Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

To this scientific and metaphysical side Browning adds, as has also already been pointed out, a mystical side based upon feeling. His revelations of divinity do not come by means of self-induced trances, as Tennyson’s seem to have come, but through the mystery of feeling. This mystical state seems to have been his habitual one, if we may judge by its prominence in his poetry. He occasionally descends to the realm of reason, as he has in “La Saisiaz,” but the true plane of his existence is up among the exaltations of aspiration and love. His cosmic sense is a sense of God as Love, and is the quality most characteristic of the man. It is like, though perhaps not identical with, the mysticism of Whitman, which seems to have been an habitual state. He writes: “There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.”

This mystic mood of Browning’s which underlies his whole work—even a work like “The Ring and the Book,” where evil in various forms is rampant and seems for the time being to conquer—is nowhere more fully, and at the same time more concisely, expressed than in his poem “Reverie,” one of his last, which ends with a full revelation of this mystical feeling, from which the less inspired reasoning of “La Saisiaz” is a descent:

“Even as the world its life,
So have I lived my own—
Power seen with Love at strife,
That sure, this dimly shown—
Good rare and evil rife
“Whereof the effect be—faith
That, some far day, were found
Ripeness in things now rathe,
Wrong righted, each chain unbound,
Renewal born out of scathe.
“Why faith—but to lift the load,
To leaven the lump, where lies
Mind prostrate through knowledge owed
To the loveless Power it tries
To withstand, how vain! In flowed
“Ever resistless fact:
No more than the passive clay
Disputes the potter’s act,
Could the whelmed mind disobey
Knowledge the cataract.

“But, perfect in every part,
Has the potter’s moulded shape,
Leap of man’s quickened heart,
Throe of his thought’s escape,
Stings of his soul which dart,
“Through the barrier of flesh, till keen
She climbs from the calm and clear,
Through turbidity all between
From the known to the unknown here,
Heaven’s ‘Shall be’ from Earth’s ‘Has been’?
“Then life is—to wake not sleep,
Rise and not rest, but press
From earth’s level where blindly creep
Things perfected more or less,
To the heaven’s height, far and steep,
“Where, amid what strifes and storms
May wait the adventurous quest,
Power is Love—transports, transforms,
Who aspired from worst to best,
Sought the soul’s world, spurned the worms!
“I have faith such end shall be:
From the first, Power was—I knew.
Life has made clear to me
That, strive but for closer view,
Love were as plain to see.
“When see? When there dawns a day,
If not on the homely earth,
Then yonder, worlds away,
Where the strange and new have birth
And Power comes full in play.”

Browning has, far more than Tennyson, put religious speculation upon a basis where it may stand irrespective of a belief in the revelations of historical Christianity. For the central doctrine of Christianity he had so profound a reverence that he recurs to it again and again in his poetry, and at times his feeling seems to carry him to the verge of orthodox belief. So near does he come to it that many religious critics have been convinced that he might be claimed as a Christian in the orthodox sense of the word.

A more careful reading, however, of such poems as “The Death in the Desert,” and “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” upon which rest principally the claim of the poet’s orthodoxy, will reveal that no certain assertion of a belief in supernaturalism is made, even though the poems are dramatic and it might be made without necessarily expressing the feeling of the poet. What Browning felt was that in historical Christianity the highest symbol of divine love had been reached. Though he may at times have had moods in which he would fain have believed true an ideal which held for him great beauty, his worth for his age was in saving religion, not upon a basis of faith, but upon the ground of logical arguments deduced from the failure of knowledge, of his personal intuition of God and his mystical vision in regard to the nature of God.

So complete a synthesis is this that only in the present century is its full purport likely to be realized. The thought of the century is showing everywhere a strong reaction away from materialism and toward religious thought.

Even in the latest stronghold of science, psychology, as we have already seen, there is no formula which will explain the existence of individuality. While the scientists themselves plod on, often quite unconscious that they are not dealing with ultimates, the thinkers are no longer satisfied with a philosophy of materialism, and once more it is being recognized that the province of philosophy is to give us God, the soul and immortality.

It is especially interesting in this connection to observe that Germany, the land of destructive biblical criticism, which Browning before the middle of the century handled with the consummate skill characteristic of him, by accepting its historical conclusions while conserving the spirit of Christianity, has now in the person of Professor Rudolf Eucken done an almost similar thing. Like Browning, he is a strong individualist and believes that the development of the soul is the one thing of supreme moment. “There is a spontaneous springing up of the individual spiritual life,” he writes, “only within the soul of the individual. All social and all historical life that does not unceasingly draw from this source falls irrecoverably into a state of stagnation and desolation. The individual can never be reduced to the position of a mere member of society, of a church, of a state; notwithstanding all external subordination, he must assert an inner superiority; each spiritual individual is more than the whole external world.”

Browning at 77 (1889)