Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

He calls his system “activism,” which merely seems to be another way of saying that the soul-life is one of aspiration toward moral ideals and the will to carry them out. Such a life, he thinks, demands a new world and a new character in man, and is entirely at variance with nature. “Our whole life is an indefatigable seeking and pressing forward. In self-consciousness the framework is given which has to be filled; in it we have acquired only the basis upon which the superstructure has to be raised. We have to find experience in life itself to reveal something new, to develop life, to increase its range and depth. The endeavor to advance in spirituality, to win through struggle, is the soul of the life of the individual and the work of universal history.” Readers of Browning will certainly not feel that there is anything new in this.

In so far, however, as he finds the spiritual life at variance with nature he parts company with Browning, showing himself to be under the influence of the dualism of the past which regarded matter and spirit as antagonistic. In Browning’s view, matter and spirit are the two aspects of God, in the one, power being manifested; in the other, love.

It follows naturally from this, that Eucken does not think of evil as a means by which good is developed. He prefers to regard it as unexplained, and forever with us to be overcome. Its reduction to a means of realizing the good leads, he thinks, “to a weakening which threatens to transform the mighty world-struggle into an artistic arrangement of things and into an effeminate play, and which takes away that bitterness from evil without which there is no strenuousness in the struggle and no vitality in life. Thus it remains true that religion does not so much explain as presuppose evil.” An attempt to explain evil, he says, belongs to speculation rather than to religion. That he has an inkling of the region to which speculation might lead him is shown when it is realized, that upon his explanation, as one critic of him has said, it might be possible to find “some reconciliation in the fact that this world with its negations had awakened the spiritual life to its absolute affirmation, which could, therefore, not be in absolute opposition.”

In leaving aside speculation and confining himself to what he considers the religious aspects of life, he no doubt strengthens himself as a leader of those whose speculative powers have not yet been developed, or who can put one side of the mind to sleep and accept with the other half-truths. The more developed mind, however, will prefer Browning’s greater inclusiveness. To possess a complete view of life, man must live his own life as a human being struggling to overcome the evil, at the same time keeping in mind the fact that evil is in a sense the raw material provided by God, or the Absolute, or whatever name one chooses to give to the all-powerful and all-loving, from which the active soul of man is to derive a richness of beauty and harmony of development not otherwise possible. Eucken’s attitude toward Jesus is summed up in a way which reminds one strongly of the position taken in the comment made at the end of “The Death in the Desert.” He writes: “The position of the believer in the universal Christian Church is grounded upon a relation to God whose uniqueness emerges from the essential divinity of Jesus; only on this supposition can the personality of Christ stand as the unconditional Lord and Master to whom the ages must do homage. And while the person of Jesus retains a wonderful majesty apart from dogma, its greatness is confined to the realm of humanity, and whatever of new and divine life it brings to us must be potential and capable of realization in us all. We therefore see no more in this figure the normative and universally valid type of all human life, but merely an incomparable individuality which cannot be directly imitated. At any rate the figure of Jesus, thus understood in all its height and pure humanity, can no longer be an object of faith and divine honor. All attempts to take shelter in a mediating position are shattered against a relentless either—or. Between man and God there is no intermediate form of being for us, for we cannot sink back into the ancient cult of heroes. If Jesus, therefore, is not God, if Christ is not the second person in the Trinity, then he is a man; not a man like any average man among ourselves, but still man. We can therefore honor him as a leader, a hero, a martyr, but we cannot directly bind ourselves to him or root ourselves in him; we cannot submit to him unconditionally. Still less can we make him the centre of a cult. To do so from our point of view would be nothing else than an intolerable deification of a human being.” The comment at the end of “The Death in the Desert” puts a similar question, and answers, “Call Christ, then, the illimitable God, Or Lost!” But the final word which casts a light back upon the previous conclusion is “But, ’twas Cerinthus that is lost”—the man, in other words, who held the heresy that the Christ part only resided in Jesus, who was merely human, and that the divine part was not crucified, having flown away before. Thus it is implied that neither those who believe Jesus divine, nor those who believe him human, are lost, but those who try as Cerinthus did to make a compromise. The same note is struck in “Christmas Eve,” and now Professor Eucken takes an exactly similar ground in regard to any sort of compromise, coming out boldly, however, as Browning does not in this poem, though he makes no strong argument against it—in the acceptance of Christ as human. Browning’s own attitude is expressed as clearly as it is anywhere in his work in the epilogue to “Dramatis Personæ,” in which the conclusion is entirely in sympathy with that of Eucken:

“When you see what I tell you—nature dance
About each man of us, retire, advance,
As though the pageant’s end were to enhance
“His worth, and—once the life, his product gained—
Roll away elsewhere, keep the strife sustained,
And show thus real, a thing the North but feigned—
“When you acknowledge that one world could do
All the diverse work, old yet ever new,
Divide us, each from other, me from you—
“Why, where’s the need of Temple, when the walls
O’ the world are that? What use of swells and falls
From Levites’ choir, Priests’ cries, and trumpet calls?
“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.”

The hold which the philosophy of Eucken seems to have taken upon the minds of many people all over the world shows that it must have great elements of strength. That there is a partial resemblance between his thought, which belongs to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and Browning’s is certain, but the fact remains that the poet made a synthesis of the elements which must go to the forming of any complete religious conceptions of the future so far in advance of his own century that even Eucken is in some respects behind it.

Another interesting instance of Browning’s presenting a line of reasoning which resembles very strongly one phase of present-day philosophy is to be found in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” The worldly Bishop gives voice to good pragmatic doctrine, which in a nutshell is, “believe in, or rather follow, that ideal which will be of the most use to you, and if it turns out not to be successful, then try another one.” The poet declares that Blougram said good things but called them by wrong names. If the ideal is a high one there is no great danger in such reasoning, but it can very easily be turned into sophistical arguments for an ideal of living to thoroughly selfish ends, as Blougram actually did. The poem might almost be taken as a prophetic criticism of the weak aspects of pragmatism.

The belief in immortality which pervades Browning’s work often comes out in a form suggesting the idea of reincarnation. His future for the human soul is not a heaven of bliss, but life in other worlds full of activity and aspiration. This note is struck in “Paracelsus,” where life’s destiny is described to be the climbing of pleasure’s heights forever the seeking of a flying point of bliss remote. In his last volume the idea is more fully brought out in “Rephan.” In this it is held that a state of perfect bliss might grow monotonous, and that a preferable state would be to aspire, yet never attain, to the object aimed at. The transmigration is from “Rephan,” where all was merged in a neutral Best to Earth, where the soul which had been stagnating would have an opportunity to strive, not rest. The most beautiful expression, however, of the idea of a future of many lives is found in “One Word More”:

“So it seems: I stand on my attainment.
This of verse, alone, one life allows me;
Verse and nothing else have I to give you.
Other heights in other lives, God willing:
All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love!”

Though the theory of reincarnation is so ancient a one, and one entirely discredited by Christianity, Browning was again expressing an ideal which was to be revived in our own day. Oriental thought has made it almost a commonplace of talk. Many people doubtless speak of what they mean to do in their next incarnation without having the thought very deeply imbedded in their consciousness, yet the mere fact that one hears the remark so often proves what a hold the theory has on the imagination of mankind. As Browning gives it in “One Word More,” the successive incarnations take one on to higher heights—“other lives in other worlds.” Thus regarded, it is the final outcome of evolution and progress, a process to be carried forward in other worlds than our own, and has no degrading suggestion of a degenerating, because of sin, into lower forms of existence. The movement is always upward. Thus it has been effected by the idea that progress is the law of life, and that evolution means, on the whole, progress.