of Browning's so-called obscurity in his greatest works? A. He has deliberately chosen to speak to his audiences in hints or half-words, leaving the rude explicit details to be filled up in thought by them.1 This is a compliment to his readers, or rather it is a "brother's" mark of confidence. Q. How should Poets be ranked? A. According to their possession of the highest faculty. Q. What is that highest faculty A. The vision of Power and Love in God, and of Beauty and Good in God's world; and the power to connect these two, or to show the correspondence of the World with God. Q. Is the true Poet a Realist or an Idealist? A. He is both in one. He extracts the ideal from the real, and this ideal becomes again the real in a further stage of progress. Q. What is the true principle of criticism as applied to a Poet? 4. We should judge him by his highest attainment. most perfect art does not stand so high as the undeveloped moral ideal.2 6. THEORIES OF ESTHETIC AND ART. There are in Sordello3 further glimpses of that severe and lofty ideal of artistic effort which Browning early set up for himself, and which he has consistently pursued. On the relation of perception, thought, and language he holds views which, well considered, are destructive of many wide-spread fallacies. It is common to confuse language with thought, and thought with things, whereas Browning holds, in common with thinkers of his order, that language is but a poor reflection of thought, and thought at best an imperfect presentment of personality and life. In coenaesthesis or synaesthesis, i. e. in the simultaneous perception of an Unity or organic Whole, we are at one with the Truth. A tone tells us more of the immediate truth than any word or word-combination can do; and tonecombinations or Music reach more to the heart of things than any possible syntax of words. When we seek to convert poetic æsthesis into language, we must break up the organic Whole perceived into its constituent parts, and these parts must then be recombined in the syntax of speech. The result is that much is lost from the force and fulness of the original perception. The mass of readers, painfully piecing together its disjecta membra, cannot recover the unity of the poet's thought. They "recognize no jot as he intends."4 The careful consideration of this point gives the deepest explanation of the difficulty of Browning's language. If all articulate expression of what the poet sees and feels is a narrowing and contracting of that seen and felt, Essay on Shelley, p. 171. 3. Sordello, pp. 59, 60; Paracelsus, p. 92; Fifine, § 61. 2 lb. compared with the inarticulate expression, he must try to surmount the difficulty by a suggestive mode of using words analogous to the mode in which Turner or D. Cox employed colours. In both cases we must bring to the canvas or to the page an awakened conscience for Nature and the fact, otherwise the one presents a smear of colour and the other a haze of words. After all that can be said, there are, no doubt, obstinate superstitions on this point. People imagine that thought which cannot be definitely named and labelled is either non-existent or of no value; and conversely, that if we have a thought, it can be represented in current forms. But this is only true of the poorest part of our thought; the best part, viz. immediate, mystic, æsthetic experience of the truth of life, finds language a cumbrous vehicle at best. If it were otherwise poetic art would have exhausted itself. Sculpture did exhaust itself as a means of expression some 2000 years ago, because sculpture deals with the abstraction and the form; poetry like that of Browning's cannot exhaust itself, because it draws from the inexhaustible fountain of life itself. The great poet produces new creations in language. Once his superiority ascertained, the business of the grammarian is to take notes of him, not to lecture him. And so with the critic. It follows that language contracting thought, as thought contracts perception, the poet in whose soul perception broods "whole and unexpressed" is greater than his works can ever represent him. From true works 66 escapes there still Some proof, the singer's proper life was 'neath Let us apply this to Browning himself. In this sense, and only in this sense, as far as I can see, is he concealed behind his works; that they are imperfect transcripts of a nature "by far the richest of our time."2 It follows also that in the exercise of thought proper, as distinguished from passive surrender of the mind to truth, we remove from the truth and pass through a stage of falsehood on the way to a higher apprehension of the truth in a more universal form. Thus Browning uses the paradox: "the thought of Eglamor least like a thought and yet a false one." "13 The realm of poetic conceits and of opinions, and fancies born of the observation of the accidents rather than of essences, is the 3 Sordello, p. 186; cf. "a fable, therefore truth," Fifine. region through which souls are pursuing their "pilgrim's progress towards a better region. "Divest mind of e'en thought," says the poet again, "and lo, God's unexpress'd will draws above us."1 I believe the doctrine recently set forth with so much brilliance by the popular German philosopher Von Hartmann, that the Unconscious is more in our life than the Conscious, is so far in Browning. It has been a neglected side of truth. May I say in passing that Browning's thought, while apparently unfamiliar in England, is in close affinity at points with the great German masters in philosophy, although I think we have been informed he was not in early life a student of them. Our friend Mr. Bury has pointed out affinities to Hegel, and it would be strange if there were not affinities to one of the vastest of spiritual thinkers. But the chief reason of this affinity is, I believe, that Hegel absorbed the mystics into himself; and it has been said that he hunted with the hounds of Meister Eckhardt, who lived many centuries before him. There is a vein of thought, therefore, in Browning, who has also absorbed the mystics, running parallel to that of Hegel. But from the leading principle of Hegel's system, viz. the identity of thought and being leading to the consequence that by an act of thought we can grasp the essence of being, Browning seems as wide as the poles asunder. On the whole, in his lofty idealism and his passionate belief in the freedom of the soul and the vocation of man, Browning is in sympathy with the noble-minded Fichte; but he is, I need not say, free from the extravagance of Fichte in denying the objective existence of the world. 7. SPIRITUALITY OF BROWNING. Perhaps this is a suitable place to notice a criticism passed by Browning on a certain falsity of thought he detects in certain popular poetry of our time. It is very characteristic of the man, and proceeds from that intense spirituality which instinctively rejects any attempt to derive mind from matter, or subordinate the freedom of the soul to the greatness of external Nature. Thus Eglamor's thought least like a thought was, "Man shrinks to nought The thought is specious only, says Browning. Why indeed should the soul quail before so many square miles of sky, or so many cubic miles of water? Do we not know that all grandeur and beauty 1 Sordello, p. 169. happens in the soul, and nowhere else?1 and why should the soul be cowed by its own imaginings? Now upon this same weak "thoughtling" Browning pounces in Pacchiarotto. As a sample of what passes for thought in popular poetry, he sarcastically cites this sentiment: "What is a man beside a mount?" 2 I am afraid this is the kind of thoughtling we have all had in our time beneath the shadow of the Matterhorn, unaware how childish it was till our Mentor came by. However, I recollect an American on the Riffel, who said he did not see what there was to stare at in all those heaps of snow and rock, and that he could look down from a height in his own country on a dozen thriving townships, with their cultivated fields. Possibly he was a true disciple. Then in Fifine Browning banters Byron in a most amusing way. There is a noted passage in Childe Harold, learnt by heart, I believe, at most schools, beginning "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll," and reflecting poor Eglamor's sentiment. Byron personifies the Sea, and makes man its sport and contemptible plaything. And Browning tells Childe Harold that he is a very childish childe, and that he has written great nonsense and bad grammar into the bargain. Common sense "taught that ocean might be blue, Of all triumphal fire, matter with intellect Once fairly matched; bade him who egged on hounds to bay In general, I may remark, how healthy are Browning's critical principles as we may extract them from his writings from first to last. In poetry he says that strength must come before sweetness. He thinks the earlier ideal of Apollo, as the Divine Hunter with bow and arrow,5 the brother of Artemis, is a better ideal than the later and softer one of the half feminine Apollo with the lyre. In the same way he quotes the KаρтEρúταTоV Béλoc of Pindar as the true description of Song. Those of our friends who will deal with Browning's taste in painting and sculpture and music will doubtless show us how self-consistent are all his judgments on art. 2 6 1 "No such bad place to happen in."-Lotze, Aesthetik. p. 238. 3 clxxix. 4 Fifine, p. 81; cf. "quack-quack" in Pacchiarotto, p. 45. 5 Sordello, p. 63. 6 Pacchiarotto, p. 44. III. BROWNING AS RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHER. ONE of our friends has asked the question, Of what consequence to us is the philosophy of a poet? I reply that in the case of Browning it seems of the first consequence to understand his philosophy, his religion, or whatever we choose to call his serious thought. To attempt to study him while ignoring this seems to go against his own canons of criticism; it is like studying the Hebrew prophets for their poetry and antiquarian lore, and anything and everything except their divine and moral doctrine. I presume that it is clear by this time that the core and life of Browning's poetry is Conviction upon the most serious subjects that have occupied the attention of mankind. His work is just as much the expression of his faith as any other kind of good works. It is to him philanthropical work.1 Any doctrine of "art for art's sake" finds, I believe, not the slightest encouragement in his writings. One of our first tasks as students must therefore be to disengage and detach and exhibit as far as we can this element of faith and of religious speculation, which is the very stuff of all his multiform and many-coloured creations. There are one or two points here that have not been noticed as yet, so far as I am aware. 1. BROWNING A MYSTIC. In the first place, it seems to me that Browning cannot be properly understood unless we refer him to the fellowship of thinkers, to which, by the whole turn of his mind and of his studies, he belongs. He is distinctly a Mystic. He stands in the line of those illustrious thinkers whom we designate Platonists, Neo-Platonists, and middle-age mystics in general. Especially he appears early in life to have lived with the mystics and mages of the Pre-Reformation period. The Abt Tritheim and his pupils C. Agrippa and Paracelsus, Pietro of Abano, and in the next century G. Bruno,2 Jacob Boehme, and others, were all profound men of powerful imagination, who comprehended in their scope both imagination and science, in fact all that was known. They, living in a twilight time of transition, embraced the truth of God and man and nature in an indissoluble unity. During the later centuries we have learned by the use of the logical organ to sharply separate and hold asunder elements of our knowledge which are really at one in our consciousness. We have become so intoxicated with the successful use of 1 Sordello, p. 99 sqq. 2 G. Bruno the martyr should be mentioned for his principle of the coincidence of extreme opposites, which is so marked in Browning's writings. Hamann, the mystical friend of Herder, said that he found more in this principle than in all the rest of philosophy together. |