words, he has treated it as supernatural. "Mind," he makes the Pope say, in The Ring and the Book,-and his poetry bears testimony to its being his own conviction and doctrine,-"Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but above." With every student of Browning, the recognition and acceptance of this, must be his starting-point. Even that which impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled Tray (Dramatic Lyrics, First Series), to rescue the beggar child that fell into the river, and then to dive after the child's doll, and bring it up, after a long stay under water, the poet evidently distinguishes from matter,—regards as matter nor from matter, but above :" "And so, amid the laughter gay, With reason, reasoned: 'Why he dived, John, go and catch-or, if needs be, By vivisection, at expense Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence, "not In his poem entitled Halbert and Hob (Dramatic Lyrics, First Series), quoting from Shakspere's King Lear, "Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?" the poet adds, "O Lear, That a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems clear!" Mind is, with Browning, supernatural, but linked with, and restrained, and even enslaved by, the natural. The soul, in its education, that is,. in its awakening, becomes more and more independent of the natural, and, as a consequence, more responsive to higher souls and to the Divine. All spirit is mutually attractive, and the degree of attractiveness results from the degree of freedom from the obstructions of the material, or the natural. Loving the truth implies a greater or less degree of that freedom of the spirit which brings it into sympathy with the true. "If ye abide in My word," says Christ (and we must understand by "word" His own concrete life, the word made flesh, and living and breathing), "if ye abide in My word" (that is, continue to live My life), "then are ye truly My disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John viii. 32). In regard to the soul's inherent possessions, its microcosmic potentialities, Paracelsus is made to say (and this may be taken, too, as the poet's own creed), "Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate'er you may believe there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fullness; and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, this perfect, clear perception-which is truth. A baffling and perverting carnal mesh blinds it, and makes all error: and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without." All possible thought is implicit in the mind, and waiting for release -waiting to become explicit. "Seek within yourself," says Goethe, "and you will find everything; and rejoice that, without, there lies a Nature that says yea and amen to all you have discovered in yourself." And Mrs. Browning, in the person of Aurora Leigh, writes: "The cygnet finds the water; but the man is born in ignorance of his element, and feels but blind at first, disorganized by sin in the blood,-his spiritinsight dulled and crossed by his sensations. Presently we feel it quicken in the dark sometimes; then mark, be reverent, be obedient,for those dumb motions of imperfect life are oracles of vital Deity attesting the Hereafter. Let who says 'The soul's a clean white paper,' rather say, a palimpsest, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's,-the Apocalypse by a Longus! poring on which obscure text, we may discern perhaps some fair, fine trace of what was written once, some off-stroke of an alpha and omega expressing the old Scripture." This "fair, fine trace of what was written once," it was the mission of Christ, it is the mission of all great personalities, of all the concrete creations of Genius, to bring out into distinctness and vital glow. It is not, and cannot be, brought out, and this fact is emphasized in the poetry of Browning,-it cannot be brought out, through what is born and resides in the brain: it is brought out, either directly or indirectly, by the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute personality being the God-man, Christ, 0ɛáv0ρwжOS. The human soul is regarded in Browning's poetry as a complexly organized, individualized divine force, destined to gravitate towards the Infinite. How is this force, with its numberless checks and counterchecks, its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry, to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with materialistic heaviness? How much certainty must it have of its course, and how much uncertainty, that it may shun the " torpor of assurance," ," and not lose the vigor which comes of a dubious and obstructed road, "which who stands upon is apt to doubt if it's indeed a road." "2 "Pure faith indeed," says Bishop Blougram, to Gigadibs, the literary man, you know not what you ask! naked belief 66 1 The Ring and the Book, The Pope, v. 1853. in God the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much the sense of conscious creatures, to be borne. It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare. Some think, Creation's meant to show him forth: I say, it's meant to hide him all it can, and that's what all the blessed Evil's for. Its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress. Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye and disimprisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once, than mind, confronted with the truth of Him. But time and earth case-harden us to live; the feeblest sense is trusted most: the child feels God a moment, ichors o'er the place, plays on and grows to be a man like us. With me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe." 1 There is a remarkable passage to the same effect in Paracelsus, in which Paracelsus expatiates on the "just so much of doubt as bade him plant a surer foot upon the sun-road." And in Easter Day: "You must mix some uncertainty With faith, if you would have faith be." And the good Pope in The Ring and the Book, alluding to the absence of true Christian soldiership, which is revealed by Pompilia's case,' says: "Is it not this ignoble confidence, cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps, makes the old heroism impossible? Unless . . . what whispers me of times to come? What if it be the mission of that age my death will usher into life, to shake this torpor of assurance from our creed, re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring the formidable danger back we drove long ago to the distance and the dark?" True healthy doubt means, in Browning, that the spiritual nature is sufficiently quickened not to submit to the conclusions of the insulated intellect. It will reach out beyond them, and assert itself, whatever be the resistance offered by the intellect. Mere doubt, without any resistance from the intuitive, non-discursive side of our nature, is the dry-rot of the soul. The spiritual functions are "smothered in surmise." Faith is not a matter of blind belief, of slavish assent and acceptance, as many no-faith people seem to regard it. It is what Wordsworth calls it, "a passionate intuition," and springs out of quickened and refined sentiment, out of inborn instincts which are as cultivable as are any other elements of our complex nature, and which, too, may be blunted beyond a consciousness of their possession. And when one in this latter state denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born blind denying the reality of sight. 1 Bishop Blougram's Apology, vv. 650-671. A reiterated lesson in Browning's poetry, and one that results from his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernacle-life, and that it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life; for only such a life is compatible with the ever-continued aspiration and endeavour which is a condition of, and inseparable from, spiritual vitality. Domizia, in the tragedy of Luria, is made to say, "How inexhaustibly the spirit grows! One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach So like a wall at the world's edge it stood, With naught beyond to live for,—is that reached?— Outgrowing under, and extending farther To a new object;-there's another world!" The dying John in A Death in the Desert, says, "I say that man was made to grow, not stop; Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done; And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved." Browning has given varied and beautiful expressions to this idea, throughout his poetry. The soul must rest in nothing this side of the infinite. If it does rest in anything, however relatively noble that thing may be, whether art, or literature, or science, or theology, even, it declines in vitalityit torpifies. However great a conquest the combatant may achieve in any of these arenas, "striding away from the huge gratitude, his club shouldered, lion-fleece round loin and flank," he must be "bound on the next new labour, height o'er height ever surmounting-destiny's decree ! " 1 But this tabernacle-life, which should ever look ahead, has its claims which must not be ignored, and its standards which must not be too much above present conditions. Man must "fit to the finite his infinity" (Sordello, p. 203). Life may be over-spiritual as well as over-worldly. "Let us cry, 'All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'"2 The figure the poet employs in the Ring and the Book to illustrate the art process, may be as aptly applied to life itself—the greatest of all arts. The life-artist must know 1 Aristophanes' Apology, p. 35, American ed. 2 Rabbi Ben Ezra. how to secure the proper degree of malleability in this mixture of flesh and soul. He must mingle gold with gold's alloy, and duly tempering both effect a manageable mass. There may be too little of alloy in earth-life as well as too much—too little to work the gold and fashion it, not into a ring, but ring-ward. "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round" (Abt Vogler). "Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure, bad is our bargain" (A Grammarian's Funeral). An Epistle containing the strange Medical Experiences of Karshish, the Arab Physician, is one of Browning's most remarkable psychological studies. It may be said to polarise the idea, so often presented in his poetry, that doubt is a condition of the vitality of faith. In this poem, the poet has treated a supposed case of a spiritual knowledge "increased beyond the fleshly faculty-heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven," a spiritual state, less desirable and far less favourable to the true fulfilment of the purposes of earth-life, than that expressed in the following lines from Easter Day:-- "A world of spirit as of sense Was plain to him, yet not too plain, A guest in :-else were permanent Heaven on earth, which its gleams were meant To sting with hunger for full light," etc. The Epistle is a subtle representation of a soul conceived with absolute spiritual standards, while obliged to live in a world where all standards are relative and determined by the circumstances and limitations of its situation. The spiritual life has been too distinctly revealed for fulfilling aright the purposes of earth-life, purposes which the soul, while in the flesh, must not ignore, since, in the words of Rabbi Ben Ezra, "all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul." The poem may also be said to represent what is, or should be; the true spirit of the man of science. In spite of what Karshish writes, apologetically, he betrays his real attitude throughout, towards the wonderful spiritual problem involved. It is, as many of Browning's Monologues are, a double picture-one direct, the other reflected, and the reflected one is as distinct as the direct. The composition also bears testimony to Browning's own soulhealthfulness. Though the spiritual bearing of things is the all-in-all, in his poetry, the robustness of his nature, the fullness and splendid equilibrium of his life, protect him against an inarticulate mysticism. Browning is, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, the healthiest of all living poets; and in general constitution the most Shaksperian. |