuine in its gross way that it has been acquired
in the course of professional training, and is valued as a professional
asset. But his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual
quality. His "spiritual facts" are collections of miraculous
coincidences raked together by the anteater's tongue of a cool egoist,
who waits for them
"lazily alive,
Open-mouthed, ...
Letting all nature's loosely guarded motes
Settle and, slick, be swallowed."
Like Caliban, who also finds the anteater an instructive symbol, he sees
"the supernatural" everywhere, and everywhere concerned with himself.
But Caliban's religion of terror, cunning, and cajolery is more
estimable than Sludge's business-like faith in the virtue of wares for
which he finds so profitable a market, and which he gets on such easy
terms. Caliban tremblingly does his best to hitch his waggon to
Setebos's star--when Setebos is looking; Sludge is convinced that the
stars are once for all hitched to his waggon; that heaven is occupied in
catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins.
Sludge's spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the
name in common with that of the poet of Ben Ezra, and of the _Epilogue_
which immediately follows.[44]
[Footnote 44: The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not
written, as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his
settlement in London. The only ground for the current view is Mrs
Browning's mention of his having been "working at a long poem" that
winter (_Letters_, May 18, 1860). I am enabled, by the kindness of Prof.
Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to
Buchanan in 1871 shows this "long poem" to have been one on Napoleon
III. (cf. above, p. 90). Some of it probably appears in _Hohenstiel
Schwangau_.]
This _Epilogue_ is one of the few utterances in which Browning draws the
ambiguous dramatic veil from his personal faith. That he should choose
this moment of parting with the reader for such a confession confirms
one's impression that the focus of his interest in poetry now, more than
ever before, lay among those problems of life and death, of God and man,
to which nearly all the finest work of this collection is devoted. Far
more emphatically than in the analogous _Christmas-Eve_, Browning
resolves not only the negations of critical scholarship but the dogmatic
affirmations of the Churches into symptoms of immaturity in the
understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven's high
with earth's low should intertwine. The third speaker voices the
manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built
upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof God could
be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare
abstraction, whose "pale bliss" never thrilled in response to human
hearts. The best comment upon his faith is the saying of Meredith, "The
fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of
circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[45] Only, for
Browning, that "infinite hope" translates itself into a sense of present
divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end,
till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered
Temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly
vanished Face, which
"far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows."[46]
[Footnote 45: Quoted _Int. Journ. of Ethics_, April 1902.]
[Footnote 46: The last line is pantheistic in expression, and has been
so understood by some, particularly by Mr J.M. Robertson. But pantheism
was at most a tendency, which the stubborn concreteness of his mind held
effectually in check; a point, one might say, upon which his thinking
converges, but which it never even proximately attains. God and the Soul
never mingle, however intimate their communion. Cf. chap. x. below.]