Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

In these lines we feel the poet's purpose, constant throughout the whole poem. We know all the while that with him at our side we can travel safely through the depths of the Inferno—for the flames bend back from him; and it is only what we expect as the result of it all, that there should come

"A bolt from heaven to cleave roof and clear place,

. . . . then flood

And purify the scene with outside day—

Which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark,

Ne'er wants its witness, some stray beauty-beam

To the despair of hell."^C

C: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 996-1003.

The superabundant strength of Browning's conviction in the supremacy of the good, which led him in The Ring and the Book to depict criminals at their worst, forced him later on in his life to exhibit evil in another form. The real meaning and value of such poems as Fifine at the Fair, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, Ferishtah's Francies, and others, can only be determined by a careful and complete analysis of each of them. But they have one characteristic so prominent, and so new in poetry, that the most careless reader cannot fail to detect it. Action and dramatic treatment give place to a discussion which is metaphysical; instead of the conflict of motives within a character, the stress and strain of passion and will in collision with circumstances, there is reflection on action after it has passed, and the conflict of subtle arguments on the ethical value of motives and ways of conduct, which the ordinary moral consciousness condemns without hesitation. All agree that these poems represent a new departure in poetry, and some consider that in them the poet, in thus dealing with metaphysical abstractions, has overleapt the boundaries of the poetic art. To such critics, this later period seems the period of his decadence, in which the casuistical tendencies, which had already appeared in Bishop Blougram's Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, and other poems, have overwhelmed his art, and his intellect, in its pride of strength, has grown wanton. Fifine at the Fair is said to be "a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love." Its hero, who is "a modern gentleman, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophic person, of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will," produces arguments "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation of character. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is spoken of in a similar manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of morality, of compromise, hypocrisy, lying, and a selfishness that betrays every cause to the individual's meanest welfare. The object of the poet is "by no means to prove black white, or white black, or to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less self-delusion reconcile itself to itself."

I am not able to accept this as a complete explanation of the intention of the poet, except with reference to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. The Prince is a psychological study, like Mr. Sludge the Medium, and Bishop Blougram. No doubt he had the interest of a dramatist in the hero of Fifine at the Fair and in the hero of Red Cotton Nightcap Country; but, in these poems, his dramatic interest is itself determined by an ethical purpose, which is equally profound. His meeting with the gipsy at Pornic, and the spectacle of her unscrupulous audacity in vice, not only "sent his fancy roaming," but opened out before him the fundamental problems of life. What I would find, therefore, in Fifine at the Fair is not the casuistic defence of an artistic and speculative libertine, but an earnest attempt on the part of the poet to prove,