Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

While no one can doubt that the exalted mysticism based upon feeling, and the large tolerance of the poem, reflect most nearly the poet’s personal attitude, on the other hand it is made clear that in his opinion the dissenting bodies possessed the forms of religious orthodoxy most potent at the time for good.

In “Easter Day,” the doubts and fears which have racked the hearts and minds of hundreds and thousands of individuals, as the result of the increase of scientific knowledge and biblical criticism are given more personal expression. The discussion turns principally upon the relation of the finite to the Infinite, a philosophical problem capable of much hair-splitting controversy, solved here in keeping with the prevailing thought of the century—namely, that the finite is relative and that this relativity is the proof of the Infinite.

The boldness of this statement, one such as might be found in the pages of Spencer, is by Browning elaborated with pictorial and emotional power. Only by a marvelous vision is the truth brought home to the speaker that the beauties and joys of earth are not all-sufficient, but that they are in the poet’s speech but partial beauty, though through this very limitation they become “a pledge of beauty in its plenitude,” gleams “meant to sting with hunger for full light.” It is not, however, until this see-er of visions perceives the highest gleam of earth that he is able to realize through the spiritual voice of his vision that the nature of the Infinite is in its essence Love, the supreme manifestation of which was symbolized in the death and resurrection of Christ.

This revelation is nevertheless rendered null by the man’s conviction that the vision was merely such “stuff as dreams are made on.” At the end as at the beginning he finds it hard to be a Christian.

His vision, which thus symbolizes his own course of emotionalized reasoning, brings hope but not conviction. Like the type in “Christmas Eve,” conviction can come to him only through a belief in supernatural revelation. He is evidently a man of broad intellectual endowment, who cannot, as the Tractarians did, lay his mind asleep, and rest in the authority of a church, nor yet can he be satisfied with the unconscious anthropomorphism of the sectarian. He doubts his own reasoning attempts to formulate religious doctrines, he doubts even the revelations of his own mystic states of consciousness; hence there is nothing for him but to flounder on through life as best he can, hoping, fearing, doubting, as many a serious mind has done owing to the nineteenth-century reaction against the supernatural dogmas of Christianity. Like others of his ilk, he probably stayed in the Anglican Church and weakened it through his latitudinarianisms.

A study in religious consciousness akin to this is that of Bishop Blougram. Here we have not a generalized type as in “Christmas Eve,” nor an imaginary individual as in “Easter Day,” but an actual study of a real man, it being no secret that Cardinal Wiseman was the inspiration for the poem.

Wiseman’s influence as a Catholic in the Tractarian movement was a powerful one, and in the poet’s dissection of his psychology an attempt is made to present the reasoning by means of which he made his appeal to less independent thinkers. With faith as the basis of religion, doubt serves as a moral spur, since the will must exercise itself in keeping doubt underfoot. Browning, himself, might agree that aspiration toward faith was one of the tests of its truth, he might also consider doubt as a spur to greater aspiration, but these ideals would connote something different to him from what he makes them mean to Blougram. The poet’s aspiration would be toward a belief in Omniscient Love and Power, his doubts would grow out of his inability to make this ideal tally with the sin and evil he beholds in life. Blougram’s consciousness is on a lower plane. His aspiration is to believe in the dogmas of the Church, his doubts arise from an intellectual fear that the dogmas may not be true. Where Browning seems to miss comprehension of such a nature as Blougram’s is in failing to recognize that on his own plane of consciousness genuine feeling and the perception of beauty play at least as large a part in the basis of his faith as utilitarian and instinctive reasoning do. While this poem shows in its references to the scientific theories of the origin of morals and its allusions to Strauss, as well as in the indirect portrayal of Gigadibs, the man emancipated from the Church, how entirely familiar the poet was with the currents of religious and scientific thought, it falls short as a fair analysis of a man who is acknowledged to have wielded a tremendous religious influence upon Englishmen of the caliber of Cardinal Newman, Kingsley, Arnold, and others.

If we leave out of account its connection with a special individual, the poem stands, however, as a delightful study of a type in which is depicted in passingly clever fashion methods of reasoning compounded of tantalizing gleams of truth and darkening sophistication.

The poem which shows most completely the effect of contemporary biblical criticism on the poet is “A Death in the Desert.” It has been said to be an attempt to meet the destructive criticism of Strauss. The setting of the poem is wonderfully beautiful, while the portrayal of the mystical quality of John’s reasoning is so instinct with religious feeling that it must be a wary reader indeed who does not come from the reading of this poem with the conviction that here, at least, Browning has declared himself unflinchingly on the side of supernatural Christianity in the face of the battering rams of criticism and the projectiles of science.

But if he be a wary reader, he will discover that the argument for supernaturalism only amounts to this—and it is put in the mouth of John, who had in his youth been contemporary with Christ—namely, that miracles had been performed when only by means of them faith was possible, though miracles were probably not what those who believed in them thought they were. Here is the gist of his defence of the supernatural: