Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

During these decades the solid phalanx of religious believers has continued to watch from its heights with more or less of fear the advance of science. Here, too, there has been division in the ranks. Many denounced the scientists as the destroyers of religion; others like the good Bishop Colenso could write such words as these in 1873: “Bless God devoutly for the gift of modern science”; and who ten years earlier had expressed satisfaction in the fact that superstitious belief in the letter of the Bible was giving way to a true appreciation of the real value of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures as containing the dawn of religious light.

From another quarter came the critical students of the Bible, who subjected its contents to the keen tests of historical and archæological study. Serene, above all the turmoil, was the small band of genuine philosophers who, like Browning’s own musician, Abt Vogler, knew the very truth. No matter what disturbing facts may be brought to light by science, be it man’s descent from Anthropoids or a mechanical view of sensation, they continue to dwell unshaken in the light of a transcendent truth which reaches them through some other avenue than that of the mind.

Browning belonged by nature in this last group. Already in “Sordello” his attention is turned to the development of the soul, and from that time on to the end of his career he is the champion of the soul-side of existence with all that it implies of character development—“little else being worth study,” as he declared in his introduction to a second edition of the poem written twenty years after its first appearance.

On this rock, the human soul, he takes his stand, and, though all the complex waves of the tempest of nineteenth-century thought break against his feet, he remains firm.

Beginning with “Sordello,” it is no longer evolution as applied to every aspect of the universe but evolution as applied to the human spirit which has his chief interest. Problems growing out of the marvelous developments of such sciences as astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry or biology do not enter into the main body of the poet’s thought, though there are allusions many and exact which show his familiarity with the growth of these various objective sciences during his life.

During all the middle years of his poetic career the relations of the mind and the spirit seemed to fascinate Browning, especially upon the side of the problems connected with the supernatural bases of religious experience. These are the problems which grew out of that phase of scholarly advance represented by biblical criticism.

Such a poem as “Saul,” for example, though full of a humanity and tenderness, as well as of a sheer poetic beauty, which endear it alike to those who appreciate little more than the content of the poem, and to those whose appreciation is that of the connoisseur in poetic art, is nevertheless an interpretation of the origin of prophecy, especially of the Messianic idea, which places Browning in the van of the thought of the century on questions connected with biblical criticism.

At the time when “Saul” was written, 1845, modern biblical criticism had certainly gained very little hearing in England, for even as late as 1862 Bishop Colenso’s enlightened book on the Pentateuch was received, as one writer expresses it, with “almost unanimous disapprobation and widespread horror.”

Critics of the Bible there had been since the seventeenth century, but they had produced a confused mass of stuff in their attacks upon the authenticity of the Bible against which the orthodox apologists had succeeded in holding their own. At the end of the eighteenth and the dawn of the nineteenth century came the more systematic criticism of German scholars, echoes of whose theories found their way into England through the studies of such men as Pusey. But these, though they gave full consideration to the foremost of the German critics of the day, ranged themselves, for the most part, on the side of orthodoxy.

Eichhorn, one of the first of the Germans to be studied in England, had found a point of departure in the celebrated “Wolfenbüttel Fragments,” which had been printed by Lessing from manuscripts by an unknown writer Reimarus discovered in the Wolfenbüttel library. These fragments represent criticism of the sweepingly destructive order, characteristic of what has been called the naturalistic school. Although Eichhorn agreed with the writer of the “Fragments” that the biblical narratives should be divested of all their supernatural aspects, he did not interpret the supernatural elements as simply frauds designed to deceive in order that personal ends might be gained. He restored dignity to the narrative by insisting at once upon its historical verity and upon a natural interpretation of the supernatural—“a spontaneous illumination reflected from antiquity itself,” which might result from primitive misunderstanding of natural phenomena, from the poetical embellishment of facts, or the symbolizing of an idea.