Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

It will be seen from this review of the salient points enlarged upon by Browning in these last groups of poems that he has deliberately set himself to harmonize the intellectual and the intuitional aspects of human consciousness. He has sought to join the hands of mind and spirit. The artistic exuberance of Paracelsus is supplemented by spiritual fervor. To the young Browning, the beauty of immortal, joyous life pursuing its heights forever was as a radiant vision, to the Browning who had grappled with the strangling problems of the century this beauty was not so distinctly seen, but its reality was felt with all the depth of an intensely spiritual nature—a nature moreover so absolutely fearless, that it could unflinchingly confront every giant of doubt, or of disillusionment which science in its pristine egotism had conjured up, saying “Keep to thine own province, where thou art indeed powerful; to the threshold of the eternal we may come through thy ministrations, but the consciousness of divine things cometh through the still small voice of the heart.”

Thus, while he accepted every law relating to phenomena which science has been able to formulate, he realized the futility of resting in a primal, wholly dehumanized energy, that is, something not greater but less than its own outcome, humanity. He was incapable of any such absurdity as Clifford’s dictum that “Reason, intelligence and volition are properties of a complex which is made up of elements, themselves not rational, not intelligent, not conscious.” Since Clifford’s time, the marked differences between the processes of a psychic being like man, and the processes of nature have been so fully recognized and so carefully defined by psychologists that Browning’s insistence upon making man the center whence truth radiates has had full confirmation.

Theodore Merz has summed up these psychological conclusions in regard to the characteristics peculiar to man as distinguished from all the rest of the universe in the following words:

“There are two properties with which we are familiar through common sense and ordinary reflection as belonging especially to the phenomena of our inner self-conscious life, and these properties seem to lie quite beyond the sphere and the possibilities of the ordinary methods of exact research.

“As we ascend in the scale of human beings we become aware that they exhibit a special kind of unity which cannot be defined, a unity which, even when apparently lost in periods of unconsciousness, is able to reestablish itself by the wonderful and indefinable property called ‘memory’—a center which can only be very imperfectly localized—a together which is more than a mechanical sum; in fact we rise to the conception of individuality, that which cannot be divided and put together again out of its parts.

“The second property is still more remarkable. The world of the inner processes which accompany the higher forms of nervous development in human beings is capable of unlimited growth and it is capable of this by a process of becoming external: it becomes external, and, as it were, perpetuates itself in language, literature, science and art, legislation, society, and the like. We have no analogue of this in physical nature, where matter and energy are constant quantities and where the growth and multiplication of living matter is merely a conversion of existing matter and energy into special altered forms without increase or decrease in quantity. But the quantity of the inner thing is continually on the increase; in fact, this increase is the only thing of interest in the whole world.”

Thus the modern psychologist and the poet who in the early days of the century said the soul was the only thing worth study join hands.

The passage already referred to in “Francis Furini” presents most explicitly the objective or intellectual method and the subjective or intuitional method of the search for truth.

Furini is made to question—

“Evolutionists!
At truth I glimpse from depths, you glance from heights,
Our stations for discovery opposites,
How should ensue agreement! I explain.”