Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

But the evil which results from this lack of development in individuals to other individuals, and to society at large, brings a problem which as we have already seen in the first chapter is not so easy of solution. Yet Browning solves it, for is it not through the combat with this evil that the soul is given its real opportunity for development? Pain and suffering give rise to the thirst for happiness and joy, and through the arousing of sympathy and pity, the desire that others shall have happiness and joy, therefore to be despairing and pessimistic about evil or to wish for its immediate annihilation would really be suicidal to the best interests of the human race; nay, he even goes farther than this, as is hinted in one of his last poems, “Rephan,” and imagines that any other state than one of flux between good and evil would be monotonous:

“Startle me up, by an Infinite
Discovered above and below me—height
And depth alike to attract my flight,
“Repel my descent: by hate taught love.
Oh, gain were indeed to see above
Supremacy ever—to move, remove,
“Not reach—aspire yet never attain
To the object aimed at! Scarce in vain,—
As each stage I left nor touched again.
“To suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss,
Wring knowledge from ignorance:—just for this—
To add one drop to a love—abyss!
“Enough: for you doubt, you hope, O men,
You fear, you agonize, die: what then?
Is an end to your life’s work out of ken?
“Have you no assurance that, earth at end,
Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend
In the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?”

In his attitude toward the existence of evil Browning takes issue with Carlyle, as already noted in the second chapter. Carlyle, as Browning represents him, cannot reconcile the existence of evil with beneficent and omniscient power. He makes the opponent, who is an echo of Carlyle in the argument in “Bernard de Mandeville,” exclaim:

“Where’s
Knowledge, where power and will in evidence
’Tis Man’s-play merely! Craft foils rectitude,
Malignity defeats beneficence,
And grant, at very last of all, the feud
’Twixt good and evil ends, strange thoughts intrude
Though good be garnered safely and good’s foe
Bundled for burning. Thoughts steal even so—
Why grant tares leave to thus o’ertop, o’ertower
Their field-mate, boast the stalk and flaunt the flower,
Triumph one sunny minute?”

No attempt must be made to show God’s reason for allowing evil. Any such attempt will fail. This passage comes as near as any in Browning to a plunge into the larger social questions which during the nineteenth century have come more and more to the front, and is an index of just where the poet stood in relation to the social movements of the century’s end. His gaze was so centered upon the individual and the power of the individual to work out his own salvation and the need of evil in the process that his philosophical attitude toward evil quite overtops the militant interest in overcoming it.

Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the immense evil of the social conditions in England, and raged and stormed against them, but could see no light by which evil could be turned into good. He little realized that his own storming at the ineptitude, the imbecility, the fool-ness of society, and his own despair over the, to him, unaccountable evils of existence, were in themselves a positive good growing out of the evil. Though he was not to suggest practical means for leading the masses out of bondage, he was to call attention in trumpet tones to the fact that the bondage existed. By so doing he was taking a first step or rather drawing aside the curtain and revealing the dire necessity that steps should be taken and taken soon. While Carlyle was militantly shouting against evil to some purpose which would later mean militant action against it, Browning was settling in his own mind just what relation evil should hold to good in the scheme of the universe, and writing a poem to tell why he was a liberal. In fine, Carlyle was opening the way toward the socialism of the latter part of the century, while Browning was still found in the camp of what the socialist of to-day calls the middle-class individualist.

Liberalism, which had taken on social conditions to the point through legislation where every man was free to be a property holder if he could manage to become one, and to amass wealth, left out of consideration the fact that he never could be free as long as he had to compete with every other man in the state to get these things. Hence the movement of the working classes to gain freedom by substituting for a competitive form of society a coöperative form. Great names in literature and art have helped toward the on-coming of this movement. Carlyle had railed at the millions of the English nation, “mostly fools;” Ruskin had bemoaned the enthronement of ugliness as the result of the industrial conditions; Matthew Arnold had proposed a panacea for the ills of the social condition in the bringing about of social equality through culture, and, best of all, William Morris had not only talked but acted.

William Morris

To any student of social movements to-day, whether he has been drawn into the swirl of socialistic propaganda or whether he is still comfortably sitting in his parlor feeling an intellectual sympathy but no emotional call to leave his parlor and be up and doing, Morris appears as the most interesting figure of the century. The pioneers in the nineteenth-century movement toward socialism in England, unless we except the social enthusiasm of a Shelley or a Blake, were Owen and Maurice. Owen was that remarkable anomaly, a self-made man who had gained his wealth because of the new industrial order inaugurated by the invention of machinery, who yet could look at the circumstances so fortuitous for him in an impersonal manner, and realize that what had put a silver spoon into his own mouth was taking away even pewter spoons from other men’s mouths. Although he was really in love with the new order of machine production, he realized what many to-day fail to see, that machine production organized for the benefit of private persons would most assuredly mean the poverty and the degradation of the workers. He did not stop here, however, but spent his vast fortune in trying to make the conditions of the workingmen better. In the estimation of socialists to-day his work was of a very high order, “not mere utopianism.” It bore no similarity to the romantic dreams of poets who saw visions of a perfect society regardless of the fact that a perfect society cannot suddenly blossom from conditions of appalling misery and degradation. Owen was a practical business man. He knew all the ins and outs of the industrial régime, and consequently he had a practical program, not a dream, which he wished to see carried out. Accounts of the conditions of the workers at that time are heartrending. Everywhere the same tale of abject poverty, ignorance, and oppression in field and factory, long hours of labor and dear food. To bring help to these downtrodden people was the burning desire of Robert Owen and his followers. His efforts were not rewarded by that success which they deserved, his failure being a necessary concomitant of the fact that even a practical program for betterment cannot suddenly take effect owing to the inevitable inertia of any long-established conditions. In showing the causes which kept him from the full accomplishment of his ideals, in spite of his genuine practicalness, Brougham Villiers, the recent historian of the socialist movement in England, says he attempted too much “to influence the workers from without, trying, of course vainly, to induce the governing classes to interest themselves in the work of social reform. Yet it is difficult to see what else he could have done at the time. We have already shown how utterly disorganized the working classes were, how incapable, indeed, of any organization. They were also destitute of political power, and miserably underpaid. What could they do to help themselves? Help, if it was to come at all, must come from the only people who then had the power, if they only had the will, to accord it, and to them, at first, Robert Owen appealed. Later, he turned to the people, and for them indeed his work was not utterly wasted, though generations were to pass before the full effect of it could be seen.”