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305
J3f\OWNING
AS
P^eachei^
A
SECOND PAPER.
'The first part of this essay was occupied with an attempt to define
some aspects of Mr. Browning’s position amongst contemporary poets;
¡and the tone and temper in which his poetry enters upon one of its
functions—preaching—(this word I used advisedly as better befitting
poetry than the term teaching}. His art and his preaching are, indeed,
inextricably interwoven in all his writings; and the result of an en•deavour to abstract either one or other from the whole, must of course
be unsatisfactory; nevertheless, in some measure I must aim at tracing
•one or two of his characteristics as preacher, to their expression in
some of his sermons. Within a space so limited, I can only allude
to a very few poems : a thorough analysis of any, would be, one need
hardly say, useless to attempt. ‘ Easter-day ’ is perhaps of all others,
the most strikingly illustrative of the Browning peculiarities, the one
which least of all could have been the work of any other man. Viewed
.side by side with his £ Christmas-eve,’ it is, one feels, the more
difficult of apprehension : it seems more complex in meaning, and
full of subtle transitions of thought and mood. It is possible to a cer
tain extent to content ourselves with an interpretation of ‘Christmas-eve,’
but the other poem seems to grow with each successive reading; and
by newly perceived connections of thought or feeling, to modify our old
exegeses. One feels that one is admitted more immediately in this,
into the mysterious presence of a human mind. The impression one
.gets from comparison of the two poems is that the whole of the vivid
artist and man-consciousness of which the £ Easter-day ’ is a product, is
not brought into action in the formation of the poem of ‘ Christmas-eve
and in this latter there is less absolute demand than in the other, that
his readers should have some degree of intellectual and moral affinity
■with the writer.
Granting that there is this difference in the poems, we may perhaps
VOL. II.---- NO. IX.
Q
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
discern a reason for it in the difference of the subjects which occupy
them; the subject dealt with in £ Christmas-eve,’ belonging to the region
of matters practical—-that of ‘ Easter-day’ extending into the speculative.
Vigorous and clear-sighted though Browning is in his dealings with
these former, it is in a speculative region only that the full force of hisnature seems to develope itself in that passionate pressing on after
substantial reality of some sort or other—whether good or evil, at least
truth—which is the ultimate attitude of all his intellectual and emotional
action.
1 Christmas-eve’ starts from beliefs, which it takes for granted con
cerning the relations of humanity to an unseen spiritual world. It
belongs to the world of intercourse with our fellow men, a region where'
our beliefs are certainties, or as good as certainties. The question it treatsof is one within the Christian Church. The lesson it gives is a practical
one of broad charity and tolerance, a tolerance which, resulting out of the*
love to be learned by contemplation of the Human-Divine love, is to be
able to overcome all intellectual variances and fastidious repugnances of
taste. There is wrought out in the poem the grand feeling of a brother
hood, including witbin its comprehensive hold the manifold varieties of
human lives. Browning by his deep digging into humanity, finds
essential root-union, where Matthew Arnold with his languid scratching
at the surface, finds only dissimilarities forbidding sympathy. He unites
himself and us with the men and women of the Zion Chapel meeting,,
whose portraits he places before his readers in terms so grotesquely
graphic,—omitting no offensive detail to render them thoroughly life
like; and effectually preventing any mere aesthetic sentiment from being
the basis of our Christian charity. The absence of sweetness and light,
and the presence of certan repulsive characteristics (there is a vein off
humour akin to Dickens’s, in the way in which these are individualized),,
in the 1 preaching-man,’ alike, and in the flock that sat under the ‘ pig-oflead-like pressure,’ of his ‘ immense stupidity,’ are things that Browning:
insists on our realising to the full. Then, over the disgust awakened,
in us, he gains and makes us gain, as the poem proceeds, a victory
sublime, both as ethics and as art. (I said in the earlier pages of this,
essay, that Browning had no pathos—no sense of grand incongruities;.
I retract:—this is what one might call an inverted pathos. The un
looked-for discovery that the reality is nobler than the appearance, is.
the pathos belonging to Browning, and, to Christianity; just as the
finding truth to be smaller and meaner than illusion, had been the
pathos of Paganism). ‘Christmas-eve’ unites us, also, with the crowd
of ignorant worshippers in Rome at the ‘ raree show of Peter’s suc
cessor,’ who (typical of a multitude in all sections of the Church).,
remain in the days when the ‘world’s eyes are open’
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
307
Peevish as ever to be suckled,
Lulled by the same old baby prattle,
With intermixture of the rattle ;
and with the Gottingen professor who, with an inconsistency nobler than
his logic, retains the feeling of faith in and love for what his reason has
reduced to a myth. (Were it not that this paper must abstain from
viewing Browning as an artist, I would notice as a specimen of his
power as a portrait painter, the way in which with a few vigorous touches
he sets before us the whole ‘personnel ’ outer and inner, of this ‘ virginminded studious martyr to mild enthusiasm.’) The poem has its cul
minating idea in the grand trust that can say—
‘— Subsisteth. ever
God’s care above, and I exult
That God, by God’s own ways occult
May—doth. I will believe—bring back
All wanderers to a single track.’
Browning lets us see clearly what the nature of this feeling of brother
hood is j and guards jealously against any possibility of confounding it
with ‘ mild indifferentism’ or ‘lazy glow of benevolence over the various
modes of man’s beliefs.’ He makes no attempt to harmonize the different
creeds and tempers of religious feeling, by the modern method of elimi
nating the peculiarities of each as non-essentials. He, on the contrary,
insists that what constitutes each man’s earthly care, is to ‘ strive—to
find some one chief way of worship, and contrive ’ that his fellows ‘ take
their share.’ His tolerance is only the result of his confidence that here
where man’s care ends, ‘ God’s, which is above it and distinct,’ begins.
He cannot take the philosophical bird’s-eye view of the different creeds,
which is possible to men who are sufficiently impersonal to themselves to
contemplate at their ease, and compare impartially, the various religious
systems and cults spread out before them. All conclusions taking as
their premises only the aspects of men in masses, are unsatisfactory to
him. All problems of life, social or ecclesiastical, are unintelligible to
him until he have gained a solvent for them through the solution of the
problem of the life individual. The unit from which his reasonings
start is neither Humanity, nor the portion of it included within a church,
but the ego (the only ego he knows as a basis for argument being his
own). And it is only through his individual realisings, attained through
the toil and struggle of personal faith, that he gets his hope for the des
tinies of other men : it is only because of what he has himself discerned,
that he is enabled to reach—by a leap, not by a logical process—to the
trust that the discerning» of his fellows, though varying from his own,
are not illusory. The ratio of his power of sympathy and tolerance is
exactly that of the strength of his own dogmatic beliefs.
Q 2
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
It is in tlie 1 Easter day ’ that we have to look for the record of how
an earnest human soul attains to that faith in the unseen, which in
‘ Christmas eve ’ is assumed all along as the basis of the argument. The
poem concerns itself with no questions of the ecclesiastical life, but of
the individual Christian life, which includes within itself the idea of the
objectively-including ecclesiastical life. Here Browning’s especial faculty
■—the strong venturing of faith—finds exercise. There are men (and
many amongst the highest orders of men) whose motions of thought and
feeling gain in firmness and freedom by the consciousness of belonging
to and acting with an ecclesiastical organisation or great public move
ment of opinion. But Browning’s mind has no place amongst minds of
this class : it is equally unfitted to move in an army organised under a
definite church system, or in an irregular force banded together by 1 the
spirit of an age;’ its victories must be won in single combat, if won
at all.
Here, parenthetically, we may notice this isolated working of Brown
ing’s thought, as the source of two characteristic imperfections—or,
more properly, limitations—in it. 1st, owing to this, his conception of
Christianity lacks the solidarity that arises out of the corporate feeling
and consciousness of historic permanence. It has never the broad firm
grandeur of the mood of the Ambrosian hymns, for instance, or the ‘ Te
Deum.’ According to his view, each generation of men have just the
same sort of work to do which they would have to do were all the
work of their ancestors to be blotted out, and leave no vestige of itself or
its effects. The objective creed is not placed by him ever in any secure
independence of our subjective hold upon it. 2ndly, though from this
mental aloneness comes the chief glory of his work as truthseeker,—his
way of getting face to face with his beliefs, and seeing whatever he sees,
directly and through no medium of languidly accepted traditions,—-yet
from the same source there comes one characteristic, which limits the
range of his helpfulness, and makes his teaching incapable of influencing
more than one class of minds. His own view of the immeasurable ex
panse of truth makes him, indeed, profoundly tolerant of the views of
other men whose standpoints are not his : but is he wholly free from
exclusiveness in his notions as to what should be accounted the lawful
organ in human nature for truth-discerning 1 Does he not seem to make
his very peculiar self the measure of other men, and become sometimes
intolerant of varieties of ways in which variously constituted men arrive
at and hold their beliefs ? In himself two natures are met in rare com
bination ; each of these natures being of heroic size and vigour. There
is the union of intellectual strength and subtlety, with a vividly imagin
ative and emotional temperament. He is at once a hard thinker and a
passionate feeler—a logician and a poet; and is, for his own part, able
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
30 9
to work in whatever engages him, with the faculties that belong to this
two-fold nature, and choose to which set of faculties he will entrust the
work he cares most about. His poems portray or suggest mental pro
cesses in ■which progress into scepticism and out of it takes place usually
thus:—the keen dialectic intellect first takes up the question in hand,
and works at it until it has made visible all the difficulties that are to
be found in it;—then, at the point where all objections have been fairly
brought into notice, the ego does not set the part of its nature—the in
tellect—which began operations with them, to the further task of at
tempting either to find explanation and answer to them, or to relegate
them beyond the province of things explicable ; but with a sudden
change of mood, the consciousness (leaving all these as and where they
are) flings itself with a passionate leap away from them, into the emo
tional part of human nature, and seeks its faith in a refuge from, rather
than in an encounter with, intellectual difficulty.
Whatever imperfections there are in Mr. Browning’s power of sym
pathy, are to be found on the side that is turned towards the class of
thinkers incapable, from mental constitution, of reaching faith by such
methods. His Christianity seems to exclude men born to belong to
what Mr. R. H. Hutton (in a somewhat ‘hard’-mooded essay—out of tune
with the others in his two recently-published volumes,) styles the ‘ Hard
Church.’ From these,—the men feebler in imagination and emotion,
than in intellectual power,—men whose feelings flow only as after-conse
quences from beliefs which they in no way helped to form—men who
for doubts of reason must find either satisfaction by reason, or find by it
good cause for the impossibility of such satisfaction—from such men
Browning holds aloof. His preaching rejects with somewhat of contempt
the evidences which are their faith’s all. He casts impatiently aside the
evidence, e.g., of the 1 greater probability ’—which to many a man must
be the sole ground of his belief in Christianity, and a ground which
would seem to melt from under him, if emotion or desire intruded upon
a mood dispassionately judicial. Browning’s mind, itself able instinc
tively to feel out the ‘ mightiness of love inextricably curled about ’ all
‘power and beauty in the world;’ and able to transcend, in the strength
of these intuitive perceptions, the chasm intervening between Nature
and the Christian Tale ; refuses to recognise the existence of any logical
footway of historical evidence, whereby alone a mind such as, <?.</., Arch
bishop Whately’s could arrive at belief in the truth of the story.
The failing to behold ‘lover’ written ‘on the foreheads’of the men who
must lovelessly know before they can love, is the imperfection discernible
in the great fraternal-hearted poet-thinker.
It happens often that men far more rigidly exclusive as to the ‘ what ’
of other people’s beliefs, are less so than Mr. Browning with regard to the
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BROWNING ÀS A PREACHER.
‘ how.’ This sort of tolerance results from their accepting the creed of
a church as handed down, ¿Ind not making religious truth a matter of
individual investigation. The creed of a church represents the aggre
gate action of varieties of minds it is the centre of agreement where
Opinions meet, irrespective of how they have travelled. Whoever, there
fore, takes this already-arrived-at creed as his own starting-point of
thought or feeling, acquiesces thereby in the lawfulness of roads (be these
what they may) which have brought other men to it. Keble, for in
stance, though a man immeasurably narrower in inherent sympathies
than Browning, has in some ways a larger toleration for minds of a dif
ferent order from his own, and holds in honour modes of thought such
as Bishop Butler’s. This is made possible to him (though for his own
part his faith would rest upon feeling only), by his having at the outset
abstained from individual truth-seeking, and merged his own life in the
catholic life of a church.
In Browning’s teaching there is in many respects a repetition alike of
the perfections and imperfections of Coleridge’s. In both of these men
the same intense inwardness and vivid self-concentrated thought which
fits them to accomplish—as their own peculiar work—the maintaining of
the subjective evidences for religious truth, inclines them to the same
sort of impatience towards all others, who, not able to trust the instinc
tive voices from within, have to seek faith through investigation and
comparison of what is without.
‘ Easter Day ’ is all throughout illustrative of Browning’s tendency
to exclusive reliance upon the subjective evidence of the human instincts.
The problem of the poem is the how
‘To joint
This flexile, finite life once tight
Into the fixed and infinite.’
•—the how to find, first, a ‘ fixed and infinite.’ And for the problem’s
solution, his mind refuses to avail itself of all aids which the intellect,
judging from things external, can offer. Meeting each answer of the
interlocutor with freshly occurring objections, he gets down deeper into
the difficulty, seeing ever more and more ‘ how very hard it is to be a
Christian.’ Then there comes to him, out of his great poet-heart, a
means of escape from the throng of surrounding perplexities, in that
strange, terribly vivid vision-dream, which brings in succession all earthly
things accounted good—earth’s exquisite treasures of wonder and delight
■—the waving of her woods, and flowing of her rivers, and all her vast
exhaustless beauty, and endless change—art in its most perfect ancient
and modern forms—knowledge, and the power to range Faust-like
‘through all circling sciences, philosophies, and histories’—brings all
these to the test of the human soul’s hunger for satisfaction; until it
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
311
feels that none of them is sufficient to stay its cravings; and that its one
final desire (to attain which it would let all else go in exchange) is for
love. And then there comes the mighty leap up of the human instincts,
regardless of intervening intellectual obstacles, towards the love of God
as told of in the Christian story,
£ "What doubt in thee, could countervail
Belief in it— ?’
and in ‘ it ’ he feels that he has found the substance of the gleams
that, blending with all the displays of power and beauty on the earth,
have been the essence of the brightness and good in her, which men have
rejoiced in. The scene which the dream tells of is placed in the after
judgment state; the whole poem, however, is in its scope not illustra
tive of a belief in a spiritual world, and of man’s probation for it, but
tentative of the grounds for such belief; and taking the judgment sen
tences of condemnation, merely as hypotheses in order to have in them,
the most searching tests to apply to human instincts.
Characteristically, too, in his £ Saul,’ Browning makes the Messianic
prophecy evolve itself to David from his instincts introspectively per
ceived. The £ Caliban upon Setebos’ gives us his views (strikingly unPaleyan) of the utmost that natural theology would amount to, argued
out without the aid of the intuitions of human love. These he illus
trates in this (which is one of his most powerfully executed poems), by
showing how Caliban, the loveless creature, who is either devoid of human
affections, or in whom they have not been called into activity by fellow
ship with men, can bring no key from within to unlock the meanings of
the universe; and therefore all that he can find in it, everywhere, all
around, by those shrewd bitterly ironical reasonings which his intellect
alone gathers from external things, is only merciless power, and capri
ciously used strength. And the horrible loathsomeness of this idea is
drawn out with a minute perfection curiously fascinating.
Preference for internal evidence is shown, too, in the whole tenor of
Pope Innocent’s monologue in the £ Ring and the Book.’ Here, though
truth is sought not through the mere instincts of the heart, but with
long patient reasonings of the head, it is still the introspective glance
into the human mind which supplies the starting point of the whole
.argument by which the old Pope, finding therein ideas' of strength, inrtelligence and goodness, larger in conception than in human fulfilment,
;and finding in the natural order of the world, actual fulfilment corre
sponding to two only of these ideas, arrives (by the necessity of finding
some instance of the third) at belief in the Christian story of limitless
Jove and sacrifice.
Brom -within, too, Innocent gets his very beautiful answer to the doubt
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
that inevitably suggested itself to a man living in days when the earth
had become very evil, and lust and cruelty such as Guido’s ‘ had their
way i’ the world where God should rule,’ lest haply Christianity’s visible
failure should disprove its truth. The query,
‘ And is this little all that was to be;
Where is the glorious decisive change ?
The immeasurable metamorphosis
Of human clay to divine gold, we looked
Should in some poor sort justify the price ?
.*
«
*
*
*
*
Well, is the thing we see salvation ? ’
is answered by the guess which is supplied by his own heart instincts,,
that this very weakness and failure may be, after all,
‘ But repetition of the miracle,
The Divine instance of self-sacrifice
That never ends, and aye begins for man.’
and are characteristics necessary in a religion corresponding to the re
quirements of our truest humanity.
‘ How can man love but what he yearns to help ?
What but the weakness in a faith supplies
The incentive to humanity, no strength
Absolute, irresistible, comports ? ’
Thoroughly Browning-like is the Pope’s mood, when in his forecast of
the age succeeding his own, his hopes of world-regeneration are placed
in his expectation that it will ‘ shake the torpor of assurance from men’s
creed,’ and compel them, when they shall have grown to disbelieve re
port, to look inwards for truth, and
‘ Correct the portrait by the living face ;
Man’s God, by God’s God in the mind of man.’
A noticeable exception to Browning’s usual attitude of thought occurs,
in the closing pages of the ‘Paracelsus.’ The speech of the dying
knowledge-seeker contains a passage (too long to quote, and whose im
measurable poetic beauty must not here be spoken of), where the argu
ment extends over the whole known aspect of our world, viewing man
objectively in his chronological place in Nature, as an appearance illus
trative by its ‘ supplementary reflux of light’ of all foregoing appearances:
as the counterpai-t of anterior creations, a mirror consciously reflectant
of the whole.
Mr. Browning is an optimist: and all throughout his poetry his opti
mism is as the life-blood, circulating through and giving colour to every
part of it. Some notion of this element in his creed must be defined in
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
all criticism of him, either as teachei’ or artist. The features distinguish
ing his optimistic theory, are, I think, first, his never at any time ceas
ing to behold evil as evil, and to hate it as such : and secondly, his seeming
not to feel the oppression of its mystery that has lain as a burden so
heavily on the minds of generations of thinkers.
Moral evil he beholds as a thing in no way resolvable into mere imper
fection. Where he finds it in the human world it retains for him its old
meaning of sin, and is viewed as something wholly distinct from a stunting
of the beautiful development of men’s natures: by unfavourable outward
circumstances, such as the absence of knowledge and culture. His own
favourite theory of the position of human impulse, and the homage due
to it, never leads him into letting that homage be of a blind indiscrimina
ting sort. He recognises that there is a principle working internally,
and sending forth impulses which must not be mistaken for those which
are men’s lawful guides. With him holiness and healthiness are not
quite convertible terms. Caponsacchi and Guido have both acted
according to the promptings of impulse, obeying laws which were part of
the nature of each : yet between them a difference is set. Rejoicing
praise is bestowed by the Pope, in the 1 Ring and the Book,’ on the
obedience yielded to instincts by one of these men ;
‘ Well done !
Be glad thou hast let light into the world
Through that irregular breach in the boundary,—see
The same upon thy path, and march assured,
Learning anew the use of soldiership,
Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear ;
Loyalty to the life’s end.’
And on the other—Guido—whom he images to himself as pleading in
self-justification that his course of action has been only the same as that
commended, inasmuch as he too has guided his steps according to the
tune of impulse, the old man’s righteous anger smites the blow of the
sentence of temporal death. Wherein does Pope Innocent account this
difference just ? In this—that there has been a probation for both ;
each of them having within him a something to follow, and a some
thing to resist. Count Guido he beholds as
‘ Furnished forth for his career,
On starting for his life-chance in our world,
With nearly all we count sufficient help.
Body and mind in balance—a sound frame,
A solid intellect; the wit to seek,
Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal with whatsoever circumstance
Should minister to man—make life succeed.’
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
■and fortified in his surroundings with 1 great birth, good breeding, and
the Church for guide.’ He accounts that such a man’s trial lies in the
having within, evil impulses balanced more evenly against the good than
they are in the man less favourably circumstanced for resistance to evil.
He condemns (justly, he feels) him who, if he had so willed, might have
made the good outweigh the evil,—might have used stumbling-block as
stepping-stone; but -who has chosen rather to love and believe in—
‘ Just the vile of life,
Low instinct—base pretension.’
Caponsacchi, too, Innocent views as having undergone trial by urgings
of two kinds of impulse ; and as having followed the noble and resisted
the base,—as having, while yielding to instincts of ‘healthy rage’
against cruelty and oppression, retained self-government, and kept
himself pure in thought, and word, and deed. In his praise there is
involved the idea that evil has been present as—
‘ Temptation . . . for man to meet
And master, and make crouch beneath his feet,
And so be pedestailed in triumph.’
.So, too, in the 1 Easter Day’ (as elsewhere) we find the same doctrine of
.a probation for all human life by instincts good and evil. To each
¿human soul has been shown—
‘ The earthly mixed
With heavenly, it must choose betwixt.
The earthly joys lay palpable,—
A taint in each, distinct as well
The heavenly flitted faint and rare
Above them.’
Far on, indeed, in the hereafter, Browning looks on to there being no
longer this two-fold and contrary working of impulse. His expectation
is that human nature will take its perfection in a grand one-ness. When
it shall—
‘ reach the ultimate, angel’s law
Indulging every instinct of the soul,
There where law, Hfe, joy, impulse are one thing.’
-—‘ A Death in the Desert.’
But he does not confound his hope for the future with his teaching for
.the needs of the present.
An optimist Browning is not in the sense of rejecting or explaining
•away the dogma that humanity has inherent tendencies to moral evil
dark and foul; or proclaiming a freedom to all impulses from any bar
save that of physical or social inexpediency; yet an optimist he is—and
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
315
that not falteringly, but with the conviction of his whole heart—in the
¡sense of being able, all the while he sees the evil which he will not dis
guise by any other name, to look steadily into its dark hateful face, assured
that its ultimate significance is good. He does not conceive that it has
come as some unlucky accident to spoil a harmony of order in a world
which but for it had been perfect; he holds, rather, that it is through
it that a higher perfection is attainable. Feeling this, he does not need
that shuffle into a real though unacknowledged Manichceism, which is
the refuge of so many men from the perplexities and contradictions of a
creed of mingled pessimism and optimism. He believes that the antagon
ism between principles does not extend beyond the world of finite being;
and ventures to refer to the same source the placing in this world of ours
the two contrary principles which we call good and evil. Here is some
of his doctrine, spoken by the Pope in the ‘ Ring and the Book.’
He says (having reached the point of acknowledgment that the
Christian story is true, and that therein ‘ God shows complete’):—
‘ I can believe this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else
Devised,-—all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve
By new machinery in counterpart
The moral qualities of man—how else ?
To make him love in turn and be beloved,
Creating and self-sacrificing too—
And thus eventually, God-like (ay
■“I have said ye are Gods”—shall it be said for nought ?)
Enable man to wring from out all pain
All pleasure for a common heritage.
******
The moral sense grows but by exercise,
’Tis even as man grew, probatively
Initiated in Godship, set to make
A fairer moral world than this he finds.
******
Life is probation, and this earth no goal,
But starting-point for man, compel him strive,
Which means in man as good as reach the goal.’
Evil he beholds as the immediate bringer to humanity of our chief and
peculiar glory—progress, as a messenger sent to institute a race for men,
from less to more, from lower to higher. The one thing of which he
feels a shrinking horror is ‘ ghastly smooth life ’ in which man should be
left ‘dead at heart;’ and his whole spirit leaps up to behold purposes of
goodness in the appearance of anything as a deliverer from that.
Browning’s is a creed including within it the hope that where during
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
the earthly probation, men’s moral wills have been too feeble to enable
them to use temptations by evil as ‘ points that prove advantage for who
vaults from low to high;’ the work neglected or failed in here, may yet
elsewhere, though under harder conditions, be ultimately done. Even
Guido Franceschini, the abominable, he will not allow to depart from
our sight unfollowed by words of hope. In the forgivingness of Pompilia,
the victim of the murderer in her life and death, there is a gospel of a
far-off healing and restoration for him even, albeit by God’s shadow instead
of the light of His face. And the Pope, Guido’s judge, thinks of the
criminal on whom he pronounces sentence of temporal death, as going,
forth—
‘ Into that sad, obscui’e, sequestered state,
Where God unmakes but to remake a soul
He else had made in vain ; which must not be.’
And the same hope comes out, in vaguer expression, in that last phrase-,
of ‘Easter Day’ (without adding which, the human heart of the poet will
not suffer him to let go his vision of the close of the earthly probation):—
‘ Mercy, every way,
Is infinite—and who can say 1 ’
Very faint, by comparison with Browning’s, is Tennyson’s trust in the
‘larger hope;’ though lie, too, seeks to hold the creed that ‘somehow
good will be the final goal of ill.’ All that Tennyson attains to is an
infant’s blind crying after it—a groping for it, with ‘lame hands of faith.’
He looks for his theory of optimism in a direction whither Browning, an
idealist in his metaphysics, does not turn in his quests of objective
realities. And looking for it all throughout the material world and her
analogies, he finds nothing to be a reliable guide to it; and can only fall
in the darkness upon that ‘great world’s altar-stairs;’ not feeling assured
as to what ultimate law and purpose he should find above them, could he
see up their heights.
However, in speaking of the Tennyson and Browning optimisms, it is
not fail’ to make the quality of vigour the point of comparison—nor,
indeed, any other quality either. The aim of the two poets, in their
search, is essentially different. Tennyson’s colder and more symmetrical
mind looks to find truth as harmony and proportion; and is alwayssuspicious of the parts unless it can see the whole. What Browning;
seeks is truth absolute, not relative ; and if he thinks he has got hold of
the minutest particle of that, it is to him as a thing indestructible by
any mass of contradictions; and it suffices to him as a sure earnest of
the rest. His own heart’s instinctive conviction of a law of Lave is out
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
317
of the reach of whatever ‘evil dreams ’ Nature may lend, and does not
need to concern itself with analogies of her waste and destruction—with
appearances such as that ‘of fifty seeds, she often brings but one to bear?
The optimistic creed of Tennyson is the result of an effort, very noble, to
comprehend: that of Browning is an effort to apprehend. The one seeks
a superhuman solution to the problem, and fails : the other, grasping
with a human passion, succeeds in finding satisfaction.
At this part of Browning’s creed there is one of the many doors of
entrance, from the question of his work as a truth-seeker, into the question
of his Art. Into this we may not now’ trespass, further than to observe
that the character of his work, as poet of external Nature, seems to be
determined by the negative influence of his optimism, and his method of
.attaining thereto. His seeking and finding his satisfaction as to the
world’s purport, in another quarter than in the material world, leaves
him free to derive from that world, art of a peculiar and very valuable
kind. Browning’s poetry of external Nature has some characteristics so
rare, that (though in quantity it is much less than what most other great
poets have produced) its loss would leave a gap in our literature. It is
nowhere mystical, like Wordsworth’s, nor eesthetico-scientific, like Tenny
son’s Nature-poetry ; but it is simply full of a noble sensuousness. It is
not the product of moods of intellectual and moral tension. It is glad
acceptance of the physical influences of external Nature—not truth.seeking in and through her mysteries. The contact of the phenomena
which we term material, in ourselves, with the so-called material phe
nomena outside us, is rested in, for the time being, without endeavour to
pursue a further significance. Beautiful art, as well as teaching not a
little wholesome, is given to us in Mr. Browning’s poems of Nature; of
which the speciality is theii’ being sensuous, yet restrained by a manly
■dignity from ever becoming a voluptuous self-abandoning to enslavement
by her beauty. We have the same sort of thing only from one other
modern English poet—A. H. Clough. (See ‘The Bothie.’) There is a cer
tain amount of positivism in both Clough’s and Browning’s acceptance of
the material -world, which results, in both cases, in a similar sort of purely
physical enjoyment of it (the latter’s poetical expression of this being,
however, by far the superior in varied richness). Their positivisms are,
of course, alike in their effects only, and are essentially different. Clough’s
is the positivism of a strong mind, sternly setting aside truth-seeking in
this direction as bootless, and -with a resolute temperate cheerfulness,
accepting whatever certain good it can find. Browning’s is the positivism
of childlike trust—so confident in the truth which it has found elsewhere,
that it can afford to pause here from restless searching, and take the
-earth’s beauty as beauty—joys of sense as joy. For illustration of Mr.
JBrowning’s poetical feeling for external Nature, we might refer to his
�318
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
‘ Pippa Passes,’ to his ‘ Saul ’ (specially to the passage in it beginning1 Oh, our manhood’s prime vigour’), to parts of the ‘Paracelsus,’ and to
other passages, which cannot here be enumerated. Though none otherof our poets is so perpetually on the watch to discern transcendental
significance, translucent through the facts of mind, yet he, more than,
most others, is content to behold the facts of matter as (so to speak)‘ opaque] and to describe his impressions from them, directly and unsymbolically. To Wordsworth it would be impossible to tell simply of.
‘the sense of the yellow mountain flowers.’
This paper must hasten to conclude, leaving with only a passing
mention, one of the aspects of Mr. Browning’s preaching—its stern moral
lessons, and its peculiar downrightness of enforcing them. As poet of
the Will, he has words of unsparing condemnation to bestow on such sins
as failure ‘ through weak endeavour.’ There is an earnest severity in
‘The Statue and the Bust,’ and in his ‘Sordello’—terriblest of tragedies,
inasmuch as it depicts the deterioration of a soul. The miserable life
failure, of which this latter is the history, is looked on by him as resulting
from the man’s irresoluteness to overcome and banish his probation
spectre (Do not many of us know something akin to it ?); of his hauntingdouble consciousness—fourfold consciousness, rather; of, at the same
time, an ego divided by impulses diverging towards two ways of utterance
—Art and action; and of another two-fold spectral ego—reflexion of the
actual ego—contemplating, as if from some view-point in nowhere, it and.
its work, in their place in the All-of-things. The real self and its re
flexion keep on, like opposite mirrors, reflecting each other backwards
and forwards, ad infinitum; each becoming alternately subject and
object, until there is produced in Sordello, as the result, a wretched
paralysis of all working-power, either artistic or practical. And all for
lack of the vigorous effort of whole-hearted obedience to either impulse, ,
by which his will could have freed him from the thing that wrought the
ruin of his life. Sternest of sermons this I on the text, difip Si^vyos,.
aKaTaoraTos,’ &c., &c. (St. James i., 8.)
Need one say anything with reference to one charge which we some
times heai* brought against Mr. Browning—of being, in ‘ The Ring and.
the Book,’ too open—offensively coarse, even, of speech 1 I—a woman—
feel that he needs no apology in this matter. Those of his readers who
are capable of, and willing to take the trouble of entering into the spirit
of his poetry, do not fail to find in it, moral saltness enough to keep its
purity untainted by the ugly words which his grave truthfulness some
times uses in indicating ugly things : and to mere criticism from without
—from those who neither learn from or sympathise with him—I imagine
that Mr. Browning does not greatly care to commend himself and his.
poems.
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
319'
Wholly unsatisfied by what these two papers have been able to say as
to some of the characteristics noticeable on one side of the most manysided of contemporary poets, I gladly cease from the attempt to write
little definitions of the poetry which I would rather feel indefinitely, and
grow into increasingly.
E. Dickinson West.
Mr. Browning’s latest work, ‘ Balanstione Adventure,’ lets us see, in its whole tenorand purport, the same characteristics of his preaching. There is no slight significance
in his choosing for his theme, a Greek play not ranked by critics amongst the finest;
but having peculiar attractions for the poet of the will, on account of its being the
story of the victory of a will—a half-7iw?iara will—over death and fate.
For nothing human or divine, does Browning recognise an iron law of necesssity.
He cares not for the grand Greek lifeless virtue of endurance of the inevitable ; and
would find his own poetical feeling wholly unsuited- to reproduce utterances such as
the hEschylean :
Tijv 7re7rpwp,ev7jv 8e ypiy
aT<rav (f>epeLV ws pacna, yiyva><TK.ov3’ on
’Avay/<7js ecrr’ aBrjpLTOV cr^evos
to ttjs
of Prometheus in his majestic passiveness.
There seems to be a curiously personal sympathy in Mr. Browning for Herakles, the
labour and effort God, whose strength is a thoroughly human strength of conscious
toil. Browning’s enlargement of Euripides’ portraiture of the hero, has been criti
cized as exaggerating the idea of joyous helpful strength ; and making him too much
of a ‘muscular Christian.’ I think that this objection to it fades out of sight, when
we view the poem as tinged and explained by the luminous Browning conscious
ness that indefinitely appears all throughout it. Struggle—and joy and hope in
struggle, and all things that he holds to be the portion best suited for the spiritual
part of our human life, are connected by him in a deep dim suggestiveness, with his
representation of Herakles. It is a spiritual truth—and not mere admiration of
thews and muscles, and good use of them, that he preaches to us.
In Browning’s suggested new version of the story, ‘ New Admetos new Alkestis,’
we may notice his characteristic way of penetrating through all surface appearances.
Deep underneath these, he finds a connection between human and infinite truths, and
sees there a beautiful ‘ how,’ by which Admetos might worthily let his wife die that
he might live. In harmony with all his other teaching, too, is Browning’s idea of
making the undyingness of Alkestis come to her, not as a mere salvation given from
without, but as worked out from wii7wn. The principle of life which cannot be holden
of death, is viewed by him always as a thing given to be in humanity.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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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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Title
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Browning as a preacher. Part 2
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West, Elizabeth Dickinson
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 305-319 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (November, 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
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[s.n.]
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[1871]
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G5337
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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 2), 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
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
Robert Browning