The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made;
and they read it because of a secret sense of failure. But the poem, and the message of Browning in general, came to those of my generation with a different force. When I was twenty I lived with the poem, as did those I loved; I carried it with me wherever I went; it burned, it blazed in my mind. It was a triumphant song. All the beauty of the time seemed to radiate from it, and as I recall it to-day and write the old words down, it brings back to me the fields, the hills, the roads, lime blossoms, roses, faces of the summer when its meaning was first absolutely and clearly mine. What was it in the poem? It was the modern movement. It was good b’ye to the old. It was a sight of one’s own immortality and Psyche herself, the ever-lovely one.
But necessarily I cannot write down what it meant. Suffice it that I can remember how a boy of this time reacted to the touch of Browning. Browning was a wonderful turn in English thought.
It was not simply one poem of Browning that broke away from Victorianism. We had held that there was no greater satisfaction than that of the craftsman in the work of his own hands. His was the real Imitatio Christi when he made something with his hands and saw that it was good. Then we read Andrea del Sarto, despising
This low-pulsed craftsman’s hand of mine,
knowing that the artists who failed reached a heaven denied to him.
From Browning’s day on we have been moving away from Martha and coming to Mary. The note-books of those young ones who loved thoughts began to be filled with verses, sayings, apothegms of a new character, and many of the elder ones to whom we read what we had found were blind and deaf to the new ideas. I remember one old literary man and artist who used always to say, “I take my stand with Jim”—meaning that he held with St. James that faith without works is barren. He belonged to the old.
I admit we were not sober in our judgments. We went to see Ibsen and Bernard Shaw, and it was easy to agree that Nora was right when she fled from her home and her husband to save her soul, and we thought that the immoral and unprincipled Dubedat was sooner to be saved than the hard-working slum doctor. We saw in Solveig, who stayed in the background and prayed, the true type of womanhood, and understood how Peer Gynt through her could be saved. We read Nietzsche, that mad Christian, a sort of Mary who hated her sister Martha, calling out in anger that man had ceased to be man and had become merely neighbour. We entered the domain of Russian literature, and read Dostoieffsky and Chekhof and Gorky, and so fell under the spell of Eastern Christianity, where we remain to-day.
The taste of England has been steadily changing this last ten years, and the current becoming deeper and broader. Russia and the East have been coming steadily nearer, and more and more of us have turned our backs on work and service and that Divine materialism—the raising of the poor. Not that we are on the way to becoming a philosophic and reflective or ascetic nation, or even in the way of singing again “Doing is a deadly thing”; but more and more of our nation is attempting to take to itself and re-express the other aspect of Christianity—the way of Mary.