Browning and His Century Part 3

Those who were unafraid followed the lead of German criticism and French materialism, but the large ma.s.s of common people found in Methodism the sort of religious guidance which it craved.

To this sect has been attributed an unparalleled influence in the moral development of England. By rescuing mult.i.tudes from ignorance and from almost the degradation of beasts, and by fostering habits of industry and thrift, Methodism became a chief factor in building up a great, intelligent and industrious middle-cla.s.s. Its influence has been felt even in the Established Church, and as its enthusiastic historians have pointed out, England might have suffered the political and religious convulsions inaugurated by the French Revolution if it had not been for the saving grace of Methodism.

Appealing at first to the poor and lowly, suffering wrong and persecution with its founder, Wesley, it was so flexible in its const.i.tution that after the death of Wesley it broadened out and differentiated in a way that made it adaptable to very varied human needs. In consequence of this it finally became a genuine power in the Church and State of Great Britain.

The poem "Christmas Eve" becomes much more understandable when these facts about Methodism are borne in mind--facts which were evidently in the poet's mind, although the poem itself has the character of a symbolic rather than a personal utterance. The speaker might be regarded as a type of the religious conscience of England. In spite of whatever direct visions of the divine such a type of conscience may gain through the contemplation of nature and the revelations of the human heart, its relations to the past cause it to feel the need of some sectarian form of religion--a sort of inherited need to be orthodox in one form or another.

This religious conscience has its artistic side; it can clothe its inborn religious instincts in exquisite imaginative vision. Also, it has its clear-sighted reasoning side. This is able unerringly to put its finger upon any flaw of doctrine or reasoning in the forms of religion it contemplates. Hence, Catholic doctrine, which was claiming the allegiance of those who were willing to put their troublesome intellects to sleep and accept authority where religion was concerned, does not satisfy this keen a.n.a.lyzer. Nor yet is it able to see any religious reality in such a myth of Christ rehabilitated as an ethical prophet as the Gottingen professor constructs in a manner so reminiscent of a pa.s.sage in Strauss's "Life of Jesus," where he is describing the opinions of the rationalists'

school of criticism, that a comparison with that pa.s.sage is enlightening.

Having swept away completely the supernatural basis of religion, the rationalist is able still to conceive of Jesus as a divine Messenger, a special favorite and charge of the Deity:

"He had implanted in him by G.o.d the natural conditions only of that which he was ultimately to become, and his realization of this destiny was the result of his own spontaneity. His admirable wisdom he acquired by the judicious application of his intellectual powers and the conscientious use of all the aids within his reach; his moral greatness, by the zealous culture of his moral dispositions, the restraint of his sensual inclinations and pa.s.sions, and a scrupulous obedience to the voice of his conscience; and on these alone rested all that was exalted in his personality, all that was encouraging in his example."

The difficulty to this order of mind of the direct personal revelation lies in the fact that it is convincing only to those who experience it, having no basis in authority, and may even for them lose its force.

What then is the conclusion forced upon this English religious conscience?

Simply this: that, though failing both from the intellectual and the aesthetic standpoint, the dissenting view was the only religious view of the time possessing any genuine vitality. It represented the progressive, democratic religious force which was then in England bringing religion into the lives of the people with a positiveness long lost to the Anglican Church. The religious conscience of England was growing through this Methodist movement. This is why the speaker of the poem chooses at last that form of wors.h.i.+p which he finds in the little chapel.

While no one can doubt that the exalted mysticism based upon feeling, and the large tolerance of the poem, reflect most nearly the poet's personal att.i.tude, on the other hand it is made clear that in his opinion the dissenting bodies possessed the forms of religious orthodoxy most potent at the time for good.

In "Easter Day," the doubts and fears which have racked the hearts and minds of hundreds and thousands of individuals, as the result of the increase of scientific knowledge and biblical criticism are given more personal expression. The discussion turns princ.i.p.ally upon the relation of the finite to the Infinite, a philosophical problem capable of much hair-splitting controversy, solved here in keeping with the prevailing thought of the century--namely, that the finite is relative and that this relativity is the proof of the Infinite.

The boldness of this statement, one such as might be found in the pages of Spencer, is by Browning elaborated with pictorial and emotional power.

Only by a marvelous vision is the truth brought home to the speaker that the beauties and joys of earth are not all-sufficient, but that they are in the poet's speech but partial beauty, though through this very limitation they become "a pledge of beauty in its plenitude," gleams "meant to sting with hunger for full light." It is not, however, until this see-er of visions perceives the highest gleam of earth that he is able to realize through the spiritual voice of his vision that the nature of the Infinite is in its essence Love, the supreme manifestation of which was symbolized in the death and resurrection of Christ.

This revelation is nevertheless rendered null by the man's conviction that the vision was merely such "stuff as dreams are made on." At the end as at the beginning he finds it hard to be a Christian.

His vision, which thus symbolizes his own course of emotionalized reasoning, brings hope but not conviction. Like the type in "Christmas Eve," conviction can come to him only through a belief in supernatural revelation. He is evidently a man of broad intellectual endowment, who cannot, as the Tractarians did, lay his mind asleep, and rest in the authority of a church, nor yet can he be satisfied with the unconscious anthropomorphism of the sectarian. He doubts his own reasoning attempts to formulate religious doctrines, he doubts even the revelations of his own mystic states of consciousness; hence there is nothing for him but to flounder on through life as best he can, hoping, fearing, doubting, as many a serious mind has done owing to the nineteenth-century reaction against the supernatural dogmas of Christianity. Like others of his ilk, he probably stayed in the Anglican Church and weakened it through his lat.i.tudinarianisms.

A study in religious consciousness akin to this is that of Bishop Blougram. Here we have not a generalized type as in "Christmas Eve," nor an imaginary individual as in "Easter Day," but an actual study of a real man, it being no secret that Cardinal Wiseman was the inspiration for the poem.

Wiseman's influence as a Catholic in the Tractarian movement was a powerful one, and in the poet's dissection of his psychology an attempt is made to present the reasoning by means of which he made his appeal to less independent thinkers. With faith as the basis of religion, doubt serves as a moral spur, since the will must exercise itself in keeping doubt underfoot. Browning, himself, might agree that aspiration toward faith was one of the tests of its truth, he might also consider doubt as a spur to greater aspiration, but these ideals would connote something different to him from what he makes them mean to Blougram. The poet's aspiration would be toward a belief in Omniscient Love and Power, his doubts would grow out of his inability to make this ideal tally with the sin and evil he beholds in life. Blougram's consciousness is on a lower plane. His aspiration is to believe in the dogmas of the Church, his doubts arise from an intellectual fear that the dogmas may not be true. Where Browning seems to miss comprehension of such a nature as Blougram's is in failing to recognize that on his own plane of consciousness genuine feeling and the perception of beauty play at least as large a part in the basis of his faith as utilitarian and instinctive reasoning do. While this poem shows in its references to the scientific theories of the origin of morals and its allusions to Strauss, as well as in the indirect portrayal of Gigadibs, the man emanc.i.p.ated from the Church, how entirely familiar the poet was with the currents of religious and scientific thought, it falls short as a fair a.n.a.lysis of a man who is acknowledged to have wielded a tremendous religious influence upon Englishmen of the caliber of Cardinal Newman, Kingsley, Arnold, and others.

If we leave out of account its connection with a special individual, the poem stands, however, as a delightful study of a type in which is depicted in pa.s.singly clever fas.h.i.+on methods of reasoning compounded of tantalizing gleams of truth and darkening sophistication.

The poem which shows most completely the effect of contemporary biblical criticism on the poet is "A Death in the Desert." It has been said to be an attempt to meet the destructive criticism of Strauss. The setting of the poem is wonderfully beautiful, while the portrayal of the mystical quality of John's reasoning is so instinct with religious feeling that it must be a wary reader indeed who does not come from the reading of this poem with the conviction that here, at least, Browning has declared himself unflinchingly on the side of supernatural Christianity in the face of the battering rams of criticism and the projectiles of science.

But if he be a wary reader, he will discover that the argument for supernaturalism only amounts to this--and it is put in the mouth of John, who had in his youth been contemporary with Christ--namely, that miracles had been performed when only by means of them faith was possible, though miracles were probably not what those who believed in them thought they were. Here is the gist of his defence of the supernatural:

"I say, that as a babe, you feed awhile, Becomes a boy and fit to feed himself, So, minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth: When they can eat, babes'-nurture is withdrawn.

I fed the babe whether it would or no: I bid the boy or feed himself or starve.

I cried once, 'That ye may believe in Christ, Behold this blind man shall receive his sight!'

I cry now, 'Urgest thou, _for I am shrewd And smile at stories how John's word could cure-- Repeat that miracle and take my faith_?'

I say, that miracle was duly wrought When save for it no faith was possible.

Whether a change were wrought in the shows o' the world, Whether the change came from our minds which see Of shows o' the world so much as and no more Than G.o.d wills for his purpose,--(what do I See now, suppose you, there where you see rock Round us?)--I know not; such was the effect, So faith grew, making void more miracles, Because too much they would compel, not help.

I say, the acknowledgment of G.o.d in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And has so far advanced thee to be wise.

Wouldst thou improve this to re-prove the proved?

In life's mere minute, with power to use the proof, Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung?

Thou hast it; use it and forthwith, or die!"

The important truth as seen by John's dying eyes is that faith in a beautiful ideal has been born in the human soul. Whether the accounts of the exact means by which this faith arose were literally true is of little importance, the faith itself is no less G.o.d-given, as another pa.s.sage will make clear:

"Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect He could not, what he knows now, know at first; What he considers that he knows to-day, Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown; Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns Because he lives, which is to be a man, Set to instruct himself by his past self; First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.

G.o.d's gift was that man should conceive of truth And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake As midway help till he reach fact indeed."

The defence of Christianity in this poem reminds one very strongly of the theology of Schleiermacher, a resume of which the poet might have found in Strauss's "Life of Jesus." Although Schleiermacher accepted and even went beyond the negative criticism of the rationalists against the doctrines of the Church, he sought to retain the essential aspects of positive Christianity. He starts out from the consciousness of the Christian, "from that internal experience resulting to the individual from his connection with the Christian community, and he thus obtains a material which, as its basis of feeling, is more flexible and to which it is easier to give dialectically a form that satisfies science."

Again, "If we owe to him [Jesus] the continual strengthening of the consciousness of G.o.d within us, this consciousness must have existed in him in absolute strength, so that it or G.o.d in the form of the consciousness was the only operative force within him." In other words, in Jesus was the supreme manifestation of G.o.d in human consciousness. This truth, first grasped by means which seemed miraculous, is finally recognized in man's developing consciousness as a consummation brought about by natural means. John's reasoning in the poem can lead to no other conclusion than this.

Schleiermacher's theology has, of course, been objected to on the ground that if this incarnation of G.o.d was possible in one man, there is no reason why it should not frequently be possible. This is the orthodox objection, and it is voiced in the comment added by "One" at the end of the poem showing the weakness of John's argument from the strictly orthodox point of view.

With regard to the miracles being natural events supernaturally interpreted--that is an explanation familiar to the biblical critic, and one which the psychologist of to-day is ready to support with numberless proofs and a.n.a.lyses. How much this poem owes to hints derived from Strauss's book is further ill.u.s.trated by the "Glossa of Theotypas," which is borrowed from Origen, whose theory is referred to by Strauss in his Introduction as follows: "Origen attributes a threefold meaning to the Scriptures, corresponding with his distribution of the human being into three parts, the liberal sense answering to the body, the moral to the soul, and the mystical to the spirit."

On the whole, the poem appears to be influenced more by the actual contents of Strauss's book than to be deliberately directed against his thought, for John's own reasoning when his feelings are in abeyance might be deduced from more than one pa.s.sage in this work wherein are pa.s.sed in review the conclusions of divers critics of the naturalist and rationalist schools of thought.

The poem "An Epistle" purports to give a nearly contemporary opinion by an Arab physician upon the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. We have here, on the one hand, the Arab's natural explanation of the miracle as an epileptic trance prolonged some three days, and Lazarus's interpretation of his cure as a supernatural event. Though absolutely skeptical, the Arab cannot but be impressed with the beliefs of Lazarus, because of their revelation of G.o.d as a G.o.d of Love. Thus Browning brings out the power of the truth in the underlying ideas of Christianity, whatever skepticism may be felt as to the letter of it.

The effect of the trance upon the nature of Lazarus is paralleled to-day by accounts, given by various persons, of their sensations when they have sunk into unconsciousness nigh unto death. I remember reading of a case in which a man described his feeling of entire indifference as to the relations of life, his joy in a sense of freedom and ineffable beauty toward which he seemed to be flying through s.p.a.ce, and his disinclination to be resuscitated, a process which his spirit was watching from its heights with fear lest his friends should bring him back to earth. This higher sort of consciousness seems to have evolved in some people to-day without the intervention of such an experience as that of Lazarus or one such as that of the above subject of the Society for Psychical Research.

In describing Lazarus to have reached such an outlook upon life, Browning again ranges himself with the most advanced psychological thought of the century. Hear William James: "The existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized. It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed const.i.tution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and subst.i.tuting just as is our custom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fulness of the truth."

The vision of Lazarus belongs to the beatific realm, and the naturalistic Arab has a longing for similar strange vision, though he calls it a madman's, for--

"So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too-- So, through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!

Face, my hands fas.h.i.+oned, see it in myself!

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love me who have died for thee.'"

A survey of Browning's contributions to the theological differences of the mid-century would not be complete without some reference to "Caliban" and "Childe Roland." In the former, the absurdities of anthropomorphism, of the G.o.d conceived in the likeness of man, are presented with dramatic and ironical force, but, at the same time, is shown the aspiration to something beyond, which has carried dogma through all the centuries, forward to ever purer and more spiritual conceptions of the absolute. In the second, though it be a purely romantic ballad, there seems to be symbolized the scientific knight-errant of the century, who, with belief and faith completely annihilated by the science which allows for no realm of knowledge beyond its own experimental reach, yet considers life worth living. Despite the complex interpretations which have issued from the oracular tripods of Browning Societies, one cannot read the last lines of this poem--

"Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew, '_Childe Roland to the dark Tower came_'"--

without thinking of the splendid courage in the face of disillusionment of such men of the century as Huxley, Tyndall or Clifford.

When we ask, where is Browning in all this diversity of theological opinion? we can only answer that beyond an ever-present undercurrent of religious aspiration there is no possibility of pinning the poet to any given dogmas. Everywhere we feel the dramatic artist. In "Paracelsus" the philosophy of life was that of the artist whose adoration finds its completion in beauty and joy; now the poet himself is the artist experiencing as Aprile did, this beauty and joy in a boundless sympathy with many forms of mystical religious ecstasy. Every one of these poems presents a conflict between the doubts born of some phase of theological controversy and the exaltation of moments or periods of ecstatic vision, and though nowhere is dogmatic truth a.s.serted with positiveness, everywhere we feel a mystic sympathy with the moving power of religious aspiration, a sympathy which belongs to a form of consciousness perhaps more inclusive than the religious--namely, a poetic consciousness, able at once to sympathize with the content and to present the forms of mystic vision belonging to various phases of human consciousness.

II

THE CENTURY'S END: PROMISE OF PEACE

Pa.s.sing onward from this mid-century phase of Browning's interest in what I have called the battle of the mind and the spirit, we find him in his later poems taking up the subject in its broader aspects, more as he treated it in "Paracelsus," yet with a marked difference in temper. G.o.d is no longer conceived of merely as a divine creator, joying in the wonder and beauty of his creations. The ideal of the artist has been modified by the observation of the thinker and the feeling induced by human rather than by artistic emotion. Life's experiences have shown to the more humanly conscious Browning that the problem of evil is not one to be so easily dismissed. The scientist may point out that evil is but lack of development, and the lover and artist may exult when he sees the wonderful processes of nature and mind carrying forward development until he can picture a time when the evil shall become null and void, but the human, feeling being sees the misery and the unloveliness of evil. It does not satisfy him to know that it is lack of development or the outcome of lack of development, nor yet that it will grow less as time goes on he ponders the problem, "why is evil permitted, how is it to be harmonized with the existence of a universe planned upon a scheme which he believes to be the outcome of a source all-powerful and all-loving!"

About this problem and its corollary, the conception of the infinite, Browning's latter-day thought revolves as it did in his middle years about the basis of religious belief.

It is one of the strange freaks of criticism that many admirers of Browning's earlier work have failed to see the importance of his later poems, especially "Ferishtah's Fancies," and "The Parleyings," not only as expressions of the poet's own spiritual growth, but as showing his mental grasp of the problems which the advance of nineteenth-century scientific thought brought to the fore in the last days of the century.