Poet-Lore: A Quarterly Magazine of Letters. April, May, June, 1900

by Various

and so is led to combine his own former standpoint with Aprile's by perceiving God and God's love in progress from lesser to ever greater good, and that evil and failure are the spurs that send man onwards to a future where joy climbs its heights "forever and forever."

From this point in his work Browning, like the Hindu Brahmah, becomes manifest not as himself, but in his creations. The poet whose portrait we get in 'Pauline' is the same poet who sympathetically presents a whole world of human experiences to us, keeping his own individuality for the most part intact, and the philosopher whose portrait is drawn in 'Paracelsus' is the same who interprets these human experiences in the light of the great life-theories therein presented.

But as the creations of Brahmah return into himself, so the human experiences Browning has entered into artistic sympathy with return to enrich his completed view of the problems of life, when like his own Rabbi Ben Ezra, he reaches the last of life for which "the first was planned" in these 'Fancies' and 'Parleyings'.

Though these two groups of poems undoubtedly express the poet's own mature conclusions, they yet preserve the dramatic form. Several things are gained in this way. First, the poems are saved from didacticism, for the poet expresses his opinion as an individual and not as a seer, trying to implant his theories in the minds of disciples. Second, variety is given and the mind is stimulated by having opposite points of view presented, while the thought is infused with a certain amount of emotional force through the heat of argument.

It has, of course, been objected that philosophical and ethical problems are not fit subjects for discussion in poetry. It should be remembered, however, that there is one point the critic of Æsthetics has not yet learned to realize; namely, that the law of evolution is differentiation, in art as well as in cosmic, organic, and social life. It is just as prejudiced and unforeseeing in these days to limit poetry to this or that subject, or say that nothing is dramatic that does not deal with immediate action, as it would have been for Homer to declare that no poem would ever be worthy the name that did not contain a catalogue of ships.

These facts exist! We have dramas dealing merely with action, dramas, in which character development is of prime importance; dramas, wherein action and character are entirely synchronous; and those in which the action means more than appears upon the surface, like Hauptmann's 'Sunken Bell,' or Ibsen's 'Master Builder,' then why not dramas of thought and dramas of mood when the brain and heart become the stage of action instead of an actual stage. Surely, such dramas are a natural development of this Nineteenth Century. As the man in 'Half Rome' says

"Facts are facts and lie not, and the question 'How came that purse i' the poke o' you admits of no reply.'" Art has a great many forms of drama in its poke already, so we would better be careful how we make authoritative statements on the subject.

Another advantage, gained from the dramatic form and this is most important, is that the poet has been enabled by means of it to hold the mirror up to the turmoil of thought that has racked the brains and hearts of the last half of the Nineteenth Century. Victorian England in its thought phases lives just as surely in these poems as Renaissance Italy in its art phases in 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Andrea del Sarto,' 'Pictor Ignotus' and 'The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's;' and this is true though the first series is cast in the form of Persian Fables and the second, in the form of Parleyings with worthies of past centuries.

We who have grown up under the dispensation, so to speak, of the doctrine of evolution, now acknowledged to be the guiding principle in every department of knowledge find it hard to enter into the spirit of that mid-century Sturm and Drang period which resulted upon the publication of Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' This book is the landmark of the century, and commemorates at once the triumph of knowledge, and its failure. The triumph of science in the realm of phenomena, its failure to pierce into the ultimate causes of these phenomena. What a hard fight scientific methods of investigating the phenomena of nature and life had had up to that time, in the teeth of opposition from the less instructed religious world, has been summarized for us in the fascinating pages of Andrew D. White's 'Warfare Between Theology and Science.' One by one, Science won the outposts held by prejudice and conservatism. It had to be admitted that the earth was not flat and that it did not float upon an infinite sea supported on the back of a tortoise. It had to be admitted, even, that it did not occupy the chief seat in the synagogue of the firmament, but went rolling about the sun like any common little asteroid. Finally, the great guns of science were trained upon man himself and he was forced to retire from his lofty position of Lord of Creation to the much more humble one of outcome of creation.

To a large proportion of mankind it seemed as if, should these things be admitted as truth, the whole fabric of society must fall to pieces and religion become a mockery. Those who felt so fought, as for their life, against the conclusions of science. There was a large minority, however, which, intellectually constrained to accept the conclusions of science, yet differed much in temperament and were by consequence, affected in very different ways by the new truths. There were men like Matthew Arnold who no longer believed in the revelations of the past, yet who clung to the beauty of religious forms, in despair at the thought of the wilderness life would be without them. There were others like George Eliot, who became positivists, and gained comfort only in the thought of a religion of humanity and an immortality of nothing more tangible than human influence. There were those like William Morris who accepted cheerfully this life as being all and who devoted their energies to making it as lovely as possible and working to make it more lovely for the future. There were still others, like Clifford, entirely hopeless, but who like Childe Roland put the slug horn to their lips, and lived brave, noble lives in the certainty of coming annihilation; a divine melancholy seized upon some, such as we see reflected in much of Tennyson's verse.