R640700E. Dramatis Personæ.
St. James’s Magazine, July 1864, pp. 477–491.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 343.
Professor Draper of New York, in his recently published volume on the intellectual development of Europe, edifies us with the information that an animal is the form through which material substance is visibly passing and suffering transmutation into new products, that in that act of transmutation force is disengaged, and that what we call its life is the display of the manner in which the force thus disengaged is expended; adding, further, that the life of an individual is a miniature of the life of a nation. Lamentable is the future which this sort of reasoning presents to the professor; enabling him to trace the progress of Europe through the ages of credulity, inquiry, faith, reason, until it finally halts, like China, at the age of decrepitude. This is the materialistic theory of life, embracing such reasoning as Lucretius would have appreciated and Buckle would have enjoyed, and promulgated by a man who lives and understands medicine better than metaphysics. The doctor, feeling the pulse of his patient, proclaims that he is growing old, and will soon become a confirmed and stupid invalid. A pleasant prospect this for those who have been accustomed, Prometheus-like, to snatch down divine fire and mingle it with the clay of our modern humanity. What, is all our boasted progress to come to nothing—to nothing, at least, but the lifeless stagnation of intellectual senility,—while some other body of human beings, at present at the credulous stage (the subjects of the King of Dahomey, for instance), take their turn of growing up to mental manhood and gradually declining into old age? Unfortunately, the fact that Professor Draper is an American makes us doubtful as to the sincerity of his argument. We know the common Yankee notion, that America is yet in her infancy, but that she, while Europe is sinking into obtuseness and inactivity, is gradually but surely growing up to her full stature. It must be very pleasant for the Yankees to find that one of their number is clever enough to shape this notion into philosophical form, and to prove by inference that the time when they will be able, figuratively speaking, to “lick creation,” must infallibly arrive. This Professor Draper does very cleverly, but not cleverly enough to convince those who dissected the generalizations of the philosopher whose scepticism culminated in so sad a darkness at Damascus. The worst of theories like that of the professor is, that they are positively valueless as guides to human conduct. Christianity says, “Believe, and you shall receive the reward of belief; repent, and your sins shall be forgiven you.” Draper says, “Do what you please,—remonstrate, reason, aspire,—you are nevertheless a helpless log, drifted swiftly on to a fixed destination. You are merely a form of material substance which will reach the stage of decrepitude and change; and it is your destiny to pass from childhood back to childhood.” If the Professor really believes that he is right, we [p. 478→] can account for the stoical calm with which, even when the dim of battle was ringing at his very door, he favoured the publisher with his fatalistic reveries.
Draperism, to use its own technology, is another display of the manner in which the substance of scepticism shows itself while passing into fresh products. Pure and simple scepticism, and that of the most valuable kind, has budded forth also in “Essays and Review”-ism, and Colensoism—manifestations upon which far too much false emphasis has been laid by English people. Luckily, there are people who turn their eyes upward, and have not forgotten what “the wise man” said:—
Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;
Dein sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt!
Auf! bade, Schüller, unverdrossen
Die ird ’sche Brust im Morgenroth!*
The soul listens to calls like this more willingly than to the whispers of the fatalist, and is conscious that it has the power of renewing itself by aspiration. Counteracting the influence of the materialistic teachers, English and American, is a class of minds which forms in reality one of the bulwarks of our national religion, and which, if it divided Europe into cycles as Draper has done, would certainly assign the latest and final place to the age of faith. To such men it is of infinitely less importance whether Oxford is right or Colenso wrong, than whether modern society is in danger of stagnation from the lack of original thinkers,—thinkers who are capable of communing with the spirit-world, and of renewing the Æson of upward-looking Hope by bathing him in the red of the morning. They look forward, not to the senility, but to the manhood of a world which is yet in its youth. Their reasoning is metaphysical in the highest sense of that much-bandied-about word; they decline to believe that life is merely the fortuitous form that a substance assumes in the progress of transmutation, or that the soul is evaporative carbon. They accept scepticism as a means to faith, and they value positive science as a manifestation of the thirst for divine inquiry.
________
*The spirit-world is not yet closed: thy sense
Is shut, thy heart is dead. Up, scholar, up!
And bathe thy earthly breast in the crimson day.
“Faust,” Scene I.
________
Modern scepticism has developed itself markedly in two distinct forms of thinkers; the positive reasoner, who accepts nothing but direct evidence, and the merely subjective poet, who searches inward for the light in which he wishes to believe. The region of the one is the earth, the microcosm; the latter, because he feels his own soul to be boundless, is content with nothing but the universe itself. On the whole, the positivist is the more useful of the two, but both have their uses, even though they arrive at somewhat lame conclusions; they keep thought awake, and they prove, at least, what will be a great comfort to readers of [p. 479→] Professor Draper, that the age of faith, whatsoever be its relative position in the cycle of intellectual progress, is as yet far distant.
These remarks have been partly called forth by a perusal of Mr. Browning’s last volume of poetry, a book as remarkable for its immediate applications as for thoughts which will endure for all time, and which, if taken up after a perusal of Professor Draper’s “History of Intellectual Development,” must help much to disperse the fogs of materialistic theory. Mr. Browning’s usual reticence as regards his own religious belief is dignified and manly; and the opinions he puts into the mouths of his characters must not be identified with his personal convictions. In one or two remarkable instances, however, he gives us a plain, straightforward statement, as in the last verses of the “Legend of Pornic:”—
The candid incline to surmise, of late,
That the Christian faith may be false, I find;
For our “Essays and Reviews” debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso’s words have weight.
I still, to suppose it true, for my part,
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin,—
’Tis the faith that launch’d point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man’s Heart.
But whether Mr. Browning does or does not believe in Original Sin is a minor question! More than most men does he believe in the ever-present stimulation of divine agencies. Nor is he a mere torpid acceptor of the respectable, the orthodox; he has reasoned out the matter entirely to his own conviction.
This brings us to a point from which we wish to look at Browning’s genius. Nothing, it seems to us, is more remarkable in his poetry than the steady determination shown by the writer to regard things from their best side, to look with lenience on human frailty and shortcoming, and to get as much good out of human character as possible. Browning is the “Man of Feeling” without his stupidity and effeminacy. He does justice to everybody, even the most vicious, and discovers that even Mr. Sludge, the medium, has his good points; he won’t be too hard even upon sophistry, so he shows glimpses of the divine even through the portly waistcoat of Bishop Blougram. He is not an optimist, but he is always trying, unsuccessfully, to be one. He seems grieved beyond measure when brought face to face with wickedness and humbug, so close that he must perforce see and recognize them; but he immediately sets to work to take them to pieces, not with a view to detecting the weak points, but solely in order to find out the good ones; and if the search prove unsatisfactory, he has always the grand resource of discovering the divine agency, whose marvellous workmanship brings him to his knees. He could see more fine points in the character of the Devil than any man that ever wrote, and solely for [p. 480→] the reason he trusts so completely in the wisdom of the devil’s master. In fact, he finds something to like everywhere, but he never likes without a reason; and his extraordinary sympathy with humanity in general makes him as much at his ease in Petticoat Lane as in Belgravia; as much at home at Stoke-in-Pogis, which is agitated by the squabbles of a vestry, as in Paris, which is softly stirred by the on dits of a salon. This is meant to be high praise, and it is praise which shows the distinction between Mr. Browning and the poets who, however exalted be their musings, are merely subjective. The merely subjective poet has very little sympathy with the world in general; he admires his own little circle, and he employs his faculties in inward contemplation. Intellectually speaking, he is as lonely as a St. Simeon Stylites. Like Wordsworth, he feels himself an exceptional creature in the world, or like Shelley, he endows all mankind with his own high-mindedness and generosity. It is pretty evident that such a man lacks the weapons to combat with materialistic reasoners; while he dreams, they work; they are not satisfied with his dreams, though they are facts to him; they ask proofs—he retreats in high dudgeon, and appeals to the invisible. But when the dramatist steps forward to do battle on the side of faith, the case is widely different; he is armed at all points, and is not to be laughed down. Like his opponents, he is content to confine his arguments to facts, and mighty are the facts that humanity affords him. He is content to allow the enemy to heap the Pelion of positive science upon the Ossa of scepticism, and to climb to the top, and to cry out that they can still behold no God, while he remains in the earth, and, entering into the psychology of motives, discovers the divine spark there. History aids him with her wondrous suggestions. While the other side has ascertained that the Pentateuch is a marvellous contradiction, the dramatist has held commune with the souls of Luther and St. Paul. If they cry “Fate!” he answers “Napoleon!” While they are raking the old red sandstone, he is standing at the death-bed of Voltaire.
And Mr. Browning is a dramatist of a very high, if not of the highest, order. He has not written a line which, however lyrical in form, is not essentially dramatic in expression. Even “Evelyn Hope,” that most exquisite of English morceaux, is the last sweet scene of a beautiful drama. His long plays are not successful, simply because the form they wear leads us to expect something more familiar in their character; but if they were divided into separate poems, they would rank among the noblest dramatic studies. It is in miniature pictures—such as “My Last Duchess” and the “Epistle of Karsheek”—that Browning excels. Nothing could be nobler or truer than the description of Lazarus in the latter poem. The man lives before us—gentle, subdued, mysterious, after the spirit of Christ has passed over him:—
The man is witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much. [p. 481→]
Discourse to him of prodigious armaments
Assembled to besiege his city now,
And of the passing of a mule with gourds—
’Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling fact—he will gaze rapt
With stupor at its very littleness
(Far as I see),—as if in that indeed
He caught prodigious import, whole results;
And so will turn to us the bystanders
In ever the same stupor (note this point)
That we, too, see not with his open’d eyes.
* * * * * *
And oft the man’s soul springs into his face,
As if he saw again and heard again
His sage that bade him “Rise,” and he did rise.
Something—a word, a tick of the blood within—
Admonishes—then back he sinks at once
To ashes, that was very fire before,
In sedulous recurrence to his trade
Whereby he earneth him the daily bread;
And studiously the humbler for that pride,
Professedly the faultier that he knows
God’s secret, while he holds the thread of life.
Indeed, the especial marking of the man
Is prone submission to the heavenly will—
Seeing it what is, and why it is.
Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last
For that same death which must restore his being
To equilibrium, body loosening soul,
Divorced even now by premature full growth.”*
________
*“The Collected Works of Robert Browning.” Chapman and Hall, 1864.
________
This is a mere outline of the drawing, but it shows the subtilty of Mr. Browning’s psychology. The result produced in Lazarus by the visible presence of Christ is such as now appears frequently in men when the invisible Spirit actuates. Mr. Browning seems to have gone about his work in a pre-Raphaelite spirit, and starting from the assumption that men are radically the same in all ages, he may have drawn Lazarus from a living model. As Browning paints him, Lazarus must doubtless have appeared to the learned men of his time—such as the Leech who tells the story; but the picture affords glimpses which are true to all time, and which will manifest themselves wherever there is a great faith.
We have suggested that Mr. Browning’s method is pre-Raphaelistic. Nothing could be more commonplace than this method, were it not raised above commonplace by the startling fidelity of its results. Like Millais, Mr. Browning throws in the background by a few broad dashes of the brush, leaving a great deal to the imagination, and adopting a boldness of colour which sometimes startles one, as nature often does. Like Hunt, he is laboriously elaborate in the execution of his figures. His poetry, [p. 482→] indeed, has the faults as well as the beauties of the pre-Raphaelites. These faults consist of a certain unpleasant look of the work at first sight, and a frequent smudginess of the tints on further examination; and they constitute what is known to a large portion of the public as Mr. Browning’s style—a style so bold, rough-hewn, and withal so original, that it has never been imitated with any success. Those who call it careless don’t know what they are talking about. It is the fine conscientious expression of clearly defined thought, startling one ever and again by unconscious effects; and if it be full of mannerisms, they are the mannerisms of a man who is so much in earnest that he has no time to fill his pictures with charmingly pretty bits of unnatural colour. And in more than one marked respect does Mr. Browning resemble the painters who preceded Raphael. He is so pre-eminently Christian that he sacrifices everything for the sake of truth, pure and simple. The central figure in his mind’s eye is Christ, whose spirit breathes gently through all his poetry. We are inclined to think that those poems in which Mr. Browning deals with historical religious subjects are his masterpieces. The parsimony of their colour results in one gentle and very lovely evenness of tone; for Christianity abhors tinsel.
There is nothing in the new volume better than the “Epistle of Karsheek,” but there is one poem which is more immediately available for purposes of moral teaching. This is entitled “A Death in the Desert,” and describes the last moments of the apostle John. Here the background is thrown quickly in by a few soft lines. Inside, the dark cool cave; further, a subdued glimpse of “noon and the burning blue;” and, halfway up the mouth of the cave, tending his goat, the wild Bactrian convert, who lives before us through the might of two strong lines,—
The Bactrian was but a wild, childish man,
And could not read nor speak, but only loved.
Painfully interesting is the figure of the apostle, who, stretched dying on his camel’s skin, delivers his last teaching to his companions in hiding. The words live and breathe, while John sinks fast; and already, afar away, people who wish to believe are beginning to doubt whether or not John has lived at all, and to doubt the promise of His coming. Antichrist is already in the world. Men doubt the miracles, and ask for more; but the dying apostle has an answer, which should reach the souls of those who admire M. Ernest Renan:—
I say that man was made to grow, not stop;
That help he needed once, and needs no more,
Having grown up but an inch by, is withdrawn;
For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.
This imports solely, man should mount on each
New height in view; the help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth. [p. 483→]
Man apprehends Him newly at each stage
Whereat earth’s ladder drops, its service done;
And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved.
You stick a garden plot with order’d twigs
To show inside the germs of herbs unborn,
And check the careless step would spoil their birth;
But when herbs wave, the guardian twigs may go,
Since should you doubt of virtues, questions kind,
It is no longer for old twigs ye look,
Which proved once underneath lay store of seed,
But to the herb’s self, by what light ye boast,
For what fruit’s signs are. This book’s fruit is plain,
Nor miracles need prove it any more.
Doth the fruit show? Then miracles bade ’ware
At first of root and stem, saved both till now
From trampling ox, rough boar and wanton goat.
What! Was man made a wheelwork to wind up,
And be discharged, and straight wound up anew?
No!—grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne’er forgets:
May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.
This might be pagan teaching; now hear mine.
I say, that as the babe, you feed awhile
Becomes a boy, and fit to feed himself,
So minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth:
When they can eat, babes’ nurture is withdrawn.
I fed the babe whether it would or no:
I bid the boy to feed himself or starve.
I cried once, “That ye may believe in Christ,
Behold, this blind man shall receive his sight!”
I cry now, “Urgest thou, for I am shrewd
And smile at stories how John’s word could cure—
Repeat that miracle and take my faith?”
I say, that miracle was duly wrought
When, save for it, no faith was possible.
Whether a change were wrought i’ the shows o’ the world,
Whether the change came from our minds which see
Of the shows o’ the world so much as and no more
Than God wills for His purpose,—(what do I
See now, suppose you, there where you see rock
Round us?)—I know not; such was the effect,
So faith grew, making void more miracles
Because too much: they would compel, not help.
I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise.
Wouldst thou unprove this to re-prove the proved?
In life’s mere minute, with power to use that proof,
Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung?
Thou hast it; use it, and forthwith, or die!
For I say, this is death, and the sole death,
When a man’s loss comes to him from his gain, [p. 484→]
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance,
And lack of love from love made manifest.
Further on, John adds forcibly,—
Man knows partly, but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid he may grasp and use,
Finds progress, man’s destructive march alone,
Not God’s, and not the heart’s: God is, they are,
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
Such progress could no more attend his soul,
Were all it struggles after found at first
And guesses changed to knowledge absolute,
Than motion wait his body, were all else
Than it the solid earth on every side,
Where now through space he moves from rest to rest.
Man, therefore, thus condition’d, must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first;
What he considers that he knows to-day,
Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self:
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn;
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God’s gift was that man should conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help, till he reach fact indeed.
Here we indeed hear the voice of John, the “well-beloved,” phrasing into clear speech reflections which must have occurred to many thinking people. “More miracles!” cry the unbelievers. “Nay,” answers John, “miracles are no longer necessary if man be made to grow, not stop.” The good seed is sown—the sun and rain will nourish it until it peeps greenly through the earth. Mr. Browning has shown elsewhere, in former volumes, how useful scepticism is in promoting the good growth. Side by side with John’s glorification of revealed religion is a companion poem, marvellously unlike the other, but fit to be placed side by side with it on account of that law of mental association which is called contrast. Whom have we here, sprawling in the mire, grumbling, muttering, gazing out from the island, but Caliban, that most unprototyped of extraordinary mundane monsters? Browning enters into the psychology of Shakspere’s creation with that marvellous sympathy which expressly distinguishes his method of character-painting, and which enables him to draw the very souls of his subjects. If Caliban could have been at all, his “natural theology” would have been precisely that described in the strange soliloquy put upon his lips by Mr. Browning. His Setebos is a tyrant god, much of Caliban’s [p. 485→] own humour—jealous of the beautiful things he has made, but occasionally good-natured; loving what does him good; falling to making things, or to knocking things down again, just as a means of wiling away the time; having a spite against Caliban, and an unaccountable liking for Prosper; probably doomed some day to be caught napping; to doze, doze, as good as die. A cold god, Setebos, but powerful to mar and make with much such power over Caliban as has the monster in his turn over the crabs and creeping things that crawl, slimy, on the shore of the enchanted isle:—
Thinketh such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
Am strong myself, compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea.
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say the first straggler that boasts purple spots,
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
Say this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: so He.
Well, then, supposeth He is good i’ the main,
Placable if His mind and ways were guess’d,
But rougher than His handiwork, be sure!
Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself,
And envieth that, so help’d, such things do more
Than He who made them! What consoles but this?
That they, unless through Him, do nought at all,
And must submit: what other use in things?
Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder joint
That, blown through, gives exact the scream o’ the jay,
When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue:
Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay
Flock within stone’s throw, glad their foe is hurt:
But case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth,
“I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing,
I make the cry my maker cannot make
With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!”
Would not I smash it with my foot? So He.
But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease?
Aha! that is a question. Ask, for that,
What knows,—the something over Setebos
That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought,
Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance.
There may be something quiet o’er His head,
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind?
This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,
But never spends much thought nor care that way. [p. 486→]
It may look up; work up,—the worse for those
It works on!
Here we have indeed a true glimpse of the “very shallow monster, most poor credulous monster, most puppy-headed monster,” described by Master Trinculo, and “the freckled whelp, hag-born” of Prospero. The conception seems founded on the following lines in the “Tempest:”—
I must obey: his art is of such power,
It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.
But the quotation at the head of the poem touches the key-note of the whole howling tune;—“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.”
But clever as “Caliban” is, it is a mistake. The subject is exceedingly repulsive, and almost unfit for separate artistic treatment. As part of the strange machinery of a play brimful of characters, Caliban is invaluable; and while his character is abundantly conveyed in the strong touches of the great master, he is always kept studiously in the background. More than once Mr. Browning, in his desire to say the best he can of things, has affirmed that mere beauty is something; but what plea can he set up for mere ugliness—ugliness so extreme as to fill the gazer with instinctive detestation and loathing? What would Mr. Millais make of a gorilla? The poem is a mistake; yet we value it highly, as a true index to the character of the poet’s mind. In the excess of his Christian love and sympathy, we have no doubt that he sees some points of sympathy between himself and the whelp of Sycorax. But his error lies here; though the point of sympathy is discernible, it is swamped in the solitary full-length figure of the monster. In Shakspere, Caliban is far more likeable than in Mr. Browning’s poem.
One feels quite ashamed to find fault with so mighty a master of psychology as Mr. Browning, who is as far above mere fault-finding as it is possible for writer to be. Nothing is more remarkable in his career than the steady, determined manner in which, regardless of neglect and hostile censure, he has clung to what he considers the right principles of art, without deviating for a moment into unbelief or hesitation. Like the Christian painters before Raphael, he merges the means in the end, deeming fineness of workmanship of less importance than the plain representation of what is true. His Christian feeling guides him at every step, and gives force and meaning to his very roughest outlines. He is the Michael Angelo of poets, with the qualification that he has the advantage of modern progress, and perceives, instead of the Great Terror, the Great Charity. Even when raking the dregs of our contemporary life, and turning up that unmitigated humbug, “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” Mr. Browning shows far more mercy than any one of his contemporary authors—Mr. Dickens, for instance—would have done under the same circumstances. This exposé of spirit-rapping is powerful enough in its [p. 487→] way; and it strikes us forcibly that we know who sat for the portrait. But Mr. Sludge is not proper matter for poetry, save from a point of view which Browning touches very lightly in the following passage:—
I and all such boys, of course,
Started with the same stock of Bible truth;
Only,—what in the rest you style their sense,
Instinct, blind reasoning but imperative,
This, betimes, taught them the old world had one law,
And ours another: “New world, new laws,” cried they;
“None but old laws seem everywhere at work,”
Cried I, and by their help explain’d my life,
The Jews’ way, still a waking way to me.
Ghosts made the noises, fairies waved the lights,
Or Santaclaus slid down on New Year’s eve,
And stuff’d with cakes the stocking at my bed,
Changed the worn shoes, rubb’d clean the finger’d slate
Of the sum that came to grief the day before.
This could not last long: soon enough I found
Who had work’d wonders thus, and to what end:
But did I find all easy, like my mates?
Henceforth no supernatural any more?
Not a whit: what projects the billiard-balls?
“A cue,” you answer: “yes, a cue,” said I;
“But what hand, off the cushion, moved the cue?
What unseen agency, outside the world,
Prompted its puppets to do this and that,
Put cakes and shoes and slates into their mind,
These mothers and aunts, nay, even schoolmasters?”
Thus high I sprang, and there have settled since,
But so I reason, in sober earnest still,
About the greater godsends, what you call
The serious gains and losses of my life.
What do I know or care about your world,
Which either is or seems to be? This snap
Of my fingers, sir! My care is for myself.”
But the worst of this poem is that it proves nothing—lets in no new light upon the vexed question on which it touches. It proves that Sludge is a humbug—that is all, and of course it is gentler with humbug than it might have been; but we know that there are “mediums” in the world, who, so far from being Sludges, are quite cultured enough to love and understand Mr. Browning. The intention of the writer, we guess, was merely to divert himself with a little psychological dissection. And the portrait, besides being grossly ill-favoured, becomes inconsistent with itself when it represents Sludge as talking tenderly about the spirits of infants, and quoting the “Bridgewater Treatises.” It is very like Mr. Browning to make his medium feel deeply conscious of the pathos which is woven in with the hyprocrisy of his profession. But it is not like Sludge. [p. 488→] The short lyrics interspersed with the longer poems are much better. The best of them is called “A Face,” but we shall not quote it. More to our purpose is it to follow Mr. Browning into the Morgue, where the sight of “the three men who did most abhor their life in Paris” the day previous, leads to the utterance of a fine truth:—
Poor men, God-made, and all for that!
* * * * * *
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretch’d;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetch’d;
That what began best can’t prove worst,
Nor what God bless’d once prove accurst.
Out of these weighty lines, perhaps, might be constructed Mr. Browning’s answer to certain philosophers, of whom we preambled. The man in whom the Morgue could awaken no sadder reflection than the above, would never, in his theorizing, let mankind stop short at the age of decrepitude. The life of the world, like the life of an individual, “began best,” and was blessed by God. That was in the fig-leaf time, when man “knew not vice at all, and kept true state.”* Then came knowledge; and for century after century the intellect strove wildly, grandly, vainly, after the old faith; but Egypt had the fate of its Pharaohs, and Greece fell. These great people, Draperism would argue, proved decrepitude the fate of nations to come. Not so; they attained to the highest possible mental perfection,—and they fell. Divinity sent Plato to show man how much the mere intellect could do in its grand strivings after the immortal; till there came the period when man knew that faith was as ungraspable as an angel’s robe by the clutchings of the mind. This was the time for a new dispensation—the time for the coming of that Teacher whose aim was the cultivation of perfect self-abnegation, perfect love and hope, in which lay the strength which intellect sought in vain—the strength of faith. The whole aim of His teaching was to prove that God was right after all; that the strife after knowledge was vain and unprofitable, and that we were better in the humble state, just as we were in the beginning. Egypt fell, and Greece perished, to prove this. When we know this thoroughly we have gained much; and the world learns it much in the same manner as do individuals—by special loss and suffering. Day by day, year by year, century by century, man grows nearer and nearer to the period when faith will put on his wings for him, and he will take flight to the immortal,—with no joy but the glory he sought to comprehend through the knowledge of good and evil. John in the desert might have prophesied that Christ never intended to “return”, until this same good time came. Much of this high trust is whispered in “Abt Vogler:”—
________
*Ben Jonson’s “Underwoods.”
________ [p. 489→]
All we have will’d, or hoped, or dream’d of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty nor good power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-bye.
And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we wither’d and agonized?
Why else was the pause prolong’d but that singing might issue thence?
Why rush’d the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear;
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: ’tis we musicians know.
More of the same teaching is put upon the lips of “Rabbi Ben Ezra:”—
What is he but a brute,
Whose flesh hath soul to suit,
Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play?
To man propose this test,—
Thy body at its best,
How far can that project thy soul on its lone way?
Yet gifts should prove their use:
I own the past profuse
Of power each side, perfection every turn:
Eyes, ears took in their dole,
Brain treasured up the whole;
Should not the heart beat once, “How good to live and learn?”
Not once beat, “Praise be Thine!
I see the whole design,
I, who saw power, see now love perfect too:
Perfect I call Thy plan:
Thanks that I was a man!
Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!”
For pleasant is this flesh;
Our soul, in its rose-mesh
Pull’d ever to the earth, still yearns for rest:
Would me some prize might hold
To match those manifold
Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best!
Let us not always say
“Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gain’d ground, upon the whole!”
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry “All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!”
Therefore I summon age
To grant youth’s heritage,
Life’s struggle having so far reach’d its term: [p. 490→]
Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the develop’d brute; a god, though in the germ.
And I shall thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new:
Fearless and unperplexed,
When I wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armour to indue.
Youth ended, I shall try
My gain or loss thereby;
Be the fire ashes, what survives is gold:
And I shall weigh the same,
Give life its praise or blame:
Young, all lay in dispute, I shall know, being old.
For note, when evening shuts,
A certain moment cuts
The deed off, calls the glory from the grey:
A whisper from the west
Shoots—“Add this to the rest,
Take it and try its worth: here dies another day.”
So still within this life,
Though lifted o’er its strife,
Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last,
“This rage was right i’ the main,
That acquiescence vain:
The future I may face now I have proved the past.”
For more is not reserved
To man, with soul just nerved
To act to-morrow what he learns to-day:
Here, work enough to watch
The master work, and catch
Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool’s true play.
As it was better, youth
Should strive, through acts uncouth,
Toward making, than repose on aught found made;
So, better age, exempt
From strife, should know than tempt
Further. Thou waitedst age; wait death, nor be afraid!
It is impossible not to feel that Mr. Browning utters here, under the guises of the musician and the rabbi, some of the dearly-bought experience of his life. As through the masks of Æschylus we catch glimpses of the white faces, agonized with human passion, so here we see the veil lifted occasionally by a quick painful movement, and the earnest eyes of the poet gleam for a moment on his audience. But in these eyes lies no shade of Byronic misanthropy; they are full of the deep wondrous light which never was in sea or land, and they gaze, not at the feet of clay, but upward. [p. 491→] Those who know the story of the one great loss of Mr. Browning’s life feel how and whence has come to him the serene wisdom, the belief in things good, which is the best and most valuable characteristic of his poetry. Further, out of his great love for the belief in mankind, he takes his readers into his secret, though with a vague reticence that shows how profound and how sacred has been the man’s agony. This is in the “Epilogue,” the spirit of which is, “I believe because I have loved much.” How many men have learned this mystery, whereby belief is woven out of love? How many men know that when one loves wholly, he must believe? Yet this is the knowledge which it is the business of Mr. Browning, and all great modern poets, to teach. This is the knowledge which is born out of suffering, and which the world has been struggling for centuries to attain. Do we perceive now why Mr. Browning has so much gentleness for human frailty and error? or do we deny what Christ came to prove—that when man has learned to love once, he has learned to love for ever? When the world, in its restless strife, has taught us the truth which Mr. Browning utters in his Epilogue—when our vanished faces, dear to us as hers to him, have mingled into the ineffable Face which rose at Bethlehem, and made a visible place for the dim human tribute—when we know that the end of all this wild pageant is to enhance the worth of each individual, from the highest to the meanest of mankind,—
Why, where’s the need of temple, when the walls
O’ the world are that? What use of swells and falls
From Levite’s choir, priest’s cries, and trumpet-calls?
That one face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Became my universe that feels and knows!”
R. B[ell].
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
___________________
