Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

There is the constant passing onward from joy to joy. All the processes of nature from the simplest to the most complex bring, in their turn, a delight to their Creator until man appears, and is not only a joy to his Creator, but is the first in the order of creation to share in the joy of existence, the first to arrive at the full consciousness of beauty. So overwhelming is this consciousness of beauty that man perceives it struggling for expression in the hates and fallacies of undeveloped natures.

All this is characteristic of the artistic way of looking at life. The artist is prone either to ignore the ugly or to transmute it by art into something possessing beauty of power if not of loveliness. What are plays like “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” “Brand” and “Peer Gynt,” music like “Tristan and Isolde” or the “Pathetic Symphony,” Rodin’s statues, but actual, palpable realizations of the fact that hate is but a mask of love, or that human fallacies and human passions have within them the seeds of immense beauty if only there appear the artist who can bring them forth. If this is true of the human artist, how much more is it true of the divine artist in whose shadow, as Pompilia says, even a Guido may find healing.

The optimism of such a theory of existence is intoxicating. Not only does this artist-man look backward and rejoice in all the beauty of past phases of creation, but he looks forward to endless progression in the enjoyment of fresh phases of beauty—“a flying point of bliss remote.” This is a universe in which the Prometheus of the old myths is indeed unbound. Mankind is literally free to progress forever upward. If there are some men in darkness, they are like plants in mines struggling to break out into the sunlight they see beyond.

The interesting question arises here, was Browning, himself, entirely responsible for the soul of his Paracelsus theory of life or was there some source beyond him from which he drew inspiration?

It has frequently been suggested that Aprile in this poem is a sort of symbolic representation of Shelley. Why not rather a composite of both Shelley and Keats, the poet of love and the poet of beauty? An examination of the greatest poems of these two writers, “Prometheus Unbound” and “Hyperion,” will bring out the elements in both which I believe entered into Browning’s conception.

In the exalted symbolism of the “Prometheus Unbound” Shelley shows that, in his view, evil and suffering were not inherent in the nature of things, the tyranny of evil having gained its ascendancy through the persistence of out-worn ideals, such as that of Power or Force symbolized in the Greek idea of Jupiter. Prometheus is the revolting mind of mankind, enslaved by the tyranny of Jupiter, hating the tyrant, yet determined to endure all the tyrant can inflict upon him rather than admit his right to rule. The freeing of Prometheus and the dethronement of Jupiter come through the awakening in the heart of Prometheus of pity for the tyrant—that is, Prometheus has learned to love his enemies as he loves his friends. The remainder of the poem is occupied with showing the effects upon humanity of this universal awakening of love.

In the fine passage where the Spirit of the Earth hears the trumpet of the Spirit of the Hour sound in a great city, it beholds all ugly human shapes and visages which had caused it pain pass floating through the air, and fading still

“Into the winds that scattered them, and those
From whom they passed seemed mild and lovely forms
After some foul disguise had fallen, and all
Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise
And greetings of delighted wonder, all
Went to their sleep again.”

And the Spirit of the Hour relates:

“Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled
The abysses of the sky and the wide earth,
There was a change: the impalpable thin air
And the all-circling sunlight were transformed
As if the sense of love dissolved in them
Had folded itself around the sphered world.”