Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

In order, however, to estimate the value of this feature of the poet's work, it is necessary to look more closely into the character of his faith in the good. Merely to attribute to him an optimistic creed is to say very little; for the worth, or worthlessness, of such a creed depends upon its content—upon its fidelity to the facts of human life, the clearness of its consciousness of the evils it confronts, and the intensity of its realism.

There is a sense, and that a true one, in which it may be said that all men are optimists; for such a faith is implied in every conscious and deliberate action of man. There is no deed which is not an attempt to realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously he may misunderstand its nature. Final and absolute disbelief in an ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an impossibility in fact. The one stultifies action, and asserts an effect without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other stultifies intellectual activity: and both views imply that the critic has so escaped the conditions of human life, as to be able to pass a condemnatory judgment upon them. The belief that a harmonious relation between the self-conscious agent and the supreme good is possible, underlies the practical activity of man; just as the belief in the unity of thought and being underlies his intellectual activity. A moral order—that is, an order of rational ends—is postulated in all human actions, and we act at all only in virtue of it,—just as truly as we move and work only in virtue of the forces which make the spheres revolve, or think by help of the meaning which presses upon us from the thought-woven world, through all the pores of sense. A true ethics, like a true psychology, or a true science of nature, must lean upon metaphysics, and it cannot pretend to start ab initio. We live in the Copernican age, which puts the individual in a system, in obedience to whose laws he finds his welfare. And this is simply the assertion of an optimistic creed, for it implies a harmonious world.

But, though this is true, it must be remembered that this faith is a prophetic anticipation, rather than acquired knowledge. We are only on the way towards reconstructing in thought the fact which we are, or towards bringing into clear knowledge the elemental power which manifests itself within us as thought, desire, and deed. And, until this is achieved, we have no full right to an optimistic creed. The revelation of the unity which pervades all things, even in the natural world, will be the last attainment of science; and the reconciliation of nature and man and God is still further in the future, and will be the last triumph of philosophy. During all the interval the world will be a scene of warring elements; and poetry, religion, and philosophy can only hold forth a promise, and give to man a foretaste of ultimate victory. And in this state of things even their assurance often falters. Faith lapses into doubt, poetry becomes a wail for a lost god, and its votary exhibits, "through Europe to the AEtolian shore, the pageant of his bleeding heart." The optimistic faith is, as a rule, only a hope and a desire, a "Grand Perhaps," which knows no defence against the critical understanding, and sinks dumb when questioned. If, in the form of a religious conviction, its assurance is more confident, then, too often, it rests upon the treacherous foundations of authoritative ignorance, which crumble into dust beneath the blows of awakened and liberated reason. Nay, if by the aid of philosophy we turn our optimism into a faith held by reason, a fact before which the intellect, as well as the heart, worships and grows glad, it still is for most of us only a general hypothesis, a mere leap to God which spurns the intermediate steps, a universal without content, a bare form that lacks reality.

Such an optimism, such a plunge into the pure blue and away from facts, was Emerson's. Caroline Fox tells a story of him and Carlyle which reveals this very pointedly. It seems that Carlyle once led the serene philosopher through the abominations of the streets of London at midnight, asking him with grim humour at every few steps, "Do you believe in the devil now?" Emerson replied that the more he saw of the English people the greater and better he thought them. This little incident lays bare the limits of both these great men. Where the one saw, the other was blind. To the one there was the misery and the universal mirk; to the other, the pure white beam was scarcely broken. Carlyle believed in the good, beyond all doubt: he fought his great battle in its strength and won, but "he was sorely wounded." Emerson was Sir Galahad, blind to all but the Holy Grail, his armour spotless-white, his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and heat. But his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory. His victory was not won in the enemy's citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos, but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination. And, in consequence, Emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along which burthened humanity meanly toils.

But Browning's optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher, protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an invisible garment of contemplative holiness. It is a conviction which has sustained shocks of criticism and the test of facts; and it therefore, both for the poet and his readers, fulfils a mission beyond the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good. Its power will be felt and its value recognized by those who have themselves confronted the contradictions of human life and known their depths.

No lover of Browning's poetry can miss the vigorous manliness of the poet's own bearing, or fail to recognize the strength that flows from his joyous, fearless personality, and the might of his intellect and heart. "When British literature," said Carlyle of Scott and Cobbett, "lay all puking and sprawling in Wertherism, Byronism and other Sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us two healthy men." And he breaks out into a eulogy of mere health, of "the just balance of faculties that radiates a glad light outwards, enlightening and embellishing all things." But he finds it easy to account for the health of these men: they had never faced the mystery of existence. Such healthiness we find in Browning, although he wrote with Carlyle at his side, and within earshot of the infinite wail of this moral fatalist. And yet, the word health is inadequate to convey the depth of the joyous meaning which the poet found in the world. His optimism was not a constitutional and irreflective hopefulness, to be accounted for on the ground that "the great mystery of existence was not great to him: did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish." There are, indeed, certain rash and foolish persons who pretend to trace Browning's optimism to his mixed descent; but there is a "pause in the leading and the light" of those wiseacres, who pretend to trace moral and mental characteristics to physiological antecedents. They cannot quite catch a great man in the making, nor, even by the help of evolution, say anything wiser about genius than that "the wind bloweth where it listeth." No doubt the poet's optimism indicates a native sturdiness of head and heart. He had the invaluable endowment of a pre-disposition to see the sunny side of life, and a native tendency to revolt against that subjectivity, which is the root of our misery in all its forms. He had little respect for the Welt-schmerz, and can scarcely be civil to the hero of the bleeding heart.

"Sinning, sorrowing, despairing,

Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked—

Should I give my woes an airing,—

Where's one plague that claims respect?