Good is positive, and must be ultimately victorious, with Hegel as with Browning. Hear Walt Whitman's lines on reading Hegel : Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead."

The development of Hegel's pure, bare, undiluted Being through successive stages up to the complicated forms of State, Religion, Philosophy, is like the mounting of waves towering higher and higher, "one crowd but with many a crest"; and as the waves must fall in order to rise to a greater height, so the march of the Idea is a series of self-negations involving self-affirmations. But the poet has not to do, as the philosopher has, with a systematic history of the progress of the Universal Principle. By seeing into souls, Browning has obtained his notion of God, which is accordingly of an ethical nature, not merely logical. With him the absolute Idea is Love, which as a negative, self-revealing force phenomenally in Nature is Power, and, becoming conscious of itself in individuals as spirit, moves in a continually advancing process of reconciliation of its absolute noumenal permanence (Love) with its phenomenal mode of manifestation (Power).

An obvious objection (admitting of an obvious enough answer) that might be made against Browning's principle may be noticed. It may be said that Love has no meaning except as characterizing the relations of sentient beings; that to set it up seriously as a first universal principle, not only supplies no explanation, but is unwarranted, either mystical or absurd; that it can be analyzed into simpler elements-its evolution traced back, for example, to Hegel's Being. This objection, although if Browning were a pure philosopher it would apply so far as to demand from him definite explanation and logical analysis, is really shallow. Browning knows, like all philosophers, that Time is phenomenal, and that an absolute Principle by its very notion is independent of Time, contains in itself the possibility of Time :

"Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure." (R. Ben Ezra.) "Till earth's work stop and useless time run out." (Death in Desert.)

But the distinction between First and Final Cause depends on Time; and as the latter is a far fuller idea than the former, it is more adequate to express God, who is indifferent to the distinction: consequently Browning is strictly justified in conceiving God as Love, because he has found in the world Love as an abiding reality, to whose perfection the world's movement is tending as an End. But the proximate reason for the form which his universal principle takes is his individual and ethical (poetical), not universal and metaphysical (philosophical), standpoint.

L

A main point on which I wish throughout to insist is that Browning realizes the defect and falseness of one-sidedness, and never halts at halftruths he always gives them their proper place in relation to each other and a higher unity. This, as is well known, is a great characteristic of Hegel.

VII. PERSONAL GOD: CHRISTIANITY: INDIVIDUALS.

Browning is generally spoken of as holding the doctrine of a personal God: the orthodox are glad, and the unbelieving shrug their shoulders. But it is plain that a personal God (in any meaning of the word "personal" that is intelligible to us) is inconsistent with the tenor of Browning's teaching. For God is not limited by time, as we have seen above, nor by space (compare Ring and Book, Pope, 1. 1317, "There (which is nowhere) speech must babble thus! In the absolute immensity-”), and thus personality applied to him in our sense has no meaning: personal is a completely inadequate and therefore misleading term―"speech must babble thus!" Even supposing a supposition which seems to me to have no basis, and to be due to superficial study-Browning does teach a personal God, his God is at all events a Being of a glorious kind whom we could feel glad to worship, far different from the diabolical God or divine Devil whom many are still taught to praise and pray to. This may enable us to comprehend his attitude to Christian Dogma, of which there have also- -even more so-been false ideas abroad. If, as he holds, Love is God, then the greatest crisis in Love's conscious development as human spirit is when it first knows itself explicitly as Love,—that is, when man first recognizes that God, in whom he lives, moves, and has his being, is Love. But this recognition is the soul of Christianity; this gives it a divinity different in kind and not merely in degree from all other religions: its main dogma is true, though disfigured by so many false wraps. Historical questions about parthenogenesis, resurrection, ascension, are quite irrelevant to this truth, and owe all their significance to the false conception of a personal God.. Browning's view transcends and includes the one-sidedness of the Churches and the Göttingen professor. Relative historical falseness or myth in the Christian creed is consistent with the absolute truth of the dogma: the professor clung to the former and rejected the latter, and thereby, to use an expressive German proverb, "schüttete das Kind mit dem Bade aus"; the preachers holding the dogma insist on the historical truth of the myth.

This view of Christianity is practically that of Hegel. But it is his individualism, so to speak, that gives Browning's view its peculiar character. Throughout the preceding remarks I have purposely dwelt

more on his conceptions of the evolving world and mankind as a collection of units, than on his view of the individual in himself and for himself purposely because, the latter being more prominent, readers of Browning are much less likely to overlook it. We must now turn to the individual side of his Weltanschauung. The tendency nowadays among English scientific thinkers is to look on the human individual as a passing accidental mode of the universal energy, who contributes to the progress of humanity, but has no further significance. From an empirical standpoint this is true; but, like all empiricism, it is onesided, and Browning teaches us that the individual has a worth and meaning in and for himself independent of his worth and meaning for the world: he comes and goes, and serves the world while he stays, but the world also serves him, is meant to try him and turn him forth "sufficiently impressed": he is related to it indirectly as a particular member of a multitude, but as an individual he is directly related to the Absolute, and possesses universal value. He has a significance in time and space, as a unit helping in the process of the universe; but he has also a primary significance for himself that is independent of these limitations; and since this latter significance, being absolute, is superior and logically prior to the former, which is only relative, it must legislate morality (cf. Statue and Bust, and monologue of Caponsacchi in Ring and Book, 1. 1812, &c.). A man's highest boast is

"not even while the whirl was worst,

Did I,-to the wheel of life,

With shapes and colours rife,

Bound dizzily,-mistake my end, to slake thy thirst."

This would be the place to speak of—I can now only refer to-the autonomy of the Will, an important and often-noticed element in Browning's teaching; for the right of an individual will to autonomy depends upon its universal value.

And here I must again call attention to the incomplete and unsatisfying character of man's work, for to the individual this is a gauge of his universality. His individuality goes out beyond its work, and is like a space without bound which the work, at least in this cramped life, can never fill: the soul's "lone way" is limitless, and its home is not here.

This union of individualism and universalism in Browning is perhaps most strikingly set forth in Rabbi Ben Ezra, and in the Epilogue of Three Speakers, which shows its bearing on Christianity, and is, I think, the decisive passage as to Browning's view. The simple universalism of David, who worships with the senses in a temple made with hands, and the particularism of Renan, who is sceptical because historical difficulties

give pause to the understanding, are superseded by the individualism of the Third Speaker, whose reason transcends the simple conviction of David and the intellectual doubt of Renan, by seeing that both are reconcilable when transformed into parts of a higher view: as an individual personality, Christ was God (self-conscious Love); as a particular unit in the world he was man, subject to the laws of the world's machinery. It is for the individual that his personality and divinity have their significance: progressive humanity and scientific history concern themselves only with the phenomenal effects produced by his teaching independently of his personality.

And thus Browning's view is on the one side consistent with all Herbert Spencer's philosophy, whose result is to show that egoism and altruism (the interests of the individual and of society) are in gradual process of conciliation; but he gives prominence to another side also, in which virtue and vice have an inward significance for the individual, apart from the evolution of the world.

In Browning are the germs of a religion that transcends ecclesiastical Christianity and Comte's Positivism, and includes the truth of both.

In connection with his individualism should be considered his original views of the relations of men and women, which I can but barely touch on. An individual's soul has two sides: the potential and the actual, the divine and the human, reality and show. But the inner side can be revealed to the object of sexual love, and so even in this world to a certain extent actualize its divinity:

"Was there nought better than to enjoy ?

No feat which, done, would make time break,

And let us pent-up creatures through

Into eternity, our due?

No forcing earth teach heaven's employ ? ”—Dís aliter visum.

Thus an individual receives a revelation of Love from another of opposite sex (sex, it must not be forgotten, is only phenomenal), and this person might be called a Personal God, as the vehicle of the revelation of the Absolute God. It is this love alone that can reach to the inner pent-up side of the soul, else unrevealed and "locked fast," but let loose by "love for a key." Shelley reached this view by spiritual intuition (witness Epipsychidion), and Dante said of Beatrice, "Che lume fia tra 'l vero e lo 'ntelletto"; but Browning, combining the reason of the philosopher with the instinct of a poet, first worked it consistently out. See on this subject Fifine, Dramatic Lyrics passim, James Lee's Wife, The Worst of it, Dis aliter visum, Too Late, Youth and Art, Statue and Bust, &c., but above all, One Word More. This two-sidedness of souls is the leading idea running through the Pacchiarotto volume.

As a consequence of his individual point of view, Mr. Browning has reached a higher standpoint than the vague pantheism of, for example, Mr. Tennyson's In Memoriam, in the same way as the German Transcendentalists, beginning with Kant, got beyond the pantheism of Spinoza. The universe exists for the individual as much as the individual for the universe: he is immortal. But immortality in Browning's poems has a different significance from that which it ordinarily conveys. (Personal immortality is as inadequate a term as personal God.) It does not imply memory in the sense of an unbroken chain of consciousnesswhich has significance only in time-nor yet an absorption into unconsciousness: it implies a state inconceivable to us, limited as we are by phenomenal conditions,—a state which may involve other manifest ations in other worlds not a few. There is indeed one way, according to Browning, in which it is possible for some to approximate to a conception and gain a foretaste of this state which may be called heaven— namely by music. Music, as Hegel says, frees from the limit of spaceand also partially suspends time. Past and future seem mixed into one present ideal emotion :— "Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the protoplast," " or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone" are not wanting "in the glare and glow." It is our completest revelation of God: earth attains to heaven; there is no more near nor far. Mr. Herbert Spencer has well spoken of cadences as the comments of the emotion on the propositions of the intellect. Thus in music ideas and emotions, love and knowledge, are fused in a perfect mixture, that is, an anticipation of the absolute union of love and knowledge the goal to which both the individual and the universe tend.

As I said before, while Shakspere sets us problems, Browning tries to give us solutions, or at least grounds for hoping that there are solutions that are not merely negative. Hamlet's last words are, "The rest is silence"; Romeo and Othello "look their last" and "die upon a kiss"; but with Browning silence means sound, and in the hand of the dead Evelyn Hope lies a leaf, earnest of a future.

To some this belief in "silence implying sound" will appear very consoling; others will find more comfort in an eternal night in which "silence is more than all tunes." But it is not consolation or pathos that Browning offers (and for this reason in certain moods we find Mr. Swinburne's or Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems more solacing): his message to us is to remember that our aspirations, our ways of life and manners of thought, our seeking after Love, and our love for Beauty, are all so much gain for the individual soul, and have an eternal value BROWNING, 3.

X