Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

IV

SOCIAL IDEALS

Browning’s social ideals revolve about a trinity of values: the value of love, the value of truth, the value of evil. His ethics are the natural outgrowth of his mysticism and his idealism, with no touch of the utilitarianism which has been a distinctive mark of the fabric of English society during the nineteenth century, nor, on the other hand, of the hidebound conventionalism which has limited personal freedom in ways detrimental to just those aspects of social morality it was most anxious to preserve.

The fact of which Browning seemed more conscious than of any other fact of his existence, and which, as we have seen, was the very core of his mysticism, was feeling. Things about which an ordinary man would feel no emotion at all start in his mind a train of thoughts, ending only in the perception of divine love. The eating of a palatable fig fills his heart with such gratefulness to the giver of the fig that immediately he fares forth upon the way which brings him into the presence of the Prime Giver from whom all gifts are received. What ecstasy of feeling in the artist aspiring through his art to the higher regions of Absolute Beauty in “Abt Vogler” of the poet who loves, aspiring to the divine through his human love in the epilogue to “Ferishtah’s Fancies!” The perception of feeling was so intense that it became in him exalted and concentrated, incapable of dissipating itself in ephemeral sentimentalities, and this it is which gives feeling to Browning its mystical quality, and puts personal love upon the plane of a veritable revelation.

Though reports have often floated about in regard to his attachments to other women after Mrs. Browning’s death, the fact remains that he did not marry again, that he wrote the lyrics in “Ferishtah’s Fancies,” and the sonnet to Edward Fitzgerald just before his death, and thirty years after his wife’s death. Moreover, in the epilogue to “The Two Poets of Croisic” he gives a hint of what might be his attitude toward any other women who may have come into his life, in the application of the tale of the cricket chirping “love” in the place of the broken string of a poet’s lyre—

“For as victory was nighest,
While I sang and played,
With my lyre at lowest, highest,
Right alike—one string that made
Love sound soft was snapt in twain,
Never to be heard again,——
“Had not a kind cricket fluttered,
Perched upon the place
Vacant left, and duly uttered,
‘Love, Love, Love,’ when’er the bass
Asked the treble to atone
For its somewhat sombre drone.”

These rare qualities of constancy, exaltation and aspiration, in love sublimating it into a spiritual emotion, which was evidently the distinctive mark of Browning’s personality on the emotional side, furnishes the keynote by which his presentation or solution of the social problems involved in the relations of men and women is always to be gauged.

He had been writing ten years when he essayed his first serious presentation of what we might to-day call a problem play on an English subject in “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” In all of his long poems and in many of his short ones personal love had been portrayed under various conditions—between friends or lovers, husband and wife, or father and son, and in every instance it is a dominating influence in the action, as we have already seen it to be in “Strafford.” Again, in “King Victor and King Charles” the action centers upon Charles’s love for his father, and is also moulded in many ways by Polyxena’s love for her husband, Charles.

But a perception of the possible heights to be obtained by the passion of romantic love only fully emerges in “Pippa Passes,” for example in Ottima’s vision of the reality of her own love, despite her great sin as contrasted with that of Sebald’s, and in Jules’s rising above the conventionally low when he discovers he has been duped, and perceiving in Phene a purity of soul which no earthly conditions had been able to sully,

“Who, what is Lutwyche, what Natalia’s friends,
What the whole world except our love—my own,
Own Phene?...
I do but break these paltry models up
To begin art afresh ...
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!
Like a god going through the world there stands
One mountain for a moment in the dusk,
Whole brotherhoods of cedars on its brow:
And you are ever by me while I gaze
—Are in my arms as now—as now—as now!
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!
Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!”