it might seem at first as if it were unfair to attempt any estimate of the philosophic and religious teaching of a poet like browning, whose method we have already recognized as dramatic. can we ascribe to the poet himself the opinions which he puts into the mouths of his characters? can we hold him responsible for the sentiments which are expressed by the actors on his stage?
certainly this objection must be admitted as a restraint in the interpretation of his poetry. we are not to take all that his characters say, literally and directly, as his own belief, any more than we are to read the speeches of satan, and eliphaz, and bildad, and zophar, in the book of job, as utterances of the spirit of inspiration. but just as that great dramatic scripture, dealing with the problems
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of evil and suffering and sovereignty, does contain a doctrine and convey a lesson, so the poetry of browning, taken as a whole, utters a distinct and positive prophetic message.
in the first place, many of the poems are evidently subjective, written without disguise in the first person. among these we may consider my star; by the fireside; one word more; the epilogues to dramatis personæ and pachiarrotto and ferishtah’s fancies; the introduction and the close of the ring and the book; christmas eve and easter day; the ending of the poem called gold hair, and of a death in the desert, and of bishop blougram’s apology; prospice and reverie. in the second place we must remember goethe’s dictum: “every author in some degree, pourtrays himself in his works, even be it against his will.” even when browning is writing dramatically, he cannot conceal his sympathy. the masks are thin. his eyes shine through. “his own personality,” says mr. stedman, “is manifest in the speech and movement of almost every character of each piece. his spirit is infused as if by metempsychosis, within them all,
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and forces each to assume a strange pentecostal tone, which we discover to be that of the poet himself.” thus it is not impossible, nor even difficult, to reach a fair estimate of his ethical and religious teaching and discover its principal elements.
1. first among these i would put a great confidence in god. browning is the most theological of modern poets. the epithet which was applied to spinoza might well be transferred to him. he is a “god-intoxicated” man. but in a very different sense, for whereas the philosopher felt god as an idea, the poet feels him intensely as a person. the song which he puts into the lips of the unconscious heroine in pippa passes,—
“god’s in his heaven
all’s right with the world,——”
is the recurrent theme of his poetry. he cries with paracelsus,
“god thou art love, i build my faith on that.”
even when his music is broken and interrupted by discords, when it seems to dissolve and fade away as all human work, in its outward form, dissolves
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and fades, he turns, as abt vogler turns from his silent organ, to god;
“therefore to whom turn i but to thee, the ineffable name?
builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!
what, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?
doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?”
in rabbi ben ezra he takes up the ancient figure of the potter and the clay and uses it to express his boundless trust in god.
the characteristic mark of browning’s view of god is that it is always taken from the side of humanity. the perfect glory is the correlative of the glory of the imperfect. the divine love is the answer to the human longing. god is, because man needs him. from this point of view it almost seems, as a brilliant essayist has said, as if “in browning, god is adjective to man.”[18]
but it may be said in answer, that, at least for man, this is the only point of view that is accessible.
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we can never leave our own needs behind us, however high we may try to climb. certainly if we succeed in forgetting them for a moment, in that very moment we have passed out of the region of poetry, which is the impassioned interpretation of man’s heart.
2. the second element of power in browning’s poetry is that he sees in the personal christ the very revelation of god that man’s heart most needs and welcomes. nowhere else in all the range of modern poetry has this vision been expressed with such spiritual ardour, with such poignant joy. we must turn back to the pages of isaiah to find anything to equal the messianic rapture of the minstrel in saul.
“he who did most shall bear most: the strongest shall stand the most weak.
’tis the weakness in strength that i cry for! my flesh that i seek
in the godhead! i seek and i find it. o saul, it shall be,
a face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me,
thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a hand like this hand
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shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! see the christ stand!”
we must look into the christ-filled letters of st. paul to find the attractions of the crucified one uttered as powerfully as they are in the epistle of karshish.
“the very god! think abib; dost thou think?
so, the all-great, were the all-loving too—
so, through the thunder comes a human voice
saying, ‘o heart i made, a heart beats here!
face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine,
but love i gave thee, with myself to love,
and thou must love me who have died for thee!’”
it is idle to assert that these are only dramatic presentations of the christian faith. no poet could have imagined such utterances without feeling their significance; and the piercing splendour of their expression discloses his sympathy. he reveals it yet more unmistakably in christmas eve, (strophe xvii) and in easter day, (strophe xxx.) in the epilogue to dramatis personæ it flashes out clearly. the second speaker, as renan, has bewailed the vanishing of the face of christ from the sorrowful
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vision of the race. the third speaker, the poet himself, answers:
“that one face, far from vanish, rather grows,
or decomposes but to recompose
become my universe that feels and knows!”
“that face,” said browning to a friend, “that face is the face of christ: that is how i feel him.”
surely this is the religious message that the world most needs to-day. more and more everything in christianity hangs upon the truth of the incarnation. the alternative declares itself. either no god whom we can know and love at all, or god personally manifest in christ!
3. the third religious element in browning’s poetry is his faith that this life is a probation, a discipline for the future. he says, again and again,
“i count life just a stuff
to try the soul’s strength on, educe the man.”
the glory of the imperfect lies in the power of progress, “man’s distinctive mark.” and progress comes by conflict; conflict with falsehood and ignorance,—
“living here means nescience simply; ’tis next life that helps to learn—”
and conflict with evil,—
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“why comes temptation but for man to meet,
and master and make crouch beneath his foot,
and so be pedestalled in triumph?”
the poet is always calling us to be glad we are engaged in such a noble strife.
“rejoice we are allied
to that which doth provide
and not partake, effect and not receive!
a spark disturbs our clod;
nearer we hold of god
who gives, than of his tribes that take, i must believe.
then welcome each rebuff
that turns earth’s smoothness rough,
each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
be our joys three-parts pain!
strive and hold cheap the strain;
learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”
now this is fine doctrine, lofty, strenuous, stimulating. it appeals to the will, which is man’s central power. it proclaims the truth that virtue must be active in its essence though it may also be passive in its education, positive in its spirit and negative only by contrast.
but it is in the working out of this doctrine into
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an ethical system that browning enters upon dangerous ground, and arrives at results which seem to obscure the clearness, and to threaten the stability of the moral order, by which alone, if the world’s greatest teachers have been right, the ultimate good of humanity can be attained. here, it seems to me, his teaching, especially in its latter utterances, is often confused, turbulent, misleading. his light is mixed with darkness. he seems almost to say that it matters little which way we go, provided only we go.
he overlooks the deep truth that there is an activity of the soul in self-restraint as well as in self-assertion. it takes as much courage to dare not to do evil as it does to dare to do good. the hero is sometimes the man who stands still. virtue is noblest when it is joined to virility. but virility alone is not virtue nor does it always lead to moral victory. sometimes it leads straight towards moral paralysis, death, extinction. browning fails to see this, because his method is dramatic and because he dramatizes through himself. he puts himself into this or the other character, and works himself
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out through it, preserving still in himself, though all unconsciously, the soul of something good. thus he does not touch that peculiar deadening of spiritual power which is one result of the unrestrained following of impulse and passion. it is this defect in his vision of life that leads to the dubious and interrogatory moral of such a poem as the statue and the bust.
browning values the individual so much that he lays all his emphasis upon the development of stronger passions and aspirations, the unfolding of a more vivid and intense personality, and has comparatively little stress to lay upon the larger thought of the progress of mankind in harmony and order. indeed he poetizes so vigorously against the conventional judgments of society that he often seems to set himself against the moral sentiments on which those conventional judgments, however warped, ultimately rest. “over and over again in browning’s poetry,” says a penetrating critic, “we meet with this insistence on the value of moments of high excitement, of intense living, of full experience of pleasure, even though such moments be of the
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essence of evil and fruitful in all dark consequences.”
take for example his treatment of love. he is right in saying “love is best.” but is he right in admitting, even by inference, that love has a right to take its own way of realizing itself? can love be at its best unless it is obedient to law? does it not make its truest music when it keeps its place in the harmony of purity and peace and good living? surely the wild and reckless view of love as its own law which seems to glimmer through the unconsumed smoke of browning’s later poems, such as fifine at the fair, the inn album, and red cotton nightcap country, needs correction by a true flash of insight like that which we find in two lines of one word more:
“dante, who loved well because he hated,
hated wickedness that hinders loving.”
browning was at times misled by a perilous philosophy into a position where the vital distinction between good and evil dissolved away in a cloud of unreality. in ferishtah’s fancies and parleyings with certain people of importance, any one who has
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the patience to read them will find himself in a nebulous moral world. the supposed necessity of showing that evil is always a means to good tempts to the assertion that it has no other reality. perhaps it is altogether an illusion, needed to sting us into conflict, but really non-existent. perhaps it is only the shadow cast by the good,—or “the silence implying sound.” perhaps it is good in disguise, not yet developed from the crawling worm into the creature with wings. after this fashion the whimsical dervish ferishtah strews his beans upon the table.
“this bean was white, this—black,
set by itself,—but see if good and bad
each following other in companionship,
black have not grown less black and white less white,
till blackish seems but dun, and whitish,—gray,
and the whole line turns—well, or black to thee
or white alike to me—no matter which.”
certainly if this were the essence of browning’s poetry the best safeguard against its falsehood would be its own weakness. such a message, if this were all, could never attract many hearers, nor inspire those whom it attracted. effort, struggle, noble
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conflict would be impossible in a world where there were no moral certainties or realities, but all men felt that they were playing at a stupid game like the caucus race in alice in wonderland, where everything went round in a circle and every runner received a prize.
but in fact these elements of weakness in browning’s work, as it seems to me, do not belong to his true poetry. they are expressed, generally, in his most obfuscated style, and at a prohibitory length. they are embodied in poems which no one is likely to read for fun, and few are capable of learning by heart.
but when we go back to his best work we find another spirit, we hear another message. clear, resonant, trumpet-like his voice calls to us proclaiming the glorious possibilities of this imperfect life. only do not despair; only do not sink down into conventionality, indifference, mockery, cynicism; only rise and hope and go forward out of the house of bondage into the land of liberty. true, the prophecy is not complete. but it is inspiring. he does not teach us how to live. but he does tell
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us to live,—with courage, with love to man, with trust in god,—and he bids us find life glorious, because it is still imperfect and therefore full of promise.
