Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

In relation to Browning and the other chief poets of the nineteenth century, the only aspects of interest are in the region of thought and social ideals.

With the exception of Tennyson, no other of the chief poets of the century need be considered in this connection with Browning, because, as we have seen in a previous chapter, they reflected on the whole the prevalent disbelief and doubt of the century which came with the revelations of science. Many people have regarded Tennyson as the chief prophet of the century. He seems, however, to the present writer to have held an attitude which reflected the general tone of religious aspiration in the century, rather than one which struck a new note indicating the direction in which future religious aspiration might turn.

The conflict in his mind is between doubt and belief. To doubt he has often given the most poignant expression, as in his poem called “Despair.” The story is of a man and his wife who have lost all religious faith through the reading of scientific books:

“Have I crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? O, yes,
For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press,
When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are whooping at noon,
And doubt is the lord of the dunghill, and crows to the sun and the moon,
Till the sun and the moon of our science are both of them turned into blood.
And hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good;
For their knowing and know-nothing books are scatter’d from hand to hand—
We have knelt in your know-all chapel, too, looking over the sand.”

If the effect of science was bad upon this weak-minded pair, the effect of religion as it had been taught them was no better. The absolute hopelessness of a blasted faith in all things reaches its climax in the following stanzas:

“And the suns of the limitless universe sparkled and shone in the sky,
Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light was a lie—
Bright as with deathless hope—but, however they sparkled and shone,
The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our own—
No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below,
A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.

“See, we were nursed in the drear nightfold of your fatalist creed,
And we turn’d to the growing dawn, we had hoped for a dawn indeed,
When the light of a sun that was coming would scatter the ghosts of the past.
And the cramping creeds that had madden’d the peoples would vanish at last,
And we broke away from the Christ, our human brother and friend,
For He spoke, or it seemed that He spoke, of a hell without help, without end.
“Hoped for a dawn, and it came, but the promise had faded away;
We had passed from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day;
He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire,
The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire—
Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong,
Of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder and wrong.”

There are many hopeful passages in Tennyson to offset such deep pessimism as is expressed in this one, which, moreover, being a dramatic utterance it must be remembered, does not reflect any settled conviction on the poet’s part, though it shows him liable to moods of the most extreme doubt. In “The Ancient Sage” the agnostic spirit of the century is fully described, but instead of leading to a mood of despair, the mood is one of clinging to faith in the face of all doubt. The sage speaking, says:

“Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one.
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee,
Are not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven. Wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’
She sees the best that glimmers thro’ the worst,
She feels the sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d Mirage!”

There is nothing here more reassuring than a statement made by the sage, based upon no argument, nor revelation, nor intuition—nothing but the utilitarian doctrine that it will be wiser to cling to Faith beyond Faith! This is a sample of the sort of assurance in the reality of God and of immortality which Tennyson was in the habit of giving. In the poem called “Vastness” he presents with genuine power a pessimistic view of humanity and civilization in all its various phases—all of no use, neither the good any more than the bad, “if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last?” The effect of the dismal atmosphere of the poem as a whole is supposed to be dissipated by the last stanza:

“Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him forever: the dead are not dead but alive.”