Browning and His Century Part 18

So complete a synthesis is this that only in the present century is its full purport likely to be realized. The thought of the century is showing everywhere a strong reaction away from materialism and toward religious thought.

Even in the latest stronghold of science, psychology, as we have already seen, there is no formula which will explain the existence of individuality. While the scientists themselves plod on, often quite unconscious that they are not dealing with ultimates, the thinkers are no longer satisfied with a philosophy of materialism, and once more it is being recognized that the province of philosophy is to give us G.o.d, the soul and immortality.

It is especially interesting in this connection to observe that Germany, the land of destructive biblical criticism, which Browning before the middle of the century handled with the consummate skill characteristic of him, by accepting its historical conclusions while conserving the spirit of Christianity, has now in the person of Professor Rudolf Eucken done an almost similar thing. Like Browning, he is a strong individualist and believes that the development of the soul is the one thing of supreme moment. "There is a spontaneous springing up of the individual spiritual life," he writes, "only within the soul of the individual. All social and all historical life that does not unceasingly draw from this source falls irrecoverably into a state of stagnation and desolation. The individual can never be reduced to the position of a mere member of society, of a church, of a state; notwithstanding all external subordination, he must a.s.sert an inner superiority; each spiritual individual is more than the whole external world."

[Ill.u.s.tration: BROWNING AT 77 (1889)]

He calls his system "activism," which merely seems to be another way of saying that the soul-life is one of aspiration toward moral ideals and the will to carry them out. Such a life, he thinks, demands a new world and a new character in man, and is entirely at variance with nature. "Our whole life is an indefatigable seeking and pressing forward. In self-consciousness the framework is given which has to be filled; in it we have acquired only the basis upon which the superstructure has to be raised. We have to find experience in life itself to reveal something new, to develop life, to increase its range and depth. The endeavor to advance in spirituality, to win through struggle, is the soul of the life of the individual and the work of universal history." Readers of Browning will certainly not feel that there is anything new in this.

In so far, however, as he finds the spiritual life at variance with nature he parts company with Browning, showing himself to be under the influence of the dualism of the past which regarded matter and spirit as antagonistic. In Browning's view, matter and spirit are the two aspects of G.o.d, in the one, power being manifested; in the other, love.

It follows naturally from this, that Eucken does not think of evil as a means by which good is developed. He prefers to regard it as unexplained, and forever with us to be overcome. Its reduction to a means of realizing the good leads, he thinks, "to a weakening which threatens to transform the mighty world-struggle into an artistic arrangement of things and into an effeminate play, and which takes away that bitterness from evil without which there is no strenuousness in the struggle and no vitality in life.

Thus it remains true that religion does not so much explain as presuppose evil." An attempt to explain evil, he says, belongs to speculation rather than to religion. That he has an inkling of the region to which speculation might lead him is shown when it is realized, that upon his explanation, as one critic of him has said, it might be possible to find "some reconciliation in the fact that this world with its negations had awakened the spiritual life to its absolute affirmation, which could, therefore, not be in absolute opposition."

In leaving aside speculation and confining himself to what he considers the religious aspects of life, he no doubt strengthens himself as a leader of those whose speculative powers have not yet been developed, or who can put one side of the mind to sleep and accept with the other half-truths.

The more developed mind, however, will prefer Browning's greater inclusiveness. To possess a complete view of life, man must live his own life as a human being struggling to overcome the evil, at the same time keeping in mind the fact that evil is in a sense the raw material provided by G.o.d, or the Absolute, or whatever name one chooses to give to the all-powerful and all-loving, from which the active soul of man is to derive a richness of beauty and harmony of development not otherwise possible. Eucken's att.i.tude toward Jesus is summed up in a way which reminds one strongly of the position taken in the comment made at the end of "The Death in the Desert." He writes: "The position of the believer in the universal Christian Church is grounded upon a relation to G.o.d whose uniqueness emerges from the essential divinity of Jesus; only on this supposition can the personality of Christ stand as the unconditional Lord and Master to whom the ages must do homage. And while the person of Jesus retains a wonderful majesty apart from dogma, its greatness is confined to the realm of humanity, and whatever of new and divine life it brings to us must be potential and capable of realization in us all. We therefore see no more in this figure the normative and universally valid type of all human life, but merely an incomparable individuality which cannot be directly imitated. At any rate the figure of Jesus, thus understood in all its height and pure humanity, can no longer be an object of faith and divine honor. All attempts to take shelter in a mediating position are shattered against a relentless either--or. Between man and G.o.d there is no intermediate form of being for us, for we cannot sink back into the ancient cult of heroes. If Jesus, therefore, is not G.o.d, if Christ is not the second person in the Trinity, then he is a man; not a man like any average man among ourselves, but still man. We can therefore honor him as a leader, a hero, a martyr, but we cannot directly bind ourselves to him or root ourselves in him; we cannot submit to him unconditionally. Still less can we make him the centre of a cult. To do so from our point of view would be nothing else than an intolerable deification of a human being."

The comment at the end of "The Death in the Desert" puts a similar question, and answers, "Call Christ, then, the illimitable G.o.d, Or Lost!"

But the final word which casts a light back upon the previous conclusion is "But, 'twas Cerinthus that is lost"--the man, in other words, who held the heresy that the Christ part only resided in Jesus, who was merely human, and that the divine part was not crucified, having flown away before. Thus it is implied that neither those who believe Jesus divine, nor those who believe him human, are lost, but those who try as Cerinthus did to make a compromise. The same note is struck in "Christmas Eve," and now Professor Eucken takes an exactly similar ground in regard to any sort of compromise, coming out boldly, however, as Browning does not in this poem, though he makes no strong argument against it--in the acceptance of Christ as human. Browning's own att.i.tude is expressed as clearly as it is anywhere in his work in the epilogue to "Dramatis Personae," in which the conclusion is entirely in sympathy with that of Eucken:

"When you see what I tell you--nature dance About each man of us, retire, advance, As though the pageant's end were to enhance

"His worth, and--once the life, his product gained-- Roll away elsewhere, keep the strife sustained, And show thus real, a thing the North but feigned--

"When you acknowledge that one world could do All the diverse work, old yet ever new, Divide us, each from other, me from you--

"Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet calls?

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows."

The hold which the philosophy of Eucken seems to have taken upon the minds of many people all over the world shows that it must have great elements of strength. That there is a partial resemblance between his thought, which belongs to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and Browning's is certain, but the fact remains that the poet made a synthesis of the elements which must go to the forming of any complete religious conceptions of the future so far in advance of his own century that even Eucken is in some respects behind it.

Another interesting instance of Browning's presenting a line of reasoning which resembles very strongly one phase of present-day philosophy is to be found in "Bishop Blougram's Apology." The worldly Bishop gives voice to good pragmatic doctrine, which in a nutsh.e.l.l is, "believe in, or rather follow, that ideal which will be of the most use to you, and if it turns out not to be successful, then try another one." The poet declares that Blougram said good things but called them by wrong names. If the ideal is a high one there is no great danger in such reasoning, but it can very easily be turned into sophistical arguments for an ideal of living to thoroughly selfish ends, as Blougram actually did. The poem might almost be taken as a prophetic criticism of the weak aspects of pragmatism.

The belief in immortality which pervades Browning's work often comes out in a form suggesting the idea of reincarnation. His future for the human soul is not a heaven of bliss, but life in other worlds full of activity and aspiration. This note is struck in "Paracelsus," where life's destiny is described to be the climbing of pleasure's heights forever the seeking of a flying point of bliss remote. In his last volume the idea is more fully brought out in "Rephan." In this it is held that a state of perfect bliss might grow monotonous, and that a preferable state would be to aspire, yet never attain, to the object aimed at. The transmigration is from "Rephan," where all was merged in a neutral Best to Earth, where the soul which had been stagnating would have an opportunity to strive, not rest. The most beautiful expression, however, of the idea of a future of many lives is found in "One Word More":

"So it seems: I stand on my attainment.

This of verse, alone, one life allows me; Verse and nothing else have I to give you.

Other heights in other lives, G.o.d willing: All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love!"

Though the theory of reincarnation is so ancient a one, and one entirely discredited by Christianity, Browning was again expressing an ideal which was to be revived in our own day. Oriental thought has made it almost a commonplace of talk. Many people doubtless speak of what they mean to do in their next incarnation without having the thought very deeply imbedded in their consciousness, yet the mere fact that one hears the remark so often proves what a hold the theory has on the imagination of mankind. As Browning gives it in "One Word More," the successive incarnations take one on to higher heights--"other lives in other worlds." Thus regarded, it is the final outcome of evolution and progress, a process to be carried forward in other worlds than our own, and has no degrading suggestion of a degenerating, because of sin, into lower forms of existence. The movement is always upward. Thus it has been effected by the idea that progress is the law of life, and that evolution means, on the whole, progress.

Again, in the liberality of his social ideals, combined with an intensest belief in the supremacy of genuine love, he was the forerunner of Ibsen, who, the world is beginning to discover, was not a subverter of high moral ideals, as it had thought, but a prophet of the new day, when to be untrue to the highest ideal of love will be accounted the greatest crime of one human being against another. From "The Doll's House" to "When We That Are Dead Awaken" the same lesson is taught. Few people realize that this is the keynote of Browning's teaching, or would be ready to regard him as a prophet of an ideal of love which shall come to be seen as the true one after the science of eugenics, the latest of the exact sciences, has found itself as powerless as all other sciences have been to touch the reality of life, because amid all the mysteries of the universe none is greater than the spiritual mystery of love. Among writers who are to-day recognizing a part of the truth, at least, is Ellen Key, but neither she nor Ibsen has insisted in the way that Browning has upon the mystical source of human love. That Browning is the poet who has given the world the utmost certainty of G.o.d, the soul and immortality, and the most inspiring ideals of human love, will be more completely recognized in the future. As time goes on he will emerge above the tumultuous intellectual life of the present, which, with its enormous increase of knowledge of phenomena, bringing with it a fairly t.i.tanic mastery of the forces of nature, and its generation of mult.i.tudes of ideas upon every conceivable subject, many of them trite, many of them puerile, and some of them no doubt of genuine value, obscures for the time being the greatness of any one voice. A little later, when the winnowing of ideas shall come, Browning will be recognized as one of the greatest men of his own age or any age--a man combining knowledge, wisdom, aspiration, and vision to a marvelous degree. He belongs to the master-order of poets, who write some things which will pa.s.s into the popular knowledge of the day, but whose serious achievements will be read and studied by the cultured and scholarly of all time. No students of Greek literature will feel that they can omit from their reading his Greek poems, no students of sociology will feel that they can omit from their reading "The Ring and the Book." Lovers of the drama must ever respond to the beauty of "The Blot in the 'Scutcheon" and "Pippa Pa.s.ses." Even the student of verse technique will not be able to leave Browning out of account, and making allowances for the fact that the individuality of his style sometimes overa.s.serts itself, he will realize more and more its freshness and its vividness, its power of suggestion, and its depths of emotional fervor. When the romanticism of a Keats or a Sh.e.l.ley has completely worked itself out in musical efflorescence; from which all thought-content has disappeared, there may grow up a school of poets which shall, without direct imitation, develop poetry along the lines of vigor and strength in form, and which shall have for its content a tremendous sense of the worth of humanity and an unshakable belief in the splendor of its destiny. _Virilists_ might well be the name of this future school of poets who would hark back to Browning as their inspiration, and a most pleasant contrast would they be to the sentimental namby-pambyism which pa.s.ses muster as poetry in much of the work of to-day.

In closing this volume which has been inspired by a deep sense of the abiding greatness of Robert Browning, it has been my desire to put on record in some way my personal indebtedness to his poetry as an inspiration not only to high thinking and living, but as a genuine revelation to me of the rare possibilities in poetic art, for I may almost say that Browning was my first poet, and through him, strange as it may seem, I came to an appreciation of all other poets. His poetry, fortunately for me an early influence in my life, awakened my, until then, dormant faculty for poetic appreciation. I owe him, therefore, a double debt of grat.i.tude: Not only has he given me the joy of knowing his own great work, but through him I have entered the land of all poesie, led as I truly think by his sympathy with the scientific dispensation into which I was born. His thought has always seemed so naturally akin to my own that it has never seemed to me obscure. Finding such thoughts expressed through the medium of great poetic genius, the beauty of poetic expression was brought home to me as it never had been before, and hence the poetic expression of all thought became a deep pleasure to me.

So much interpretation and criticism of Browning has been given to the world during the last twenty years, that further work in that direction seems hardly necessary for the present. There will for many a day to come be those who feel him to be among the greatest poets the world has seen, and those who find much more to blame in his work than to praise.

I have tried to give a few suggestions in regard to what Robert Browning actually was in relation to his time. The nineteenth century was so remarkable a one in the complexity of its growth, both in practical affairs and in intellectual developments, that it has been possible in the s.p.a.ce of one volume to touch only upon the most important aspects under each division, and to try to show what measure of influence important movements had in the molding of the poet's genius.

Though in the nature of the case the treatment could not be exhaustive, I hope to have opened out a sufficient number of pathways into the fascinating vistas of the nineteenth century in its relation to Browning to inspire others to make further excursions for themselves; and, above all, I hope I may have added at least one stone to the cairn which many, past and to come, are building to his fame.

THE END