Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

He describes, then, how the search of the evolutionist for the absolute is outside of man. “’Tis the tip-top of things to which you strain.” Arriving at the spasm which sets things going, they are stopped, and since having arrived at unconscious energy, they can go no further, they now drop down to a point where atoms somehow begin to think, feel, and know themselves to be, and the world’s begun such as we recognize it. This is a true presentation of the attitude of physicists and chemists to-day, the latter especially holding that experiment proves that in the atoms themselves is an embryonic form of consciousness and will. From these is finally evolved at last self-conscious man. But after all this investigating on the part of the evolutionist what has been gained? Of power—that is, power to create nature or life, or even to understand it—man possesses no particle, and of knowledge, only just so much as to show that it ends in ignorance on every side. This is the result of the objective search for truth. But begin with man himself, and there is a fact upon which he can take a sure stand, his self-consciousness—a “togetherness,” as Merz says, which cannot be explained mathematically by the adding up of atoms; and furthermore an inborn certainty that whatever is felt to be within had its rise or cause without: “thus blend the conscious I, and all things perceived in one Effect.” Through this subjective perception of an all-powerful cause a reflex light is thrown back upon all that the investigations of the intellect have accomplished. The cause is no longer simply blind energy, but must itself be possessed of gifts as great and still greater than those with which the soul of man is endowed. The forces at work in nature thus become instinct with wonder and beauty, the good and evil of life reveal themselves as a means used by absolute Power and Love for the perfecting of the soul which made to know on and ever must know

“All to be known at any halting stage
Of [the] soul’s progress, such as earth, where wage
War, just for soul’s instruction, pain with joy,
Folly with wisdom, all that works annoy
With all that quiets and contents.”

To sum up—our investigations into Browning’s thought show him to be a type primarily of the mystic. Mysticism in its most pronounced forms regards the emotions of the human mind as supreme. The mystic, instead of allowing the intellectual faculty to lead the way, degrades it to an inferior position and makes it entirely subservient to the feelings. In some moods Browning seems almost to belong to this pronounced type; for example, when he says in “A Pillar at Sebzevar,” “Say not that we know, rather that we love, therefore we know enough.”

David Strauss

It must be remembered, however, that he is not in either class of the supernatural mystic, one of which supposes truth to be gained by a fixed supernatural channel, the other that it is gained by extraordinary supernatural means. On the contrary, truth comes to Browning in pursuance of a regular law or fact of the inward sensibility, which may be defined in his case as a mode of intuition. His intuition of God, as we have seen, is based upon the feeling of love both in its human and its abstract aspects.

But this is not all. Upon the intellectual side Browning accepted the conclusions of scientific investigation as far as phenomena were concerned, and while he denied its worth in giving direct knowledge of the Absolute, he recognized it as useful because of its very failure in strengthening the sense of the existence of a power transcending human conception. “What is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence of the fulness of the days?” And, furthermore, with mystic love already in our hearts, all knowledge that the scientist may bring us of the phenomena of nature and life only adds immeasurably to our wonder and awe of the power which has brought these things to pass, thus “with much more knowledge” comes “always much more love.”

Once more, the poet’s mysticism is tempered by a tinge of idealism. There are several passages in his poems, notably one already quoted from Furini, which show him to have had a perception of God directly through his own consciousness by means of what the idealist calls the higher reason. His perception, for instance, that whatever takes place within the consciousness had its rise without and that this external origin emanates from God is the idealist’s way of arriving at the absolute.

Thus we see that into Browning’s religious conceptions enter the intuitions of the artistic consciousness as illustrated in Paracelsus where God is the divine artist joying in his creations, the intuitions of the intellect which finds in the failure of knowledge to probe the secrets of the universe the assurance of a transcendent power beyond human ken, the intuition of the higher reason which affirms God is, and the intuitions of the heart which promise that God is love, through whom is to come fulfilment of all human aspirations toward Beauty, Truth, and Love in immortality.

If these are all points which have been emphasized, now by one, now by another, of the vast array of thinkers who have crowded the past century, there is no one who to my knowledge has so completely harmonized the various thought tendencies of the age, and certainly none who has clothed them in such a wealth of imaginative and emotional illustration.