Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

Another doctrine upon which the nineteenth-century belief in progress as the law of life has set its seal is that of the pursuit of happiness, or the striving for the greatest good of the whole number in which oneself is not to be excluded. With this doctrine Browning shows himself in full sympathy in “Two Camels,” wherein Ferishtah contends that only through the development of individual happiness and the experiencing of many forms of joyousness can one help others to happiness and joyousness, while in “Plot Culture” the enjoyment of human emotion as a means of developing the soul is emphasized.

The relation of good and evil in their broader aspects occupy the poet’s attention in others of this group. Nineteenth-century thought brought about a readjustment of these relations. Good and evil as absolutely definable entities gave place to the doctrine that good and evil are relative terms, a phrase which we sometimes forget must be understood in two ways: first, that good and evil are relative to the state of society in which they exist. What may be good according to the ethics of a Fejee Islander would not hold in the civilized society of to-day. This is the evil of lack of development which in the long run becomes less. On the other hand, there is the evil of suffering and pain which it is more difficult to reconcile with the idea of omnipotent power. In “Mihrab Shah,” Browning gives a solution of this problem in consonance with the idea that were it not for evil we should not have learned how to appreciate the good, to work for it, and, in doing so, bring about progress.

To his pupil, worried over this problem, Ferishtah points out that evil in the form of bodily suffering has given rise to the beautiful sentiments of pity and sympathy. Having proved in this way that good really grows out of evil, there is still the query, shall evil be encouraged in order that good may be evolved? “No!” Ferishtah declares, man bound by man’s conditions is obliged to estimate as “fair or foul right, wrong, good, evil, what man’s faculty adjudges as such,” therefore the man will do all he can to relieve the suffering or poor Mihrab Shah with a fig plaster.

The final answers, then, which Browning gives to the ethical problems which grew out of the acceptance of modern scientific doctrines are, in brief, that man shall use that will-power of which he feels himself possessed—the power really distinguishing him from the brute creation—in working against whatever appears to him to be evil; while that good for which he shall work is the greatest happiness of all.

In the remaining poems of the group we have the poet’s mature word upon the philosophical doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, a doctrine which received the most elaborate demonstration from Herbert Spencer in many directions. It is insisted upon in “Cherries,” “The Sun,” in “A Bean Stripe also Apple Eating,” and especially in that remarkable poem, “A Pillar at Sebzevar.” That knowledge fails is the burden of these poems. Knowledge the golden is but lacquered ignorance, as gain to be mistrusted. Curiously enough, this contention of Browning’s has been the cause of most of the criticisms against him as a thinker, yet the deepest thinkers of to-day as well as many in the past have held the opinion in some form or another that the intellect was unable to solve the mysterious problems of the universe. Even the metaphysicians who build their unstable air castles on à priori ideas declare these ideas cannot be matters of mere intellectual perception, but must be intuitions of the higher reason. Browning, however, does not rest in the mere assertion that the intellect fails. From this truth, so disconcerting to many, he draws immense comfort. Though intellectual knowledge be mistrusted as gain, it is not to be mistrusted as means to gain, for through its very failure it becomes a promise of greater things.

“Friend,” quoth Ferishtah in “A Pillar of Sebzevar,”

“As gain—mistrust it! Nor as means to gain:
Lacquer we learn by: cast in firing-pot,
We learn—when what seemed ore assayed proves dross
Surelier true gold’s worth, guess how purity
I’ the lode were precious could one light on ore
Clarified up to test of crucible.
The prize is in the process: knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach.”

For men with minds of the type of Spencer’s this negative assurance of the Infinite is sufficient, but human beings as a rule will not rest satisfied with such cold abstractions. Though Job said thousands of years ago, “Who by searching can find out God,” mankind still continues to search. They long to know something of the nature of the divine as well as to be assured of its existence. In this very act of searching Browning declares the divine becomes most directly manifest.

From the earliest times of which we have any record man has been aspiring toward God. Many times has he thought he had found him, but with enlarged perceptions he discovered later that what he had found was only God’s image built up out of his own human experiences.

This search of man for the divine is described with great power and originality in the Fancy called “The Sun,” under the symbol of the man who seeks the prime Giver that he may give thanks where it is due for a palatable fig. This search for God, Browning calls love, meaning by that the moving, aspiring force of the whole universe in its multifarious manifestations, from the love that goes forth in thanks for benefits received, through the aspiration of the artist toward beauty, of the lover toward human sympathy, even of the scientist toward knowledge, to the lover of humanity like Ferishtah, who declares, “I know nothing save that love I can, boundlessly, endlessly.”