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itself if it knows the sum total of its objects. Hence self-consciousness consists in the turning of the Subject from the Object which is identical with itself, to itself. It is reflection, self-recovery. We have evidence in Browning of a nature of extraordinary power of self-recovery; but one's brain requires hardening before one can follow him without feeling the effects of excessive stimulation. It is watching the agitated movement of a lark; the lark knows what he is about, and will not lose himself, for his movement is governed by law; but he dazzles and bewilders us. We cannot detect anything morbid or one-sided in Browning. On the contrary, the effect he produces on us is that of a person the magnetism of whose vis vivida is too strong for weak nerves, where intense wakefulness positively hurts us when we want to drowse. leridge complained of the general hatred to thinking; and Browning, as he walks the streets of London and reads men's blank faces, fears that few will believe his prophecies. What we call dreaming he calls waking earnest; a poet, he says, never dreams.2

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7. MORAL CONSCIENCE IN BROWNING'S EARLY POEMS.

But, again, Pauline, followed by Paracelsus, Strafford, Sordello, and Pippa Passes, are all variations of the theme of Conscience, in the narrower sense in which that word is commonly employed. It is the sense of the dualism of flesh and spirit, of a split between the actual and the ideal or ethical self. The whole problem of conduct consists in the endeavour to heal this schism, to reduce this opposition to a harmony. I should be glad to know where there is a finer body of lofty ethical teaching than in these two volumes. In Pauline the keynote is struck. The core of sin is shown to be in self-idolatry, ending in the vitiation and degradation of the spirit. The last hell the spirit can know is isolation, to be shut out from part or lot in humankind. To be unable to love is like the brand of Cain upon the brow. The young poet fastens eagerly upon any symptom of a love still living in his heart which can find an object far beyond rivalry (pp. 18, 23).

Browning, we know, is a close disciple of the mystical apostle St. John. The passage from life to death, from death to life, is the passage between love and hate, hate and love of humankind in the soul. In Paracelsus we have another tragedy of Conscience. The love of Power, and of Knowledge as its means, intoxicates the soul and blinds it through a lifetime to Love. A being knowing not what Love is—a monstrous spectacle upon the earth" (Par., p. 69). This is the plaguespot in P.-carelessness to human love (p. 67). Love, on the other

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hand (in Aprile), that is, desire to be at one with each and every form of Beauty and Good in the world, may become enslaved to them, may lose freedom, may fail of constancy, may surrender all distinct purpose, and leave life's work undone. The union of love with knowledge makes the perfect spheric life. This divorce yet reconciliation, this love in strife, has been presented again in the wondrous parable of Fifine at the Fair.

Aprile fails because he fixes on the end, and rejects the laborious means of self-realization; Paracelsus fails because he fixes upon mere v means as if they were ends. Both fail from excess, or ill-regulation of instincts in themselves true and lofty. They both "o'er-pass life's restrictions, and they die." Here again the sobriety and collectedness of the poet impresses; he has been enabled to keep his eye steadily fixed on the great ends of living, undazzled by those splendid temptations of the poetic mind so consummately described.

Pippa Passes contains a series of studies of Conscience relieved by the innocence of Pippa, whose sweet and pious song is ever heard from the background.

Strafford, as a drama intended for the stage, naturally contains less didactic; but how fine is the contrast of conscience in Strafford and Pym! Strafford, a magnificent spirit worshipping a delusive ideal in King Charles, and wrecked thereby; Pym bowing before a loftier ideal than either the king or the friend of his youth, viz. England herself, and standing in moral majesty at the end.

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In Sordello we have the working of Conscience in a soul whose ambition is in extravagant disproportion to its physical powers and means, and whose temptation is at every crisis to seek pleasure in the picture of willing and doing rather than in willing and doing itself. is a fine study of a delicate "eudaemonism" which counterfeits genuine conduct. Sordello can purchase the pleasure of decided action at a cheaper rate than by acting; he revels in the consciousness of Will, yet finds that at the critical moment his Will won't act. He cannot raise his judgment of what is right into an imperative which must be obeyed. He falls at last a victim to Conscience. There is an apt word of Rousseau's which applies to Sordello: "The weaker the body is, the more it commands; the stronger it is, the more it obeys." The thought is emphatic in Dante. His last effort against himself succeeds, but it kills him. Browning has often set before us the banefulness of that compromise in which we seek to content our desires with only a half-satisfaction. To find a keen æsthetic delight in imagined good is very different from enjoying the good itself. Sordello remains "a tree

1 The Statue and the Bust.

that covets fruitage, yet tastes never itself, itself." The first step to worthy living is the conquest of egoism, a most refined and insidious form of which is here faithfully exhibited. Sordello fails because he cannot fit his great thoughts with corresponding deeds. Salinguerra, on the other hand, who acts without thinking, deteriorates into a sort of unmeaning puppet. Thought without action, action without thought, such is the tragic contrast of different sorts of men.

8. OBJECTIONS TO SPIRITUAL ANALYSIS ANSWERED.

Here, perhaps, an objection or two may be noticed which Browning has answered. In the course of that delightful meditation which he pursues in propria persona on the palace step at Venice, he tells us in effect that before we can attempt to apply remedies to the sorrowing souls of men, we must try to understand their souls. He most amusingly satirizes the quackery often observable in the didactic world. Amidst the great desert and waste of human suffering men appear with a smiling self-conceit, assuring us that they have the nostrum, the panacea; that there are plenty of founts about, that they have some pretty madrigal about a dewdrop inside a mugwort, and so on. People are only increasing ignorance teufold by talking in this way, says Browning. The only method to get at the waters that will refresh and comfort is to strike the hard rock of fact.3 We have all of us a great deal to learn by trial and experience before we can be of use to others. We are not on the threshold of social science yet. Preachers, therefore, ought not to speak down to men from a higher level, but simply compare notes with them and interchange experiences, or report what they have seen and heard. This is how Browning has preached to his generation, and has earned the love of many and perhaps imparted the gift of seeing to a few. The defence, then, of psychic analysis is that the development of the soul is the one serious and all-embracing study. Strictly speaking, all else is hearsay, abstraction, unreality.

But, again, there is a common prejudice against these studies. Men praise action rather than thought, Salinguerras rather than Sordellos. But Browning thinks it good to try to bring thought and action, seeing and doing, into closer correspondence. By way of change, let R. W. Emerson answer this objection; the greatest American man of letters coincides with our countryman on so many points. "That hankering after an overt or practical effect seems to me an apostasy. In

Cf. Fifine, § 102: "the lust to seem the thing it cannot be."

2 Sordello, p. 97 sqq.

3 The aliusion to Moses is repeated in One Word More. Dedication of Sordello to M. Milsand.

good earnest I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face.1 Hardest, roughest action is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing and intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august entertainment, and would suffice me a great while. To know a little would be worth the expense of this world. I hear always the law of Adrasteia, 'that every soul which had acquired any truth should be safe from harm until another period." " 2

We are here, says Emerson, not so much to act as to be acted upon. We "watch construct an engine;" we are here on the potter's wheel, says Browning.3

9. HOPEFULNESS OF THE POET.

But in these soul-tragedies on which we have been dwelling it is important to note that they none of them end in the silence of despair. In Pauline the young poet is brought through penitence to a state of mind in which he feels assured of redemption through Divine loves mediately made known to him through human love; his "last state is happy." Paracelsus dies, "stooping into a dark tremendous sea of cloud," but blessed with the ministry of human love, and confident that as he is known to God in all his good as well as evil, so he will "emerge one day" to the view of men. And Sordello in his last agony of selfconflict fails only to succeed, takes up his cross and loses to find himself :

"A triumph lingering in the wide eyes,

Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies
Help from above in his extreme despair.”

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Here we touch

God will not resign his progeny; Sordello may be absorbed in him of whom he was the forerunner, but cannot be lost. upon that deepest debt we owe to our beloved teacher. He is the very prophet of Hope. What other man do we know of in our time who had the courage, only to be justified by an inspired faith or higher reason, to stand in the Morgue at Paris, and, gazing on three suicidal corpses, to say, "I thought and think their sin's atoned"?

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II. POINTS OF ART AND ÆSTHETIC.

1. USE OF LANGUAGE.

I PASS on to a subject on which I should like to say a few words, viz. the supposed unintelligibility or extreme difficulty of the poet's language. It is impossible not to feel that a thick film interposes itself between this great man and his generation, a sorrow both to him and to them. There can be only three general explanations of this peculiarity. Readers are obtuse and inattentive, or the writer is not a clear thinker, or, lastly, the difficulty lies in the subject itself. On the first I will say nothing. On the second I would remark that an obscure thinker is very different from a thinker on obscure subjects. Browning is the latter, not the former. Let me take the last explanation, and assume that the nature of our poet's themes is such that not only is it impossible to make them clearer than he has made them, but that he has wrought marvels in depicting the scenery and events of the soul. But when we reflect what such a phrase as the "scenery of the soul" means,—all that crossing and recrossing of shapes in the theatre of the phantasy; fears meeting hopes, spectres confronting realities, constant advances, retreats, shocks in that eternal conflict in which the soul is split asunder, as at once actor, sufferer, spectator,-what art can adequately imitate or represent this endlessly repeated Drama?

We are not accustomed to watch this scene, we cannot endure the fatigue and pain. And when a magical artist comes to watch and then to represent and report for us, it is at first only a degree less painful than confronting the reality in our own soul. Wordsworth, I think, said of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister that it was "like the crossing of flies in the air," and threw the book to the end of the room. I suppose it would not be difficult to find a considerable number of persons who have in like manner given up Sordello in despair. But this does not prove much so long as there are others who have taken up Sordello, made merry over it, laid it down, taken it up again, gone on with it, tried back, gone forward again, repeating this process many times, until they have come to feel that no more truthful and therefore more fascinating book was ever penned. Browning will not in the end be found utterly unintelligible by any who have felt it either a pleasure or a duty to study the mechanism and working of their own soul. I suppose there is a deep-rooted general aversion from such study; I need not stay to inquire from what causes. In short, the poet has had to create an interest in what lies nearest to us, yet is most neglected, and the result is what it is. Besides all this, there is an extraordinary condensation of thought and expression throughout, perhaps unparalleled in literature.

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