Introduction to BrowningHiram Corson An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning’s Poetry by Hiram Corson, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in the Cornell University; Author of “An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare”, “A Primer of English Verse, chiefly in its Aesthetic and Organic Character”, “The Aims of Literary Study”, etc. “Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in song.” {There are several Greek phrases in this book. ASCII cannot represent the Greek characters, so if you are interested in these phrases, use the following map. Hopefully these phrases will not be mistaken for another language. . . . ASCII to Greek A,a alphaB,b betaG,g gammaD,d deltaE,e epsilonZ,z zetaH,h etaQ,q thetaI,i iotaK,k kappaL,l lambdaM,m mi/muN,n ni/nuJ,j ksi/xiO,o omikron/omicronP,p piR,r rhoS,s,c sigmaT,t tauU,u ypsilon/upsilonF,f phiX,x chi/khiY,y psiW,w omega ‘,,/,\,^ Accents, follow the vowel. You figure them out.} {The following is transcribed from a letter (from Browning to Corson) which Corson chose to use in facsimile form to begin his text. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it will be regular text here.} 19. Warwick Crescent. W. Dec. 28. ’86 My dear Dr. Corson, I waited some days after the arrival of your Book and Letter, thinking I might be able to say more of my sense of your goodness: but I can do no more now than a week ago. You “hope I shall not find too much to disapprove of”: what I ought to protest against, is “a load to sink a navy — too much honor”: how can I put aside your generosity, as if cold justice — however befitting myself — would be in better agreement with your nature? Let it remain as an assurance to younger poets that, after fifty years’ work unattended by any conspicuous recognition, an over-payment may be made, if there be such another munificent appreciator as I have been privileged to find, in which case let them, even if more deserving, be equally grateful. I have not observed anything in need of correction in the notes. The “little Tablet” was a famous “Last Supper”, mentioned by Vasari, (page. 232), and gone astray long ago from the Church of S. Spirito: it turned up, according to report, in some obscure corner, while I was in Florence, and was at once acquired by a stranger. I saw it, genuine or no, a work of great beauty. (Page 156.) “A canon”, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated — in various keys: and being strictly obeyed in the repetition, becomes the “Canon” — the imperative law — to what follows. Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal: to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician. And now, — here is Christmas: all my best wishes go to you and Mrs Corson. Those of my sister also. She was indeed suffering from grave indisposition in the summer, but is happily recovered. I could not venture, under the circumstances, to expose her convalescence to the accidents of foreign travel: hence our contenting ourselves with Wales rather than Italy. Shall you be again induced to visit us? Present or absent, you will remember me always, I trust, as Yours most affectionately Robert Browning. “Quanta subtilitate ipsa corda hominum reserat, intimos mentis recessus explorat, varios animi motus perscrutatur. Quod ad tragoediam antiquiorem attinet, interpretatus est, uti nostis omnes, non modo Aeschylum quo nemo sublimior, sed etiam Euripidem quo nemo humanior; quo fit ut etiam illos qui Graece nesciunt, misericordia tangat Alcestis, terrore tangat Hercules. Recentiora argumenta tragica cum lyrico quodam scribendi genere coniunxit, duas Musas et Melpomenen et Euterpen simul veneratus. Musicae miracula quis dignius cecinit? Pictoris Florentini sine fraude vitam quasi inter crepuscula vesperascentem coloribus quam vividis depinxit. Vesperi quotiens, dum foco adsidemus, hoc iubente resurgit Italia. Vesperi nuper, dum huius idyllia forte meditabar, Cami inter arundines mihi videbar vocem magnam audire clamantis, Pa\n o me/gas ou’ te/qnhken. Vivit adhuc Pan ipse, cum Marathonis memoria et Pheidippidis velocitate immortali consociatus.” — Eulogium pronounced by Mr. J. E. Sandys, Public Orator at the University of Cambridge, on presenting Mr. Browning for the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, June 10, 1879. PREFACE. The purpose of the present volume is to afford some aid and guidance in the study of Robert Browning’s Poetry, which, being the most complexly subjective of all English poetry, is, for that reason alone, the most difficult. And then the poet’s favorite art-form, the dramatic, or, rather, psychologic, monologue, which is quite original with himself, and peculiarly adapted to the constitution of his genius and to the revelation of themselves by the several “dramatis personae”, presents certain structural difficulties, but difficulties which, with an increased familiarity, grow less and less. The exposition presented in the Introduction, of its constitution and skilful management, and the Arguments given of the several poems included in the volume, will, it is hoped, reduce, if not altogether remove, the difficulties of this kind. In the same section of the Introduction, certain peculiarities of the poet’s diction, which sometimes give a check to the reader’s understanding of a passage, are presented and illustrated. I think it not necessary to offer any apology for my going all the way back to Chaucer, and noting the Ebb and Flow in English Poetry down to the present time, of the spirituality which constitutes the real life of poetry, and which should, as far as possible, be brought to the consciousness and appreciation of students. What I mean by spirituality is explained in my treatment of the subject. The degree to which poetry is quickened with it should always enter into an estimate of its absolute worth. It is that, indeed, which constitutes its absolute worth. The weight of thought conveyed, whatever that be, will not compensate for the absence of it. The study of poetry, in our institutions of learning, so far as I have taken note of it, and the education induced thereby, are almost purely intellectual. The student’s spiritual nature is left to take care of itself; and the consequence is that he becomes, at best, only a thinking and analyzing machine. The spiritual claims of the study of poetry are especially demanded in the case of Browning’s poetry. Browning is generally and truly regarded as the most intellectual of poets. No poetry in English literature, or in any literature, is more charged with discursive thought than his. But he is, at the same time, the most spiritual and transcendental of poets, the “subtlest assertor of the Soul in Song”. His thought is never an end to itself, but is always subservient to an ulterior spiritual end — always directed towards “a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal”; and it is all-important that students should be awakened, and made, as far as possible, responsive to this spiritual end. The sections of the Introduction on Personality and Art were read before the Browning Society of London, in June, 1882. I have seen no reason for changing or modifying, in any respect, the views therein expressed. The idea of personality as a quickening, regenerating power, and the idea of art as an intermediate agency of personality, are, perhaps, the most reiterated (implicitly, not explicitly) in Browning’s poetry, and lead up to the dominant idea of Christianity, the idea of a Divine Personality; the idea that the soul, to use an expression from his earliest poem, Pauline’, must “rest beneath some better essence than itself in weakness”. The notes to the poems will be found, I trust, to cover all points and features of the text which require explanation and elucidation. I have not, at any rate, wittingly passed by any real difficulties. Whether my explanations and interpretations will in all cases be acceptable, remains to be seen. Hiram Corson. Cascadilla Cottage, Ithaca, N.Y.September, 1886. Note to the Second Edition. In this edition, several errors of the first have been corrected. For the notes on “fifty-part canon”, p. 156, and “a certain precious little tablet”, p. 232, I am indebted to Mr. Browning. H. C. {p. 156 — in this etext, see line 322 of “The Flight of the Duchess”, in the Poems section. p. 232 — see Stanza 30 of “Old Pictures in Florence”, also in the Poems section.} Note to the Third Edition. In this edition have been added, A Death in the Desert’, with argument, notes, and commentary, a fac-simile of a letter from the poet, and a portrait copied from a photograph (the last taken of him) which he gave me when visiting him in Venice, a month before his death. It may be of interest, and of some value, to many students of Browning’s poetry, to know a reply he made, in regard to the expression in My Last Duchess’, “I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.” We were walking up and down the great hall of the Palazzo Rezzonico, when, in the course of what I was telling him about the study of his works in the United States, I alluded to the divided opinion as to the meaning of the above expression in My Last Duchess’, some understanding that the commands were to put the Duchess to death, and others, as I have explained the expression on p. 87 of this volume (last paragraph). {For etext use, section III (Browning’s Obscurity) of the Introduction, sixth paragraph before the end of the section.} He made no reply, for a moment, and then said, meditatively, “Yes, I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death.” And then, after a pause, he added, with a characteristic dash of expression, and as if the thought had just started in his mind, “Or he might have had her shut up in a convent.” This was to me very significant. When he wrote the expression, “I gave commands”, etc., he may not have thought definitely what the commands were, more than that they put a stop to the smiles of the sweet Duchess, which provoked the contemptible jealousy of the Duke. This was all his art purpose required, and his mind did not go beyond it. I thought how many vain discussions take place in Browning Clubs, about little points which are outside of the range of the artistic motive of a composition, and how many minds are occupied with anything and everything under the sun, except the one thing needful (the artistic or spiritual motive), the result being “as if one should be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets, except the scent itself.” H.C. CONTENTS. PREFACE. INTRODUCTION. I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning. {This section contains Browning’s Popularity’ and many excerpts.} II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning’s Poetry. III. Mr. Browning’s “Obscurity”. {This section contains Browning’s My Last Duchess’} IV. Browning’s Verse. V. Arguments of the Poems. Wanting is — What? My Star. The Flight of the Duchess. The Last Ride Together. By the Fireside. Prospice. Amphibian. James Lee’s Wife. A Tale. Confessions. Respectability. Home-Thoughts from Abroad. Home-Thoughts from the Sea. Old Pictures in Florence. Pictor Ignotus. Andrea del Sarto. Fra Lippo Lippi. A Face. The Bishop orders his Tomb. A Toccata of Galuppi’s. Abt Vogler. Touch him ne’er so lightly’, etc. Memorabilia. How it strikes a Contemporary. “Transcendentalism”. Apparent Failure. Rabbi Ben Ezra. A Grammarian’s Funeral. An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician. A Martyr’s Epitaph. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister. Holy-Cross Day. Saul. A Death in the Desert. POEMS. Wanting is — What? My Star. The Flight of the Duchess. The Last Ride Together. By the Fireside. Prospice. Amphibian. James Lee’s Wife. A Tale. Confessions. Respectability. Home Thoughts, from Abroad. Home Thoughts, from the Sea. Old Pictures in Florence. Pictor Ignotus. Andrea del Sarto. Fra Lippo Lippi. A Face. The Bishop orders his Tomb. A Toccata of Galuppi’s. Abt Vogler. “Touch him ne’er so lightly.” Memorabilia. How it strikes a Contemporary. “Transcendentalism”: Apparent Failure. Rabbi Ben Ezra. A Grammarian’s Funeral. An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician. A Martyr’s Epitaph. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister. Holy-Cross Day. Saul. A Death in the Desert. A LIST OF CRITICISMS OF BROWNING’S WORKS. INTRODUCTION. I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning. Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man, the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought, whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid’s Elements’, Newton’s Principia’, Spinoza’s Ethica’, and Kant’s Critique of the Pure Reason’, do not properly belong to literature. (By the “spiritual” I would be understood to mean the whole domain of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic, the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution of man by and through which he holds relationship with the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal of which the senses take cognizance.) The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters, on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification of the word, “beauty” to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit, — “the accommodation,” in Bacon’s words, “of the shows of things to the desires of the mind.” It follows that the relative merit and importance of different periods of a literature should be determined by the relative degrees of spirituality which these different periods exhibit. The intellectual power of two or more periods, as exhibited in their literatures, may show no marked difference, while the spiritual vitality of these same periods may very distinctly differ. And if it be admitted that literature proper is the product of co-operative intellect and spirit (the latter being always an indispensable factor, though there can be no high order of literature that is not strongly articulated, that is not well freighted, with thought), it follows that the periods of a literature should be determined by the ebb and flow of spiritual life which they severally register, rather than by any other considerations. There are periods which are characterized by a “blindness of heart”, an inactive, quiescent condition of the spirit, by which the intellect is more or less divorced from the essential, the eternal, and it directs itself to the shows of things. Such periods may embody in their literatures a large amount of thought, — thought which is conversant with the externality of things; but that of itself will not constitute a noble literature, however perfect the forms in which it may be embodied, and the general sense of the civilized world, independently of any theories of literature, will not regard such a literature as noble. It is made up of what must be, in time, superseded; it has not a sufficiently large element of the essential, the eternal, which can be reached only through the assimilating life of the spirit. The spirit may be so “cabined, cribbed, confined” as not to come to any consciousness of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and, by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers call the UNKNOWABLE. To turn now to the line of English poets who may be said to have passed the torch of spiritual life, from lifted hand to hand, along the generations. And first is “the morning star of song, who made His music heard below: “Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still.” Chaucer exhibits, in a high degree, this life of the spirit, and it is the secret of the charm which his poetry possesses for us after a lapse of five hundred years. It vitalizes, warms, fuses, and imparts a lightsomeness to his verse; it creeps and kindles beneath the tissues of his thought. When we compare Dryden’s modernizations of Chaucer with the originals, we see the difference between the verse of a poet, with a healthy vitality of spirit, and, through that healthy vitality of spirit, having secret dealings with things, and verse which is largely the product of the rhetorical or literary faculty. We do not feel, when reading the latter, that any unconscious might co-operated with the conscious powers of the writer. But we DO feel this when we read Chaucer’s verse. All of the Canterbury Tales have originals or analogues, most of which have been reproduced by the London Chaucer Society. Not one of the tales is of Chaucer’s own invention. And yet they may all be said to be original, in the truest, deepest sense of the word. They have been vitalized from the poet’s own soul. He has infused his own personality, his own spirit-life, into his originals; he has “created a soul under the ribs of death.” It is this infused vitality which will constitute the charm of the Canterbury Tales for all generations of English speaking and English reading people. This life of the spirit, of which I am speaking, as distinguished from the intellect, is felt, though much less distinctly, in a contemporary work, The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman’. What the author calls “KIND WIT”, that is, “natural intelligence”, has, generally, the ascendency. We meet, however, with powerful passages, wherein the thoughts are aglow with the warmth from the writer’s inner spirit. He shows at times the moral indignation of a Hebrew prophet. The Confessio Amantis’ of John Gower, another contemporary work, exhibits comparatively little of the life of the spirit, either in its verse or in its thought. The thought rarely passes the limit of natural intelligence. The stories, which the poet drew from the Gesta Romanorum’ and numerous other sources, can hardly be said to have been BORN AGAIN. The verse is smooth and fluent, but the reader feels it to be the product of literary skill. It wants what can be imparted only by an unconscious might back of the consciously active and trained powers. It is this unconscious might which John Keats, in his Sleep and Poetry’, speaks of as “might half slumbering on its own right arm”, and which every reader, with the requisite susceptibility, can always detect in the verse of a true poet. In the interval between Chaucer and Spenser, this life of the spirit is not distinctly marked in any of its authors, not excepting even Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose sad fate gave a factitious interest to his writings. It is more noticeable in Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst’s Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates’, which, in the words of Hallam, “forms a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate to the Faerie Queene’.” The Rev. James Byrne, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his lecture on The Influence of National Character on English Literature’, remarks of Spenser: “After that dark period which separated him from Chaucer, after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses, and all the deep trials of the Reformation, he rose on England as if, to use an image of his own, “At last the golden orientall gate Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre, And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate, Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre, And hurled his glistering beams through gloomy ayre.’ “That baptism of blood and fire through which England passed at the Reformation, raised both Protestant and Catholic to a newness of life. That mighty working of heart and mind with which the nation then heaved throughout, went through every man and woman, and tried what manner of spirits they were of. What a preparation was this for that period of our literature in which man, the great actor of the drama of life, was about to appear on the stage! It was to be expected that the drama should then start into life, and that human character should speak from the stage with a depth of life never known before; but who could have imagined Shakespeare?” And what a new music burst upon the world in Spenser’s verse! His noble stanza, so admirably adapted to pictorial effect, has since been used by some of the greatest poets of the literature, Thomson, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and numerous others; but none of them, except in rare instances, have drawn the music out of it which Spenser drew. Professor Goldwin Smith well remarks, in his article on Mark Pattison’s Milton, “The great growths of poetry have coincided with the great bursts of national life, and the great bursts of national life have hitherto been generally periods of controversy and struggle. Art itself, in its highest forms, has been the expression of faith. We have now people who profess to cultivate art for its own sake; but they have hardly produced anything which the world accepts as great, though they have supplied some subjects for Punch’.” Spenser who, of all the great English poets, is regarded by some critics as the most remote from real life, and the least reflecting his age, is, nevertheless, filled with the spirit of his age — its chivalric, romantic, patriotic, moral, and religious spirit. When he began to write, the nation had just passed through the fiery furnace of a religious persecution, and was rejoicing in its deliverance from the papistical rule of Mary. The devotion to the new queen with which it was inspired was grateful, generous, enthusiastic, and even romantic. This devotion Spenser’s great poem everywhere reflects, and it has been justly pronounced to be the best exponent of the subtleties of that Calvinism which was the aristocratic form of Protestantism at that time in both France and England. The renewed spiritual life which set in so strongly with Spenser, reached its springtide in Shakespeare. It was the secret of that sense of moral proportion which pervades his plays. Moral proportion cannot be secured through the laws of the ancients, or through any formulated theory of art. It was, I am assured, through his deep and sensitive spirit-life that Shakespeare felt the universal spirit and constitution of the world as fully, perhaps, as the human soul, in this life, is capable of feeling it. Through it he took cognizance of the workings of nature, and of the life of man, BY DIRECT ASSIMILATION OF THEIR HIDDEN PRINCIPLES, — principles which cannot be reached through an observation, by the natural intelligence, of the phenomenal. He thus became possessed of a knowledge, or rather wisdom, far beyond his conscious observation and objective experience. Shakespeare may be regarded as the first and the last great artistic physiologist or natural historian of the passions; and he was this by virtue of the life of the spirit, which enabled him to reproduce sympathetically the whole range of human passion within himself. He was the first of the world’s dramatists that exhibited the passions in their evolutions, and in their subtlest complications. And the moral proportion he preserved in exhibiting the complex and often wild play of the passions must have been largely due to the harmony of his soul with the constitution of things. What the Restoration dramatists regarded or understood as moral proportion, was not moral proportion at all, but a proportion fashioned according to merely conventional ideas of justice. Shakespeare’s moral proportion appeared to them, in their low spiritual condition, a moral chaos, which they set about converting, in some of his great plays, into a cosmos; and a sad muss, if not a ridiculous muss, they made of it. Signal examples of this are the rifacimenti’ of the Tempest by Dryden and Davenant, the King Lear by Tate, and the Antony and Cleopatra (entitled All for Love, or the World well Lost’) by Dryden. In Milton, though there is a noticeable, an even distinctly marked, reduction of the life of the spirit (in the sense in which I have been using these words) exhibited by Shakespeare, it is still very strong and efficient, and continues uninfluenced by the malign atmosphere around him the last fifteen years of his life, which were lived in the reign of Charles II. Within that period he wrote the Paradise Lost’, Paradise Regained’, and Samson Agonistes’. “Milton,” says Emerson, “was the stair or high table-land to let down the English genius from the summits of Shakespeare.” “These heights could not be maintained. They were followed by a meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and his “understanding” the measure, in all nations, of the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on which they had once walked with echoing steps, and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers of thought fell into neglect.” The highest powers of thought cannot be realized without the life of the spirit. It is this, as I have already said, which has been the glory of the greatest thinkers since the world began; not their intellects, but the co-operating, unconscious power IMMANENT in their intellects. During the Restoration period, and later, spiritual life was at its very lowest ebb. I mean, spiritual life as exhibited in the poetic and dramatic literature of the time, whose poisoned fountain-head was the dissolute court of Charles II. All the slops of that court went into the drama, all the sentina reipublicae’, the bilge water of the ship of state. The dramatic writers of the time, to use the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, “walked in the vanity of their mind; having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that was in them because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, gave themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” The age, as Emerson says, had no live, distinct, actuating convictions. It was in even worse than a negative condition. As represented by its drama and poetry, it may almost be said to have repudiated the moral sentiment. A spiritual disease affected the upper classes, which continued down into the reign of the Georges. There appears to have been but little belief in the impulse which the heart imparts to the intellect, or that the latter draws greatness from the inspiration of the former. There was a time in the history of the Jews in which, it is recorded, “there was no open vision”. It can be said, emphatically, that in the time of Charles II. there was no open vision. And yet that besotted, that spiritually dark age, which was afflicted with pneumatophobia, flattered itself that there had never been an age so flooded with light. The great age of Elizabeth (which designation I would apply to the period of fifty years or more, from 1575 to 1625, or somewhat later), in which the human faculties, in their whole range, both intellectual and spiritual, reached such a degree of expansion as they had never before reached in the history of the world, — that great age, I say, the age of Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Hooker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Herbert, Heywood, Massinger (and this list of great names might be continued), — that great age, I say, was regarded by the men of the Restoration period as barbarous in comparison with their own. But beneath all, still lay the restorative elements of the English character, which were to reassert themselves and usher in a new era of literary productiveness, the greatest since the Elizabethan age, and embodying the highest ideals of life to which the race has yet attained. We can account, to some extent, for this interregnum or spiritual life, but only to some extent. The brutal heartlessness and licentiousness of the court which the exiled Charles brought back with him, and the release from Puritan restraint, explain partly the state of things, or rather the degree to which the state of things was pushed. In the middle of the eighteenth century, or somewhat earlier, the rise of the spiritual tide is distinctly observable. We see a reaction setting in against the soulless poetry which culminated in Alexander Pope, whose Rape of the Lock’ is the masterpiece of that poetry. It is, in fact, the most brilliant society-poem in the literature. De Quincey pronounces it to be, though somewhat extravagantly, “the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers.” Bishop Warburton, one of the great critical authorities of the age, believed in the infallibility of Pope, if not of THE Pope. To notice but a few of the influences at work: Thomson sang of the Seasons, and invited attention to the beauties of the natural world, to which the previous generation had been blind and indifferent. Bishop Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’, thus awakening a new interest in the old ballads which had sprung from the heart of the people, and contributing much to free poetry from the yoke of the conventional and the artificial, and to work a revival of natural unaffected feeling. Thomas Tyrwhitt edited in a scholarly and appreciative manner, the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. James McPherson published what he claimed to be translations from the poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal. Whether genuine or not, these poems indicated the tendency of the time. In Scotland, the old ballad spirit, which had continued to exist with a vigor but little abated by the influence of the artificial, mechanical school of poetry, was gathered up and intensified in the songs of him “who walked in glory and in joy, following his plow, along the mountain-side”, and who is entitled to a high rank among the poetical reformers of the age. It is not surprising that the great literary dictator in Percy’s day, Dr. Samuel Johnson, should treat the old ballads with ridicule. The good man had been trained in a different school of poetry, and could not in his old age yield to the reactionary movement. Bishop Warburton, who ranked next to Johnson in literary authority, had nothing but sneering contempt to bestow upon upon the old ballads, and this feeling was shared by many others in the foremost ranks of literature and criticism. But in the face of all opposition, and aided by the yearning for literary liberty that was abroad, the old ballads grew more and more into favor. The influence of this folklore was not confined to England. It extended across the sea, and swayed the genius of such poets as Buerger and Goethe and Schiller. Along with the poetical revival in the eighteenth century, came the great religious revival inaugurated by the Wesleys and Whitefield; and of this revival, the poetry of William Cowper was a direct product. But the two revivals were co-radical, — one was not derived from the other. The long-suppressed spiritual elements of the nation began to reassert themselves in religion and in poetry. The Church had been as sound asleep as the Muses. Cowper belongs to the Whitefield side of the religious revival, the Evangelicals, as they were called (those that remained within the Establishment). In his poem entitled Hope’, he vindicates the memory of Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism which gave him his inspiration and his themes. The Task’ has been as justly called the poem of Methodism as the Paradise Lost’ has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II., vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the clergy and the universities). Cowper has been truly characterized by Professor Goldwin Smith, as “the apostle of feeling to a hard age, to an artificial age, the apostle of nature. He opened beneath the arid surface of a polished but soulless society, a fountain of sentiment which had long ceased to flow.” The greatest things in this world are often done by those who do not know they are doing them. This is especially true of William Cowper. He was wholly unaware of the great mission he was fulfilling; his contemporaries were wholly unaware of it. And so temporal are the world’s standards, in the best of times, that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses. “Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly Down to towered Camelot: And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers, ‘Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott.” John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled The Flight of the Eagle’, quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by “a lecturer from over seas”, whom he does not name: “When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be found not educated under its influence.” Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was “Strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation”, and who “Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated, — Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created.” John Keats, in his poem entitled Sleep and Poetry’, has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period. After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period, he continues: — “Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant’s force They sway’d about upon a rocking-horse, And thought it Pegasus.” (Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.) “Ah dismal soul’d! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d It’s gathering waves — ye felt it not. The blue Bar’d its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious: beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of, — were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphem’d the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it, — no, they went about, Holding a poor, decrepid standard out Mark’d with most flimsy mottoes, and in large The name of one Boileau!” It was these lines that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope. In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks, “Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid? Is it Milton’s? Is it Dryden’s? Is it any one’s except Pope’s and Goldsmith’s, of which ALL is good?” In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the spiritual flow which, as I have said, set in about the middle of the eighteenth century, and received its first great impulse from William Cowper, reached its high tide in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Southey, and Byron. These poets were all, more or less, influenced by that great moral convulsion, the French revolution, which stirred men’s souls to their deepest depths, induced a vast stimulation of the meditative faculties, and contributed much toward the unfolding of the ideas “on man, on nature, and on human life”, which have since so vitalized English poetry. * —* “The agitation, the frenzy, the sorrow of the times, reacted upon the human intellect, and FORCED men into meditation. Their own nature was held up before them in a sterner form. They were compelled to contemplate an ideal of man, far more colossal than is brought forward in the tranquil aspects of society; and they were often engaged, whether they would or not, with the elementary problems of social philosophy. Mere danger forced a man into thoughts which else were foreign to his habits. Mere necessity of action forced him to decide.” — Thomas De Quincey’s Essay on Style’. — Wordsworth exhibited in his poetry, as they had never before been exhibited, the permanent absolute relations of nature to the human spirit, interpreted the relations between the elemental powers of creation and the moral life of man, and vindicated the inalienable birthright of the lowliest of men to those inward “oracles of vital deity attesting the Hereafter.” Wordsworth’s poetry is, in fact, so far as it bears upon the natural world, a protest against the association theory of beauty of the eighteenth century — a theory which was an offshoot of the philosophy of Locke, well characterized by Macvicar, in his Philosophy of the Beautiful’ (Introd., pp. xv., xvi), as “an ingenious hypothesis for the close of the eighteenth century, when the philosophy then popular did not admit, as the ground of any knowledge, anything higher than self-repetition and the transformation of sensations.” Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is an imaginative expression of that divine love which embraces all creatures, from the highest to the lowest, of the consequences of the severance of man’s soul from this animating principle of the universe, and of those spiritual threshings by and through which it is brought again under its blessed influence. In his Cristabel’ he has exhibited the dark principle of evil, lurking within the good, and ever struggling with it. We read it in the spell the wicked witch Geraldine works upon her innocent and unsuspecting protector; we read it in the strange words which Geraldine addresses to the spirit of the saintly mother who has approached to shield from harm the beloved child for whom she died; we read it in the story of the friendship and enmity between the Baron and Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine; we read it in the vision seen in the forest by the minstrel Bard, of the bright green snake coiled around the wings and neck of a fluttering dove; and, finally, we read it in its most startling form, in the conclusion of the poem, “A little child, a limber elf, singing, dancing to itself,” etc., wherein is exhibited the strange tendency to express love’s excess “with words of unmeant bitterness”. This dark principle of evil, we may suppose, after dwelling in the poet’s mind, in an abstract form, crept into this broken poem, where it lies coiled up among the choicest and most fragrant flowers, and occasionally springs its warning rattle, and projects its forked tongue, to assure us of its ugly presence. Both these great poems show the influence of the revival of the old English Ballads. Coleridge had drunk deep of their spirit. Shelley and Byron were fully charged with the revolutionary spirit of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation, had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in the Prometheus Unbound’, which is, in the words of Todhunter, “to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation of the genius of humanity, chained and suffering under the tyranny of the evil principle which at present rules over the world, typified in Jupiter; the name Prometheus, FORESIGHT, connecting him with that poetic imagination which is the true prophetic power, penetrating the mystery of things, because, as Shelley implies, it is a kind of divine Logos incarnate in man — a creative force which dominates nature by acting in harmony with her.” It is, perhaps, more correct to say of Byron, that he was charged with the spirit of revolt rather than with the revolutionary spirit. The revolutionary spirit was in him indefinite, inarticulate; he offered nothing to put in the place of the social and political evils against which he rebelled. There is nothing CONSTRUCTIVE in his poetry. But if his great passion-capital, his keen spiritual susceptibility, and his great power of vigorous expression, had been brought into the service of constructive thought, he might have been a restorative power in his generation. The greatest loss which English poetry ever sustained, was in the premature death of John Keats. What he would have done had his life been spared, we have an assurance in what he has left us. He was spiritually constituted to be one of the subtlest interpreters of the secrets of life that the whole range of English poetry exhibits. No poet ever more deeply felt “the vital connection of beauty with truth”. He realized in himself his idea of the poet expressed in his lines, — “‘Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king, Or poorest of the beggar-clan, Or any other wondrous thing A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato; ‘Tis the man who with a bird, Wren, or eagle, finds his way to All its instincts; he hath heard The lion’s roaring, and can tell What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the tiger’s yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother tongue.” * —* “We often think of Shelley and Keats together, and they seem to have an attraction for minds of the same cast. They were both exposed to the same influences, those revolutionary influences in literature and religion which inaugurated a new period. Yet there is a great contrast as well as a great similarity between them, and it is interesting to remark the different spiritual results in the case of these two different minds subjected to conditions so similar in general, though different in detail. Both felt the same need, the need of ESCAPE, desiring to escape from the actual world in which they perceived more evil than good, to some other ideal world which they had to create for themselves. This is the point of their similarity; their need and motive were the same, to escape from the limitations of the present. But they escaped in different directions, Keats into the past where he reconstructed a mythical Greek world after the designs of his own fancy, Shelley into a future where he sought in a new and distant era, in a new and distant world, a refuge from the present. We may compare Keats’s Hyperion’ with Shelley’s Prometheus’, as both poems touch the same idea — the dominion of elder gods usurped by younger, for Prometheus belonged to the elder generation. The impression Keats gives us is that he represents the dethroned gods in the sad vale, “far from the fiery noon”, for the pleasure of moving among them himself, and creates their lonely world as a retreat for his own spirit. Whereas in the Prometheus Unbound’ we feel that the scenes laid in ancient days and built on Greek myths, have a direct relation to the destinies of man, and that Shelley went back into the past because he believed it was connected with the future, and because he could use it as an artistic setting for exhibiting an ideal world in the future. “This problem of escape — to rescue the soul from the clutches of time, ineluctabile tempus’, — which Keats and Shelley tried to resolve for themselves by creating a new world in the past and the future, met Browning too. The new way which Browning has essayed — the way in which he accepts the present and deals with it, CLOSES with time instead of trying to elude it, and discovers in the struggle that this time, ineluctabile tempus’, is really a faithful vassal of eternity, and that its limits serve and do not enslave illimitable spirit.” — From a Paper by John B. Bury, B.A., Trin. Coll., Dublin, on Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology’, read at 38th meeting of the Browning Soc., Jan. 29, 1886.— Wordsworth, and the other poets I have named, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, made such a protest against authority in poetry as had been made in the 16th century against authority in religion; and for this authority were substituted the soul-experiences of the individual poet, who set his verse to the song that was within him, and chose such subjects as would best embody and articulate that song. But by the end of the first quarter of the present century, the great poetical billow, which was not indeed caused by, but received an impulse from, the great political billow, the French Revolution (for they were cognate or co-radical movements), had quite spent itself, and English poetry was at a comparatively low ebb. The Poetical Revolution had done its work. A poetical interregnum of a few years’ duration followed, in which there appeared to be a great reduction of the spiritual life of which poetry is the outgrowth. Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in his article On the Early Writings of Robert Browning’, in the Century’ for December, 1881, has characterized this interregnum a little too contemptuously, perhaps. There was, indeed, a great fall in the spiritual tide; but it was not such a dead-low tide as Mr. Gosse would make it. At length, in 1830, appeared a volume of poems by a young man, then but twenty-one years of age, which distinctly marked the setting in of a new order of things. It bore the following title: Poems, chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson, London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830.’ pp. 154. The volume comprised fifty-three poems, among which were The Poet’ and The Poet’s Mind’. These two poems were emphatically indicative of the high ideal of poetry which had been attained, and to the development of which the band of poets of the preceding generation had largely contributed. A review of the volume, by John Stuart Mill, then a young man not yet twenty-five years of age, was published in The Westminster’ for January, 1831. It bears testimony to the writer’s fine insight and sure foresight; and it bears testimony, too, to his high estimate of the function of poetry in this world — an estimate, too, in kind and in degree, not older than this present century. The review is as important a landmark in the development of poetical criticism, as are the two poems I have mentioned, in the development of poetical ideals, in the nineteenth century. In the concluding paragraph of the review, Mill says: “A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present and future generations, to earth and heaven. He, of all men, should have distinct and worthy objects before him, and consecrate himself to their promotion. It is thus that he best consults the glory of his art, and his own lasting fame. . . . Mr. Tennyson knows that “the poet’s mind is holy ground”; he knows that the poet’s portion is to be “Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love”; he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of a poet’s destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment. . . . If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may be read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own works.” Two years later, that is, in 1832 (the volume, however, is antedated 1833), appeared Poems by Alfred Tennyson’, pp. 163. In it were contained The Lady of Shalott’, and the untitled poems, known by their first lines, You ask me why, tho’ ill at ease’, Of old sat Freedom on the Heights’, and Love thou thy Land, with Love far brought’. In The Lady of Shalott’ is mystically shadowed forth the relation which poetic genius should sustain to the world for whose spiritual redemption it labors, and the fatal consequences of its being seduced by the world’s temptations, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. The other poems, You ask me why’, Of old sat Freedom’, and Love thou thy land’, are important as exponents of what may be called the poet’s institutional creed. A careful study of his subsequent poetry will show that in these early poems he accurately and distinctly revealed the attitude toward outside things which he has since maintained. He is a good deal of an institutional poet, and, as compared with Browning, a STRONGLY institutional poet. Browning’s supreme and all-absorbing interest is in individual souls. He cares but little, evidently, about institutions. At any rate, he gives them little or no place in his poetry. Tennyson is a very decided reactionary product of the revolutionary spirit which inspired some of his poetical predecessors of the previous generation. He has a horror of the revolutionary. To him, the French Revolution was “the blind hysterics of the Celt”, [In Memoriam’, cix.], and “the red fool-fury of the Seine” [I. M.’, cxxvii.]. He attaches great importance to the outside arrangements of society for upholding and advancing the individual. He would “make Knowledge circle with the winds”, but “her herald, Reverence”, must “fly Before her to whatever sky Bear seed of men and growth of minds.” He has a great regard for precedents, almost AS precedents. He is emphatically the poet of law and order. All his sympathies are decidedly, but not narrowly, conservative. He is, in short, a choice product of nineteenth century ENGLISH civilization; and his poetry may be said to be the most distinct expression of the refinements of English culture — refinements, rather than the ruder but more vital forms of English strength and power. All his ideals of institutions and the general machinery of life, are derived from England. She is “the land that freemen till, That sober-suited Freedom chose, The land where, girt with friends or foes, A man may speak the thing he will; A land of SETTLED GOVERNMENT, A LAND OF JUST AND OLD RENOWN, WHERE FREEDOM BROADENS SLOWLY DOWN FROM PRECEDENT TO PRECEDENT: Where faction seldom gathers head, But by degrees to fullness wrought, The strength of some diffusive thought Hath time and space to work and spread.” But the anti-revolutionary and the institutional features of Tennyson’s poetry are not those of the higher ground of his poetry. They are features which, though primarily due, it may be, to the poet’s temperament, are indirectly due to the particular form of civilization in which he has lived, and moved, and had his culture, and which he reflects more than any of his poetical contemporaries. The most emphasized and most vitalized idea, the idea which glints forth everywhere in his poetry, which has the most important bearing on man’s higher life, and which marks the height of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest order of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which INFORMS his poem of The Princess’. It is prominent in In Memoriam’ and in The Idylls of the King’. In The Princess’, the Prince, speaking of the relations of the sexes, says: — “in the long years liker must they grow; The man be more of woman, she of man; He gain in sweetness and in moral height, Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world; She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind; Till at the last she set herself to man, Like perfect music unto noble words; And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time, Sit side by side, full-summ’d in all their powers, Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be, Self-reverent each and reverencing each, Distinct in individualities, But like each other ev’n as those who love. Then comes the statelier Eden back to men: Then reign the world’s great bridals, chaste and calm: Then springs the crowning race of humankind.” To state briefly the cardinal Tennysonian idea, man must realize a WOMANLY MANLINESS, and woman a MANLY WOMANLINESS. Tennyson presents to us his ideal man in the 109th section of In Memoriam’. It is descriptive of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. All that is most characteristic of Tennyson, even his Englishness, is gathered up in this poem of six stanzas. It is interesting to meet with such a representative and comprehensive bit in a great poet. “HEART-AFFLUENCE in discursive talk From household fountains never dry; The CRITIC CLEARNESS of an eye, That saw through all the Muses’ walk; SERAPHIC INTELLECT AND FORCE TO SEIZE AND THROW THE DOUBTS OF MAN; IMPASSIONED LOGIC, which outran The bearer in its fiery course; HIGH NATURE AMOROUS OF THE GOOD, BUT TOUCH’D WITH NO ASCETIC GLOOM; And passions pure in snowy bloom Through all the years of April blood.” The first two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur of the Idylls of the King’. *1* In the next stanza we have the poet’s institutional Englishness: — “A love of freedom rarely felt, Of freedom in her regal seat Of England; not the school-boy heat, The blind hysterics of the Celt; And MANHOOD FUSED WITH FEMALE GRACE *2* In such a sort, the child would twine A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine, And find his comfort in thy face; All these have been, and thee mine eyes Have look’d on; if they look’d in vain, My shame is greater who remain, Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.” —*1* See The Holy Grail’, the concluding thirty-two verses, beginning: “And spake I not too truly, O my Knights”, and ending “ye have seen that ye have seen”.2 The idea of The Princess’.— Tennyson’s genius was early trained by the skeptical philosophy of the age. All his poetry shows this. The In Memoriam’ may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism. To this scepticism he has applied an “all-subtilizing intellect”, and has translated it into the poetical “concrete”, with a rare artistic skill, and more than this, has subjected it to the spiritual instincts and apperceptions of the feminine side of his nature and made it vassal to a larger faith. But it is, after all, not the vital faith which Browning’s poetry exhibits, a faith PROCEEDING DIRECTLY FROM THE SPIRITUAL MAN. It is rather the faith expressed by Browning’s Bishop Blougram: — “With me faith means perpetual unbelief Kept quiet like the snake ‘neath Michael’s foot, Who stands firm just because he feels it writhe.” And Tennyson, in picturing to us in the Idylls, the passage of the soul “from the great deep to the great deep”, appears to have felt it necessary to the completion of that picture (or why did he do it?), that he should bring out that doubt at the last moment. The dying Arthur is made to say: — “I am going a long way With these thou seest — if indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) — To the island-valley of Avilion”; etc. Tennyson’s poetry is, in fact, an expression of the highest sublimation of the scepticism which came out of the eighteenth century, which invoked the authority of the sensualistic philosophy of Locke, and has since been fostered by the science of the nineteenth; while Browning’s poetry is a decided protest against, and a reactionary product of, that scepticism, that infidel philosophy (infidel as to the transcendental), and has CLOSED with it and borne away the palm. The key-note of his poetry is struck in Paracelsus’, published in 1835, in his twenty-third year, and, with the exception of Pauline’ published in 1833, the earliest of his compositions: Paracelsus says (and he who knows Browning knows it to be substantially his 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 fulness; 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. Watch narrowly The demonstration of a truth, its birth, And you trace back the effluence to its spring And source within us, where broods radiance vast, To be elicited ray by ray, as chance Shall favour: chance — for hitherto, your sage Even as he knows not how those beams are born, As little knows he what unlocks their fount; And men have oft grown old among their books To die, case-hardened in their ignorance, Whose careless youth had promised what long years Of unremitted labour ne’er performed: While, contrary, it has chanced some idle day, That autumn-loiterers just as fancy-free As the midges in the sun, have oft given vent To truth — produced mysteriously as cape Of cloud grown out of the invisible air. Hence, may not truth be lodged alike in all, The lowest as the highest? some slight film The interposing bar which binds it up, And makes the idiot, just as makes the sage Some film removed, the happy outlet whence Truth issues proudly? See this soul of ours! How it strives weakly in the child, is loosed In manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled By age and waste, set free at last by death: Why is it, flesh enthralls it or enthrones? What is this flesh we have to penetrate? Oh, not alone when life flows still do truth And power emerge, but also when strange chance Ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture, When sickness breaks the body — hunger, watching, Excess, or languor — oftenest death’s approach — Peril, deep joy, or woe. One man shall crawl Through life, surrounded with all stirring things, Unmoved — and he goes mad; and from the wreck Of what he was, by his wild talk alone, You first collect how great a spirit he hid. Therefore set free the spirit alike in all, Discovering the true laws by which the flesh Bars in the spirit! . . . * * * * * I go to gather this The sacred knowledge, here and there dispersed About the world, long lost or never found. And why should I be sad, or lorn of hope? Why ever make man’s good distinct from God’s? Or, finding they are one, why dare mistrust? Who shall succeed if not one pledged like me? Mine is no mad attempt to build a world Apart from His, like those who set themselves To find the nature of the spirit they bore, And, taught betimes that all their gorgeous dreams Were only born to vanish in this life, Refused to fit them to this narrow sphere, But chose to figure forth another world And other frames meet for their vast desires, — Still, all a dream! Thus was life scorned; but life Shall yet be crowned: twine amaranth! I am priest!” And again: — “In man’s self arise August anticipations, symbols, types Of a dim splendour ever on before, In that eternal circle run by life: For men begin to pass their nature’s bound, And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant Their proper joys and griefs; and outgrow all * The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade Before the unmeasured thirst for good; while peace Rises within them ever more and more. Such men are even now upon the earth, Serene amid the half-formed creatures round, Who should be saved by them and joined with them.” In the last three verses is indicated the doctrine of the regenerating power of exalted personalities, so prominent in Browning’s poetry, and which is treated in the next paper. —* proper: In the sense of the Latin PROPRIUS, peculiar, private, personal. — There is no tabula rasa’ doctrine in these passages, nor in any others, in the poet’s voluminous works; and of all men of great intellect and learning (it is always a matter of mere insulated intellect), born in England since the days of John Locke, no one, perhaps, has been so entirely untainted with this doctrine as Robert Browning. It is a doctrine which great spiritual vitality (and that he early possessed), reaching out, as it does, beyond all experience, beyond all transformation of sensations, and all conclusions of the discursive understanding, naturally and spontaneously rejects. It simply says, “I know better”, and there an end. The great function of the poet, as poet, is, with Browning, to open out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, not to effect entry for a light supposed to be without; to trace back the effluence to its spring and source within us, where broods radiance vast, to be elicited ray by ray. In Fifine at the Fair’, published thirty-seven years after Paracelsus’, is substantially the same doctrine: — “Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence. The individual soul works through the shows of sense, (Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true) Up to an outer soul as individual too; And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, And reach at length God, man, or both together mixed’.” In his poem entitled Popularity’, included in his “fifty men and women”, the speaker, in the monologue, “draws” his “true poet”, whom HE knows, if others do not; who, though he renders, or stands ready to render, to his fellows, the supreme service of opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor of their souls may escape, is yet locked safe from end to end of this dark world. Though there may be, in his own time, no “reapers reaping early in among the bearded barley” and “piling sheaves in uplands airy” who hear his song, he holds the FUTURE fast, accepts the COMING AGES’ duty, their present for this past. This true, creative poet, whom the speaker calls “God’s glow-worm, creative in the sense of revealing, whose inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness, has that freedom of responsiveness to the divine which makes him the revealer of it to men, plays the part in the world of spirit which, in the material world was played by the fisher who, first on the coast of Tyre the old, fished up the purple-yielding murex. Until the precious liquor, filtered by degrees, and refined to proof, is flasked and priced, and salable at last, the world stands aloof. But when it is all ready for the market, the small dealers, “put blue into their line”, and outdare each other in azure feats by which they secure great popularity, and, as a result, fare sumptuously; while he who fished the murex up was unrecognized, and fed, perhaps, on porridge. Popularity. I. Stand still, true poet that you are!I know you; let me try and draw you. Some night you’ll fail us: when afarYou rise, remember one man saw you, Knew you, and named a star! 1 II. My star, God’s glow-worm! Why extendThat loving hand of His which leads you, Yet locks you safe from end to endOf this dark world, unless He needs you, Just saves your light to spend? III. His clenched hand shall unclose at last, I know, and let out all the beauty:My poet holds the future fast,Accepts the coming ages’ duty,Their present for this past. IV. That day, the earth’s feast-master’s brow Shall clear, to God the chalice raising; “Others give best at first, but ThouForever set’st our table praising,Keep’st the good wine till now!” V. Meantime, I’ll draw you as you stand, With few or none to watch and wonder:I’ll say — a fisher, on the sandBy Tyre the old, with ocean-plunder, A netful, brought to land. VI. Who has not heard how Tyrian shellsEnclosed the blue, that dye of dyes Whereof one drop worked miracles,And colored like Astarte’s eyesRaw silk the merchant sells? VII. And each by-stander of them allCould criticise, and quote tradition How depths of blue sublimed some pall — To get which, pricked a king’s ambition; Worth sceptre, crown, and ball. VIII. Yet there’s the dye, in that rough mesh, The sea has only just o’er-whispered!Live whelks, each lip’s beard dripping fresh, As if they still the water’s lisp heardThrough foam the rock-weeds thresh. IX. Enough to furnish SolomonSuch hangings for his cedar-house,That, when gold-robed he took the throne In that abyss of blue, the SpouseMight swear his presence shone X. Most like the centre-spike of goldWhich burns deep in the blue-bell’s womb What time, with ardors manifold,The bee goes singing to her groom,Drunken and overbold. XI. Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof! Till cunning come to pound and squeezeAnd clarify, — refine to proof 2 The liquor filtered by degrees,While the world stands aloof. XII. And there’s the extract, flasked and fine, And priced and salable at last!And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes combine To paint the future from the past,Put blue into their line. 3 XIII. Hobbs hints blue, — straight he turtle eats: Nobbs prints blue, — claret crowns his cup: Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats, — Both gorge. Who finished the murex up?What porridge had John Keats? —1 named: Announced.2 Original reading: — “Till art comes, — comes to pound and squeeze And clarify, — refines to proof.”3 “Line” is perhaps meant to be used equivocally, — their line of business or line of their verse. — The spiritual ebb and flow exhibited in English poetry (the highest tide being reached in Tennyson and Browning) which I have endeavored cursorily to present, bear testimony to the fact that human nature WILL assert its wholeness in the civilized man. And there must come a time, in the progress of civilization, when this ebb and flow will be less marked than it has been heretofore, by reason of a better balancing, which will be brought about, of the intellectual and the spiritual. Each will have its due activity. The man of intellectual pursuits will not have a starved spiritual nature; and the man of predominant spiritual functions will not have an intellect weakened into a submissiveness to formulated, stereotyped, and, consequently, lifeless dogmas. Robert Browning is in himself the completest fulfilment of this equipoise of the intellectual and the spiritual, possessing each in an exalted degree; and his poetry is an emphasized expression of his own personality, and a prophecy of the ultimate results of Christian civilization. II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning’s Poetry.

  1. General Remarks. “Subsists no law of Life outside of Life. * * * * The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law.” The importance of Robert Browning’s poetry, as embodying the profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and, above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, as yet, notwithstanding the great increase within the last few years of devoted students, received but a niggardly recognition when compared with that received by far inferior contemporary poets. There are, however, many indications in the poetical criticism of the day that upon it will ere long be pronounced the verdict which is its due. And the founding of a society in England in 1881, “to gather together some at least of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study and discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them, and extracts from works illustrating them” has already contributed much towards paying a long-standing debt. Mr. Browning’s earliest poems, Pauline’ (he calls it in the preface to the reprint of it in 1868 “a boyish work”, though it exhibits the great basal thought of all his subsequent poetry), was published in 1833, since which time he has produced the largest body of poetry produced by any one poet in English literature; and the range of thought and passion which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a single exception, since the days of Shakespeare. And he is the most like Shakespeare in his deep interest in human nature in all its varieties of good and evil. Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless intellect, he has throughout his voluminous poetry made the strongest protest that has been made in these days against mere intellect. And his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age like the present — an age exhibiting “a condition of humanity which has thrown itself wholly on its intellect and its genius in physics, and has done marvels in material science and invention, but at the expense of the interior divinity.” It is the human heart, that is, the intuitive, the non-discursive side of man, with its hopes and its prophetic aspirations, as opposed to the analytic, the discursive understanding, which is to him a subject of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that its deepest depths are “deeper than did ever plummet sound”; but he also knows that it is in these depths that life’s greatest secrets must be sought. The philosophies excogitated by the insulated intellect help nothing toward even a glimpse of these secrets. In one of his later poems, that entitled House’, he has intimated, and forcibly intimated, his sense of the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies of this wondrous human heart, though assured as he is that all our hopes in regard to the soul’s destiny are warmed and cherished by what radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem, from Wordsworth’s sonnet on the Sonnet, “With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” and then adds, “DID Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!” Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her Aurora Leigh’, has given a full and very forcible expression to the feeling which has caused the highest dramatic genius of the present day to seek refuge in the poem and the novel. “I will write no plays; because the drama, less sublime in this, makes lower appeals, defends more menially, adopts the standard of the public taste to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day, to please the day; . . . ‘Tis that, honoring to its worth the drama, I would fear to keep it down to the level of the footlights. . . . The growing drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face, and speech, it also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation of the painted scene, boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; and TAKE FOR A WORTHIER STAGE, THE SOUL ITSELF, ITS SHIFTING FANCIES AND CELESTIAL LIGHTS, WITH ALL ITS GRAND ORCHESTRAL SILENCES TO KEEP THE PAUSES OF THE RHYTHMIC SOUNDS.” Robert Browning’s poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization of what is expressed in the concluding lines of this passage: he has taken for a worthier stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial lights, more than any other poet of the age. And he has worked with a thought-and-passion capital greater than the combined thought-and-passion capital of the richest of his poetical contemporaries. And he has thought nobly of the soul, and has treated it as, in its essence, above the fixed and law-bound system of things which we call nature; in other 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 “not matter nor from matter, but above”: — “And so, amid the laughter gay, Trotted my hero off, — old Tray, — Till somebody, prerogatived With reason, reasoned: Why he dived, His brain would show us, I should say. John, go and catch — or, if needs be, Purchase that animal for me! By vivisection, at expense Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence, How brain secretes dog’s soul, we’ll see!” In his poem entitled Halbert and Hob’ (Dramatic Lyrics’, First Series), quoting from Shakespeare’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 fulness; 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 out blind at first, disorganized by sin in the blood, — his spirit-insight 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, qea/nqrwpos. 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 counter-checks, 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”, 1 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 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.” 3 —1 The Ring and the Book’, The Pope, v. 1853. *2* Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, vv. 198, 199. 3 Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, vv. 650-671. — 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, reintroduce 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. 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 endeavor 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 With her whole energies and die content, — So like a wall at the world’s edge it stood, With naught beyond to live for, — is that reached? — Already are new undream’d energies Outgrowing under, and extending farther To a new object; — there’s another world!” The dying John in A Death in the Desert’, is made to say: — “I say that man was made to grow, not stop; That help he needed once, and needs no more, Having grown up but an inch by, is withdrawn: For he hath new needs, and new helps to these. This imports solely, man should mount on each New height in view; the help whereby he mounts, The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall, Since all things suffer change save God the Truth. Man apprehends him newly at each stage Whereat earth’s ladder drops, its service done; And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved.” And again: — “Man knows partly but conceives beside, Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, And in this striving, this converting air Into a solid he may grasp and use, Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone, Not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. Such progress could no more attend his soul Were all it struggles after found at first And guesses changed to knowledge absolute, Than motion wait his body, were all else Than it the solid earth on every side, Where now through space he moves from rest to rest. 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. God’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 statuary ere he mould a shape Boasts a like gift, the shape’s idea, and next The aspiration to produce the same; So, taking clay, he calls his shape thereout, Cries ever, Now I have the thing I see’: Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought, From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself. How were it had he cried, I see no face, No breast, no feet i’ the ineffectual clay’? Rather commend him that he clapped his hands, And laughed, It is my shape and lives again!’ Enjoyed the falsehood touched it on to truth, Until yourselves applaud the flesh indeed In what is still flesh-imitating clay. Right in you, right in him, such way be man’s! God only makes the live shape at a jet. Will ye renounce this fact of creatureship? The pattern on the Mount subsists no more, Seemed awhile, then returned to nothingness, But copies, Moses strove to make thereby Serve still and are replaced as time requires: By these make newest vessels, reach the type! If ye demur, this judgment on your head, Never to reach the ultimate, angels’ law, Indulging every instinct of the soul There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing.” Browning has given varied and beautiful expressions to these ideas 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 vitality — it 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!” * —* Aristophanes’ Apology’, p. 31, English ed. — “Rejoice that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul’s wings never furled!” * — James Lee’s Wife’, sect. 6.— 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’). 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!'” * 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 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’). —* Rabbi Ben Ezra’.— 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 polarize 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 favorable 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, Which he could traverse, not remain 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 soul-healthfulness. Though the spiritual bearing of things is the all-in-all, in his poetry, the robustness of his nature, the fulness and splendid equilibrium of his life, protect him against an inarticulate mysticism. Browning is, in the widest and deepest