The poet's youthful zest in scandalizing the orthodox is likely, however, to be early outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be, indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood, frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: See Christmas Eve and Easter Day.] of Tennyson, [Footnote: See In Memoriam.] of Arnold, [Footnote: See Dover Beach.] of Clough. [Footnote: See The New Sinai, Qui Laborat Orat, Hymnos Amnos, Epistrausium.] So, too, James Thomson muses with regret,
How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray
With all the others whom we love so well!
All disbelief and doubt might pass away,
And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell.
Conscience replies, There is but one good rest,
Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast.
[Footnote: The Reclusant.]
In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind, rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his contemporaries,
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and love." [Footnote: Preface to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards proved spurious).]
The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold.
Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry,
Ah, but there should be one!
There should be one. And there's the bitterness
Of this unending torture-place for men,
For the proud soul that craves a perfectness
That might outwear the rotting of all things
Rooted in earth.
[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, Marlowe.]
The public which refuses to credit the poet with earnestness in his quest of God may misconceive the dignified attempts of Arnold to free himself from the tangle of doubt, and deem his beautiful gestures purposely futile, but before condemning the poetic attitude toward religion it must also take into account the contrary disposition of Browning to kick his way out of difficulties with entire indifference to the greater dignity of an attitude of resignation; and no more than Arnold does Browning ever depict a poet who achieves religious satisfaction. Thus the hero of Pauline comes to no triumphant issue, though he maintains,
I have always had one lode-star; now
As I look back, I see that I have halted
Or hastened as I looked towards that star,
A need, a trust, a yearning after God.