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FIRST PAPER.
1 L’Art pour l’Art ’ is a motto that supplies us with a very satisfactory
definition of the aim and purport of the poetry of those early times
when men, not having lost their fresh childlike rejoicing in the present,
sang—if they had the power to sing—aimlessly ‘ wie der Vogel singt,’
just only because
Das Lied das aus der Kehle dringt
1st Lohn der reichli ch lohnet.
,
But every year is now carrying us farther away from a state of things
in which it is possible that there should be produced poetry of the kind
to which this definition is applicable. The great flood of subjectivity
which has made its way into all modern thought has brought with it
problems pressing for answer in such a crowd as to leave no room for
thinking or feeling to be exercised unconsciously and without purpose.
Of the poets now writing amongst us we cannot say that their work
is 1 pour l’Art.’ In the generation immediately preceding theirs there
was, indeed, one poet—Scott—who contrived to keep himself apart, as
on an island, nntouched by the waves of restless subjective thought
that had come over the intellectual life of his age, and who retained the
power of purposeless poetical utterance. But has there been produced,
since his, any poetry seeking no further office than to become a beauti
ful or noble piece of art ? Does not all, or by far the greater part of
that which is of recent origin, seem to be sent forth for the purpose of
gaining satisfaction of one kind or another for the craving self-con
sciousness of the writers, and of their contemporaries who are to share
in the results of their quest? Poetry, like every other power which
man has at command, has now been forced to take its part in supplying
the two great wants, Pleasure and Truth—which, little felt in simple
primitive times, become passionately urgent in a state of high civilisation
and culture. We have not now—and probably the world will never
have again—poets who are poets and nothing more. What we have
now is truth-seekers and pleasure-seekers gifted with the power of
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
artistic perception and imagination, of rhythmical or melodious ex«
pression, and using these gifts to seek what without them they would!
have sought by other means.
The school of thought which is content to regard pleasure as the
satisfaction for which all desires are craving, uses its poetry to go forth,
and bring in full richness of pleasures ; careless, if only there can be
found in them beauty and delight, from whence they come and of what
sort they are. Not the value of a man’s work as art, but the power it
has to awaken in writer or readers a stranger susceptibility to
pleasure of sense or imagination, is here the measure of his success.
There is a great deal of poetry which seems on its surface to be alto
gether the free playing of spontaneous instincts, but which we find,
if we look a little deeper into it, to have at bottom the principle of
utilitarianism, not of art.
Nor can the men whose desires are towards the satisfaction of truth
be poets more unconscious of a purpose. To find that satisfaction for
themselves and for others is the aim towards which all their faculties
are bent, and in proportion as their search is successful these men
become teachers and preachers. The poet on whose characteristics the
following pages will contain a few thoughts—Mr. Robert Browning—
is one whose gifts as a poet, strong and true as they are, are perhaps
oftener than any contemporary artist’s, merged in his character as
preacher of what he has gained as a truth-seeker. I cannot but think
that the full value of his work can only be estimated by recognising
him first in his office of preacher rathei’ than of poet.
Any reader who has had patience enough to force his way through
the bristling hedge of complicated sentences that forms so much of the
outer fence of Browning’s writings, and has gone in and got hold of
intelligible meaning, must surely perceive that he has to do with some
thing which cannot be judged of by aesthetic tests,. We feel that what
is to be found there is the work of a man who is bound by all the
impulses of his nature to preach what he believes and to persuade
other men. He seems to have chosen the office of poet voluntarily, for
the sake of this preaching ; partly because the rythmical form of words
will carry his doctrine where it might not otherwise reach and partly
because amongst the truths he would set forth, there are some which
are of the kind that to men’s present faculties must be always only
as sights half seen, as sounds half heard, and which become dimmer
and fainter if the attempt is made to define them into the accurate
form and articulate speech of ordinary prose. Browning’s place is
amongst the teachers whose words come forth allowed by their own
conscious will; not amongst the artists controlled by involuntarily
instincts.
His poetry is not a great artist utterance that has fulfilled its end—
or at least the only end with which the artist is concerned—when once
it has got outside the mind in which it originated into audible sound
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173
or visible form, whether that sound be heard or that form be seen or
not; but it is a message intended to travel (the sender hardly cares
how, provided that the end be reached) from the heart and brain of
one man to the hearts and brains of those who will hear him. The
necessity that is laid upon him, through his instincts, is the ‘ When
thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren ; ’ and the setting himself
to his work as a poet seems to be his choice of the way in which he
will obey that impulse. Not for his own sake does poetry seem to be
a necessity to him. As far as his own needs are concerned, such a man
could afford to be silent. It is neither for the relief nor for the pleasure
of self-utterance that he speaks. Nothing that he has written
betokens the weakness and incapacity of_reticence that have opened the
mouths of so many poets in a great strong bitter crying, which
they tuned into beautiful music whose sweetness might ease them of
their pain. Nor has he that irrepressible joy in beauty for its own
sake which forced Wordsworth to tell of the loveliness of the visible
world.
And we cannot attribute his becoming a poet to the pressure of
dramatic instincts. Though in power of imagining dramatic characters
it is he and he only who at all fills the office’of modern Shakespeare,
yet there is something in his manner of exercising that power which
tells us that in him it is subordinate to some other motive. This
difference there is between Browning and other poets who could
create ‘ men and women,’ that w’hereas with others the production
of life-like characters seems to be the aim and end, with him it is only
the means to a further end—namely, the arguing out and setting
forth of general truths. He cannot, as others have done, rest
satisfied with contemplating the children of his imagination, and find
the fulfilment of his aim in the fact of his having given them existence.
It seems always as if his purpose in creating them was to make them
serve as questioners and objectors and answerers in the great debate
of conflicting thoughts of which nearly all his poetry forms part. His
object in transferring (as he can do with such marvellous success)
his own consciousness, as it were, into the consciousness of some
imagined character, seems to be only to gain a new stand-point, from
which to see another and a different aspect of the questions concerning
which he could not wholly satisfy himself from his own point of view.
He can create characters with as strongly marked individualities as
had ever any that came out of the brain of dramatist or novelist, but
he cannot be content to leave them, as Shakespere did the characters
he created, to look, all of them, off in various directions according to
whatever chanced to suit best with the temper and disposition he had
imagined for them. Still less can he leave to any of his men and
women the vraisemblable attribute of having no steady outlook at
anything in particular. They are all placed by him with their eyes
turned in very much in the same direction, gazing towards the same class
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
of questions. And, somehow, Browning himself seems to he in com
pany with them all the time, hearing their different reports of the
various aspects which those questions present to each of them ; and
judging and choosing between all these different reports, in order to
give credence to the true one. The study of no individual character
would seem to him of much value, unless that character contained
something which should help to throw light upon matters common to
all humanity, upon the questions either as to what it is, or as to what are
its relations to the things outside humanity. Desire to know the truth,
and to make other men know it, seems to be the essential quality of
his nature, and his poetry only its separable accident — a garment
which it wears because if finds such best suited to it in the nineteenth
century, but which it might very likely have gone without, if placed
among the surroundings of some other age. If we can fancy him
transferred back some five hundred years ago, he would be found
surely not among the followers of the 1 gaye science/ as a trouvère
or troubadour, exercising his art to give pleasure at the court or the
knightly castle, but rather in the solitude of a monastic cell, gazing
with fixed eyes into the things of the unseen world, until they became
the real, and the shows of earth the unreal, things ; or, later on, would
surely have been a worker, not in the cause of the great art revival of
the sixteenth century but of its Reformation movement. One can fancy
how grandly he would then have preached his gospel of the sanctity
of things secular, in rough plain Luther-like prose, with the same
singleness of purpose with which he now, as a poet, sets himself to
preach a gospel—needed more than all others by his contemporaries—
of the reality and presence of things immaterial and extra-human.
Browning’s poetry has one characteristic which gives its teaching
peculiar influence over contemporary minds. I mean the way in which,
all the while being perfectly free from egoism, it brings its readers in
some inexplicable way into a contact with the real self of the author,
closer and more direct than that which we have with any other poets
through their writings. Once you succeed in construing the compli
cated thinking and feeling of this or that passage of his, you feel,
not that youtare seeing something that a man has made, but that you
are in the immediate presence of the man himself. I know of no other
writings (except J. H. Newman’s) having this peculiarity to such a
degree (it is in this that the secret of the fascination of those wonder
ful sermons of Newman’s consists). These two men, so different,
have yet this in common, that there is something in their written
words which communicates to the men who read them the thrill of
contact with the.pulsations of another human life. And the knowledge
that there is the real living mind of another man speaking to your
mind, gives a restful sense of reality that is the starting-point of all
belief and of all motive to action. Surely anyone who has received
this from Browning must feel as if there would be a miserable ingrati-
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175
tu.de in the sort of criticism which should carp at his poetry for its
lack of polish in style or prettiness in ideas.
Browning is greater than his art, and the best work which his poetry
does is to bring you into his own presence: and once there you no
longer care what brought you there, and feel as if it mattered very
little whether the means of communication had been poetry or other
form of words. Tennyson’s art is greater than Tennyson ; and it is
with it, and not with the man himself, that you have to do.
Of course, though Tennyson can have no direct influence as a teacher
over anyone who feels thus about him and his work, yet his indirect
influence over the minds of men is not to be lightly accounted of. His
poetry is what it is, and may be accepted by us as we accept a beauti
ful painting or piece of music, as an end in itself. Acting through our
aesthetic perceptions, it affects the tone and colour of our moods. And
most of us know by experience that the character of our thinking is in
a great measure dependent upon moods and feelings open to impres
sions of this sort. It is of course no slight gift that Mr. Tennyson has
given to his contemporaries when he has shown them ideas so pure and
calm and noble, by the contemplation of which their own lives may
unconsciously become purer and higher.
Acknowledging this influence that he has, and giving him due honour
for it, all I would say is that there is another kind of influence which
he cannot exercise, and that his poetry, though making nineteenth cen
tury problems so constantly its theme, is not to be reckoned amongst the
books that give any real availing help against the modern 1 spectres of
the mind.’ To the needs of vital doubt it is no more than if it told us
tales of fairy-land. And this because of its failing to give us that entire
satisfaction as to its being truth subjective, which alone could be our
guarantee for its being able to help in guiding us to truth objective. In
the times when neither our hearts nor brains can get hold of the sense
of reality in anything around us, we find that instead of aiding us ‘ aus
diesem Meer des Irrthums aufzutauchen,’ all that Tennyson’s poetry
seems to have done for us is to have made a beautiful word-phantom,
having a semblance of wise human counsel, to add another to the
number of the appearances that with aspects beautiful or horrible are
floating over and under and around us, and perpetually eluding our
grasp. Fai’ more is to be gained at such times from poetry even such
as Clough’s, which, though it carries you to no farther resting-place, at
least lets you take hold of one substantial thing—'the veritable mind of
a human being, doubting with its. own doubts and having its certaintainties its own, each of those certainties, however few and imperfect,
having a distinct place as independent testimony to truth.. . ?
Browning brings from out of his own individuality something which
he did not receive from his age, and which he offers to it as a gift, and
which is of a spirit so foreign to the atmosphere into which it comes
that he requires men to accept him as a. teacher before attaining to
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BROWNING- AS A PREACHER.
sympathy with. him. This that he has to give is some of the intense
earnestness of Puritanism, and the strenuousness of effort which gave
heroic grandeur to the old asceticism. He offers this to a state of
society, which along with all its practical vigour and perseverance in
the affairs of men’s outer lives, has so much of aimlessness and aban
donment of self-direction in all that concerns the life of inner thought
and feeling.
Other men of present and recent times have had a like gift to bestow,
but their manner of giving it was such as to make its acceptance for
the most part impossible. J. H. Newman and the company of men
who, with him, were the Puritans and ascetics of the nineteenth century,
have gained no permanent influence as teachers of their age. Teachers
of their age, indeed, they did not attempt to be, but only of whoever
should be willing to betake himself out of it back into mediaeval modes
cf thought; and with the thoughts and difficulties of the men who
refused to do this, they either could not or would not sympathise nor
have anything to do. Hence, the vigour and thoroughness of their
own individual lives was able only very partially to affect the thinking
and feeling of the world around them. But Browning undertakes the
work which they would not attempt. The chief glory of his labour is
that he has taken so much of what was good in the old Puritan spirit,
and has brought it into harmony with the wider knowledge and larger
life of later times. He devises for the fixedness of moral purpose and
power of asceticism, which are the inherent characteristics of his own
nature, another and a worthier use than the uses which in old times
men had been wont to make them serve. He sees in moral fixedness a
means that may be used not to check intellectual advance, but to help
it forward by steadying its aim; and he finds that asceticism is capable
of becoming, from having been the old monkish discipline of repression,
the nobler acncriaic of the mental athlete, which is to prepare him for
strenuous exertions whereby all parts of his human nature may
develop themselves to the full.
The idea of a struggle and a wrestling in which the wills of men are
to be engaged—the central idea of early and mediaeval Christian
thought—is recognised fully and distinctly by Browning in all that he
has written. He holds that men’s business in this world’is labour and
strife and conquest, and not merely free unconscious growth and
harmonious development. He differs thoroughly from the modern
thinking, which sees no moral evil distinct from and antagonistic to
good; and again and again, directly or indirectly, his poems let us see
how wide is his separation, both in belief and feeling, from the many
poets of these present days, who have returned to the idea round which
the old Greek poetry had all revolved, of the powerlessness of man’s
will and the drifting of his life before an unalterable destiny. In a
recent . criticism on Tennyson’s and Browning’s characteristics,1
1 Professor Dowden’s lecture on ‘ Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning,’ The Dublin
Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art (1867-68). London: Bell & Daldy.
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BROWNING- AS A PREACHER.
Browning is distinguished as being pre-eminently the poet of impulse.
This he doubtless is, but it seems to me that his chief point of difference
from the majority of modern poets, is his being emphatically the poet
of the will.
That this is the characteristic feature of his poetry strikes one most
forcibly if one chances to take up a volume of it immediately after
reading his contemporary Matthew Arnold’s sufficiently to have let
one’s mood take the impress of his. The transition from the one man’s
conception of life to that of the other seems like the waking from one
of those nightmare dreams in which we have the sense of being for
ever passive (all the while struggling in vain not to be) under
some Compelling that is horrible and yet mockingly sweet; to find
Ourselves restored from this to the wide-awake state of things, in
which we regain the consciousness of freedom of action.
There is much in which he makes common cause with J. H. Newman
and the men who were imbued with his spirit. They and Browning alike
realise the individuality of each human life, and the struggle which is
for each man a separate work to be entered into by his self-determined
will, and feel the intense mysteriousness of human personality. And they
may be classed together as protesters against nineteenth-centuryism—
the habit of thought which makes so little account of these things.
The question on which they part company is the question as to whether
the impulses which men find within them are to be opposed by their
wills as enemies, or to be accepted by them as allies in the struggle
that has to be engaged in. While, on the one hand, by Newman and
those like-minded with him, the only guide internal to man which is
acknowledged as having the authority of a voice from the invisible
world, is the conscience—the sense of a law binding to the doing of
one sort of actions and the refraining from another sort (the law by
making its presence thus felt being in itself evidence for its giver) ;
by Browning, on the other hand, other mental phenomena to be found
in human nature are accepted, as having first their intellectual signifi
cance as evidences ‘ whence a world of spirit as of sense’ is made plain
to us, and afterwards their moral uses in raising us from the world of
sense into the world of spirit.
Our human impulses towards knowledge, towards beauty, towards
love—all these impulses, the feeling of which is common in various
degrees to all men, and the expression of which by some few among
them is Art—are reverenced by him as the signs and tokens of a world
not included in that which meets our senses, as the
Intuitions, grasps of guess,
That pull the more into the less,
Making the finite comprehend
Infinity.
j
-“-not of course that Browning does not also recognise the evidential
force of conscience as an internal witness, but still, I think, it is chiefly
VOL. IL—NO. VIII.
K
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
in the human impulses which in the world of sense are never satisfied,
that he considers the subjective evidence for the spirit world to lie.
And from this difference in the grounds of his and Newman’s beliefs
there results a difference in their whole conception of man’s life and its
aims. The part of human nature which alone Newman will acknow
ledge as a divine guide is a part which in itself furnishes no principle
of growth or progress (the conscience being only a power capable of
restraining and directing), and the ideal life in this world is therefore,
according to him, only a state of waiting, a walking warily in obedience,
until some other state shall be reached in which man shall be in a
condition to begin growth. According to him the business of the
earthly life is only to get safely out of it as out of an enemy’s country.
And as a natural result of his theory of the earthly life, we find that
Newman, even with all his vivid perception of each human soul’s
individual existence, becomes unable to sympathise with diversities of
individuality: no scope for human diversities being allowed by the
theory which sets all men to the same sort of work—the mere work of
escaping (each with his unused individualities) to some future condition
in’which life, in the sense of an active and growing state, may begin.
But Browning, on the other hand, having taken all the higher human
impulses and aspirations to be evidences whereby we discern an order
of things extending beyond the world of which sense is cognizant,
becomes able to conceive of the life that now is, as a condition, not of
mere waiting and watching—not as a struggle only on the defensive
against evil, in which safety is the only kind of success sought for—but
as a state in which growth and progress are to be things of the present
—in which the struggle is to be for acquisition and not alone for
defence. His recognition of impulse as a guide to be accounted divine,
makes him recognise human nature as being furnished with means of
self-evolving growth and action, and not merely of obedience to laws
given from without.
Browning’s theory of human impulse removes him from a sort of
asceticism which he would doubtless have been capable of exercising
(if his judgment had decided in favour of it) as unflinchingly and as
fiercely as mediaeval monk or modern ascetic, such as Newman or
Baber. He, like them, could have preached and practised the restraining
of human feelings and hopes, and the reducing of life to a toilsomelymaintained condition of high-wrought quiescence. He is too entirely
filled with the sense of the resolute human will to have ever let himself
be driven along, Swinburne-like, by mighty art impulses. He would
have been able to separate his thinking wholly from their influences,
had it not been that he had deliberately accepted them as guides which
ought to be followed. The moral half of him is stronger than the
eesthetic ; and the stronger could have crushed out the weaker if it had
not chosen to yield it willing honour. A mind such as his is solitary
and ascetic in its natural temperament; yet by his creed Browning
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
179
gains catholicity of thought and of interests. Wide sympathy with
^dissimilar types of human character would be a thing not to be looked
for in a thinker who realises so intensely the mysteries of his own indivi
dual existence, if it had not been that he had taken those very things in
which their dissimilarity lies—their multiform impulses—as the many
witnesses for the same truths, each witness requiring to be understood
by a reverent and appreciative sympathy. To a man whose whole
soul could be absorbed by the vividly realised vision of an Easter Day,
desires such as Abt Vogler’s towards ideal beauty of sound; as those
of Paracelsus towards knowledge; of Aprile towards love; and the
restless battle-ardour of Luria, would seem trivial, and not worthy of
detaining the eyes to search into them and analyse their peculiarities,
Were it not for his belief that in all such desires an infinite meaning’
could be discerned ; and that they were the varying pledges, given to
various human beings, of the individual immortality of each. Prom
this his belief there follows a wide development of human sympathy
which has a peculiar value, because of its not being the expression of
naturally gregarious tendencies, but of an originally self-concentrated
nature, transferring, as it were, its own consciousness, with all its
intensity, into the diverse human individualities that come under its
notice.
Very wide indeed is this sympathy. All human feelings and aspira
tions become precious in Browning’s eyes, not for what they are, but for
what they point to. He becomes capable of seeing a grandeur (poten
tial though not actual) in human aims whose aspect would be, to
Careless unsympathising eyes, ridiculous rather than sublime. For
instance, the instinctive craving after perfection and accuracy, which
had for its only visible result the expending of the energies of a lifetime
on the task of determining the exact force and functions of Greek
particles, is treated by Browning, in that very noble poem of his, ‘ The
Grammarian’s Funeral,’ with no contemptuous pity, but is honoured as
being a pledge of the limitless future, which, lying before all human
workers, renders it unnecessary that a man should slur over the
jjiinutiee of his work hastily, in the endeavour to compress into a life
time all that he aims at accomplishing.
The sort of asceticism which Browning’s theory of impulse
makes impossible to him, is that which fears to let the senses enjoy
¡tile whole fulness of earthly beauty, and seeks to narrow and enfeeble
¡the affections, and to stifle men’s noble ambitions. Yet his poetry
keeps for its characteristic spirit that other asceticism which implies
the using of the world’s material beauty and human passion, not as
ends in themselves, but as means whereby man’s spirit may reach to
the heights above them, there to find new steps by which to ascend.
He counsels no abstinence from beauty for the senses, but it is to be
to men not as a banquet, but as a draught which will give them
¡strength for labour, the fuller the draught the greater the strength.
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
He, more than any other poet, has ever present with him these two
ideas : that the world—the material and the human—contains what is
‘very good;’ and also that ‘ the fashion of this world passeth away.’
His noble christianised Platonism takes ‘ all partial beauty as a pledge
of beauty in its plenitude.’ His mood the pledge never wholly suffices.
The earth is to him ‘ God’s ante-chamber ’—God’s, not a devil’s—yet
still only an ante-chamber.
Asceticism of this kind is the great glory of his doctrine as a preacher.
It may be that, considering him solely as a poet, he loses somewhat by
it. One sort of beauty there is of which it deprives his work, how
ever great may be the compensating gains. This is the artistic
beauty of pathos, of which Browning’s poetry is wholly, or almost
wholly, devoid. There are two kinds of pathos lying on opposite sides
of the position which Browning occupies as a thinker. One of these
is the pathos of mediaeval art, and the other the pathos of pagan art.
And with neither of these has he anything to do. The old ascetic
conception of the earthly life gives a strange yearning tenderness,
infinitely pathetic, to the manner in which the early and mediaeval
hymn writers and the modern mediaevallists, Newman and Faber, look
onward as if from out of a desert or an enemy’s country to the far-off
unseen world—their ‘ Urbs Beata Jerusalem,’ their ‘ Paradise,’ their
‘ Calm land beyond the sea.’ But Browning has no need nor room for
pathos of this sort: the tender ‘ Heimweh ’ of this has no place amongst
his feelings. He does not image to himself the life after death as a
home, in the sense of a state that shall be rested in and never ex
changed for a higher. He conceives of it as differing from the life
that now is, not in permanency, but in elevation and in increase of
capacities. And the earth has its own especial glory, which he will
not overlook, of being first of an infinite series of ascending stages,
showing even now, in the beauty and love that is abroad in it, the
tokens of the visitings of God’s free spirit.
The feeling which we commonly callpathos seems, when one analyses
it, to arise out of a perception of grand incongruities—filling a place
in one class of our ideas corresponding to that in another in which
the sense of the ludicrous is placed by Locke. And this pathos was
attained by mediaeval asceticism through its habit of dwarfing into
insignificance the earthly life and its belongings, and setting the mean
ness and wretchedness which it attributed to it in contrast to the faroff vision of glory and greatness. But by Browning no such incon
gruity is recognised between what is and what shall be.
Another sort of pathos—the Pagan—is equally impossible to him.
This is the sort which results from a full realising of the joy and th®
beauty of the earth, and the nobleness of men’s lives on it; and
from seeing a grand inexplicablenes in the incongruity between th©
brightness of these and the darkness which lies at either end of them
—the infinite contradiction between actual greatness and the apparent
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
181
nothingness of its whence and whither—the mystery of strong and
beautiful impulses finding no adequate outcome now, nor promise of
ever finding it hereafter—human passion kindling into light and glow,
only to burn itself out into ashes—the struggle kept up by the will of
successive generations against Fate, ever beginning and ever ending in
defeat, to recommence as vainly as before—the never-answered ‘ Why ? ’
uttered unceasingly in myriad tones from out all human life.
The poetry of the Greeks gained from the contemplation of these
things a pathos, which, however gladly a Christian poet may forego
such gain for his art, was in its sadness inexpressibly beautiful. The
Iliad had a deep under-current of it even in the midst of all its healthy
childlike objectivity; and it was ever present amongst the great
tragedians’ introspective analysings of humanity.
High art of later times has for the most part retained this pagan
beauty. Though there is no reason to think that there was any
paganism in Shakespeare’s creed, yet we cannot help feeling that,
whether the cause is to be sought in his individual genius or in
Renaissance influences, the spirit of his art is in many respects pagan.
In his great tragedies he traces the workings of noble or lovely human
character on to the point—and no further—where they disappear into
the darkness of death ; and ends with a look back, never on towards
anything beyond. His sternly truthful realism will not, of course,
allow him to attempt a shallow poetical justice, and mete out to each
of his men and women the portion of earthly good which might seem
their due : and his artistic instincts'—positive rather than speculative
—prefer the majesty and infinite sadness of unexplainedness to any
attempt to look on towards a future solution of hard riddles in human
fates. ‘ King Lear,’ for instance, is pathetic because of its paganism ; and
would, be spoiled, or at all events changed into something quite differ
ent, by the introduction of any Christian hope. One of the chief artistic
effects of the story is the incongruity between the wealth of devotion
poured out by Cordelia’s impulses of love and the dreary nothingness
in which those beautiful impulses end. If there was anything in it to
leave with us the impression that this was not the end of all, and that
this expenditure of love was not in vain, but had its results yet to
come, the story could not call forth in us an emotion of such keen and
tender pity. And in this tragedy, as in Shakespeare’s others, one of its
greatest effects, as art, is produced by the idea which had acted so
mightily on the minds of old Greek poets—the powerlessness of man’s
moral agency against his destiny. Hamlet, for instance, ends in ac
complishing nothing of what he has set before him as his aim. Some
thing, over and above his own irresoluteness is hindering him. He
becomes, through no fault of his, the murderer of a harmless old man,
and breaks the innocent young heart of Ophelia, becoming to her
another link in the chain of involuntary evil, and being the cause of
her unconscious sin of self-destruction. (It is as sin that Shakespeare
�182
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
regards Ophelia’s suicide ; and this parodox of his, of guilt without
moral volition is thoroughly Greek—akin, e.g. to the tragic aspect of
the crime of CEdipus.)
So too, in Othello’s character, there is no lack of noble impulses •
yet they are productive of no results. His fate, taking advantage of
the one vulnerable part of his nature, impels him to the destruction
of all his happiness by the murder of Desdemona. And the artist
breaks off, taking the murdered and the murderer out of our sight,
and leaving with us only the impression of the irreparableness of
the deed, and of the mysteriousness and inevitableness of the innocent
suffering and almost involuntary guilt that came upon two human
creatures. The effect of the tragedies depends upon the total absence
in them of anything which might suggest the possibility of a future
answer to the great ‘ Wherefore ? ’ which their endings evoke from our
hearts. Their pathos arises out of their tacit exclusion of hope.1
The contrast between the spirit (apart of course from any thought
as to the relative poetical rank) of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and of
Mr. Browning’s greatest tragic work, ‘ The Ring and the Book,’ is very
striking. The impression which the latter leaves upon the reader’s
mind is that of a great solemn looking forward, which absorbs into
itself all emotions of pity that might have been awakened by Pompilia’s
innocent suffering and Caponsacchi’s love ; and which mitigates the
hatred which we must feel for Guido, by the thought that even for him
a far-off possible good may be waiting. The spirit of Shakespeare’s
tragic art (however much the form may differ from the classical) has
much of the sort of completeness which was characteristic of Greek
art. There is no suggestiveness in it of a state of things out of the
reach of his art, and therefore he allows you to feel to the full (as far
as you are able) any emotion which the character and circumstances
of his dramatic creations should properly give rise to. When once he
has shaped and fashioned his men and women, he leaves them with
you—fixed as a sculptor might, leave his work—in attitudes which
appeal perpetually to one or other of your human feelings, with no
indication of such attitudes not being the only possible ones in which
they might appear. But Browning never completes, or would have
his readers complete, the emotions called forth by his dramatic art.
He checks them, while as yet only half realised, by his perpetual
suggestiveness that what his art represents is only a portion of a great
1 There is an analogy between the poetry of ancient and modern paganism, and
some of 'the greatest poems in the modern art—music. The spirit which seems
to pervade Beethoven’s is essentially pagan. He is the great musical poet of un
answered seeking. There is joyousness enough in his music to contrast with its
tones of mighty Faust-like despair; but I have never heard a passage of it that
suggested emotions of hope or deep restful happiness. Outside the world in which
Beethoven and his art move, there is for him only a ‘ dim gray lampless world.’
Outside the world of Mendelssohn, however, who is no pagan, there is an infinite
encircling love, to which he sings his ‘Lobgesang.’ He seeks—and finds.
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
183
unknown whole, without knowing, which neither he nor you can
determine, what the feelings with which you regard the portion ought
to b©. Considering, as he does, every human life as only a glimpse of
a beginning, its minglings of greatness and imperfection have not for
him the same aspect of pathetic mysterious paradox which they have
for those poets who, either from their creed or from their v’/tioc, regard
it as a rounaed whole.
The absence of any pagan spirit in Browning’s writings deprives
them also of a sort of beauty that belongs to so much of the modern
poetry of external nature. Paganism is the source whence many
poets have drawn their adoration of that loveliness of the earth—
serene and terrible, outlasting and unmoved by human struggles.
When these men behold the infinity of her beauty, they merge in their
adoration of it all dissatisfactions with human life ; attaining to one
kind of intellectual repose, by giving up hope to find satisfaction for
thought or moral feeling, and by taking instead, for solace, the
unmeasured pleasure of «esthetic perception.
Shelley’s creed, taking the visible world for its all in all, has for its
product the intense vividness with which he perceives the richness
and glory of the sights of that world. He looks at, rests in, the
beauty that he sees ; and it becomes more to him than it can be even
to Wordsworth, who, with all his devotion to external nature, looked
through rather than at her. And Shelley’s poetry derives its strange
intangible pathos from its having all this aesthetic brightness to set in
contrast over against the darkness that surrounds those ‘ obstinate
questionings ’ from within, which again and again, in spite of his own
desire, distract his mind from its joyous vision of what is without.
And there is a sort of passionate grasping, clutching rather, at the
light of the sun, and all the sights and sounds and fragrances of the
earth, which belongs especially to pagan poetry, ancient or modern,
and which tells of a prizing of these things not for their own mere
beauty’s sake, but chiefly because in the perception of them life is
implied, and the separation from them means extinction and dark
nothingness. This idea, so all-pervading in the old Greek feeling for
External nature, finds in our own days its chief exponent in Swinburne.
I know of nothing in contemporary poetry that is so supremely
pathetic as the perpetual alternations in those wonderful choruses in
his ‘ Atalanta in Calydon,’ between a wild revelling in the freshness
and exuberant gladness of the earth, in the rush of her joyance,
when—
‘ in green underwood and cover,
Blossom by blossom the spring begins ’—
and a wailing lamentation over the life of man who has for his portion
on the earth
* light in his ways,
And love and a space for delight,
And beauty and length of days,
And night and sleep in the night.’
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
Yet whose doom is only to abide there during a brief space, knowing
neither content nor hope.
‘ His speech is a burning fire,
With his lips he travaileth,
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes fore-knowledge of death.
He weaves, and is clothed with derision,
Sows, and he shall not reap ;
His life is a watch or a vision,
Between a sleep and a sleep.’
The poem of ‘ Atalanta ’ is of course a direct utterance of modern
paganism, and not merely expressive of historical sympathy with ancient;
and is a specimen, most perfect of its kind, of that eesthetic beauty of
which Browning’s poetry is rendered incapable by the creed in which
his strong, earnest mind, never able to rest without getting down into
the realities that nnderlie the visible surface of things, finds the Sub
stantial reality that it seeks.
Yet it may indeed be that the feeling gained by Browning’s onward
gaze of expectation is higher, even if considered purely as an artist's
feeling, than that of the wistful pathos that comes to other poets
through their sense of a seeking baffled alike behind and before. And,
it may be that our inability instantly to recognise it as higher, is because
of our having, although contemporaries with Browning, lagged behind
him in thought and aspiration ; and not having as yet attained to tho
conception towards which his poetry reaches in its beautiful imperfect
grandeur, of a Christianity and Art—nowhere destructive of each other
—two parts of one great Revelation.
E.
Dicktnson West.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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Browning as a preacher. Part 1
Creator
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West, Elizabeth Dickinson
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 171-184 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2: Attribution of journal title and date from Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[1871]
Identifier
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G5317
Subject
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Browning as a preacher. Part 1), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
Robert Browning