seem needlessly hostile and which time and posterity will doubtless
make in their own quiet and decisive fashion) in that Browning did not
keep within the sphere of drama and analysis, where he was strong, but
allowed his own temperament and opinions to vitiate his representation
of life, so that he sometimes turned the expression of a violent
passion into the last word of what he thought a religion. He had a
didactic vein, a habit of judging the spectacle he evoked and of
loading the passions he depicted with his visible sympathy or scorn.
Now a chief support of Browning's popularity is that he is, for
many, an initiator into the deeper mysteries of passion, a means of
escaping from the moral poverty of their own lives and of feeling the
rhythm and compulsion of the general striving. He figures, therefore,
distinctly as a prophet, as a bearer of glad tidings, and it is easy
for those who hail him as such to imagine that, knowing the labour of
life so well, he must know something also of its fruits, and that in
giving us the feeling of existence, he is also giving us its meaning.
There is serious danger that a mind gathering from his pages the raw
materials of truth, the unthreshed harvest of reality, may take him for
a philosopher, for a rationalizer of what he describes. Awakening may
be mistaken for enlightenment, and the galvanizing of torpid sensations
and impulses for wisdom.
Against such fatuity reason should raise her voice. The vital and
historic forces that produce illusions of this sort in large groups of
men are indeed beyond the control of criticism. The ideas of passion
are more vivid than those of memory, until they become memories in
turn. They must be allowed to fight out their desperate battle against
the laws of Nature and reason. But it is worth while in the meantime,
for the sake of the truth and of a just philosophy, to meet the varying
though perpetual charlatanism of the world with a steady protest. As
soon as Browning is proposed to us as a leader, as soon as we are asked
to be not the occasional patrons of his art, but the pupils of his
philosophy, we have a right to express the radical dissatisfaction
which we must feel, if we are rational, with his whole attitude and
temper of mind.
The great dramatists have seldom dealt with perfectly virtuous
characters. The great poets have seldom represented mythologies that
would bear scientific criticism. But by an instinct which constituted
their greatness they have cast these mixed materials furnished by life
into forms congenial to the specific principles of their art, and by
this transformation they have made acceptable in the æsthetic sphere
things that in the sphere of reality were evil or imperfect: in a word,
their works have been beautiful as works of art. Or, if their genius
exceeded that of the technical poet and rose to prophetic intuition,
they have known how to create ideal characters, not possessed, perhaps,
of every virtue accidentally needed in this world, but possessed of
what is ideally better, of internal greatness and perfection. They
have also known how to select and reconstruct their mythology so as to
make it a true interpretation of moral life. When we read the maxims
of Iago, Falstaff, or Hamlet, we are delighted if the thought strikes
us as true, but we are not less delighted if it strikes us as false.
These characters are not presented to us in order to enlarge our
capacities of passion nor in order to justify themselves as processes
of redemption; they are there, clothed in poetry and imbedded in plot,
to entertain us with their imaginable feelings and their interesting
errors. The poet, without being especially a philosopher, stands by
virtue of his superlative genius on the plane of universal reason, far
above the passionate experience which he overlooks and on which he
reflects; and he raises us for the moment to his own level, to send
us back again, if not better endowed for practical life, at least not
unacquainted with speculation.
With Browning the case is essentially different. When his heroes are
blinded by passion and warped by circumstance, as they almost always
are, he does not describe the fact from the vantage-ground of the
intellect and invite us to look at it from that point of view. On the
contrary, his art is all self-expression or satire. For the most part
his hero, like Whitman's, is himself; not appearing, as in the case
of the American bard, _in puris naturalibus,_ but masked in all sorts
of historical and romantic finery. Sometimes, however, the personage,
like Guido in "The Ring and the Book" or the "frustrate ghosts" of
other poems, is merely a Marsyas, shown flayed and quivering to the
greater glory of the poet's ideal Apollo. The impulsive utterances and
the crudities of most of the speakers are passionately adopted by the
poet as his own. He thus perverts what might have been a triumph of
imagination into a failure of reason.
This circumstance has much to do with the fact that Browning, in spite
of his extraordinary gift for expressing emotion, has hardly produced
works purely and unconditionally delightful. They not only portray
passion, which is interesting, but they betray it, which is odious.
His art was still in the service of the will. He had not attained, in
studying the beauty of things, that detachment of the phenomenon, that
love of the form for its own sake, which is the secret of contemplative
satisfaction. Therefore, the lamentable accidents of his personality
and opinions, in themselves no worse than those of other mortals,
passed into his art. He did not seek to elude them: he had no free
speculative faculty to dominate them by. Or, to put the same thing
differently, he was too much in earnest in his fictions, he threw
himself too unreservedly into his creations. His imagination, like
the imagination we have in dreams, was merely a vent for personal
preoccupations. His art was inspired by purposes less simple and
universal than the ends of imagination itself. His play of mind
consequently could not be free or pure. The creative impulse could not
reach its goal or manifest in any notable degree its own organic ideal.
We may illustrate these assertions by considering Browning's treatment
of the passion of love, a passion to which he gives great prominence
and in which he finds the highest significance.
Love is depicted by Browning with truth, with vehemence, and with
the constant conviction that it is the supreme thing in life. The
great variety of occasions in which it appears in his pages and the
different degrees of elaboration it receives, leave it always of the
same quality--the quality of passion. It never sinks into sensuality;
in spite of its frequent extreme crudeness, it is always, in Browning's
hands, a passion of the imagination, it is always love. On the other
hand it never rises into contemplation: mingled as it may be with
friendship, with religion, or with various forms of natural tenderness,
it always remains a passion; it always remains a personal impulse,
a hypnotization, with another person for its object or its cause.
Kept within these limits it is represented, in a series of powerful
sketches, which are for most readers the gems of the Browning gallery,
as the last word of experience, the highest phase of human life.
"The woman yonder, there's no use in life
But just to obtain her! Heap earth's woes in one
And bear them--make a pile of all earth's joys
And spurn them, as they help or help not this;
Only, obtain her!"
"When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each....
O heart, O blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin--
Shut them in--
With their triumphs and their follies and the rest.
Love is best."
In the piece called "In a Gondola" the lady says to her lover:--
"Heart to heart
And lips to lips! Yet once more, ere we part,
Clasp me and make me thine, as mine thou art."
And he, after being surprised and stabbed in her arms, replies:--
"It was ordained to be so, sweet!--and best
Comes now, beneath thine eyes, upon thy breast:
Still kiss me! Care not for the cowards; care
Only to put aside thy beauteous hair
My blood will hurt! The Three I do not scorn
To death, because they never lived, but I
Have lived indeed, and so--(yet one more kiss)--can die."
We are not allowed to regard these expressions as the cries of souls
blinded by the agony of passion and lust. Browning unmistakably adopts
them as expressing his own highest intuitions. He so much admires the
strength of this weakness that he does not admit that it is a weakness
at all. It is with the strut of self-satisfaction, with the sensation,
almost, of muscular Christianity, that he boasts of it through the
mouth of one of his heroes, who is explaining to his mistress the
motive of his faithful services as a minister of the queen:--
"She thinks there was more cause
In love of power, high fame, pure loyalty?
Perhaps she fancies men wear out their lives
Chasing such shades....
I worked because I want you with my soul."
Readers of the fifth chapter of this volume need not be reminded here
of the contrast which this method of understanding love offers to that
adopted by the real masters of passion and imagination. They began with
that crude emotion with which Browning ends; they lived it down, they
exalted it by thought, they extracted the pure gold of it in a long
purgation of discipline and suffering. The fierce paroxysm which for
him is heaven, was for them the proof that heaven cannot be found on
earth, that the value of experience is not in experience itself but
in the ideals which it reveals. The intense, voluminous emotion, the
sudden, overwhelming self-surrender in which he rests was for them
the starting-point of a life of rational worship, of an austere and
impersonal religion, by which the fire of love, kindled for a moment by
the sight of some creature, was put, as it were, into a censer, to burn
incense before every image of the Highest Good. Thus love ceased to be
a passion and became the energy of contemplation: it diffused over the
universe, natural and ideal, that light of tenderness and that faculty
of worship which the passion of love often is first to quicken in a
man's breast.
Of this art, recommended by Plato and practised in the Christian Church
by all adepts of the spiritual life, Browning knew absolutely nothing.
About the object of love he had no misgivings. What could the object
be except somebody or other? The important thing was to love intensely
and to love often. He remained in the phenomenal sphere: he was a lover
of experience; the ideal did not exist for him. No conception could be
farther from his thought than the essential conception of any rational
philosophy, namely, that feeling is to be treated as raw material
for thought, and that the destiny of emotion is to pass into objects
which shall contain all its value while losing all its formlessness.
This transformation of sense and emotion into objects agreeable to
the intellect, into clear ideas and beautiful things, is the natural
work of reason; when it has been accomplished very imperfectly, or not
at all, we have a barbarous mind, a mind full of chaotic sensations,
objectless passions, and undigested ideas. Such a mind Browning's was,
to a degree remarkable in one with so rich a heritage of civilization.
The nineteenth century, as we have already said, has nourished the hope
of abolishing the past as a force while it studies it as an object; and
Browning, with his fondness for a historical stage setting and for the
gossip of history, rebelled equally against the Pagan and the Christian
discipline. The "Soul" which he trusted in was the barbarous soul,
the "Spontaneous Me" of his half-brother Whitman. It was a restless
personal impulse, conscious of obscure depths within itself which it
fancied to be infinite, and of a certain vague sympathy with wind and
cloud and with the universal mutation. It was the soul that might have
animated Attila and Alaric when they came down into Italy, a soul not
incurious of the tawdriness and corruption of the strange civilization
it beheld, but incapable of understanding its original spirit; a soul
maintaining in the presence of that noble, unappreciated ruin all its
own lordliness and energy, and all its native vulgarity.
Browning, who had not had the education traditional in his own country,
used to say that Italy had been his university. But it was a school for
which he was ill prepared, and he did not sit under its best teachers.
For the superficial ferment, the worldly passions, and the crimes of
the Italian Renaissance he had a keen interest and intelligence. But
Italy has been always a civilized country, and beneath the trappings
and suits of civilization which at that particular time it flaunted
so gayly, it preserved a civilized heart to which Browning's insight
could never penetrate. There subsisted in the best minds a trained
imagination and a cogent ideal of virtue. Italy had a religion, and
that religion permeated all its life, and was the background without
which even its secular art and secular passions would not be truly
intelligible. The most commanding and representative, the deepest and
most appealing of Italian natures are permeated with this religious
inspiration. A Saint Francis, a Dante, a Michael Angelo, breathe hardly
anything else. Yet for Browning these men and what they represented
may be said not to have existed. He saw, he studied, and he painted a
decapitated Italy. His vision could not mount so high as her head.
One of the elements of that higher tradition which Browning was not
prepared to imbibe was the idealization of love. The passion he
represents is lava hot from the crater, in no way moulded, smelted,
or refined. He had no thought of subjugating impulses into the
harmony of reason. He did not master life, but was mastered by it.
Accordingly the love he describes has no wings; it issues in nothing.
His lovers "extinguish sight and speech, each on each"; sense, as
he says elsewhere, drowning soul. The man in the gondola may well
boast that he can die; it is the only thing he can properly do.
Death is the only solution of a love that is tied to its individual
object and inseparable from the alloy of passion and illusion within
itself. Browning's hero, because he has loved intensely, says that
he has lived; he would be right, if the significance of life were
to be measured by the intensity of the feeling it contained, and if
intelligence were not the highest form of vitality. But had that hero
known how to love better and had he had enough spirit to dominate his
love, he might perhaps have been able to carry away the better part of
it and to say that he could not die; for one half of himself and of his
love would have been dead already and the other half would have been
eternal, having fed--
"On death, that feeds on men;
And death once dead, there's no more dying then."
The irrationality of the passions which Browning glorifies, making them
the crown of life, is so gross that at times he cannot help perceiving
it.
"How perplexed
Grows belief! Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it, and what comes next? Is it God?"
Yes, he will tell us. These passions and follies, however desperate in
themselves and however vain for the individual, are excellent as parts
of the dispensation of Providence:--
"Be hate that fruit or love that fruit,
It forwards the general deed of man,
And each of the many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan,
Each living his own to boot."
If we doubt, then, the value of our own experience, even perhaps
of our experience of love, we may appeal to the interdependence of
goods and evils in the world to assure ourselves that, in view of
its consequences elsewhere, this experience was great and important
after all. We need not stop to consider this supposed solution, which
bristles with contradictions; it would not satisfy Browning himself,
if he did not back it up with something more to his purpose, something
nearer to warm and transitive feeling. The compensation for our
defeats, the answer to our doubts, is not to be found merely in a proof
of the essential necessity and perfection of the universe; that would
be cold comfort, especially to so uncontemplative a mind. No: that
answer, and compensation are to come very soon and very vividly to
every private bosom. There is another life, a series of other lives,
for this to happen in. Death will come, and--
"I shall thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new,
Fearless and unperplexed,
When I wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armour to endue."
"For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the element's rage, the fiend-voices that rave
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again
And with God be the rest!"
Into this conception of continued life Browning has put, as a
collection of further passages might easily show, all the items
furnished by fancy or tradition which at the moment satisfied his
imagination--new adventures, reunion with friends, and even, after
a severe strain and for a short while, a little peace and quiet. The
gist of the matter is that we are to live indefinitely, that all our
faults can be turned to good, all our unfinished business settled, and
that therefore there is time for anything we like in this world and
for all we need in the other. It is in spirit the direct opposite of
the philosophic maxim of regarding the end, of taking care to leave a
finished life and a perfect character behind us. It is the opposite,
also, of the religious _memento mori,_ of the warning that the time
is short before we go to our account. According to Browning, there
is no account: we have an infinite credit. With an unconscious and
characteristic mixture of heathen instinct with Christian doctrine, he
thinks of the other world as heaven, but of the life to be led there as
of the life of Nature.
Aristotle observes that we do not think the business of life worthy
of the gods, to whom we can only attribute contemplation; if Browning
had had the idea of perfecting and rationalizing this life rather than
of continuing it indefinitely, he would have followed Aristotle and
the Church in this matter. But he had no idea of anything eternal; and
so he gave, as he would probably have said,' a filling to the empty
Christian immortality by making every man busy in it about many things.
And to the irrational man, to the boy, it is no unpleasant idea to
have an infinite number of days to live through, an infinite number of
dinners to eat, with an infinity of fresh fights and new love-affairs,
and no end of last rides together.
But it is a mere euphemism to call this perpetual vagrancy a
development of the soul. A development means the unfolding of a
definite nature, the gradual manifestation of a known idea. A
series of phases, like the successive leaps of a water-fall, is no
development. And Browning has no idea of an intelligible good which the
phases of life might approach and with reference to which they might
constitute a progress. His notion is simply that the game of life, the
exhilaration of action, is inexhaustible. You may set up your tenpins
again after you have bowled them over, and you may keep up the sport
for ever. The point is to bring them down as often as possible with
a master-stroke and a big bang. That will tend to invigorate in you
that self-confidence which in this system passes for faith. But it is
unmeaning to call such an exercise heaven, or to talk of being "with
God" in such a life, in any sense in which we are not with God already
and under all circumstances. Our destiny would rather be, as Browning
himself expresses it in a phrase which Attila or Alaric might have
composed, "bound dizzily to the wheel of change to slake the thirst of
God."
Such an optimism and such a doctrine of immortality can give no
justification to experience which it does not already have in its
detached parts. Indeed, those dogmas are not the basis of Browning's
attitude, not conditions of his satisfaction in living, but rather
overflowings of that satisfaction. The present life is presumably a
fair average of the whole series of "adventures brave and new" which
fall to each man's share; were it not found delightful in itself, there
would be no motive for imagining and asserting that it is reproduced
_in infinitum_. So too if we did not think that the evil in experience
is actually utilized and visibly swallowed up in its good effects, we
should hardly venture to think that God could have regarded as a good
something which has evil for its condition and which is for that reason
profoundly sad and equivocal. But Browning's philosophy of life and
habit of imagination do not require the support of any metaphysical
theory. His temperament is perfectly self-sufficient and primary; what
doctrines he has are suggested by it and are too loose to give it more
than a hesitant expression; they are quite powerless to give it any
justification which it might lack on its face.
It is the temperament, then, that speaks; we may brush aside as
unsubstantial, and even as distorting, the web of arguments and
theories which it has spun out of itself. And what does the temperament
say? That life is an adventure, not a discipline; that the exercise
of energy is the absolute good, irrespective of motives or of
consequences. These are the maxims of a frank barbarism; nothing could
express better the lust of life, the dogged unwillingness to learn
from experience, the contempt for rationality, the carelessness about
perfection, the admiration for mere force, in which barbarism always
betrays itself. The vague religion which seeks to justify this attitude
is really only another outburst of the same irrational impulse.
In Browning this religion takes the name of Christianity, and
identifies itself with one or two Christian ideas arbitrarily selected;
but at heart it has far more affinity to the worship of Thor or of
Odin than to the religion of the Cross. The zest of life becomes
a cosmic emotion; we lump the whole together and cry, "Hurrah for
the Universe!" A faith which is thus a pure matter of lustiness and
inebriation rises and falls, attracts or repels, with the ebb and flow
of the mood from which it springs. It is invincible because unseizable;
it is as safe from refutation as it is rebellious to embodiment. But
it cannot enlighten or correct the passions on which it feeds. Like
a servile priest, it flatters them in the name of Heaven. It cloaks
irrationality in sanctimony; and its admiration for every bluff folly,
being thus justified by a theory, becomes a positive fanaticism, eager
to defend any wayward impulse.
Such barbarism of temper and thought could hardly, in a man of
Browning's independence and spontaneity, be without its counterpart in
his art. When a man's personal religion is passive, as Shakespeare's
seems to have been, and is adopted without question or particular
interest from the society around him, we may not observe any analogy
between it and the free creations of that man's mind. Not so when the
religion is created afresh by the private imagination; it is then
merely one among many personal works of art, and will naturally bear a
family likeness to the others. The same individual temperament, with
its limitations and its bias, will appear in the art which has appeared
in the religion. And such is the case with Browning. His limitations
as a poet are the counterpart of his limitations as a moralist and
theologian; only in the poet they are not so regrettable. Philosophy
and religion are nothing if not ultimate; it is their business to deal
with general principles and final aims. Now it is in the conception of
things fundamental and ultimate that Browning is weak; he is strong
in the conception of things immediate. The pulse of the emotion, the
bobbing up of the thought, the streaming of the reverie--these he can
note down with picturesque force or imagine with admirable fecundity.