To sum up, I think one is justified in concluding that as a sympathizer with the liberal political tendencies of the nineteenth century Browning is of his age. In his quiescence upon the proletarian movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century he seems to have been left behind by his age. In his insistence upon the worth of the individual to himself and to God he is both of his age and beyond it. As has been said of philosophy, “It cannot give us bread but it can give us God, soul and immortality,” so we may say of Browning, that though he did not raise up his voice in the cry of the proletarian for bread, he has insisted upon the truths of God, the soul and immortality.
V
ART SHIBBOLETHS
In the foregoing chapters the relations of the poet to the philosophical, religious, political, and social movements of the nineteenth century have been pointed out. In this and the next chapter some account of his relation to the artistic and literary ideals of the century will be attempted.
Browning’s relation to the art of the century is, of course, twofold, dealing as it must with his own conceptions and criticisms of art as well as with the position of his own art in the poetic development of the century.
In order to understand more fully his own contribution to the developing literary standards of the century it may be well first to consider the fundamental principles of art laid down by him in various poems wherein he has deliberately dealt with the subject.
The poem in which he has most clearly formulated the general principles underlying the growth of art is the “Parleying” with Charles Avison. Though music is the special art under consideration, the rules of growth obtaining in that are equally applicable to other arts. They are found to be, as we should expect in Browning, a combination of the ideas of evolution and conservation. Though the standards of art change and develop, because as man’s soul evolves, more complex forms are needed to express his deeper experiences, his wider vision, yet in each stage of the development there is an element of permanent beauty which by the aid of the historical sense man may continue to enjoy. That element of permanence exists when genuine feeling and aspiration find expression in forms of art. The element of change grows out of the fact that both the thought expressed and the form in which it is expressed are partial manifestations of the beauty or truth toward which feeling aspires; hence the need of fresh attempts to reach the infinite. The permanence of feeling, expressing itself in ever new forms, is brought out finely in this passage:
“Truths escape
Time’s insufficient garniture: they fade,
They fall—those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid
Was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine
And free through march frost: May dews crystalline
Nourish truth merely,—does June boast the fruit
As—not new vesture merely but, to boot,
Novel creation? Soon shall fade and fall
Myth after myth—the husk-like lies I call
New truth’s Corolla-safeguard.”