far without the guidance of reason. His long poems have no structure
--for that name cannot be given to the singular mechanical division of
"The Ring and the Book." Even his short poems have no completeness,
no limpidity. They are little torsos made broken so as to stimulate
the reader to the restoration of their missing legs and arms. What is
admirable in them is pregnancy of phrase, vividness of passion and
sentiment, heaped-up scraps of observation, occasional flashes of
light, occasional beauties of versification,--all like
"the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match."
There is never anything largely composed in the spirit of pure beauty,
nothing devotedly finished, nothing simple and truly just. The poet's
mind cannot reach equilibrium; at best he oscillates between opposed
extravagances; his final word is still a _boutade_, still an explosion.
He has no sustained nobility of style. He affects with the reader a
confidential and vulgar manner, so as to be more sincere and to feel
more at home. Even in the poems where the effort at impersonality is
most successful, the dramatic disguise is usually thrown off in a
preface, epilogue or parenthesis. The author likes to remind us of
himself by some confidential wink or genial poke in the ribs, by some
little interlarded sneer. We get in these tricks of manner a taste of
that essential vulgarity, that indifference to purity and distinction,
which is latent but pervasive in all the products of this mind. The
same disdain of perfection which appears in his ethics appears here in
his verse, and impairs its beauty by allowing it to remain too often
obscure, affected, and grotesque.
Such a correspondence is natural: for the same powers of conception
and expression are needed in fiction, which, if turned to reflection,
would produce a good philosophy. Reason is necessary to the perception
of high beauty. Discipline is indispensable to art. Work from which
these qualities are absent must be barbaric; it can have no ideal form
and must appeal to us only through the sensuousness and profusion of
its materials. We are invited by it to lapse into a miscellaneous
appreciativeness, into a subservience to every detached impression. And
yet, if we would only reflect even on these disordered beauties, we
should see that the principle by which they delight us is a principle
by which an ideal, an image of perfection, is inevitably evoked. We
can have no pleasure or pain, nor any preference whatsoever, without
implicitly setting up a standard of excellence, an ideal of what
would satisfy us there. To make these implicit ideals explicit, to
catch their hint, to work out their theme, and express clearly to
ourselves and to the world what they are demanding in the place of the
actual--that is the labour of reason and the task of genius. The two
cannot be divided. Clarification of ideas and disentanglement of values
are as essential to æsthetic activity as to intelligence. A failure of
reason is a failure of art and taste.
The limits of Browning's art, like the limits of Whitman's, can
therefore be understood by considering his mental habit. Both poets
had powerful imaginations, but the type of their imaginations was low.
In Whitman imagination was limited to marshalling sensations in single
file; the embroideries he made around that central line were simple and
insignificant. His energy was concentrated on that somewhat animal form
of contemplation, of which, for the rest, he was a great, perhaps an
unequalled master. Browning rose above that level; with him sensation
is usually in the background; he is not particularly a poet of the
senses or of ocular vision. His favourite subject-matter is rather the
stream of thought and feeling in the mind; he is the poet of soliloquy.
Nature and life as they really are, rather than as they may appear to
the ignorant and passionate participant in them, lie beyond his range.
Even in his best dramas, like "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon" or "Colombe's
Birthday," the interest remains in the experience of the several
persons as they explain it to us. The same is the case in "The King and
the Book," the conception of which, in twelve monstrous soliloquies, is
a striking evidence of the poet's predilection for this form.
The method is, to penetrate by sympathy rather than to portray by
intelligence. The most authoritative insight is not the poet's or the
spectator's, aroused and enlightened by the spectacle, but the various
heroes' own, in their moment of intensest passion. We therefore miss
the tragic relief and exaltation, and come away instead with the
uncomfortable feeling that an obstinate folly is apparently the most
glorious and choiceworthy thing in the world. This is evidently the
poet's own illusion, and those who do not happen to share it must feel
that if life were really as irrational as he thinks it, it would be
not only profoundly discouraging, which it often is, but profoundly
disgusting, which it surely is not; for at least it reveals the ideal
which it fails to attain.
This ideal Browning never disentangles. For him the crude experience is
the only end, the endless struggle the only ideal, and the perturbed
"Soul" the only organon of truth. The arrest of his intelligence at
this point, before it has envisaged any rational object, explains the
arrest of his dramatic art at soliloquy. His immersion in the forms of
self-consciousness prevents him from dramatizing the real relations
of men and their thinkings to one another, to Nature, and to destiny.
For in order to do so he would have had to view his characters from
above (as Cervantes did, for instance), and to see them not merely
as they appeared to themselves, but as they appear to reason. This
higher attitude, however, was not only beyond Browning's scope, it
was positively contrary to his inspiration. Had he reached it, he
would no longer have seen the universe through the "Soul," but through
the intellect, and he would not have been able to cry, "How the
world is made for each one of us!" On the contrary, the "Soul" would
have figured only in its true conditions, in all its ignorance and
dependence, and also in its essential teachableness, a point against
which Browning's barbaric wilfulness particularly rebelled. Booted
in his persuasion that the soul is essentially omnipotent and that
to live hard can never be to live wrong, he remained fascinated by
the march and method of self-consciousness, and never allowed himself
to be weaned from that romantic fatuity by the energy of rational
imagination, which prompts us not to regard our ideas as mere filling
of a dream, but rather to build on them the conception of permanent
objects and overruling principles, such as Nature, society, and the
other ideals of reason. A full-grown imagination deals with these
things, which do not obey the laws of psychological progression, and
cannot be described by the methods of soliloquy.
We thus see that Browning's sphere, though more subtle and complex
than Whitman's, was still elementary. It lay far below the spheres of
social and historical reality in which Shakespeare moved; far below
the comprehensive and cosmic sphere of every great epic poet. Browning
did not even reach the intellectual plane of such contemporary poets
as Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, who, whatever may be thought of their
powers, did not study consciousness for itself, but for the sake of
its meaning and of the objects which it revealed. The best things that
come into a man's consciousness are the things that take him out of
it--the rational things that are independent of his personal perception
and of his personal existence. These he approaches with his reason,
and they, in the same measure, endow him with their immortality. But
precisely these things--the objects of science and of the constructive
imagination--Browning always saw askance, in the out-skirts of his
field of vision, for his eye was fixed and riveted on the soliloquizing
Soul. And this Soul being, to his apprehension, irrational, did not
give itself over to those permanent objects which might otherwise have
occupied it, but ruminated on its own accidental emotions, on its
love-affairs, and on its hopes of going on so ruminating for ever.
The pathology of the human mind--for the normal, too, is pathological
when it is not referred to the ideal--the pathology of the human
mind is a very interesting subject, demanding great gifts and great
ingenuity in its treatment. Browning ministers to this interest, and
possesses this ingenuity and these gifts. More than any other poet he
keeps a kind of speculation alive in the now large body of sentimental,
eager-minded people, who no longer can find in a definite religion a
form and language for their imaginative life. That this service is
greatly appreciated speaks well for the ineradicable tendency in man to
study himself and his destiny. We do not deny the achievement when we
point out its nature and limitations. It does not cease to be something
because it is taken to be more than it is.
In every imaginative sphere the nineteenth century has been an era
of chaos, as it has been an era of order and growing organization in
the spheres of science and of industry. An ancient doctrine of the
philosophers asserts that to chaos the world must ultimately return.
And what is perhaps true of the cycles of cosmic change is certainly
true of the revolutions of culture. Nothing lasts for ever: languages,
arts, and religions disintegrate with time. Yet the perfecting of such
forms is the only criterion of progress; the destruction of them the
chief evidence of decay. Perhaps fate intends that we should have, in
our imaginative decadence, the consolation of fancying that we are
still progressing, and that the disintegration of religion and the
arts is bringing us nearer to the protoplasm of sensation and passion.
If energy and actuality are all that we care for, chaos is as good as
order, and barbarism as good as discipline--better, perhaps, since
impulse is not then restrained within any bounds of reason or beauty.
But if the powers of the human mind are at any time adequate to the
task of digesting experience, clearness and order inevitably supervene.
The moulds of thought are imposed upon Nature, and the conviction of a
definite truth arises together with the vision of a supreme perfection.
It is only at such periods that the human animal vindicates his title
of rational. If such an epoch should return, people will no doubt
retrace our present gropings with interest and see in them gradual
approaches to their own achievement. Whitman and Browning might well
figure then as representatives of our time. For the merit of being
representative cannot be denied them. The mind of our age, like theirs,
is choked with materials, emotional, and inconclusive. They merely
aggravate our characteristics, and their success with us is due partly
to their own absolute strength and partly to our common weakness. If
once, however, this imaginative weakness could be overcome, and a form
found for the crude matter of experience, men might look back from the
height of a new religion and a new poetry upon the present troubles of
the spirit; and perhaps even these things might then be pleasant to
remember.
VIII
EMERSON
Those who knew Emerson, or who stood so near to his time and to his
circle that they caught some echo of his personal influence, did
not judge him merely as a poet or philosopher, nor identify his
efficacy with that of his writings. His friends and neighbours, the
congregations he preached to in his younger days, the audiences that
afterward listened to his lectures, all agreed in a veneration for his
person which had nothing to do with their understanding or acceptance
of his opinions. They flocked to him and listened to his word, not
so much for the sake of its absolute meaning as for the atmosphere
of candour, purity, and serenity that hung about it, as about a sort
of sacred music. They felt themselves in the presence of a rare and
beautiful spirit, who was in communion with a higher world. More than
the truth his teaching might express, they valued the sense it gave
them of a truth that was inexpressible. They became aware, if we may
say so, of the ultra-violet rays of his spectrum, of the inaudible
highest notes of his gamut, too pure and thin for common ears.
This effect was by no means due to the possession on the part of
Emerson of the secret of the universe, or even of a definite conception
of ultimate truth. He was not a prophet who had once for all climbed
his Sinai or his Tabor, and having there beheld the transfigured
reality, descended again to make authoritative report of it to the
world. Far from it. At bottom he had no doctrine at all. The deeper he
went and the more he tried to grapple with fundamental conceptions,
the vaguer and more elusive they became in his hands. Did he know what
he meant by Spirit or the "Over-Soul"? Could he say what he understood
by the terms, so constantly on his lips, Nature, Law, God, Benefit, or
Beauty? He could not, and the consciousness of that incapacity was so
lively within him that he never attempted to give articulation to his
philosophy. His finer instinct kept him from doing that violence to his
inspiration.
The source of his power lay not in his doctrine, but in his
temperament, and the rare quality of his wisdom was due less to his
reason than to his imagination. Reality eluded him; he had neither
diligence nor constancy enough to master and possess it; but his mind
was open to all philosophic influences, from whatever quarter they
might blow; the lessons of science and the hints of poetry worked
themselves out in him to a free and personal religion. He differed from
the plodding many, not in knowing things better, but in having more
ways of knowing them. His grasp was not particularly firm, he was far
from being, like a Plato or an Aristotle, past master in the art and
the science of life. But his mind was endowed with unusual plasticity,
with unusual spontaneity and liberty of movement--it was a fairyland
of thoughts and fancies. He was like a young god making experiments in
creation: he blotched the work, and always began again on a new and
better plan. Every day he said, "Let there be light," and every day the
light was new. His sun, like that of Heraclitus, was different every
morning.
What seemed, then, to the more earnest and less critical of his
hearers a revelation from above was in truth rather an insurrection
from beneath, a shaking loose from convention, a disintegration of
the normal categories of reason in favour of various imaginative
principles, on which the world might have been built, if it had been
built differently. This gift of revolutionary thinking allowed new
aspects, hints of wider laws, premonitions of unthought of fundamental
unities to spring constantly into view. But such visions were
necessarily fleeting, because the human mind had long before settled
its grammar, and discovered, after much groping and many defeats, the
general forms in which experience will allow itself to be stated. These
general forms are the principles of common sense and positive science,
no less imaginative in their origin than those notions which we now
call transcendental, but grown prosaic, like the metaphors of common
speech, by dint of repetition.
Yet authority, even of this rational kind, sat lightly upon Emerson. To
reject tradition and think as one might have thought if no man had ever
existed before was indeed the aspiration of the Transcendentalists, and
although Emerson hardly regarded himself as a member of that school,
he largely shared its tendency and passed for its spokesman. Without
protesting against tradition, he smilingly eluded it in his thoughts,
untamable in their quiet irresponsibility. He fled to his woods or
to his "pleached garden," to be the creator of his own worlds in
solitude and freedom. No wonder that he brought thence to the tightly
conventional minds of his contemporaries a breath as if from paradise.
His simplicity in novelty, his profundity, his ingenuous ardour must
have seemed to them something heavenly, and they may be excused if they
thought they detected inspiration even in his occasional thin paradoxes
and guileless whims. They were stifled with conscience and he brought
them a breath of Nature; they were surfeited with shallow controversies
and he gave them poetic truth.
Imagination, indeed, is his single theme. As a preacher might under
every text enforce the same lessons of the gospel, so Emerson traces
in every sphere the same spiritual laws of experience--compensation,
continuity, the self-expression of the Soul in the forms of Nature
and of society, until she finally recognizes herself in her own work
and sees its beneficence and beauty. His constant refrain is the
omnipotence of imaginative thought; its power first to make the world,
then to understand it, and finally to rise above it. All Nature is
an embodiment of our native fancy, all history a drama in which the
innate possibilities of the spirit are enacted and realized. While
the conflict of life and the shocks of experience seem to bring us
face to face with an alien and overwhelming power, reflection can
humanize and rationalize that power by conceiving its laws; and with
this recognition of the rationality of all things comes the sense of
their beauty and order. The destruction which Nature seems to prepare
for our special hopes is thus seen to be the victory of our impersonal
interests. To awaken in us this spiritual insight, an elevation of mind
which is at once an act of comprehension and of worship, to substitute
it for lower passions and more servile forms of intelligence--that
is Emerson's constant effort. All his resources of illustration,
observation, and rhetoric are used to deepen and clarify this sort of
wisdom.
Such thought is essentially the same that is found in the German
romantic or idealistic philosophers, with whom Emerson's affinity
is remarkable, all the more as he seems to have borrowed little
or nothing from their works. The critics of human nature, in the
eighteenth century, had shown how much men's ideas depend on their
predispositions, on the character of their senses and the habits of
their intelligence. Seizing upon this thought and exaggerating it, the
romantic philosophers attributed to the spirit of man the omnipotence
which had belonged to God, and felt that in this way they were
reasserting the supremacy of mind over matter and establishing it upon
a safe and rational basis.
The Germans were great system-makers, and Emerson cannot rival them in
the sustained effort of thought by which they sought to reinterpret
every sphere of being according to their chosen principles. But he
surpassed them in an instinctive sense of what he was doing. He never
represented his poetry as science, nor countenanced the formation of
a new sect that should nurse the sense of a private and mysterious
illumination, and relight the fagots of passion and prejudice. He
never tried to seek out and defend the universal implications of his
ideas, and never wrote the book he had once planned on the law of
compensation, foreseeing, we may well believe, the sophistries in which
he would have been directly involved. He fortunately preferred a fresh
statement on a fresh subject. A suggestion once given, the spirit once
aroused to speculation, a glimpse once gained of some ideal harmony,
he chose to descend again to common sense and to touch the earth for a
moment before another flight. The faculty of idealization was itself
what he valued. Philosophy for him was rather a moral energy flowering
into sprightliness of thought than a body of serious and defensible
doctrines. In practising transcendental speculation only in this poetic
and sporadic fashion, Emerson retained its true value and avoided its
greatest danger. He secured the freedom and fertility of his thought
and did not allow one conception of law or one hint of harmony to
sterilize the mind and prevent the subsequent birth within it of other
ideas, no less just and imposing than their predecessors. For we are
not dealing at all in such a philosophy with matters of fact or with
such verifiable truths as exclude their opposites. We are dealing only
with imagination, with the art of conception, and with the various
forms in which reflection, like a poet, may compose and recompose human
experience.
A certain disquiet mingled, however, in the minds of Emerson's
contemporaries with the admiration they felt for his purity and
genius. They saw that he had forsaken the doctrines of the Church; and
they were not sure whether he held quite unequivocally any doctrine
whatever. We may not all of us share the concern for orthodoxy which
usually caused this puzzled alarm: we may understand that it was not
Emerson's vocation to be definite and dogmatic in religion any more
than in philosophy. Yet that disquiet will not, even for us, wholly
disappear. It is produced by a defect which naturally accompanies
imagination in all but the greatest minds. I mean disorganization.
Emerson not only conceived things in new ways, but he seemed to think
the new ways might cancel and supersede the old. His imagination was
to invalidate the understanding. That inspiration which should come
to fulfil seemed too often to come to destroy. If he was able so
constantly to stimulate us to fresh thoughts, was it not because he
demolished the labour of long ages of reflection? Was not the startling
effect of much of his writing due to its contradiction to tradition and
to common sense?
So long as he is a poet and in the enjoyment of his poetic license, we
can blame this play of mind only by a misunderstanding. It is possible
to think otherwise than as common sense thinks; there are other
categories beside those of science. When we employ them we enlarge
our lives. We add to the world of fact any number of worlds of the
imagination in which human nature and the eternal relations of ideas
may be nobly expressed. So far our imaginative fertility is only a
benefit: it surrounds us with the congenial and necessary radiation
of art and religion. It manifests our moral vitality in the bosom of
Nature.
But sometimes imagination invades the sphere of understanding and seems
to discredit its indispensable work. Common sense, we are allowed to
infer, is a shallow affair: true insight changes all that. When so
applied, poetic activity is not an unmixed good. It loosens our hold on
fact and confuses our intelligence, so that we forget that intelligence
has itself every prerogative of imagination, and has besides the
sanction of practical validity. We are made to believe that since the
understanding is something human and conditioned, something which might
have been different, as the senses might have been different, and
which we may yet, so to speak, get behind--therefore the understanding
ought to be abandoned. We long for higher faculties, neglecting those
we have, we yearn for intuition, closing our eyes upon experience. We
become mystical.