Again, in the liberality of his social ideals, combined with an intensest belief in the supremacy of genuine love, he was the forerunner of Ibsen, who, the world is beginning to discover, was not a subverter of high moral ideals, as it had thought, but a prophet of the new day, when to be untrue to the highest ideal of love will be accounted the greatest crime of one human being against another. From “The Doll’s House” to “When We That Are Dead Awaken” the same lesson is taught. Few people realize that this is the keynote of Browning’s teaching, or would be ready to regard him as a prophet of an ideal of love which shall come to be seen as the true one after the science of eugenics, the latest of the exact sciences, has found itself as powerless as all other sciences have been to touch the reality of life, because amid all the mysteries of the universe none is greater than the spiritual mystery of love. Among writers who are to-day recognizing a part of the truth, at least, is Ellen Key, but neither she nor Ibsen has insisted in the way that Browning has upon the mystical source of human love. That Browning is the poet who has given the world the utmost certainty of God, the soul and immortality, and the most inspiring ideals of human love, will be more completely recognized in the future. As time goes on he will emerge above the tumultuous intellectual life of the present, which, with its enormous increase of knowledge of phenomena, bringing with it a fairly titanic mastery of the forces of nature, and its generation of multitudes of ideas upon every conceivable subject, many of them trite, many of them puerile, and some of them no doubt of genuine value, obscures for the time being the greatness of any one voice. A little later, when the winnowing of ideas shall come, Browning will be recognized as one of the greatest men of his own age or any age—a man combining knowledge, wisdom, aspiration, and vision to a marvelous degree. He belongs to the master-order of poets, who write some things which will pass into the popular knowledge of the day, but whose serious achievements will be read and studied by the cultured and scholarly of all time. No students of Greek literature will feel that they can omit from their reading his Greek poems, no students of sociology will feel that they can omit from their reading “The Ring and the Book.” Lovers of the drama must ever respond to the beauty of “The Blot in the ’Scutcheon” and “Pippa Passes.” Even the student of verse technique will not be able to leave Browning out of account, and making allowances for the fact that the individuality of his style sometimes overasserts itself, he will realize more and more its freshness and its vividness, its power of suggestion, and its depths of emotional fervor. When the romanticism of a Keats or a Shelley has completely worked itself out in musical efflorescence; from which all thought-content has disappeared, there may grow up a school of poets which shall, without direct imitation, develop poetry along the lines of vigor and strength in form, and which shall have for its content a tremendous sense of the worth of humanity and an unshakable belief in the splendor of its destiny. Virilists might well be the name of this future school of poets who would hark back to Browning as their inspiration, and a most pleasant contrast would they be to the sentimental namby-pambyism which passes muster as poetry in much of the work of to-day.
In closing this volume which has been inspired by a deep sense of the abiding greatness of Robert Browning, it has been my desire to put on record in some way my personal indebtedness to his poetry as an inspiration not only to high thinking and living, but as a genuine revelation to me of the rare possibilities in poetic art, for I may almost say that Browning was my first poet, and through him, strange as it may seem, I came to an appreciation of all other poets. His poetry, fortunately for me an early influence in my life, awakened my, until then, dormant faculty for poetic appreciation. I owe him, therefore, a double debt of gratitude: Not only has he given me the joy of knowing his own great work, but through him I have entered the land of all poésie, led as I truly think by his sympathy with the scientific dispensation into which I was born. His thought has always seemed so naturally akin to my own that it has never seemed to me obscure. Finding such thoughts expressed through the medium of great poetic genius, the beauty of poetic expression was brought home to me as it never had been before, and hence the poetic expression of all thought became a deep pleasure to me.
So much interpretation and criticism of Browning has been given to the world during the last twenty years, that further work in that direction seems hardly necessary for the present. There will for many a day to come be those who feel him to be among the greatest poets the world has seen, and those who find much more to blame in his work than to praise.
I have tried to give a few suggestions in regard to what Robert Browning actually was in relation to his time. The nineteenth century was so remarkable a one in the complexity of its growth, both in practical affairs and in intellectual developments, that it has been possible in the space of one volume to touch only upon the most important aspects under each division, and to try to show what measure of influence important movements had in the molding of the poet’s genius.
Though in the nature of the case the treatment could not be exhaustive, I hope to have opened out a sufficient number of pathways into the fascinating vistas of the nineteenth century in its relation to Browning to inspire others to make further excursions for themselves; and, above all, I hope I may have added at least one stone to the cairn which many, past and to come, are building to his fame.
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
Footnotes:
[1] The influence of the “Prometheus Unbound” upon the conception of Aprile’s character was first brought forward by the writer in a paper read before the Boston Browning Society, March 15, 1910, a typewritten copy of which was placed in the Browning alcove in the Boston Public Library. In the “Life of Browning,” published the same year and not read by the writer until recently, Mr. Hall Griffin touches upon the same thought in the following words: “From some elements in the myth of Prometheus Browning unmistakably evolved the conception of his Aprile as not only the lover and the poet but as the potential sculptor, painter, orator, and musician.”