If we were called upon to describe Mr. Browning's poetic genius in one
phrase, we should say it consisted of an almost unlimited power of
imagination exerted upon real things; but we should have to explain that
with Mr. Browning the real includes everything which a human being can
think or feel, and that he is realistic only in the sense of being never
visionary; he never deals with those vague and incoherent fancies, so
attractive to some minds, which we speak of as coming only from the
poet's brain. He imagines vividly because he observes keenly and also
feels strongly; and this vividness of his nature puts him in equal
sympathy with the real and the ideal--with the seen and the unseen. The
one is as living to him as the other.
His treatment of visible and of invisible realities constitutes him
respectively a dramatic and a metaphysical poet; but, as the two kinds
of reality are inseparable in human life, so are the corresponding
qualities inseparable in Mr. Browning's work. The dramatic activity of
his genius always includes the metaphysical. His genius always shows
itself as dramatic and metaphysical at the same time.
Mr. Browning's genius is dramatic because it always expresses itself in
the forms of real life, in the supposed experiences of men and women.
These men and women are usually in a state of mental disturbance or
conflict; indeed, they think much more than they act. But their thinking
tends habitually to a practical result; and it keeps up our sense of
their reality by clothing itself always in the most practical and
picturesque language which thought can assume. It has been urged that he
does not sink himself in his characters as a completely dramatic writer
should; and this argument must stand for what it is worth. His
personality may in some degree be constructed from his works: it is, I
think, generally admitted, that that of Shakespeare cannot; and in so
far as this is the test of a complete dramatist, Mr. Browning fails of
being one. He does not sink himself in his men and women, for his
sympathy with them is too active to admit of it. He not only describes
their different modes of being, but defends them from their own point of
view; and it is natural that he should often select for this treatment
characters with which he is already disposed to sympathize. But his
women are no less living and no less distinctive than his men; and he
sinks his individuality at all times enough to interest us in the
characters which are not akin to his own as much as in those which are.
Even if it were otherwise, if his men and women were all variations of
himself, as imagined under differences of sex, of age, of training, or
of condition, he would still be dramatic in this essential quality, the
only one which bears on our contention: that everything which, as a
poet, he thinks or feels, comes from him in a dramatic, that is to say,
a completely living form.
It is in this way also that his dramatic genius includes the
metaphysical. The abstract, no less than the practical questions which
shape themselves in his mind, are put before us in the thoughts and
words, in the character and conduct of his men and women. This does not
mean that human experience solves for him all the questions which it can
be made to state, or that everything he believes can be verified by it:
for in that case his mode of thought would be scientific, and not
metaphysical; it simply means, that so much of abstract truth as cannot
be given in a picture of human life, lies outside his philosophy of it.
He accepts this residue as the ultimate mystery of what must be called
Divine Thought. Thought or spirit is with him the ultimate fact of
existence; the one thing about which it is vain to theorize, and which
we can never get behind. His gospel would begin, "In the beginning was
the Thought;" and since he can only conceive this as self-conscious, his
"Alpha and Omega" is a Divine intelligence from which all the ideas of
the human intellect are derived, and which stamps them as true. These
religious conceptions are the meeting-ground of the dramatic and the
metaphysical activity of his poetic genius. The two are blended in the
vision of a Supreme Being not to be invested with human emotions, but
only to be reached through them.
To show that Mr. Browning is a metaphysical poet, is to show that he is
not a metaphysical _thinker_, though he is a thinker whose thought is
metaphysical so far as principle goes. A metaphysical thinker is always
in some way or other thinking about _thought_; and this is precisely
what Mr. Browning has no occasion to do, because he takes its
assumptions upon trust. He is a constant analyst of secondary motives
and judgments. No modern freethinker could make a larger allowance for
what is incidental, personal, and even material in them: we shall see
that all his practical philosophy is bound up with this fact. But he has
never questioned the origin of our primary or innate ideas, for he has,
as I have said, never questioned their truth. It is essential to bear in
mind that Mr. Browning is a metaphysical poet, and not a metaphysical
thinker, to do justice to the depth and originality of his creative
power; for his imagination includes everything which at a given moment a
human being can think or feel, and often finds itself, therefore, at
some point to which other minds have _reasoned_ their way. The
coincidence occurs most often with German lines of thought, and it has
therefore been concluded that he has studied the works in which they are
laid down, or has otherwise moved in the same track; the fact being that
he has no bond of union with German philosophers, but the natural
tendencies of his own mind. It may be easily ascertained that he did not
read their language until late in life; and if what I have said of his
mental habits is true, it is equally certain that their methods have
been more foreign to him still. He resembles Hegel, Fichte, or
Schelling, as the case may be, by the purely creative impulse which has
met their thought, and which, if he had lived earlier, might have
forestalled it. Mr. Browning's position is that of a fixed centre of
thought and feeling. Fifty years ago he was in advance of his age. He
stood firm and has allowed the current to overtake him, or even leave
him behind. If I may be allowed a comparison: other mental existences
suggest the idea of a river, flowing onwards, amidst varying scenes, and
in a widening bed, to lose itself in the sea. Mr. Browning's genius
appears the sea itself, with its immensity and its limits, its
restlessness and its repose, the constant self-balancing of its ebb and
flow.
As both dramatic and metaphysical poet, Mr. Browning is inspired by one
central doctrine: that while thought is absolute in itself, it is
relative or personal to the mind which thinks it; so that no one man can
attain the whole truth of any abstract subject, and no other can convict
him of having failed to do so. And he also believes that since
intellectual truth is so largely for each of us a matter of personal
impression, no language is special enough to convey it. The arguments
which he carries on through the mouths of his men and women often
represent even moral truth as something too subtle, too complex, and too
changing, to be definitely expressed; and if we did not see that he
reverences what is good as much as he excuses what is bad, we might
imagine that even on this ground he considered no fixed knowledge to be
attainable. These opinions are, however, closely bound up with his
religious beliefs, and in great measure explained by them. He is
convinced that uncertainty is essential to the spiritual life; and his
works are saturated by the idea that where uncertainty ceases,
stagnation must begin; that our light must be wavering, and our progress
tentative, as well as our hopes chequered, and our happiness even devoid
of any sense of finality, if the creative intention is not to frustrate
itself; we may not see the path of progress and salvation clearly marked
out before us. On the other hand, he believes that the circumstances of
life are as much adapted to the guidance of each separate soul as if
each were the single object of creative care; and that therefore while
the individual knows nothing of the Divine scheme, he _is_ everything in
it.
This faith in personality is naturally abstruse on the metaphysical
side, but it is always picturesque on the dramatic; for it issues in
that love of the unusual which is so striking to every reader of Mr.
Browning's works; and we might characterize these in a few words, by
saying that they reflect at once the extent of his general sympathies,
and his antagonism to everything which is general. But the "unusual"
which attracts him is not the morbid or the monstrous, for these mean
defective life. It is every healthy escape from the conventional and the
commonplace, which are also defective life; and this is why we find in
his men and women those vivid, various, and subtly compounded motives
and feelings, which make our contact with them a slight, but continuous
electric shock.
And since the belief in personality is the belief in human life in its
fullest and truest form, it includes the belief in love and
self-sacrifice. It may, indeed, be said that while Mr. Browning's
judgments are leavened by the one idea, they are steadily coloured by
the other; this again being so evident to his serious renders that I
need only indicate it here. But the love of love does more than colour
his views of life; it is an essential element in his theology; and it
converts what would otherwise be a pure Theism into a mystical
Christianity which again is limited by his rejection of all dogmatic
religious truth. I have already alluded to his belief that, though the
Deity is not to be invested with human emotions, He can only be reached
through them. Love, according to him, is the necessary channel; since a
colourless Omnipotence is outside the conception as outside the
sympathies of man. Christ is a message of Divine love, indispensable and
therefore true; but He is, as such, a spiritual mystery far more than a
definable or dogmatic fact. A definite revelation uttered for all men
and for all time is denied by the first principles of Mr. Browning's
religious belief. What Christianity means for him, and what it does not,
we shall also see in his works.
It is almost superfluous to add that Mr. Browning's dramatic sympathies
and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an optimist. He
believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is good in its
way. We also see that his optimism takes the individual and not the race
for its test and starting point; and that he places the tendency to good
in a _conscious_ creative power which is outside both, and which deals
directly with each separate human soul. But neither must we forget that
the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself equally through
good and evil; so that he does not shrink from the contemplation of evil
or by any means always seek to extenuate it. He thinks of it
philosophically as a condition of good, or again, as an excess or a
distortion of what is good; but he can also think of it, in the natural
sense, as a distinct mode of being which a bad man may prefer for its
own sake, as a good man prefers its opposite, and may defend
accordingly. He would gladly admit that the coarser forms of evil are
passing away; and that it is the creative intention that they should do
so. Evil remains for him nevertheless essential to the variety, and
invested with the dignity of human life; and on no point does he detach
himself so clearly from the humanitarian optimist who regards evil and
its attendant sufferings as a mere disturbance to life. Even where
suffering is not caused by evil doing, he is helped over it by his
individual point of view; because this prevents his ever regarding it as
distinct from the personal compensations which it so often brings into
play. He cannot think of it in the mass; and here again his theism
asserts itself, though in a less obvious manner.
So much of Mr. Browning's moral influence lies in the hopeful religious
spirit which his works reveal, that it is important to understand how
elastic this is, and what seeming contradictions it is competent to
unite. The testimony of one poem might otherwise be set against that of
another with confusing results.
Mr. Browning's paternal grandfather was an Englishman of a west country
stock;[1] his paternal grandmother a Creole. The maternal grandfather
was a German from Hamburg named Wiedemann, an accomplished draughtsman
and musician.[2] The maternal grandmother was completely Scotch.
This pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of Mr.
Browning's genius; for it shows that on the ground of heredity they are,
in great measure, accounted for. It contains almost the only facts of a
biographical nature which can be fitly introduced into the present work.