Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

The conviction here of immortality through personal love is born of the feeling that his friend whom he has loved must live forever. The note of “In Memoriam” is sounded again. Tennyson’s philosophy, in a nutshell, seems to be that doubts are not so much overcome as quieted by a struggling faith in the truths of religion, of which the chief assurance lies in the thought of personal love. Not as in Browning, that human love, because of its beauty and ecstasy, is a symbol of divine love, but because of its wish to be reunited to the one beloved is an earnest of continued existence. While Tennyson’s poetry is saturated with allusions to the science of the century, it seems to be ever the dark side of the doctrine of evolution that is dwelt upon by him, while his religion is held to in spite of the truths of science, not because the truths of science have given him in any way a new revelation of beauty.

Much more emphasis has been laid upon Tennyson’s importance as a prophet in religious matters than seems to the present writer warranted. He did not even keep pace with the thought of the century, though his poetry undoubtedly reflected the liberalized theology of the earlier years of the second half of the century. As Joseph Jacobs says, “In Memoriam” has been to the Broad Church Movement what the “Christian Year” has been to the High Church. But where is the Broad Church now? Tennyson was, on the whole, adverse to evolution, which has been almost an instinct in English speculation for the last quarter of a century. So far as he was the voice of his age in speculative matters, he only represented the thought of the “sixties.”

What vision Tennyson did have came not through intuition or the higher reason, but through his psychic power of self-hypnotism. In “The Ancient Sage” is a passage describing the sort of trance into which he could evidently cause himself to fall:

“For more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the self was loosed,
And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of self,
The gain of such large life as match’d with ours
Were sun to spark—unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow world.”

Such trances have been of common occurrence in the religious life of the world, as Professor James has shown so exhaustively in his great book, “Varieties of Religious Experience.” And in that book, too, it is maintained, against the scientific conclusions, that such ecstasies “signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporal one of degeneration and hysteria,” that mystical states have an actual value as revelations of the truth. After passing in review many examples of ecstasy and trance, from the occasional experiences of the poets to the constant experiences of the mediæval mystics and the Hindu Yogis, he finally comes to the interesting conclusion that:

“This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our one-ness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity—which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land.”

The witness given religion in Tennyson’s mystical trances is then his most valuable contribution to the speculative thought of the century, and in a sense is prophetic of the twentieth century, because in this century revelations attained in this way have been given a credence long denied them except in the case of the uneducated and super-emotional, by a man of the sound scholarship and good judgment of Professor James.

How fully Browning was a representative of the thought of this time, combining as he did an intuitional with a scientific outlook has already been shown. Evolution means for him the progress toward the infinite, and is full of beauty and promise. The failures in nature and life which fill Tennyson with despair furnish to Browning’s mind a proof of the existence of the absolute, or a somewhere beyond, where things will be righted. Observation shows him everywhere in the universe the existence of power and mystery. The mystery is either that of the incomprehensibleness of causes, or is emphasized in the existence of evil. The first leads to awe and wonder, and is a constant spur to mankind to seek further knowledge, but the poet insists that the knowledge so accumulated is not actual gain, but only a means to gain in so far as it keeps bringing home to the human mind the fact of its own inadequacy in the discovery of truth. The existence of evil leads to the constant effort to overcome it, and to sympathy and pity, and as the failure of knowledge proves a future of truth to be won, so the failure of mankind to attain perfection in moral action proves a future of goodness to be realized. All this may be found either explicitly or implied in the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer, whose fundamental principles, despite the fire of criticism to which he has been subjected from all sides—science, religion, metaphysics, each of which felt it could not claim him exclusively as its own, yet resenting his inclusion of the other two—are now, in the first decade of the twentieth century, receiving the fullest recognition by such masters of the history of nineteenth-century thought as Theodore Merz and Émile Boutroux.

People often forget that while Spencer spent his life upon the knowledge or scientific side of human experience, he frequently asserted that there was in the human consciousness an intuition of the absolute which was the only certain knowledge possessed by man. Here again Browning was at one with Spencer. Discussing the problem of a future life in “La Saisiaz,” he declares that God and the soul are the only facts of which he is absolutely certain:

“I have questioned and am answered. Question, answer presuppose
Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers—is, it knows;
As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself—a force
Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,
Unaffected by its end—that this thing likewise needs must be;
Call this—God, then, call that—soul, and both—the only facts for me.
Prove them facts? That they o’erpass my power of proving, proves them such.”