Robert Browning

by C. H. Herford

I.

The trend of speculative thought in Europe during the century which preceded the emergence of Browning may be described as a progressive integration along several distinct lines of the great regions of existence which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous medievalism, thrust apart. Nature was brought into nearer relation with Man, and Man with God, and God with Nature and with Man. In one aspect, not the least striking, it was a "return to Nature"; economists from Adam Smith to Malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world; poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a [life] "according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the organism.

In another aspect it was a return to God. If the scientific movement tended to subjugate man to a Nature in which, as Laplace said, there was no occasion for God, Wordsworth saw both in Nature and in man a spirit "deeply interfused"; and the great contemporary school of German philosophy set all ethical thinking in a new perspective by its original handling of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will of God.

But, in yet another aspect, it was a return to Man. If Man was brought nearer to Nature and to God, it was to a Nature and to a God which had themselves acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. He divined, with Wordsworth, his own joy, with Shelley his own love, in the breathing flower; he saw with Hegel in the Absolute Spirit a power vitally present in all man's secular activities and pursuits. And these interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but the signs of less articulate sensibilities far more widely diffused, which were in effect bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental, and emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron and Goethe, in their different ways, the Hellenic past, a living element of the present; and Fichte, calling upon his [countrymen] to emancipate themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of the German people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual member, not an aggregate of other units competing with or controlling him.

In this complicated movement Browning played a very notable and memorable part. But it was one of which the first generation of his readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and which his own language often disguises or conceals. Of all the poets of the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working of God in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and destiny of man. Half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless variety of iteration, the nearness of God, to unravel the tangled circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed amid the intricacies of the finite.

On the side of Nature his interest was less keen and his vision less subtle. His "visitations of the living God" came to him by other avenues than those opened by Wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, "in love and holy passion," upon outward beauty. Only limited classes of natural phenomena appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with foreboding and suspense. For continuities, both of the mechanical and the organic kind, he lacked sense. [We] have seen how his eye fastened everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron uniformity or harmonious evolution. The abrupt demarcations which he everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a God-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome.

II.

His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God, Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile antagonists or antitheses. That their opposition is not ultimate, that evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which it could not securely rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he vindicated the "infinity" of God and the soul by banishing all the "finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. The infinite soul, imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] "which ever proving false still promise to be [true]," until death opens the prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being; and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence.

[124] Fifine at the Fair.

But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning's mental make which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by theological prepossessions, in check. His most intense consciousness, his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its ground. This "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for "intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood; Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced that "Time was done, Eternity begun."