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 11
 
 LIBRARY 
 IRVINE 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 IRVINE 
 
 GUT OF 
 LEISURE WORLD LIBRARY
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE SILENCES OF THE MASTER 
 
 Ifltno. Net, 95 cents
 
 The Confessions of 
 A Browning Lover 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN WALKER POWELL 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI
 
 It- 
 
 Copyright. 1918, by 
 JOHN ^^ALKER POWELL
 
 TO "H. G.'
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTKR PAOB 
 
 Preface 9 
 
 I. Of the Poet as Artist 15 
 
 II. Of Artists and Philosophers 49 
 
 III. Of Ideas and Forms 76 
 
 IV. Of Orthodoxy and the Theory of 
 
 Knowledge 100 
 
 V. Of Structural vs. Ornamental Truth . 132 
 
 VI. Of Life and Love 157 
 
 VII. Of the Problem of Evil 185 
 
 VIII. Prospice 213
 
 PREFACE 
 
 As I look over these pages, now that they are 
 finished, I wonder if I have accomplished the pur- 
 pose with which I began. I seem to have been 
 "ever a fighter." The controversial note runs 
 through much of what I have written. Well, 
 there seem to be plenty of windmills in our modern 
 life at which to tilt, and a Browning lover ought 
 not to be averse to breaking a lance now and then. 
 If sometimes I have fought with shadows, or 
 doughtily overthrown a man of straw, it may be I 
 have discovered to the world some lurking enemy 
 whose presence was unsuspected, or that I have 
 shown the unknowing where they may arm them- 
 selves when the hour comes to fight. 
 
 I have not much concerned me with many 
 matters of usual interest to commentators. I have 
 not attempted to discover the meaning of puzzhng 
 passages, nor to elucidate obscure references, 
 preferring to leave these things to the learned 
 librarian's assistants who dehght in them. I have 
 come upon many amusing discoveries in my 
 reading. Solemn notes in the appendix of well- 
 known editions attribute the most impossible 
 meanings to the poet, or mistake the most obvious 
 references. Misquotations abound in the writings 
 of those who are esteemed authorities. Some- 
 times the slightest tincture of Browning seems to 
 
 9
 
 PREFACE 
 
 liavr j)o\vor to color whole seas of sentimental 
 vai>()rini,'s on tlio part of popular lecturers. None 
 of those tilings move me. I may have sinned in 
 my own way, but neither an annotator nor a com- 
 mentator will I be. 
 
 It may be that I have laid myself open to the 
 charge of rambling into fields remote from the 
 path I set out to follow; of venturing to express 
 opinions on matters of literary or artistic criticism 
 too high for me. But I have ranged no more 
 widely than Browning himself, whose interests 
 veered from art and music to metaphysics, Greek 
 tragedies, and mediaeval history. If I have 
 spoken as an amateur and not as the scribes, 
 allowance may be made for the liberty of the con- 
 fessional. I shall be content, not if the reader 
 agrees with what I may have said of art or phi- 
 losophy, but if I have roused him to thought. 
 
 Another point at which I venture to anticipate 
 the critics is in the matter of my attitude toward 
 modernism, both in literature and in science. As 
 to what I have said of the chief writers of our day 
 I have no apology to make. That they are great 
 artists I have cheerfully admitted. That they 
 have no comprehensive philosophy of life, no 
 sufficient answer to its deepest questions, it seems 
 to me they would themselves as freely grant. 
 The interpretation of Christianity embodied in the 
 traditions of the church has been definitely set 
 aside by all the principal votaries of literature, 
 who base their thinking on the science of the 
 
 10
 
 PREFACE 
 
 latter half of the nineteenth century. They offer 
 nothing whatever to take its place. 
 
 That this is a weakness in their art, and that 
 the world must in the end come back to the essen- 
 tial truths which the church has been trying to 
 teach, however profoundly our interpretation of 
 these truths may be modified by the enlargement 
 of thought which the new science has afforded, is 
 the fundamental thesis of this book. I am a 
 Browning lover because Browning did teach these 
 essential truths, and taught them in a form which 
 divorced them from the specific dogmas of the 
 schools and made them acceptable to one who 
 has sat at the feet of present-day science and 
 philosophy. 
 
 I would be the last to belittle the contribution 
 of science to modern life. What I have to say re- 
 garding the shallowness of much scientific teach- 
 ing, and its tendency to deny the ideal ends of the 
 spiritual life, has nothing whatever to do with the 
 rights of science in its own field of empirical re- 
 search, nor with the value of its results as material 
 for further interpretation. Nor would I deny 
 that there are many great scientists whose spirit- 
 ual vision has been sound, and who have made im- 
 portant contributions to our knowledge of life 
 and its meaning. 
 
 But it cannot be denied, first, that the scien- 
 tific method tends to discount the ideal significance 
 of the facts with which it deals, and to fasten 
 attention upon the material universe to the exclu- 
 
 11
 
 PREFACE 
 
 sion of the world of spiritual values; and, second, 
 that tlurc is a niarkcd tendency on the part of 
 many wlio arc without a peer in their own particu- 
 lar depart men I of scientific knowledge to speak as 
 those having authority upon matters of philosophy 
 and roli^Mon in which they are veriest tyros. 
 
 ^Yhen the empirical scientist whose devotion to 
 his own special field has absorbed his thought for 
 a lifetime, and the character of whose work has in 
 itself unfitted him for abstract thinking, and who, 
 moreover, knows nothing whatever of the history 
 of the ideas with which he deals or the unnum- 
 bered times his pet fallacies have been exploded, 
 ventures into the field of metaphysics or theology, 
 the result does not always tend to edification. 
 
 Still less is such a man capable of expressing an 
 opinion on matters of religious feeling and senti- 
 ment, wherein his experience has tended to dwarf 
 his imagination and warp his judgment. Darwin, 
 as is well known, confessed that his devotion to 
 scientific study had destroyed his capacity for the 
 enjoyment of poetry and music. He had the good 
 sense, however, not to venture an opinion in these 
 departments wherein by his own confession it had 
 been worthless. Not all scientists have exhibited 
 that great man's modesty and good judgment. 
 Yet the world listens eagerly for the theological 
 opinions of great inventors or successful captains 
 of industry — on whose religious capacity I would 
 not be understood to stand in judgment, but 
 whose notions regarding spiritual truth are not to 
 
 12
 
 PREFACE 
 
 be compared in significance with those of some 
 humble saint who knows nothing but the Bible 
 and the Catechism, 
 
 As I have said in discussing this matter, the 
 scientific world itself has in the main moved a 
 good way beyond the skeptical attitude of Tyn- 
 dall and Huxley and their contemporaries. But 
 the world of magazine science, as well as the world 
 of polite literature, has not yet found it out, and 
 it will doubtless take another generation before 
 our novelists and reviewers can be expected to 
 display an open mind toward the spiritual prob- 
 lems which the common man finds paramount in 
 his experience. The younger generation of poets, 
 of whom Alfred Noyes and John Masefield are 
 representatives, display a much simpler and 
 franker acceptance of spiritual truth, sand the sky 
 seems to be reddening to the dawn of a new and 
 brighter day. ' 
 
 That a world in which the vast accumulations of 
 scientific knowledge shall become the foundation 
 for a thoroughgoing spiritual interpretation of 
 human experience w ill be a much bigger and richer 
 world than that in which Browning moved, I 
 steadfastly believe and joyfully profess. But to 
 me, at least, the poet himself has been the prophet 
 of that new day. 
 
 When this book was begun the war in Europe 
 was still in its early stages. Now in its third 
 year it is still too early even to guess what its 
 ultimate effect on the spiritual life of the world 
 
 13
 
 PREFACE 
 
 mav 1)0. Assuredly, liowevor, the unmeasured 
 
 sutfcriug of the flesh mikI ;m<,Mii.sli of spirit through 
 whit'li humanity has passed during these thirty / 
 months nmst issue in a deepened sense of spirit- ( 
 ual need and a new reliance upon the profoundly ] 
 simple truths of a spiritual faith. 
 
 The age in which we live seems typified in Par- 
 acelsus — headstrong in its eagerness for knowledge, 
 yet blind to the supreme significance of love as the 
 power which alone can take up that knowledge 
 and cause it to minister to the well-being of the 
 poor, foolish, broken human life of the world. 
 But Browning it was who taught the present world 
 to sing with Paracelsus, 
 
 "I go to prove my soul! 
 I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
 I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, 
 I ask not: but unless God send his hail 
 Or blinding fireballs, sleet, or stifling snow, 
 In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: 
 He guides me and the bird. In his good time!" 
 
 Like Paracelsus, I too commit myself to the sea 
 of circumstance for better or worse: 
 
 "Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal, 
 Two points in the adventure of the diver. 
 One — when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge, 
 One — when, a prince, he rises with his pearl? 
 Festus, I plunge!" 
 
 March 15, 1917. 
 
 14
 
 CHAPTER I 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 When Saint Luke wrote the Gospel which bears 
 his name, he made the number of similar writings 
 already in existence a reason for writing another. 
 A like apology may be desirable for adding to the 
 already interminable literature on Browning. The 
 Browning Centennial has come and gone, bringing 
 in its train the inevitable quota of essays and re- 
 views. The Papers of the Browning Society have 
 been before the world for many years. Women's 
 Clubs have discussed the deep and hidden mean- 
 ings of the poet's most obvious commonplaces, and 
 essayists and lecturers without number have 
 added their critical judgment to the mass of com- 
 ment upon his work. Can it be possible that 
 anything has been left unsaid, that any new light 
 can be thrown on the poet's message or his place 
 in the pantheon of English bards .'^ 
 
 At the same time the very number of existing 
 books and essays upon Browning is so confusing, 
 so discouraging to the most excellent but bewil- 
 dered Theophilus, that if one'new attempt might 
 be made, like the poet's own Cleon, to "prove 
 absurd all written hitherto. . . ." Or if a new 
 voice might attract the attention of some one 
 halting perplexed which treatise to select, which 
 
 15
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 essay to endue; a voi('t> ulterin^' ixMliajj-s nothing 
 j)arti('iilarly now, hnt at Irasl l(M\iiif;" out niiieh of 
 tlio old that darkened eounsel; if one wlio is neither 
 by training nor temper a literary eritie; a mere 
 representative of that ultimate public to which 
 the artist appeals; a seeker after truth, an earnest 
 believer in the Kingdom of the Spirit, holding 
 everything grist that comes to his mill, and claim- 
 ing the right to find instruction and inspiration 
 wherever he may — if such an one should reveal 
 the processes whereby he has attained to some 
 measure of insight, his experience may doubtless 
 afford little new light for the initiated, but it may 
 prove of value for some wayfaring man like him- 
 self. It may be worth while for one more witness 
 to attest the unfailing stimulus, the deep spiritual 
 satisfaction which he finds in Browning above all 
 other English poets. 
 
 This essay does not attempt anything so am- 
 bitious as a discussion of Browning's "philosophy." 
 It is only what its title imports: the confessions of 
 a Browning lover. It is inevitable, however, that 
 some comparisons and contrasts should be in- 
 volved with the main currents of present-day 
 thought. 
 
 Tennyson declared that poetry means, not what 
 the author may have had in mind, but what it 
 suggests to the reader. If I can make clear, 
 therefore, what Browning's poetry means to me, 
 I claim the right to find such inspiration therein, 
 without any desire to impose my feeling on anyone 
 
 16
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 else. I simply would fain share my discoveries 
 with my neighbors. The personal character of 
 this paper may perhaps also justify a somewhat 
 freer use of the personal pronoun than would be 
 allowable in a critical essay. 
 
 Like most citizens, I listened to a good many 
 lectures on Browning, and read with more or less 
 interest various interpretations of his teaching, 
 before I mustered courage to tackle the poet 
 himself. I knew all the stock comments on his 
 "obscurity." I was familiar with the witty jests 
 upon "Sordello." I felt, as have doubtless many 
 others, that there is enough intelligible poetry in 
 the world to justify one in refusing to be bothered 
 with the work of a man who did not think it worth 
 while to express himself clearly. As the range of 
 my reading increased, however, I kept coming 
 upon traces of Browning's influence. This theo- 
 logian, that teacher of philosophy, this preacher, 
 and that essayist would hint at the spiritual 
 riches which reward the patient explorer. Sug- 
 gestive allusions, tantalizing quotations stimu- 
 lated my curiosity. I discovered that many men 
 whose intellectual and spiritual power I had come 
 to respect held Browning in reverence. So I took 
 my courage in both hands and ordered from my 
 bookseller the fat and forbidding volume of the 
 Cambridge Edition. 
 
 17
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 I suppose up to that tinu' I luid read "How 
 TIu'v Broiighl llu- (kkmI News from Glient to Aix," 
 and '"riic Tied l*i[)cr," and "You Know We 
 French Stormed Ralisbon," but that was about 
 the extent of my acquaintance with the poet. By 
 some cliance ahnost the first poem I attempted to 
 read was "Saul." 
 
 Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken. 
 
 The vigor and freshness of the verse, the wealth 
 of imagery, the glowing enthusiasm, rising at 
 times to rapture, swept me off my feet. The 
 spiritual insight and fervor which mark the climax 
 of the poem, the unanswerable appeal of the argu- 
 ment, the thrilling power of its statement of the 
 central spiritual teaching of Christianity, affected 
 me like nothing else I had ever read. I was filledV 
 wi th en thusiasm for the j)oet as a teacher of re-l 
 ligion. I myself was trying to make spiritual 
 truth intelligible to my generation, to enforce it 
 on the hearts and consciences of the world about 
 me. Every incident, every illustration, every 
 line which opened new depths to my own under- 
 standing, or which stated the principles of the 
 spiritua'l life in a fresh and vigorous way which I 
 might employ to enforce my own teaching, was 
 so much pure gold, and I had found an inex- 
 haustible mine. It was not long before smiles 
 would pass over my congregation when I men- 
 tioned the poet's name. Enthusiastic members 
 
 18
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 of women's clubs would absent-mindedly address 
 me as Mr. Browning. I found myself invited to 
 give talks at afternoon teas, to read papers at 
 ministerial meetings, until at length I blossomed 
 into a full-fledged club lecturer upon Browning. 
 
 In all this, like the poet himself, I was no 
 Browningite. I found incredibly weary, arid 
 stretches. My somewhat narrow religious preju- 
 dices were often shocked. I could not under- 
 stand why a serious-minded religious philosopher 
 should treat many of the subjects which were to 
 be found in his poems, or look with so large a 
 tolerance upon the frailties and sins of mankind. 
 But these were only the spots on the sun; warmth 
 and light unfailing were there, and my heart 
 expanded under the beneficent rays. 
 
 For a number of years I had given courses of 
 lectures before a certain woman's club, and it 
 seemed desirable to announce a final brief series 
 which should sum up in a completer and more 
 systematic way the net results of my study of the 
 poet. To add a measure of popular interest — and 
 widen the sale of tickets — the services of a well- 
 known reader were secured, who should lighten 
 the course by dn evening of interpretive readings. 
 I came to listen on the appointed evening, secure 
 in the smug assurance of my special knowledge of 
 Browning, and quite convinced that the reader 
 would do well to confer with me before she began. 
 This being naturally out of the question, I sat in 
 the audience and listened to an artist interpreting 
 
 19
 
 CON FESSIOXS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 the work of anolhor artist — and all at once I had a 
 new Browning! Lines I had passed over a 
 thousand limes heeaiise they could not be made 
 to bear any theological significance began to live 
 and glow in my feeling. Poems that had seemed 
 mere Jcux d' esprit, thrown off by the poet in a 
 moment of fine carelessness, were suddenly made 
 to a])pear vital parts of his outlook on life. 
 
 I began the next morning to read the poems on 
 wliieh for years I had so solemnly lectured. I 
 was amazed to find what a change mj' new per- 
 sj)ectivc had wrought. The old truths which had 
 thrilled me so many times were there, but, like a 
 well-mounted jewel, they gained new beauty and 
 significance from their setting. The religious 
 teachings wdiich I had found so helpful gained 
 rather than lost by the broader human values out 
 of which they arose. I began to wonder if, after 
 all, the Browningites and their successors had not 
 been on the wrong track. So much has been 
 said of Browning as a philosopher, so much of 
 his obscurity has been laid to the profundity of 
 his thought: I began to see that perhaps, after 
 all, he was an artist rather than a philosopher, a 
 seer rather than a thinker, and tllat much of his 
 obscurity was due to the fact that he flew like a 
 monoplane from peak to peak, leaving us mere 
 thinkers toiling endlessly along the precipices, 
 amid the fogs and through the tortuous trails of 
 the valleys between. 
 
 Several years have passed since the experience 
 20
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 I have described, years wherein my acquaintance 
 with the work of the poet has broadened and 
 deepened and my enjoyment in his poetry grown 
 ever more vivid. I am less of a Browningite than 
 ever. I no longer sit awe-struck at his profound 
 commonplaces. I am not always certain of the 
 value of his theological doctrines. I am quite 
 convinced that, after being told by a generation 
 of profound and learned critics that he was a 
 philosopher, Mr. Browning came in his old age 
 to take himself at their valuation, and that he 
 tried with only a measure of success after "The 
 Ring and The Book" to be sl philosopher. At 
 any rate, for my own part I could cheerfully lose 
 almost everything he wrote after that date (unlike 
 Professor Saintsbury, I would except "Balaus- 
 tion") and not feel impoverished. Flashes there 
 are of the old fire, moments of vision, of the old 
 joy in life for its own sake, 
 
 The beauty and the wonder and the power, 
 
 The shapes of things, their colors, lights, and shades, 
 
 Changes, surprises. 
 
 But too often "there has passed away a glory from 
 the earth," and one is conscious only of the poet's 
 effort to recreate by main strength the old feeling. 
 Argument takes the place of vision, and one can 
 only regretfully acknowledge that the inspiration 
 of the prophet is like the wind that bloweth where 
 it listeth and is the free gift of God. In this we have 
 only one more instance of an old phenomenon. 
 
 21
 
 rONFKSSTOXS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Sluikosponre Jilone of bards — has not someone 
 said?— knew when to retire to wool-growing and 
 miss tlie age of wool-gat liering. 
 
 Perliaps a single illustration will make clear the 
 change which I have described in my attitude 
 toward the poet. At the height of my early en- 
 thusiasm, when I was lecturing before the women's 
 clubs, a lady came to me and with pathetic ear- 
 nestness asked me what was the meaning of the 
 poem entitled "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis." She 
 had been told by some one that it was a remarkable 
 poem with a very important lesson — which she 
 had been unable to discover — and she sought my 
 help. I read the poem with great though tfulness, 
 with intense concentration of spirit, desiring 
 earnestly to know what profound spiritual lesson 
 could be conveyed by this incident of the burial 
 and resurrection of the pedantic old book. It was 
 in vain. I had to confess to my friend that I 
 gave it up. I could see neither rhyme nor reason 
 in the incident or the telling of it. There was no 
 theological doctrine so far as I could understand, 
 no significant spiritual crisis. The whole thing 
 was apparently one of those aberrations of an 
 earnest soul when under the influence of some 
 demonic power he failed to take himself seriously, 
 and so wasted "a fire God gave for other ends." 
 
 Chesterton should have supplied the clue when 
 he wrote that the two poems entitled "Garden 
 Fancies" were intended to teach the abstruse 
 philosophical doctrine: the first that a woman may
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 be charming, the second, that a book may be a 
 bore; but the witty comment failed to pierce the 
 dense armor of my PhiHstinism, and the poem 
 remained a blank until that evening when my 
 eyes were opened. How vividly I saw it! — the 
 glorious summer morning, full of the sweetness of 
 June sunshine, of birds and flowers — wasted in the 
 soul-weariness of wading through a book in which 
 there was none of the milk of human-kindness, 
 none of the wine of life, nothing of the freshness 
 and interest of a vivid human sympathy, but only 
 barren learning thrice-removed from all contact 
 with the living world which God made. How 
 eagerly and sympathetically I followed the poet as, 
 the book disposed of in the plum-tree crevice, he 
 
 Went indoors, brought out a loaf, 
 Half a cheese and a bottle of Chablis, 
 
 Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf 
 Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais! 
 
 And his glee over the state of the book when a 
 month later he fished it solemnly up, and burying 
 it on his shelves amid seven other books more 
 useless than the first, whole-heartedly bade it 
 "Dry-rot at ease till the judgment day!" 
 
 I enjoyed the incident solely for its own sake, 
 without looking for any spiritual interpretation 
 or philosophical doctrine. It was a jolly little 
 glimpse of real life with which I entirely sym- 
 pathized. I too have been bored by books, but 
 have been debarred my revenge. The trick he 
 played on the pedantic old scholar was worth 
 
 23
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A HKOVVNING LOVER 
 
 doiiiir, in the first phicr, mid worth telling, in the 
 second, for I lie siieer fun of it, and because life is 
 too good und sweel a thing lo be wasted on such 
 vanity and vexation of spirit. 
 
 Then I reflected, to my own amazement, this is 
 a spiritual lesson! This is a philosophical teach- 
 ing; and it is hinted at in the poem itself by all 
 that wild riot of the joy of living that goes on in 
 the hollow of the plum-tree while the dry-as-dust 
 old scholar merely shivers and shrivels up in entire 
 failure to understand: 
 
 All that life and fun and rominng. 
 
 All that frisking and twisting and coupling, 
 While slowly our poor friend's leaves were swamping, 
 
 And clasps were cracking and covers suppling, 
 As if you had carried sour John Knox 
 
 To the ])layhouse at Paris, Vienna or Munich, 
 Fastened him into a front-row box 
 
 And danced oflf the ballet with trousers and tunic. 
 
 ^ 11 
 
 I began to apply my new-found method else- 
 where, and I found that everywhere the poet 
 looked upon life with the artist's frank pleasure in 
 its manifold beauty and interest; that any char- 
 acter which piqued his curiosity, any incident 
 which caught his attention, was worth transcribing 
 for its own sake, as a painter fills his sketchbook 
 with this flower and that clump of trees, this bank 
 of clouds and that sunset: 
 
 God's works — paint anyone, and count it crime 
 To let a truth slip. 
 
 24
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 To be sure, this in itself constitutes a philosophy 
 of life and is the key to much else in the poet's 
 teaching. Also, no doubt, every artist has a 
 philosophy, and consciously or unconsciously 
 employs his art in the interest of his creed. But 
 "I think this is the authentic sign and seal" of 
 artisthood that it "holds the mirror up to nature"; 
 in other words, that it enters sympathetically into 
 all the moods of the world about us and endeavors 
 to interpret them to us, so that we too may be made 
 to feel their beauty and significance and be 
 brought into harmony with them. The art of 
 poetry, of course, differs from music or the plastic 
 arts in that its effects are wrought through ideas, 
 and not through harmony of sound or visible forms, 
 and hence the intellectual content is greater. We 
 demand and expect a larger measure of intellectual 
 truth. But rhymed and rhythmic philosophy is 
 not poetry. We look first for vision, for intuitive, 
 emotional understanding of nature and life. 
 There doubtless is such a thing as didactic poetry, 
 but in the main the adjective and the noun destroy 
 each other. Even hymnology reveals the com- 
 mon emotional and idealistic element which under- 
 lies theological differences. The hymns which 
 live, which move the heart and inspire the spirit, 
 are neither Catholic nor Protestant, Liberal nor 
 Orthodox, Calvinist nor Arminian. They are the 
 expression of the emo Lions engendered by the con- 
 templation of truth rather than that of truth itself. 
 
 The "teaching" of true poetry, if this view be 
 25
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNINCi LOVER 
 
 correct, is, accordingly, sccoiuhiry and incidental. 
 It is im effect wrought by the poetic vision, first 
 in the mind of the poet himself and next in that 
 of the reader. We read Shakespeare and Goethe 
 antl Dante primarily for the sake of the variety 
 and richness of life as it appears in their pages; 
 that is to say, for the understanding and sympathy 
 and power with which they have portrayed it. It 
 is only after we have felt and appreciated that 
 power that we go on to ask what lessons the poet 
 himself drew from the things he described or what 
 he desired to teach us. Sometimes, to be sure, 
 the subject of the poem may be a mood, or an idea, 
 or the operation of an idea upon a man's feeling and 
 action. In such a case we seem to have come 
 directly upon the workings of the poet's mind 
 and to be put in possession of his thought about 
 life. But even here the truth in the poet's soul 
 must be truthfully embodied in the life he depicts, 
 and suggested by it. We are dealing with prose 
 rather than poetry if the idea which forms the 
 groundwork of the poem is not somehow univer- 
 salized through the poet's emotions rather than 
 his understanding, so that it is our own emotions 
 and intuitions that are appealed to first of all, and 
 the reason waits as handmaid upon the imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 That Browning sometimes philosophizes when 
 we want him to poetize, and that the tendency 
 grew upon him with age, I have already admitted. 
 The same thing was true of Wordsworth. Mat- 
 fee
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 thew Arnold declared that all of Wordsworth that 
 is worth reading was written during a brief period 
 of ten years in the middle of a long life. Only the 
 most abandoned Wordsworthian can find any 
 poetry in the wearisome prosing of the "Excur- 
 sion." It is not this that gives the poet of Rydal 
 Mount his place in our hearts; but his simple and 
 beautiful descriptions of nature and humble life, 
 his exquisite sensitiveness to beauty, his power to 
 discover "Joy in widest commonalty spread." 
 When he aspires to be a philosopher we part 
 company. If Browning is primarily a philosopher 
 rather than a poet, as so many of his critics and 
 admirers seek to prove, then his place in the lit- 
 erary history of the nineteenth century will be 
 determined by the soundness of his reasoning, the 
 value of his contribution to our interpretation of 
 life. But if, as I believe, he is primarily an 
 artist, then his place is to be fixed by the skill and 
 power with which he has made his appeal to our 
 heart and our imagination. His philosophical 
 teaching may be sound, or it may be subject to the 
 common aberrations which beset the abstract 
 thinker. But if his artistic intuitions are sure, we 
 may draw our own philosophical conclusions quite 
 undisturbed by any question regarding his. The 
 lasting beauty and significance of the "Ode on the 
 Intimations of Immortality" do not depend on 
 our acceptance of the doctrine of the preexistence 
 of the soul, but on the appeal which the poem 
 makes to our sense of beauty and the power with 
 
 n
 
 CONFESSIONS ()!• A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 which the i)oet has doi)ictc(l some of the phases of 
 our coninion huniaii experience. So the worth 
 and beauty of "Rabbi Ben Ezra" do not depend 
 on our behef in ininiorlality. but, rather, on the 
 power of the poem to challenge the will and in- 
 spire us to live greatly. 
 
 There seems to be a very conspiracy to refuse 
 Browning a place in the category of artists of this 
 sort and to force him into the ranks of the philoso- 
 phers and theologians. His admirers have of- 
 fended no less than his critics. On the one hand, 
 we have the never-ending procession of volumes, 
 large and small, upon his teachings. On the other 
 hand, we have the various pronouncements of the 
 critics, from the Edinburgh Review to Paul Elmer 
 More, regarding his limitations as a poet. Of his 
 teaching I shall have somewhat to say in another 
 place, but I have a few more pearls to cast to the 
 critics. 
 
 That there are in Browning's poetry occasional 
 passages of limpid clearness and great poetic 
 beauty is everywhere admitted. The dedication 
 of "The Ring and The Book," beginning, 
 
 O Lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird, 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire, 
 
 is pure vision. The love song in the first act of 
 "The Blot in the 'Scutcheon," the prologue to 
 "Two Poets of Croisic," the lines in "Paracelsus'* 
 beginning, "Spring wind, like a dancing psaltress," 
 and hundreds of other passages bear witness to the 
 
 «8
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 poet's power to sing directly to the heart. But 
 are these passages of sufficient number and extent, 
 amid the vast expanse of Browning's work, to 
 justify his hold on the world? Is not the real 
 interest in his writings rather to be found partly 
 in the pleasure of working out an intellectual 
 puzzle; partly in the psychological interest — his 
 marvelous skill in depicting what Mr. More has 
 called "suspended psychology," that peculiar 
 mental state in which a man at once acts and 
 stands apart from himself and judges his action; 
 but chiefly in the direct appeal of his philosophy 
 of life? 
 
 That there is an element of truth here must be 
 admitted. Browning's philosophy of hfe is a very 
 vigorous one and does appeal to very many earnest 
 and eager-hearted men and women. His skill in 
 portraying a complex state of mind and emotion 
 is unrivaled. That way of getting at things, of 
 telling a story almost by indirection as it were, 
 which is peculiarly Browningesque, has a fascina- 
 tion all its own. But is this all? And if it were 
 all, would it have no place in true art? Must we 
 reject the Flemish painters because they learned 
 art from the goldsmiths, and wrought their 
 backgrounds with loving care instead of cultivating 
 the delicate spiritual mood of Botticelli with his 
 dainty allegories, or imitating Fra Angelico, who 
 gives us "no more of flesh than shows soul"? If 
 Browning's poems embody a philosophy, does not 
 *'In Memoriam" as well? If Browning has his 
 
 29
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 own way of telling a story, must we reject it be- 
 cause it is not Byron's nor Keats', provided only 
 the story be interesting and the poet succeed in 
 "getting it across"? If the subject-matter which 
 he delights most to paint be the complex states of 
 human emotion in the presence of great spiritual 
 crises, shall we object to the skill with which he 
 does it and say, as Satan said to Adam, "It's 
 pretty, but is it Art?" 
 
 Mr. More, to whom I have already referred, 
 declares that the average reader of to-day is 
 "ready to accede to any legitimate demand upon 
 his analytical understanding, but responds slug- 
 gishly, if at all, to the readjustment of emotions 
 necessary for the sustained enjoyment of such a 
 poem as 'Paradise Lost.' " He also speaks of the 
 poetical mood as "the translation of the intellect 
 from the particular to the general point of view," 
 and asserts that it is the particularizing habit of 
 Browning, his method of concentrating attention 
 on the individual, and that too at a particular 
 moment or crisis, which forbids "that escape into 
 the larger and more general vision which marks the 
 transition from prose to poetry." 
 
 Admitting that the appeal of Browning's poetry 
 is not the same as that of "Paradise Lost," is the 
 remainder of this indictment true? Is the reader 
 of Browning held to the particular and prevented 
 from escaping into the larger and freer atmosphere 
 of poetry? Browning's characters are powerfully 
 individual, it is true, but is their appeal any the 
 
 30
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 less universal for that? Was Caliban the last to 
 create God in his own image? Was Bishop 
 Blougram the only modernist who has hesitated 
 to cut loose from tradition? Is Cleon alone in 
 refusing the message for which his heart hungers, 
 merely because he despises the medium through 
 which it comes? To be sure, this sort of poetry 
 is not the same as that found in the dedication of 
 "The Ring and The Book." Its emotional appeal 
 is less direct, more intellectual. None the less the 
 appeal is not to our analytical reason, but to our 
 imaginative sympathy. The method of the poet 
 is that of the artist, namely, the embodiment of the 
 general in the particular, the depicting of an indi- 
 vidual who through the very self-identity of his 
 individuality becomes a type. The appeal is, 
 first of all, to our feeling of identity with the type, 
 through which we recognize and interpret much 
 that was obscure in our own feelings and fate. 
 To say this is not poetry is to object to the "Ihad" 
 because it is not the lyrics of Sappho, or to reject 
 "Prometheus Unbound" because it is not the 
 "Skylark." 
 
 In point of fact, we seem to have come here upon 
 the old debate between the realist and the impres- 
 sionist in art. The latter maintains that since the 
 object of art is universal, the marks of the particu- 
 lar in its subject should be obhterated as much as 
 possible. Since the purpose of the artist is to 
 awaken an emotion in the beholder, it is necessary 
 only that those objects which have called forth 
 
 31
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A HKOWNING LOVER 
 
 tlu' sanio cmolioii in tlic l)ira.st of the artist be 
 sii^'iCoslod, ralluM- than (K'pictod. Starling with 
 tliis j)hilosoi)h\', the (.levehjpnient of Futurism is 
 entirely logical. The noted painting of the 
 "Nude Descending a Staircase," while assuredly 
 not suggestive in the old, crude, fleshly sense, 
 might perhaps — if we were instructed — he entirely 
 competent to suggest to the observer the emotions 
 with which the artist gazed upon the original. 
 What the artist has really undertaken to do is to 
 paint, not the object, but the emotion. 
 
 The realist, on the other hand, bases his art on 
 the conviction that it is only by being entirely and 
 particularly individual that anything in nature 
 becomes a type of the general. That man is the 
 most truly representative of humankind whose 
 personality is most developed, who is most dis- 
 tinctively and thoroughly individual. It is only 
 because Abraham's faith was so unique in its 
 vividness and entire self-surrender that Abraham 
 becomes the type and father of the faithful. It 
 is only because Hamlet's problem is so concrete 
 and definite that his vacillation and self-distrust 
 become a mirror of human weakness and slack- 
 ness of purpose. It is just the power to see the 
 all in little, "from a dewdrop to educe the world," 
 that makes the artist. 
 
 The truth which underlies impressionism seems 
 to be simply this, that art is not photography, 
 mere accuracy of reproduction. Its task is to 
 bring out what is essential; to reproduce a mood, 
 
 32
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 an emotion, a spiritual meaning, which the ob- 
 server might overlook, but which is plain to the 
 soul of the artist. Browning himself has ex- 
 pressed the principle most clearly through the 
 mouth of Lippo, and with a passion which indi- 
 cates the significance of the words to his own 
 soul: 
 
 "For don't you mark? we're made so that we love 
 
 First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
 
 Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; 
 
 And so they are better, painted — better to us, 
 
 Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; 
 
 God uses us to help each other so. 
 
 Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now. 
 
 Your cullion's hanging face.? A bit of chalk. 
 
 And trust me that you should, though ! How much 
 
 more 
 If I drew higher things with the same truth! 
 That were to take the Prior's pulpit-place. 
 Interpret God to all of you!" 
 
 The pathway to this goal lies between the Scylla 
 of a barren realism, on the one hand, which sinks 
 all ideal significance in mere accuracy of detail; and 
 the Charybdis of a bodiless emotionalism, on the 
 other, seeking to portray an abstract significance 
 unrelated to anything which the eye hath seen or 
 the ear heard. In the first case we have gained 
 nothing, since the artist has shown us nothing 
 which the dullest might not see for himself. In 
 the second case one is reminded of that scholastic 
 philosopher of the "nominalist" school who asked 
 his pupils to bring him fruit: they brought pears 
 and apples, when the master explained that these 
 
 33
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A B1U)WNING LOVER 
 
 were fruits— whixX he desirocl was fruit-iii-generiil. 
 A Cubist ju'tist iiiighl have supplied him! 
 
 I luive inadvortenlly wandered a good way into 
 tlie field of artistic criticism, wherein no doubt I 
 have displayed a lamentable ignorance — a bufTalo 
 in the temple! What I have been trying to do in 
 all this talk of matters too high for me is to explain 
 what I mean by insisting that Browning is an 
 artist first and a thinker, a philosopher, afterward. 
 I am trying, with an obscurity perchance more 
 involved than the poet's own, to say, first, that 
 Browning seems to me to be interested mainly in 
 making us see what he has seen in the w^orld rather 
 than in persuading us to think about it as he 
 thinks — a thing which I take to be the true aim of 
 all art and of poetry not least; and, second, that 
 he seems to me to have been not altogether unsuc- 
 cessful in this aim. 
 
 m 
 
 Of course it is required, first of all, in an artist 
 that his work be found beautiful. It is likewise 
 needful that it hold somewhat of human interest. 
 The defenders of "Art for Art's sake" have 
 poured their scorn on the Philistinism which wants 
 a picture to "tell a story" and can enjoy only 
 program music. But even the Fifth Symphony 
 gains significance through the idea of "Fate 
 knocking at the door," and Raphael's Madonnas 
 would lose in power if not in loveliness did the 
 beholder know nothing of the gospel story. 
 
 34
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 Inquiry concerning the artist's method, his skill 
 in the mastery of his materials, comes last of all. 
 
 Of the human interest in Browning's poetry 
 volumes have been, might still be written. As he 
 told us in "Sordello," humanity was his first love; 
 we need no telling that it was his last. He ob- 
 served men and women as Burns observed the 
 daisy or Wordsworth the small celandine. He 
 thrilled with the interest of human happenings as 
 his fellowpoet's 
 
 . . . heart with pleasure fills 
 And dances with the daffodils. 
 
 Wordsworth finds his humble neighbors of the 
 Lake district worth observing, their simple doings 
 worth telling, but he has small interest in human- 
 ity at large. Like his own Lucy, he "dwelt among 
 untrodden ways," and heard only as an undertone 
 welling up through the harmonies of nature, 
 
 The still, sad music of humanity, 
 Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
 To chasten and subdue. 
 
 It was his lack of faith in humanity, his belief that 
 "The world is too much with us," which trans- 
 formed the early enthusiasm inspired by the 
 French Revolution into the disillusionment of the 
 settled Tory, and gave rise to Browning's "The 
 Lost Leader." 
 
 Tennyson likewise dwelt somewhat apart from 
 humankind. He fled from the celebrity-hunters 
 who haunted the Isle of Wight, and could with 
 
 35
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A HllOWNING LOVER 
 
 (liHiciilly be lured to visit Ia)iu1oii. The human 
 interest in Tennyson, aceordingly, is more ab- 
 straet. It is with humanity at hirge that he 
 is eoneerned, its problems of faith, its social 
 ideals, its general welfare. Though he loves 
 to tell a simple tale, though occasional mono- 
 logues like "The Northern Farmer" show that 
 he could conceive a striking individual tv^pe, yet, 
 in the main, his mind moves in the more ab- 
 stract realm. Of the generation that produced 
 Kingsley and ^Morris and Carlyle and Ruskin, he 
 is only half conscious that there is a social problem. 
 He could write "Locksley Hall" and the opening 
 stanzas of "Maud" and yet be incapable of sym- 
 pathizing with the spirit of bitter social revolt, the 
 "red fool-fury of the Seine." His characteriza- 
 tions tend to become bloodless abstractions of 
 ethical principles, as in the "Idylls." It is when 
 he depicts a simple human emotion, clothing it in 
 all its power of pathos or of passion, that he rises 
 to his greatest height. 
 
 Browning, on the other hand, is a dweller in 
 cities, a lover of the thronged streets and crowded 
 ways. He finds his field in the individual human 
 soul, particularly in moments of supreme moral 
 struggle, in the great spiritual crises whence a man 
 emerges saved or lost. He is even less conscious 
 than Tennyson of the social movements of the 
 nineteenth century, though his social sympathies 
 are sound. For him poverty and struggle are not 
 so much social facts as the materials out of which 
 
 36
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 the individual is to construct his life. The signifi- 
 cance of this individual note for the interpretation 
 of life, even in the presence of social problems, is 
 a matter for later consideration. It is of moment 
 now to note that in breadth of human interest and 
 in power to delineate character Browning is to be 
 compared and contrasted with the great master- 
 singers of modern literature, with Goethe and 
 Shakespeare and Dante, rather than with his 
 contemporaries . 
 
 It is true that with them we stand in the presence 
 of universal genius. They are everywhere master 
 of their materials. Browning's genius has no such 
 range. A Pilgrim through Hell to Paradise, 
 whose experience should embody the whole 
 spiritual history of the human soul; a Doctor 
 Faustus who should gather up into himself the 
 experiences of universal humanity, lie entirely 
 beyond his scope. To behold all the world a 
 stage and all the men and women merely players; 
 and to people that stage with a host of characters, 
 each bearing his own distinct individuality and 
 playing his own part amid the shifting scenes of this 
 complex drama of life, is equally beyond his power. 
 None the less Browning's universal sympathy 
 makes him next of kin, while in his own chosen 
 field of the individual soul, of the hidden drama 
 whose action takes place within a man's own heart, 
 he stands without a peer. It is his gift to interpret 
 the spiritual crises of life, to individualize them 
 as the experience of distinct and concrete person- 
 
 37
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 alities; to cause every man to lay hare his heart 
 before us, revealing all the manifold complexity 
 of his spiritual conflicts and moral judgments, 
 while at the same time making clear the essential 
 character of that ultimate act in which these issue 
 and find their unification. As has repeatedly been 
 said, he is essentially a dramatist; but his interest 
 is less in the conflict of wills, or of the will with 
 fate, which constitutes the essence of objective 
 drama, than in the inner and subjective conflicts 
 within a man's own will; in which the impulses and 
 desires, the ideals and passions, the higher and 
 lower elements of his own nature 
 
 . . . rap and knock and enter in our soul, 
 Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, 
 
 on the stage of the soul itself. 
 
 It must never be forgotten, however, that in 
 these mighty dramas of human passion, from the 
 poems of character which make up not only the 
 "Men and Women" but also by far the greater 
 number of the "Idylls" and "Romances" and 
 "Lyrics" to the poet's most ambitious studies in 
 "Paracelsus" and "Sordello" and "The Ring and 
 The Book," it is the artist who speaks, not prima- 
 rily the moralist or the philosopher. This is as 
 true of "Blougram" or "Lippo" as of "A Face" or 
 "Love Among the Ruins." The jealous girl in 
 "In a Laboratory," the dying Bishop of "St. 
 Praxed's," the heartless duke in "My Last 
 Duchess," are simply painted for us without a 
 
 38
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 word of comment. We feel, indeed, that in the 
 moment of creation the poet felt an artistic sym- 
 pathy with these creatures of his genius. They 
 are human beings, the subjects of human expe- 
 rience. They are of like passions as we are, and 
 just the revelation of the ways in which the human 
 soul reacts in certain moods and under certain 
 conditions is itself a suflScient contribution to our 
 knowledge of life. Any moralizings which the 
 occasion requires we may supply for ourselves, the 
 poet will not do it for us. At the same time we 
 are not left without the material for that moral 
 judgment. In the case of the jealous girl seeking 
 a poison with which to put her rival out of the way, 
 the glimpses that are given us of the atmosphere 
 of heartless coquetry with which she was sur- 
 rounded and the scornful contempt she has suffered 
 bid us judge her not too harshly or unsympatheti- 
 cally, while at the same time we are left under no 
 illusion as to the character of her mad passion of 
 hate. In "My Last Duchess" the icy refinement, 
 the cold culture, the heartless pride and inhuman- 
 ity of the duke are thrown into high relief by the 
 glimpse he himself gives us of the sweet and simple- 
 hearted girl whose too-ready smile and gentle 
 courtesy were her undoing. 
 
 IV 
 
 And still I have not reached my goal; I have 
 not proved to the skeptical that this is poetry. It 
 may be art, it may be dramatic, it is undoubtedly 
 
 39
 
 CONFKSSIONS OF A BHOWNINCi LOVER 
 
 iiilorostiii^' and skilU'iiIly done, hut it nuiy likewise 
 be more nearly related lo the essay or the novel 
 thiin to poetry. Has it the essential beauty and 
 passion, the imaginative power appealing directly 
 to the emotions, whieh we associate with the idea 
 of poetry? I can speak only for myself. I find 
 such power not only in the lyric j^assages I have 
 already referred to, but in whole cantos of "The 
 Ring and The Book," to say nothing of such in- 
 terpretations of dee]) human experience as "An- 
 drea" and "Karshish" and "Abt Vogler," of the 
 lofty reaches of "The Last Ride Together" or of 
 "Love in a Life" and "Life in a Love." 
 
 Matthew Arnold has taught us that no art is 
 truly great, no matter how skillfully wrought, 
 unless its subject-matter be worthy. We do not 
 always sufficiently consider that the beauty of 
 any work of art may inhere chiefly in the subject- 
 matter rather than in the execution. It must, of 
 course, be sufficiently embodied. No beauty of 
 subject can make up for crudeness of drawing and 
 color, for slovenliness or lack of skill in the treat- 
 ment. The subject is the same in all the Madon- 
 nas, whether that rigid and wooden work in Santa 
 Maria Novello, attributed to Cimabue, or the 
 smooth and saccharine ])ictures of Carlo Dolci; 
 the prettily thoughtful though exquisitely wrought 
 paintings of Andrea, or the soul-moving master- 
 pieces of Raphael. The essential difference be- 
 tween the artists is in the depth of their insight 
 and the power of their treatment. On the other 
 
 40
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 hand, no skill of craftsmanship can atone for lack 
 
 of beauty or worth in the subject-matter. Even 
 
 Michelangelo could carve a Leda which is not 
 
 called to the attention of lady visitors to the Pitti 
 
 gallery, and some of Rubens's abominations are 
 
 familiar to everyone. With all this in mind, it 
 
 remains true that one artist impresses us most 
 
 with the richness of beauty and significance in his 
 
 conception, another with his mastery of his craft. 
 
 'It is this distinction which Browning himself 
 
 embodied in his contrast between Raphael and 
 
 Andrea : 
 
 I can fancy how he did it all, 
 
 Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see. 
 
 Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him, 
 
 Above and through his art — for it gives way; 
 
 That arm is wrongly put — and there again — 
 
 A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, 
 
 Its body, so to speak: its soul is right, 
 
 He means right — that, a child may understand. 
 
 Still, what an arm! and I could alter it: 
 
 But all the play, the insight and the stretch — 
 
 Out of me, out of me ! 
 
 This distinction between artists is perhaps even 
 more significant in poetry than in painting. Poe, 
 for example, for all his genuine feeling for beauty 
 and his unrivaled dexterity in the manipulation 
 of words, has never seriously impressed mankind 
 as a great poet, because of a certain shallowness of 
 sentiment and morbidness of temper which make 
 themselves felt in his finest flights. Burns, or 
 even James Whitcomb Riley at his best — is it 
 sacrilege to bracket them together .^^ — without a 
 
 41
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 tithe of Foe's actual skill, will nevertheless outlive 
 liiin ill the hearts of men by reason of the greater 
 soundness of their humanity, the simple appeal of 
 their message. 
 
 r The beauty of Browning's poetry is to be found 
 in the substance rather than the form, the soul 
 
 [rather than the body, of his work. By substance 
 I mean not subject-matter alone, but the con- 
 ceptions, tlie point of view, the imagery, the 
 atmosphere, which together sometimes so thrill 
 the reader with their wealth of beauty that he 
 forgets entirely the medium through whicli the 
 impression is made. 
 
 The other kind of poetry has perhaps a wider 
 appeal. If there are comparatively few even 
 among cultivated readers who find their greatest 
 enjoyment in the epic, in Milton or Dante, there 
 are very many to whom lyric poetry affords an 
 abiding joy. The matchless grace of form in 
 "Midsummernight's Dream" charms us without 
 regard to the substance of the verse. Or, to come 
 to the nineteenth century, such poetry as Shelley's 
 "Cloud" certainly lives in its own right. Could 
 anything exceed the limpid music of the lines, 
 
 That orbed maiden with white fire laden 
 
 Whom mortals call the moon, 
 Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor. 
 
 By the midnight breezes strewn. 
 And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, 
 
 \Miich only the angels hear. 
 May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof 
 
 The stars peep behind her and peer — 
 
 4i2
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 can we not hear the soundless pattering of fairy 
 feet whose least fall breaks the gauze-web of the 
 summer mist? The fancy is quaint and suggestive, 
 and the imagery lovely; but both alike would fail 
 to move us so deeply did the verse not catch the 
 ear and carry the imagination fairly to elf-land by 
 its delicate rhythm. Indeed, Professor Trent 
 goes so far as to say that the music is everywhere 
 the chief thing in Shelley. If it be so, God be 
 praised for its loveliness, which sings many a 
 faery fancy into our hearts to lighten the dreari- 
 ness of a work-worn world. 
 
 Kipling has declared that there are only five 
 lines amid all the boundless vast of English verse 
 which are pure vision — the rest is merely poetry. 
 The first are from "Kubla Khan": 
 
 A savage place, as holy and enchanted 
 
 As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
 
 By woman wailing for her demon lover 
 
 — lines whose drugged and languorous sweetness 
 affects the senses like incense from an Oriental 
 temple. The other two are from Keats: 
 
 Charmed magic casements, opening on the form 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, 
 
 where the words toll like a silver bell. I am con- 
 tent with Kipling's verdict. Surely, music and 
 magic were never so wedded in sound and sense. 
 It is impossible to say that the effect is wrought 
 only through the beauty of the lines; the weird 
 
 43
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 suggest ivenoss of tlie iiniigory charms us as well. 
 Such beauty is its owu excuse for being. One 
 does not ask in such a case what the poem means, 
 what spiritual lesson it conveys; one only catches 
 one's breath and lifts up one's heart. Keats was 
 right : 
 
 Beauty is truth, truth beauty: 
 
 That is all ye know or need to know. 
 
 If you get simple heauly nnd nauj^ht else. 
 
 You get about the best Ihin^f God invents; 
 
 That's somewhat, and you'll lind the soul you've missed 
 
 Within yourself when you return him thanks. 
 
 ("Fra Lippo Lippi.") 
 
 It is not this sort of beauty we find in Brown- 
 ing's poetry. The beauty of "My Star," of the 
 tribute to Shelley in "Memorabilia," the exquisite 
 tenderness of "One Word More," the sense of 
 atmosphere, of evening restfulness in "Love 
 Among the Ruins," find adequate expression in the 
 verse, but the reader is conscious chiefly of the 
 beauty of thought and feeling, rather than of the 
 form. It is true that in many single passages, 
 both in the poems just referred to and in many 
 others, the vision of the poet rises to the utmost 
 height, and the music of the verse matches the 
 beauty of the thought conveyed; but that other 
 beauty, of conception and imagery, of sympathy 
 and passion, is everywhere. Whole pages of 
 "Paracelsus" and "Sordello" are fairly weighed 
 down with excess of beauty. In "Saul" it rises 
 to very ecstasy, as where the young singer awakes 
 
 44
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 In the gray dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves 
 The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, 
 
 and Kidron retrieves 
 Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. 
 
 And again in the passage which tells how the 
 sympathetic passion awakened in nature by the 
 revelation of Divine Love made to the king 
 through the heart of the boy was slowly quelled : 
 
 Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day's tender 
 
 birth; 
 In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the 
 
 hills; 
 In the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sudden 
 
 wind-thrills; 
 
 The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by 
 
 the flowers; 
 The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved 
 
 the vine-bowers: 
 And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent 
 
 and low. 
 With their obstinate, all but hushed voices, 
 
 "E'en so, it is so"! 
 
 My own conviction is that if all the theological 
 and philosophical tours de force about which the 
 discussions of the critics and the women's clubs 
 have raged for fifty years were eliminated, there 
 would still remain of Browning's poems a volume 
 of verse which for sheer beauty and intrinsic ar- 
 tistic power — the soul of beauty, not its flesh — 
 would be suflScient to assure him high rank and 
 an abiding place among English poets. If it were 
 all collected in a single volume, it is a question if 
 
 45
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 any similar colloction from the poetry of Words- 
 wort li or Tennyson would be found to contain so 
 mueh of warm human emotion or rich poetic 
 imagery, of genuine and compelling beauty of 
 thought and feeling. 
 
 Other considerations than that of simple beauty, 
 of course, come into play in much of Browning's 
 work which has abiding interest for the reader. 
 The poems that deal with passion and jealousy 
 and envy and hatred, which embody such char- 
 acters as the monk of the "Spanish Cloister," or 
 the husband of "A Forgiveness," or Count Guido 
 Franceschini, are poetry not by virtue of artistic 
 beauty but of emotional intensity and power. 
 Even the grotesqueries — "Holy Cross Day," 
 "Sludge," "Caliban," "Master Hugues," and 
 others — have an abiding worth. To say they are 
 not poetry is merely to draw an arbitrary line 
 through all literature. They are wrought from 
 the artist's point of view; they are skillfully done 
 withal; and they grip the imagination and convey 
 truth by direct emotional and artistic appeal 
 rather than by argumentation. If that be prose, 
 make the most of it ! It may be that some of them 
 are comparable to the gargoyles of Notre Dame 
 or the Imp of Lincoln Cathedral rather than to the 
 Pieta or the Moses of Michelangelo, but some of 
 us would rather not lose even those lighter pro- 
 ducts of a sculptor's chisel. 
 
 On the other hand, let us cheerfully admit 
 defects. Like his own Raphael, the poet reaches 
 
 46
 
 OF THE POET AS ARTIST 
 
 above and through his art. There are crude 
 and uncouth rhymes, commonplace and unpoetic 
 words and phrases: 
 
 Fee, faw, fum, bubble and squeak, 
 Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week. 
 
 What porridge had John Keats? 
 
 Irks care the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw- 
 crammed beast? 
 
 Examples might be multiplied. It should be said, 
 indeed, Chesterton has vigorously said, that fre- 
 quently the use of such apparent gaucheries is 
 part of the poet's method of getting the effects 
 at which he aims, as Strauss and Debussy and 
 Schoenberg employ dissonances on the road to 
 harmony which ought to make Bach and Beetho- 
 ven turn in their graves. So far as I am con- 
 cerned, however, I am no adiocatus diaboli, I hold 
 no brief for these things: let them be cast as 
 rubbish to the void. And with them go much 
 involved construction, tedious, overloaded sen- 
 tences, much display of learning, to say nothing of 
 all the prosy philosophizing already discarded. 
 Had Browning possessed the patience or skill or 
 artistic sensitiveness to ehminate these defects, 
 his poetry would have gained in power. But 
 what would one have? Homer nods. Shake- 
 speare is ribald. Wordsworth descends to worse 
 than commonplace prose. Tennyson often is 
 "faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null." 
 
 47
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING I.OVER 
 
 So Raphiiers cartoons are not always impressive. 
 Angelo's "Day," on the Medici lonib, twists his 
 head in defiance of anatomy. Rodin, as well as 
 the great Florentine, has left much half-finished 
 marble. 
 
 Browning's songs seldom sing themselves. His 
 lines do not readily fasten themselves in the 
 memory. His ear is deficient in rhythm — we are 
 told his own physical pulse was imperceptible. 
 All tliis is merely to admit that the poet is human, 
 and works, like other artists, sometimes by main 
 strength. But it is to be said that when he is 
 swept along on the full tide of his genius these 
 defects disappear; and the verse, in "Saul" and 
 "Cleon" and "Abt Vogler" and many another 
 passage of matchless beauty and power, marches 
 with a triumphant swing which bears the reader 
 with it oblivious of the means whereby the will of 
 the poet is wrought upon his soul. 
 
 It is as an artist, therefore, that I find my en- 
 joyment in the poet; an artist with a serious pur- 
 pose withal, whose message is embedded in his 
 art. The message itself, as Kipling says, is 
 another story. 
 
 48
 
 CHAPTER II 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 The statement of my change of heart with 
 regard to Browning, when I came to look upon 
 him as first of all an artist and only secondarily a 
 philosopher, has led me a good ways afield into 
 a discussion of the principles of art. What I have 
 sought to do is to justify my own enthusiasm for 
 Browning's poetry as poetry; for its tropical 
 wealth and profusion of beauty, for its unrivaled 
 human interest, for the spiritual inspiration 
 afforded by its outlook upon life. It remains to 
 tell something of the lessons I have learned 
 from it. 
 
 But at the risk of talking more about myself and 
 my notions than about the poet who is the osten- 
 sible occasion of these outpourings I cannot tor- 
 bear to dwell a little further on the spirit and 
 temper of which I have been speaking — on the 
 essential worth of the artistic as distinguished 
 from the philosophic viewpoint. I might, no 
 doubt, have learned it from Shakespeare or 
 Keats. But, mirabile dictu, I for one learned it 
 from the very poet who is universally supposed 
 to have subordinated the emotional to the intel- 
 lectual, to have been a thinker rather than a 
 poet, to have aimed first of all at proclaiming a 
 
 49
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 message rather tlian at awakening the sense of 
 beaiily. 
 
 I make haste to concede to those who have been 
 bred in the tradition, that Browning has a message, 
 a significant one, in wliich he himself was in- 
 tensely interested, and to which I hope eventually 
 to get round. But the notion that he chose the 
 artistic way to declare his truth, and that he must 
 be approached in a spirit not essentially other 
 than that in which we read Shakespeare or look 
 at Raphael's Madonnas, has been received with 
 such astonished incredulity when I have ven- 
 tured to broach it among the devotees of culture 
 that I am constrained to give a further reason for 
 the faith that is in me. The first lesson I, at any 
 rate, have learned from Browning is the lesson of 
 sitting at the feet of an artist; learning to see 
 through his eyes, to catch his vision, to adopt his 
 point of view, to let myself go wuth him until he 
 has wrought his will upon me, careless what comes 
 of it; confident that if he has a message for the 
 world this is the only way to get it. 
 
 I 
 
 The artistic spirit has always been distrusted 
 by the moralists, from Plato to Tolstoy. Nor is 
 the reason far to seek. To begin with, the 
 artists themselves have in the main been a sorry 
 lot, unconventional, not to say Bohemian, in their 
 mode of life; creatures of impulse and emotion 
 rather than of reason and judgment; inclined to 
 
 50
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 a sad lack of reverence for bourgeois standards of 
 taste and morals. That Saul, the son of a highly 
 respectable middle-class father of considerable 
 means, should be found among the prophets has 
 always been considered rather a disgrace. 
 
 Then, too, the ideas advanced by the artist 
 have been lacking in that practical quality which 
 appeals to the essentially Philistine public. He 
 has been prone to the dilettante attitude toward 
 life, or when he inclined to take himself seriously 
 his pronouncements have been too visionary and 
 idealistic to be worthy of consideration by serious 
 men. Like Shelley, he is apt to be a "beautiful 
 and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his lu- 
 minous wings in vain." 
 
 Finally, the things in which the artist is inter- 
 ested, which are the very breath of life to him, are 
 of the sort which butter no parsnips. To sing a 
 snatch, to paint a flower, to carve a Venus, while 
 all around are men and women starving for 
 bread, while enemies threaten the fatherland, while 
 sinners are dying in their sins, is, like Nero, to 
 fiddle while Rome is burning. 
 
 One is tempted at this point to turn aside to see 
 if a good word might not be said for Nero. I 
 sometimes wonder that Browning himself did not 
 take it up — he who was ever prone to discover 
 what those whom all men despised might find in 
 their hearts to say for themselves. We may yet 
 expect Chesterton to convince us that the em- 
 peror was a grossly maligned and much misunder- 
 
 51
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 stood individual, or G. B. S. to turn our ideas 
 topsy-turvy with a play on the i)hilosophic soul 
 who when infinite disaster overwhelmed the 
 Eternal City, and nothing could be done to stay 
 her fate, sought consolation in music, or who, rapt 
 to ecstatic heights by the very breadth and sweep 
 of the tragedy, endeavored to convey to others 
 in deathless song the emotions through which the 
 soul-cleansing significance of the event trans- 
 formed life itself for the singer. I do not myself 
 insist on this point of view. Nero was doubtless 
 a half-mad degenerate, who found an idiotic 
 enjoyment in the spectacle and whose paranoiac 
 egoism imagined none other could so fitly enshrine 
 the epic tragedy in verse. But he is not for that 
 reason the fitter type of those who find pleasure 
 and meaning in the beauty and joy of the world. 
 
 Possibly Nero is too savage to stand as the type 
 of the artistic temperament in the thought of the 
 average moralist, but none the less there is a pop- 
 ular feeling that the artistic spirit is lacking in 
 moral earnestness, that it fails to comprehend the 
 tremendous seriousness of life. It is regarded as 
 essentially pagan rather than Christian. It ac- 
 cepts the world as it is instead of striving to 
 redeem and reform it. Especially does this seem 
 to be true of mere virtuosity. Creative art may 
 be granted some place in the scheme of things, 
 but the art which simply reproduces or expresses 
 the thought of another seems trivial, a waste 
 of ability and energy which, if applied to ends 
 
 52
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 worth while, might be of inestimable benefit to 
 mankind. I confess to this feeling in the presence 
 of a crack billiardist or world-famous ballet 
 dancer, and even to be the greatest violinist or 
 pianist in the world seems a trifling thing com- 
 pared with the creative genius of a Beethoven. 
 
 But may we not recognize an element of truth 
 here without thereby invalidating the right of the 
 artist or his true place in the life of the world? 
 The temptation, the besetting sin of art is the 
 dilettante spirit, as pharisaism is that of the 
 moralist. We may applaud the zeal which drove 
 the traders from the temple, and no less the moral 
 earnestness which rebukes the sentimental sesthet- 
 icism of Oscar Wilde or the license of the Boul' 
 Mich'; but all this has nothing to do with the 
 deeper question of the meaning of beauty or the 
 prophetic function of those who open our eyes that 
 we may see. 
 
 Plato's attitude toward the artist was based on 
 other grounds. The poets were to be excluded 
 from the Republic only in so far as they were bad 
 theologians and did not tell the truth. On the 
 other hand, painters and sculptors must be ac- 
 counted mere copyists of nature, who is herself 
 an indifferent copyist of the divine Idea. Art, 
 therefore, stood twice-removed from essential 
 truth, and could not be seriously regarded by the 
 philosopher. For this reason the artists, though 
 they bring somewhat of grace and joy into life, and 
 therefore must be accorded some place, were to 
 
 53
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 be ranked next above the laborers Jind artisans, the 
 Iiowors of wood and the drawers of water; while 
 the philosophers, those who seek truth, and truth 
 alone, as the chief good, were to be obeyed as the 
 natural guardians of the state. 
 
 Tolstoy's indictment of art is that it has become 
 a cult, and has removed itself from the sphere of 
 common life. The original contract between the 
 laborer and the artist was that the former would 
 bear the brunt and furnish the means of subsistence 
 in return for the inspiration, the brightening of 
 life, and the lightening of toil which the latter 
 should afford through his art. But when the 
 cultivation of art elevated the taste of the artist 
 above that of the artisan, and so established an 
 impassable gulf between the cultivated soul and 
 the horny-handed son of toil, the contract was 
 broken. Art must, therefore, be disciplined and 
 humbled until it shall once more serve the common 
 life, or submit to be driven forth from the world 
 of men. 
 
 The Puritan temper was still more severe. The 
 Puritan saw in beauty a snare of the soul, a device 
 of the Evil One to lure men from the thorny way 
 of spiritual culture to tread the primrose path of 
 dalliance. Augustine records with penitent shame 
 the day when the beauty of the Italian landscape 
 so entranced his sight that for an hour he forgot 
 the claims of the spirit and neglected to meditate 
 on the duty he owed to God. The soldiers of 
 Cromwell who defaced the abbeys and cathedrals 
 
 54
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 of England, the rugged moralists who saw in 
 statues only graven images in defiance of the sec- 
 ond commandment, and who distrusted everything 
 which added grace and sweetness to human life 
 lest the souls of men should nestle in this world nor 
 seek their rightful home above, were the spiritual 
 descendants of Augustine. 
 
 Yet herein is a marvelous thing, that the men 
 who have seen most deeply into the essential 
 meaning and purpose of life and have added the 
 largest treasure to the spiritual riches of the race 
 have been artists at heart — of whom Plato himself 
 is not least. His philosophy is embedded in 
 artistic forms, and it is, in point of fact, his artist's 
 intuition more than his logical reason which has 
 led him most deeply into the truth. The Hebrew 
 prophets were poets, and it is precisely when the 
 prophetic fire burned most intensely and their 
 visions of God attained the loftiest heights that 
 their art is most perfect. If the plastic arts of 
 Greece or the painting of the High Renaissance 
 were not always accompanied by the greatest 
 spiritual insight, or failed to minister to the deep- 
 est spiritual needs, it was not because of any in- 
 herent antagonism between truth and beauty, 
 but simply because life comes to us only in frag- 
 mentary glimpses, and mankind forever advances 
 a step at a time, first one foot and then the 
 other. 
 
 It was Plato himself who declared the essential 
 truth of the matter, namely, that the beautiful is 
 
 55
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWN INCJ LONER 
 
 at hotloin one with the g(X)(l uiul the true— that 
 all three are ahke expressions of the Perfection 
 whicli underlies all finite existence and which men 
 call God. Scientist, moralist, artist, all alike are 
 searchers after God, ministers of his divine per- 
 fections, nor can any one of them dispense with 
 the others. The scientist desires to know facts, 
 the philosopher to discover their underlying 
 principles; both find their results inextricably 
 entangled with ethical implications. They must 
 either become moralists or turn their work over to 
 the moralist to be completed, to be used, indeed, 
 for the practical and spiritual instruction of man- 
 kind. Facts and principles run up into laws, and 
 laws at bottom are an ethical matter, having their 
 root not in the barren necessities of a purposeless 
 mechanism, but in the self-consistency of an eternal 
 Will. To stop short of this is to deny any signifi- 
 cance whatever to reality and to put an end to the 
 possibility not only of ethics but of science. The 
 attitude of the average scientist at this point is 
 comparable to the performance of that celebrated 
 hero of popular song who, perched on a lofty 
 limb, sawed between himself and the tree. 
 
 But this is not the end of the matter. These 
 laws, this underlying Will, are forever finding ex- 
 pression in forms which hint at the perfection of the 
 ideal and so awaken in men the sense of beauty. It 
 is the function of beauty to bear witness to the 
 ideal amid the imperfections of reality and the 
 ignorance and blindness of the human soul. 
 
 56
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 Truth makes its appeal to the reason, ethical 
 principles to the obedient will; beauty appeals to 
 the emotions. It awakens love, and so brings 
 about the identification of man with the world 
 about him, with the divine it half -reveals and half- 
 conceals. The cave man, ignorant and super- 
 stitious, surrounded by a hostile nature whose 
 mysteries filled him with awe and fear, what time 
 he scratched the figures of beasts of the chase upon 
 scraps of reindeer bone or chiseled intricate pat- 
 terns of line on the stones which marked the 
 burying place of his dead, was lifted by these 
 fragmentary glimpses of beauty into real com- 
 munion with nature, and given a unity of spirit 
 and a mastery of life which must wait many cen- 
 turies to find expression in forms of knowledge or 
 of ethical judgment. 
 
 If this be true, then beauty, so far from being a 
 mere ornamental addition to life, is a fundamental 
 necessity, an integral part of life itself. By it 
 primitive man, chipping his spearheads into sym- 
 metry and fashioning ornaments of schist or bone, 
 bore witness to his spiritual nature; and by it he, 
 being dead, yet speaketh. It is the same spiritual 
 impulse, developed and trained by centuries of 
 struggle, which builds noble cathedrals for worship 
 and clothes its loftiest visions of truth in forms of 
 undying loveliness. 
 
 The function of beauty is twofold. It stands 
 in its own right, bringing brightness and joy into 
 life, relieving the heart weighed down by the 
 
 57
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 dullness aiul gray monotony of every tlay; soften- 
 ing our j)routi, iieree, selfish spirits by the tender 
 emotions it awakens; and it is also the minister of 
 truth. What Augustine and the Puritans failed 
 to see was that the soul of man requires nurture no 
 less than discipline; that the humanizing influence 
 of beauty may soften the heart and prepare the 
 soil for the good seed of spiritual truth which else 
 had fallen on stony ground. They forgot the 
 Hebrew teaching that Jehovah is to be worshiped 
 in the holiness of beauty no less than in the beauty 
 of holiness. A sound spiritual instinct lay behind 
 the development of Gothic architecture and made 
 the leaders of the church the chief patrons of the 
 art of Raphael and Michelangelo. 
 
 Plato and Tolstoy overlooked the function of 
 beauty as the witness of truth. Art is not, as 
 Plato imagined, the imitator of nature, the mere 
 copy of a copy. Art is truer than nature. It 
 depicts the deeper reality after which nature 
 strives. It is the minister of spiritual liberty, 
 setting men free from the limitations of the actual, 
 and suggesting the ideal which, nowhere, lies yet 
 everywhere in the w^orld. It bears with it inti- 
 mations of a wholeness and perfection infinitely 
 removed from the fragmentariness of our little 
 experience. The perception of beauty opens the 
 mind to suggestions which the dull reason has 
 failed to heed. Even if the cultivation of the 
 artistic spirit removes for a time the artist from 
 the comradeship of his duller and less fortunate 
 
 68
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 brethren, that need not be to their loss, if it take 
 him up into the mountain to behold 
 
 . . . the very God, the Highest, 
 Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire. 
 Like the bodied heaven for clearness. 
 
 Let him but come down from the mountain with 
 the tables of truth in his hands; let him but store 
 up — for future ages if need be — revelations of the 
 ideal which his own time could not bear, and the 
 pittance of food and shelter which is his meed is 
 well bestowed at men's hands. 
 
 The artist is the minister of beauty. He it is 
 who teaches us how to find it, who fashions it 
 before our eyes, who awakens in our hearts, 
 
 Those first affections. 
 
 Those shadowy recollections. 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master-light of all our seeing. 
 
 Therefore our first duty to the artist is to await 
 his pleasure, to borrow his ear and his eye, to let 
 the light break in upon our souls from the vision 
 which first enraptured him. It is his province to 
 be, first of all, the seer, and after to make us see. 
 Our hearts must vibrate to the thrill which quick- 
 ened his pulses. To stop at this point to ask him 
 what he meant, what lesson he had to teach, is an 
 impertinence. Let us get the vision first, and 
 then at our leisure we may discover what it means 
 for us. 
 
 59
 
 COM KSSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 This is not to be lucking moral earnestness. It 
 is first of all, because when we have done this we 
 shall discover life itself to be bigger and more worth 
 while tliiin we had thought, and the moral problem 
 will gain new light from the larger perspective; 
 and, second, because we ourselves will be enlarged 
 and better fitted for our moral task. 
 
 Thus it comes to pass that the artist is, as 
 Arnold said of Emerson, the "friend and aider of 
 him who would live in the spirit." That not every 
 one among artists has known what the spirit in 
 him did signify is nothing to the point. Even the 
 prophets were in no better case. The temptation 
 to rest in sheer enjoyment of beauty, to luxuriate 
 in mere sensuous pleasure born of finer nerves and 
 a more sensitive organization than one's fellows, 
 has been the snare of the artist. It differs little, 
 however, from the impulse which sent the most 
 earnest spirits of the Middle Ages into the mon- 
 asteries, that they might enjoy the vision of God 
 undistracted by the sights and sounds, the needs 
 and burdens of the workaday world. If we have 
 learned a more excellent way of spiritual attain- 
 ment through the daily service of our fellow men, 
 let us also see the true place of art and beauty in 
 the daily life, and obey the spirit of the Chinese 
 proverb which says, "If you have two loaves of 
 bread, sell one and buy lilies." 
 
 Consciousness of the besetting sin of art, and no 
 less of their own genuine moral purpose; conscious- 
 ness as well of the attitude of the practical world 
 
 60
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 toward art, has bred in many of the greatest 
 artists a distrust of their calling. Plato was not 
 the last to pride himself on being a philosopher 
 and to seek to transcend his art. Wordsworth, 
 as we have seen, and Browning himself, Tolstoy 
 and Ruskin and William Morris, and a host of 
 others have sought to prove their seriousness of 
 temper by being reformers and metaphysicians. 
 And the world has forgotten their philosophizings 
 and their social programs to treasure the mani- 
 festations of their artistic power, the embodiment 
 of their intuitions of life's beauty and significance. 
 This, then, is the lesson which I have learned 
 first of all from the metaphysical poet, the high 
 priest of the Brahmans, the master of subtleties 
 who sought to embody German transcendentalism 
 in incomprehensible English verse. Subtle he is, 
 and fond of dissertation, but at such times he is 
 by so much less an artist. If this were all, the 
 critics would be right. But when his mind runs 
 riot in chaotic profusion of metaphor, for sheer joy 
 in beauty; when he flames up in a very passion of 
 delight over the loveliness of human love and 
 truth ; when he reveals the emotion of the creative 
 artist, not in himself alone but by intuition in the 
 heart of the painter or the musician, of Andrea and 
 Lippo and Abt Vogler; when the glimpses of God 
 in the world thrill him to his soul's depths with the 
 sense of power and majestj'^ and infinite love, then I 
 have learned to surrender myself to his feeling 
 until I too have caught some glimpse of the heart 
 
 61
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 of fire which hums in truth and saving passion 
 through the whole fabrie of Creation. Then I 
 feel that I have heard something of his message to 
 his fellow men. 
 
 n 
 
 When one has thus surrendered himself to the 
 will of an artist, asking only that he may see what 
 his master has seen, the first thing he learns is 
 the worth and significance of the subject-matter. 
 The Greek sculptors revealed the beauty of the 
 human form. Raphael and the line of Italian 
 artists who preceded him from Cimabue to Botti- 
 celli carried the sweetness of the doctrine of the 
 birth of God into the heart of the world, and 
 incidentally gave new significance to motherhood 
 and babyhood. Rembrandt made men see the 
 dignity of conmion humanity by painting Christ 
 and the apostles in the humble garb and mien of 
 Dutch peasants. Millet opened the eyes of the 
 nineteenth century to the beauty of common 
 things and the worth of common folk. So in 
 poetry, to take a single example, Wordsworth was 
 enamored of nature. The sounding cataract 
 haunted him like a passion. The meanest flower 
 that blows had power to awaken in his soul 
 "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 As a result, he taught the world to find a signifi- 
 cance in the beauties of nature which became a 
 very revelation of God. 
 
 Browning's subject-matter, as we have seen, is 
 62
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 human life in the endless variety of its individual 
 manifestations. In sheer intoxication with the 
 manifold significance of human nature lie crowded 
 his verse to repletion with studies of the souls of 
 men, finding something worthy of remark in the 
 meanest and most sordid, and never weary of 
 depicting the glory of human love and the beauty 
 of the soul in action. As Angelo exhausted the 
 possibilities of the human figure on the ceiling and 
 reredos of the Sistine Chapel, so Browning has 
 painted the soul in well-nigh every conceivable 
 attitude of hope and fear, of joy and sorrow, of 
 hate and love. The result is that when we have 
 surrendered ourselves to his guidance and have 
 allowed him to show us life as he saw it and loved 
 it, in its immense complexity, its never-ending 
 variety, its beauty of form and feature, its sur- 
 prises of baseness and virtue, we find ourselves 
 saturated with it and colored by it to a degree we 
 had not supposed possible. 
 
 To have learned to look at the world with an 
 artist's eyes; to become willing to enjoy beauty in 
 painting or music or poetry as well as in nature 
 herself simply for its own sake and for the exquisite 
 pleasure it yields, no less than for the suggestion of 
 spiritual significance which the perception of 
 beauty inevitably affords — this is no small gain to 
 any soul. But if one can go on and learn to take 
 human life at its face value, to find joy in its 
 manifold interest, holding the moral judgment in 
 
 63
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 suspense until one has, first of all, let himself go 
 with his fellows in all their thoughtless and im- 
 pulsive aolivities and has assured himself that he 
 understands what they mean and purpose and 
 how they think about themselves; if one can even 
 restrain his sympathies until he has entered so 
 deeply into the life of men that he is capable of 
 something more than mere sentimental vaporings 
 about brotherhood, and has been empowered to 
 put his own life into theirs in a genuine incarnation 
 of love and service; then, I maintain, one has 
 learned the deepest lesson life has to give. 
 
 This is a matter of pecuhar importance for the 
 man who would be a spiritual teacher. It is not 
 possible to uplift men by reaching down to them 
 from above. One must be a part of the life he 
 would raise to the heights: this is the meaning of 
 the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. The 
 temptation of the moralist is to become a crusader 
 and an iconoclast, cramming his ideals down the 
 throats of his victims whether thej' will or no. The 
 baptism of Hollo and his Northmen by wholesale 
 and the attempt to convert the paynims by the edge 
 of the sword, belong in the same category with the 
 Puritan Blue Laws and the attitude of ministers 
 to the moving-picture show. The moral interest 
 is the deepest thing in life, but it is not the whole 
 of life any more than the foundation is the whole 
 of the house. This is the great gulf fixed between 
 the artist and the reformer. If the artist has 
 sinned through the dilettante spirit, through the 
 
 64
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 failure to take life seriously, the reformer has been 
 no less sadly mistaken in not recognizing the 
 wholesome character of normal human interests 
 and in not waiting until he understood his neigh- 
 bor before proceeding to the work of uplift. The 
 kingdom of heaven has always suffered violence 
 from those who would take it by force, and to 
 whom One who played with children and was a 
 welcome guest at wedding and feast must be a 
 glutton and a winebibber, the friend of publicans 
 and sinners. 
 
 Those who regard Browning as primarily a 
 philosopher have always stumbled more or less at 
 his universal interest in humanity. Why he should 
 include in his gallery of men and women so wide a 
 variety of types bad and good: Blougram and 
 Sludge and Johannes Agricola, Porphyria's Lover 
 and Ned Bratts and Ivan Ivanovitch, Caliban and 
 Count Guido, the miser-girl of Pornic and the 
 husband in "Fifine" — side by side with Capon- 
 sacchi and Pompilia and the Pope, with Gismond 
 and Cleon and Saint John, and Karshish and Ben 
 Ezra and Abt Vogler and the rest, has taxed the 
 ingenuity of commentators from Mrs. Orr and 
 Nettleship to Professor Corson. The simple fact 
 is that all these human beings were interesting; 
 and if we study them and what happened to them, 
 we may gain some knowledge of the heart of man 
 and some larger sympathy with our kind. 
 
 To do this, however, we must give the rein to 
 our interest. We must be capable of artistic 
 
 65
 
 (ONFFSSIONS OF A RHOWNING LOVER 
 
 sympalliy. Tlioro is ii K-gend that one day 
 Jesus and his disciples wciv in llio way, wlion they 
 came upon llie dead body of a dog by the road- 
 side. One by one the disciples gave expression to 
 their disgust. At length their Master said, "But 
 behold, how white its teeth!" We must be able 
 to find some i)oint of contact even with a dead dog 
 if we are to get anything out of life or learn any- 
 thing from it. 
 
 This is what is popularly known as Browning's 
 "Optimism." The word may stand for want of a 
 better, though it smacks of a certain cheap-and- 
 ready cockiness very far removed from the poet's 
 robust and manly acceptance of life. Its roots 
 lie deep in certain profound convictions of which 
 we shall presently speak. But its primary mani- 
 festation is to be found in this universal human 
 interest, this frank enjoyment of life, so closely 
 akin to the artist's enjoyment of beauty. It is 
 equally repudiated by the Puritan, to whom this 
 world is a vale of tears, the prison-house of the 
 soul whence it seeks escape. 
 
 The truth is that men are interesting because 
 there is some soul of goodness, something worth 
 while in them all. It is because there are in all 
 men traces of spiritual dignity, the germs of 
 spiritual development; and because, when one 
 undertakes to depict life as he sees it, one finds 
 these spiritual indications falling into place as the 
 most central and essential characteristics of man- 
 
 66
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 kind, that the poet is able to clothe even the most 
 sordid with some measure of dignity. They can- 
 not avoid bearing witness to the truth even when, 
 as in the case of Guido or the monk of the "Spanish 
 Cloister," it is by the measure of their instinctive 
 hostility. Ferishtah, while he refuses to dogma- 
 tize, bears this record, that 
 
 "Of absolute and irretrievable 
 And all-subduing black — black's soul of black 
 Beyond white's power to disintensify — 
 Of that I saw no sample." 
 
 The Pope declares that outside day, 
 
 "In the absolutest drench of dark 
 Ne'er wants a witness, some stray beauty-beam 
 To the despair of hell." 
 
 Paracelsus finds "E'en hate is but a mask of 
 love's," a dark saying which the poet elucidates 
 when he describes Dante as one who 
 
 loved well because he hated, 
 Hated wickedness that hinders loving. 
 
 The Bishop of St. Praxed's is at least capable, not 
 
 only of the love of art and of good Latin, but of 
 
 human love — the highest thing this world knows 
 
 save only the love of the Divine. Blougram 
 
 responds to 
 
 a sunset touch, 
 A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
 A chorus-ending from Euripides. 
 
 The heartless Duke of Ferrara is a lover of artistic 
 beauty — which does not mean that the artistic 
 
 67
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING I.OVER 
 
 instinct is witlunit moral power or spirit nal worth, 
 hnt, rather, that llicro is this nincli good in him at 
 any rate. Even Guido, under the spell of extreme 
 terror at the approach of I he death watch, bears 
 witness to the power of the goodness he has so 
 long denied and scorned, when he appeals to 
 
 "Christ, Maria, God— Pompilia! 
 Will you let them murder me?" 
 
 Ill 
 
 All this is only to say that just as beauty bears 
 witness to spiritual principles, to the reality and 
 meaning of the Ideal, so the interest with which 
 humanity is invested testifies to the ultimate 
 worth of life. The artist, whether he knows it or 
 not, is the minister of truth, bringing us into 
 contact with realities to which the sluggish reason 
 is blind, and is the revealer of God. 
 
 When we have surrendered to the spell of the 
 artist and have seen his vision, then we are in duty 
 bound to go on to inquire what it signifies. Merely 
 to give ourselves up to enjoyment, without rising 
 to self-consciousness and laying hold on the 
 treasures of wisdom which the artist has brought, 
 is to fall under the condemnation of the dilettante 
 spirit which we have reprobated in the artist 
 himself. 
 
 I make haste to insist that the true artist is, in 
 the very nature of things, the best philosopher, 
 whose exterior semblance doth belie his soul's 
 
 68
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 immensity. The recognition of the spiritual value 
 of beauty, of the essential worth and dignity of 
 life in itself, is the one thing that can justify art in 
 a busy and serious world, and itself constitutes a 
 philosophy of life. 
 
 Moreover, it rests on many other considerations, 
 explicit and implicit, some of which I have already 
 pointed out, and others will become manifest 
 when I come to speak of Browning's own way of 
 looking at things. 
 
 But one thing more remains to be said before 
 we turn from this consideration of the artistic 
 method and point of view. That is that by virtue 
 of its intimate relation to life, art may become a 
 direct means of inculcating truth. This is debat- 
 able ground, as we all know. A didactic purpose\ 
 in art is like salt in food or garlic in salad — too ] 
 much is disastrous. But we cannot forbid the 
 artist to regard himself and his work seriously. 
 If he understands himself and his art, if he has 
 thought out its essential principles and is con- 
 scious of its spiritual implications, it is not likely 
 that he will be any the less enamored of beauty 
 or eager to reveal it. The greater the artist, the 
 deeper his insight into life and its relations, the 
 more skillful in bringing out its essential lines and 
 awakening in us the recognition of its true pro- 
 portion and values, the wider is the range of 
 lessons he may consciously teach us. 
 
 The distinction between art that has a conscious 
 serious purpose and is thereby rendered the loftier 
 
 69
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 and more enduring, and art that has been over- 
 lojulod witli didactic intentions and become 
 coninu)nplaco and out of proportion, seems to 
 rest on the distinction between essential truth and 
 its statement in i)arlicular or dogmatic form. A 
 cathedral may illustrate in its ornamentation the 
 creed of its founders. A Jewish synagogue would 
 not employ trefoil decoration, nor an English parish 
 church cut the railing around the altar in the form 
 of quotations from the Koran. But the trefoil 
 may illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity, it can- 
 not teach it. That a Gothic cathedral may be 
 more impressive than a Moorish mosque does not 
 prove the superior truth of Christianity, k What 
 the beauty of both may do is to bear witness 
 to the spiritual aspirations of humanity, and 
 so impress the beholder as to awaken the con- 
 viction that those aspirations must be well 
 founded. 
 
 So "The Angelus" is fraught with spiritual 
 meaning. True, there is beauty in its simple 
 drawing and in the exquisite sunset light which 
 touches every clod and blade of grass. But one 
 has not seen "The Angelus" if he has not caught 
 the feeling of the hour, and the sense of the 
 dignity of common humanity which at the call 
 of the bell from the distant tower has been rapt 
 from its humble and drudging toil into the im- 
 mediate presence of the Infinite. So essentially 
 the meaning of the picture does this seem that 
 one cannot avoid the conviction that this is 
 
 70
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 what the artist had in mind, what he purposed 
 to teach. 
 
 One is aware of a distinction here. The purely 
 artistic attitude would be that which, though it 
 might not share the faith of the peasant, never- 
 theless recognized its beauty and sought to depict 
 simply that; to make us feel that these humble 
 toilers thought that their prayer brought them into 
 the presence of God, and so lifted them above 
 their drudgery. To share their faith and paint 
 the picture in the interest of awakening the same 
 conviction in the beholder would be quite another 
 matter. But the point I am making is that to see 
 the beauty of such a faith and be able to make 
 others see it is to share it. Such sharing may be 
 a temporary and purely artistic sympathy, as 
 Booth was Hamlet during three hours. None the 
 less the possibility of such identification of oneself 
 with another bears witness to the essential truth 
 of the other's life. Booth could not have trans- 
 formed himself into Hamlet if Hamlet did not 
 embody a genuine human experience. Millet 
 could not have shared the faith of a peasant even 
 by artistic sympathy were not such faith a vital 
 power in the lives of those whom he painted. 
 They were lifted above their humble lot by their 
 prayer. That is what the artist saw and what he 
 felt to be beautiful enough to be worth making 
 us see. And that means a conviction of the 
 essential truth of the peasants' faith. 
 
 But not of its 'particular form. This is what I am 
 71
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A RROWNING LOVER 
 
 trying to show. Nothing in "The Angchis" can 
 ])rovo tliat the Cathohc dogma is truer than the 
 Protestant faith, ll can prove that prayer 
 dignifies and ennobles hfe, and that the humblest 
 peasant, with neither learning nor privilege, can 
 siiare its benefits as readily as the wisest priest. 
 The interest in the artist may have been in the 
 dignifying of humble life rather than in the spirit- 
 ual side of his truth, but the fact remains that he 
 felt the impress of truth and employed his art to 
 declare it. 
 
 Thus art becomes, in a still more direct and 
 intimate way, the minister of truth. It cannot 
 establish any particular set of dogmas, but it can 
 so illustrate spiritual principles as to enable them 
 to be grasped by those who would have difficulty 
 in defining them. It remains an abiding char- 
 acteristic of the human mind, as Tennyson de- 
 clared, that in the deepest matters 
 
 Truth in closest words shall fail, 
 When truth embodied in a tale 
 Shall enter in at lowly doors. 
 
 We are all children when it comes to the greatest 
 things, and can be instructed by object lessons 
 when the solemn inculcation of principles glides 
 smoothly over our heads. 
 
 It is at this point that art renders its second 
 great service to humanity; and it is here that 
 poetry, by reason of its greater intellectual interest, 
 is supreme. This is what Mrs. Browning meant 
 when she called the poets 
 
 72
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 The only truth-tellers now left to God, 
 The only speakers of essential truth. 
 Opposed to relative, comparative, 
 And temporal truths; the only holders by 
 His sun-skirts through conventional gray glooms; 
 The only teachers who instruct mankind 
 From just a shadow on a charnel-wall 
 To find man's veritable stature out. 
 Erect, sublime — the measure of a man. 
 And that's the measure of an angel, says 
 The apostle. 
 
 That Browning regarded his art in this serious 
 fashion goes without saying. He was morally and 
 intellectually incapable of anything less than this. 
 I have insisted that he was, first of all, an artist 
 because I believe that he chose that method of 
 declaring the truth that was shut up like fire in his 
 bones, and that by his art he would be judged; 
 because I believe that when his readers have 
 regarded him as a philosopher they failed to find 
 that point of sight without which any picture 
 becomes distorted and out of drawing. Looking 
 for logic, they are disheartened and discouraged 
 when they find only direct intuitive insight, and 
 cry out that he is obscure. Looking everywhere 
 for doctrine, they are perplexed when they fre- 
 quently discover nothing but human interest and 
 artistic skill. Lacking the true touchstone, they 
 painfully "gather dust and chaff" and miss the 
 true grain; they cart home loads of gravel and 
 sand and pass by the gold. 
 
 Whether the poet first formulated a philosophy 
 of life and then constructed his poems and invented 
 
 73
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Iiis c'harattors lo inculcate it, or whether his 
 artistic instinct led him to find pleasure in these 
 stories and in telling them he was led to make 
 them the groundwork of his philosophy, is an in- 
 teresting psychological inquiry, but it throws little 
 light on his work. In any case, he undertakes to 
 impress us with the truth through liis art. Where 
 that falls short no amount of argumentation can 
 convince us of his doctrine. Wherein his poetry 
 is true to life, where his men and women are 
 vitally and eagerly alive, the truth upon which 
 their lives and experiences rest makes its own way 
 into our hearts. 
 
 After all (it is an old thought), literature is only 
 life. Throbbing, eager, complex life in the world 
 outside, passing through the prism of the poet's 
 intense, rich, multiform personality, is spread 
 out for us in petto, to be enjoyed and inter- 
 preted only by the life within ourselves, earnest 
 and loving and openhearted. Logic makes as 
 sad work of poetry as botany of a rose. 
 
 Our meddling intellect 
 Misshapes the beauteous forms of things, 
 We murder to dissect. 
 
 But if, firm in our faith that man and nature 
 and life are not without significance, and that the 
 primal human instincts may be provisionally 
 trusted, we are looking abroad in the world for 
 beauty which shall thrill us with consciousness of 
 the ideal, for truth which shall give firm standing 
 
 <4;
 
 OF ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 ground for our feet amid the shock of circumstance 
 and the rush and whirl of change, for love which 
 shall bind us to our fellows in the deep brother- 
 hood of common sorrows, of common joys and a 
 common spirit of service; if we lend a willing ear to 
 every voice which rings true, whether its speech 
 be of things in heaven or things on the earth; if 
 we are in search, not of arguments to bolster up 
 our dogmas but of truth to feed our souls, then 
 may we venture without fear to open mind and 
 heart to those who have been called of God 
 to See and Make-See, the master-artists of all 
 ages and all climes and all fields, nor doubt that 
 our life shall be enriched and made glad with the 
 vision of unutterable things. 
 
 And when in that spirit we take up the poetry of 
 Browning, we shall find him not the least of those 
 who were called to be prophets of truth to this 
 new, chaotic age in which we live; which has need 
 to be taught that life is worth while, despite its 
 origin; that truth is not an idle word, though its 
 meaning has often been mistaken; and that right 
 is not a barren survival of tribal custom, but a 
 corner stone on which the universe must rest. 
 
 75
 
 CHAPTER III 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 The elder Von Moltke was said to be able to 
 keep silent in seven languages. That certainly 
 is a remarkable achievement, but it never cap- 
 tured my imagination like that other of whom I 
 have read who could speak six languages fluently 
 and hadn't an idea in any of them. Richard Le 
 Gallienne has recently expressed his opinion that 
 the literary world of to-day is in the latter case. 
 He declares that never since men began to clothe 
 their ideas in literary form have there been so 
 many who have mastered the art of expression, 
 who are able to write so cleverly, so gracefully, 
 with such mastery of the mechanics of their art — 
 and never have they had so little to say! 
 
 To be sure, even critics — especially when they 
 pass forty — are likely to become mere landafores 
 temporis acti. I have recalled Mr. Le Gallienne's 
 verdict not for the sake of expressing either 
 agreement or disagreement; but because it sug- 
 gests by way of contrast Browning's "vexed 
 beating stuffed and stopped up brain," charged 
 to the brim with convictions and ideals which he 
 was straitened to deliver, forever wrestling with 
 forms of language too clumsy and intractable to 
 yield them utterance. One is reminded of the 
 
 76
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 way in which Saint Paul tortured the jflexible 
 Greek to make it convey what eye hath not seen 
 nor ear heard; how he piles Pelion on Ossa, adverb 
 on adjective, inventing new forms of super- 
 superlative to express the inexpressible. In like 
 manner Browning struggles with our sturdy and 
 forthright mother tongue to make it the vehicle 
 — not so much of subtleties of thought as of feelings 
 too delicate, of emotions too warm, of enthusiasms 
 too eager for our "matter-molded" forms of 
 speech. 
 
 To the end of his life the art of saying directly 
 and simply what one had to say remained a mys- 
 tery to Robert Browning. He could not write 
 a telegram without having to send a letter after 
 it to explain what the message was about. Even 
 Miss Barrett has to ask him to elucidate the 
 "Sordelloisms" in his letters. When he under- 
 takes, in "One Word More," to put his whole soul 
 in a sentence; when, to use his own figure, he 
 would "steal a hair-brush, curb the liberal hand, 
 subservient proudly, fill his lady's missal-marge 
 with flowerets," the fruit of speech is so near to 
 commonplace that his heart despairs, and he 
 cries, "Poor the speech! be how I speak for all 
 things!" 
 
 The source of this congenital disability is two- 
 fold. To begin with, whenever the poet under- 
 took to speak directly and simply he found himself 
 
 77
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 iiivolvcil in all the immense complexity and miin- 
 ifoKlness of even the simplest fact. It is said that 
 one of his eyes was extremely farsighted, so that 
 he could read the time on a distant tower clock 
 without a glass, but the other was equally near- 
 sighted. The result seems to have been to give 
 him both telescopic and microscopic powers, so 
 that the simplest things appeared to him both as 
 the center of vast forces and influences extending 
 to the bounds of space, and equally as a micro- 
 cosm of the intricate interweaving of the infinitely 
 little. He was so made that he never saw pure 
 white hght as simply light, but as compounded 
 of all the hues of a thousand rainbows. So 
 modest and simple-hearted was he withal that it 
 never occurred to him that every one else did not 
 see it in the same radiant and glorious fashion. 
 Add to this an altogether naive passion for telling 
 the exact truth, so that he would not call on his 
 wife during the brief interval between their mar- 
 riage and their final departure for the Continent 
 simply because he would have to ask for Miss 
 Barrett, whereas she was now Mrs. Browning, and 
 you have one clue to his "obscurity." 
 
 The other is to be found in the intensity and 
 impetuosity of spirit that was hidden behind his 
 altogether mild and commonplace exterior. He 
 was forever taking a running jump into the middle 
 of things and then finding himself under the pain- 
 ful necessity of bringing up the arrears before he 
 could go on to the end. His first letter to E. B. B., 
 
 78
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 written while as yet they were total strangers 
 except through their poetry, begins, "I love you, 
 dear Miss Barrett." It took him a full year to 
 bring their intercourse up to that point again, 
 though he nearly put the fat in the fire by another 
 outburst after his first call — and had to lie like a 
 gentleman (and very awkwardly withal) to square 
 himself; which lie, after the fashion of lies, came 
 back to torment him months afterward. He be- 
 gins "Sordello" at the end and then has to employ 
 four cantos to bring the reader up with him — with 
 indifferent success, as Tennyson declared. He 
 tells the story of "The Ring and The Book" three 
 times in the first canto despite his purpose to tell 
 it a dozen times more through different mouths. 
 
 I have often wondered what that white hot, 
 volcanic consciousness of his must have been 
 like, so surcharged with sentiment and passion, 
 forever beating in vain against the prison bars of 
 expression. He starts to say something, and 
 before a dozen words have escaped him another 
 and better way of putting it stumbles over the 
 heels of the first. He begins a metaphor, and 
 interrupts it with a simile, and that suggests an 
 allegory, and a dozen colorful adjectives and 
 adverbs insist on being heard, until before he gets 
 to the end of his sentence he has shuffled and 
 discarded enough material for a poem, besides 
 letting two or three times as much as he needed 
 escape simply because it was physically impos- 
 sible to crowd them back into their cage. 
 
 79
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 111 these characteristics of the man you have the 
 secret of his involved and cumbrous sentences, 
 his wrecked and dislocated grammar, his apparent 
 subtleties of thought, his utter inability to speak 
 his heart out clearly and simply. Of course it 
 is a fault in his art, but what a glorious fault it is! 
 One would not exchange it for all the limpid 
 clearness and delicate melody in the world. Of 
 course one is glad there are such poets as Keats, 
 such painstaking craftsmen as Tennyson; but 
 when the currents of life become clogged and 
 sluggish and one longs for the tonic electric 
 sliock of a supercharged vitality, there is no one 
 like Browning. When the blood grows thin and 
 pale in the high altitudes of speculation; when 
 life seems shallow and scanty of meaning; then a 
 half-hour's brisk gallop on his eager Pegasus sets 
 the pulses bounding and puts color in the cheek, 
 and one returns with zest to the task of living. 
 
 xVnd this is the man who looked like a French 
 banker; who was such an indefatigable diner-out; 
 whom Benson describes lunching with the college 
 boys at Cambridge, jingling the coins in his 
 pocket and putting the lads at their ease with 
 small talk, in every way the prosperous man of 
 the world and not at all like a poet. 
 
 In a way I think he was proud of this disguise. 
 He refused to wear his heart on his sleeve. He 
 would not "sonnet-sing you" about himself, nor 
 bear his breast to the curious gaze of the mob. 
 If Shakespeare unlocked his heart with a sonnet- 
 
 80
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 key, "the less Shakespeare he." But the fact is 
 that Browning chose the artistic method of 
 declaring his message because it was the only 
 one possible to him. As he said himself in the 
 closing lines of "The Ring and The Book," 
 
 Art remains the one way possible 
 Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least. 
 
 It was only when he could hide behind another 
 soul, caught in the meshes of one of life's sup- 
 preme crises, and, disentanghng for us the skein 
 of impulses and emotions which made up the 
 heart of the situation, show us the beam of 
 life spread out in the whole spectrum of its hid- 
 den constituents, that he could declare the truth 
 as he saw it. Then the whole matter becomes a 
 very ostrichlike performance, after all. The 
 hands are the hands of "Karshish, Cleon, Nor- 
 bert and the fifty," but the voice is Browning's 
 voice. Not that he makes them utter his senti- 
 ments directly — he is too much of a dramatist 
 for that — but he leaves us in no doubt of his 
 attitude toward the men and their ideas. He 
 expects us to find for ourselves the sophistries of 
 Blougram or the failure of Andrea or Cleon, but 
 he makes it very clear that Blougram was a 
 sophist and that the Greek poet and the Florentine 
 painter really failed. Partly through his choice 
 of characters, partly through the revelation in- 
 volved in the situation he depicts, partly through 
 the ring in his voice when he is speaking his own 
 
 81
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 convictions through tlicir mouths, he makes 
 through tlicm his j)ronounccmeiits upon life. 
 
 "The Ring and Tlic Book" was intended to 
 teach, among other things, how complex a thing 
 any human action is, and how impossible it is for 
 those wlio are in the very thick of it to tell exactly 
 what happened, much less for anyone else to 
 understand or tell the whole truth about it. The 
 Pope declares that he has come at the truth by 
 patiently sifting the evidence, gathering it bit 
 by bit from the whole: "Truth, nowhere, lies yet 
 everywhere in these." It is only as one senses 
 the truth half-hidden and half-revealed by the 
 spoken word, using the truth in his own soul 
 as the touchstone whereby he shall recognize the 
 truth in others, that one can arrive at a just 
 estimate of men and their deeds. 
 
 This is in effect the key to the interpretation 
 of all Browning's poetry. He nowhere declares 
 himself simply and directly, but his art holds the 
 truth everywhere in solution, whence we must 
 gather it by a process of intuition not unlike that 
 whereby we interpret life itself. This is, indeed, 
 the way to reach the truth in any art. 
 
 II 
 
 By reason of this power to find truth in solution 
 in all human experience, to find interest and sig- 
 nificance in even the meanest of lives, Browning 
 will remain forever an enigma to those simple 
 
 82
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 and forthright natures who see Hfe only in two 
 dimensions. The scientific mind, which is content 
 with purely empirical investigation and is satisfied 
 to regard classification as equivalent to explana- 
 tion, is bound to contemn the mystical subtleties 
 of metaphysics, and no less the luminous aura 
 with which art clothes the bald blank surfaces 
 of reality. The tired business man and the 
 empirical scientist alike skate blithely over the 
 surface of life in blissful unconsciousness of the 
 hidden depths into which they would plunge if 
 they should pause for an instant. 
 
 One cannot avoid a suspicion, with Le Gal- 
 lienne, that the literature of the present day has 
 fallen under the same condemnation. Life, with 
 Nietzsche, with Gorky, with Hauptmann and 
 Sudermann, is mere brute horror and suffering, 
 without reason or explanation. Even the mas- 
 terly art of Anatole France can give it no depth 
 of purpose. Holland's "Jean Christophe" is the 
 massing together of innumerable facts, the minute 
 details of reality, gaining dignity from sheer 
 number and weight, but the reader must bring 
 his own interpretation. With the British novel- 
 ists hfe is a complex of interacting forces, inter- 
 esting to unravel but with no essential meaning. 
 "It is all triumphant art," but none the less it is 
 art in two dimensions. It reminds one somehow 
 of a Chinese painting, in which men and dragons, 
 cities, mountains and sea, all lie flat against the 
 paper, with no regard for perspective, no sense of 
 
 83
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 atmosphere, of the depth and fulness of reality. 
 Maeterlinck takes refuge in a mysticism "as 
 vague as ail unsweet." Kipling alone of the more 
 important writers of the last quarter of a century 
 reveals a positive conviction of life's reality 
 and significance fairly Browningesque in its 
 intensity and moral passion. Yet the God of 
 Kipling is strangely like a grimy Vulcan, a huge 
 and unwashed demiurge painfully striving toward 
 a dimly descried goal of creative purpose. 
 
 It is with a feeling of relieved hopefulness that 
 one turns to the delicate genius of Alfred Noyes, 
 foreseeing a not-unworthy successor, if not to 
 BrowTiing, at least to Tennyson as a prophet of 
 faith and love. When Arnold Bennett comes to 
 the last chapter in the earthly career of one of 
 his heroines, he entitles it "The End of Sophia." 
 Exactly so! Whether he knows it or not, Mr. 
 Bennett has uncovered in a headline the essential 
 nakedness of his philosophy. Life has for him 
 no real meaning. It is as "a tale told by an 
 idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 
 To watch the antics of its puppets; to trace their 
 rise, development, and decay through one stage 
 after another of commonplace sordidness, until 
 one can write, "The End of Sophia," "The End 
 of Maria," is an interesting exercise, save that 
 one lays down the book at the end with the weary 
 question, "What's the use?" With what dif- 
 ferent emotions one watches Shadow-of-a-Leaf, 
 in Noyes' "Sherwood," as, the gates of Fairyland 
 
 84)
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 shut to him because of his sacrificial betrayal of 
 the secrets of the future, he goes sadly yet un- 
 daunted on his way with Blondel, Richard's min- 
 strel, singing, "What is Death? I must ride on!" 
 
 The present is an age of disillusionment. Its 
 young men are world-weary, too depressed even 
 to be cynical. The sorrows of Werther were airy 
 brightness by comparison. One by one the fond 
 follies of former ages have been laid on the shelf — 
 belief in God, in immortality, even in goodness. 
 The Golden Rule is that there is no golden rule. 
 The moral laws are but the traditions of polite 
 society, having no sanction other than the tribunal 
 which determines which fork to use first, or how 
 many cards to leave for a duty call. Professor 
 Clifford mourned, "The Great Companion is 
 dead." The present generation has not so much 
 as heard whether there be a Great Companion. 
 Like Mark Twain on being told by the guide in 
 Genoa that Columbus was dead, they politely 
 murmur, "We didn't know he was ill." 
 
 The result is a literature marked by scientific 
 accuracy of observation, by a knowledge of 
 psychology at which Thackeray and even Meredith 
 might have marveled, by a mastery of literary 
 form beside which the works of Scott and Dickens 
 are crude; but in which there are no great con- 
 victions, no evidences of moral passion; whose 
 characters are commonplace, whose incidents are 
 trivial or hopelessly tragic, whose ethics are 
 those of the barnyard, and whose ideals rise no 
 
 85
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 liigluT than llio drawing room or tlie market 
 place. Small wonder that the man in the street 
 prefers Robert W. Chambers or the moving- 
 picture show. 
 
 From such a literature one turns with zest to 
 the poet who sings, 
 
 Have you found your life distasteful? 
 
 My life did, and does, smack sweet; 
 Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? 
 
 Mine I saved, and hold complete; 
 Do your joys with age diminish? 
 
 When mine fail me I'll complain; 
 Must in death your daylight finish? 
 
 My sun sets to rise again. 
 
 The thoroughgoing modernist in literature tells 
 us that he undertakes to face life as it is, to take 
 it at its face value, unbiased by any prejudgment 
 as to its worth or meaning, or the place where it 
 must come out. Unfortunately, this apparent 
 refusal to judge is itself a judgment. One may 
 say: "I will gather roses and skunk cabbage, 
 daisies and dog fennel, without passing any judg- 
 ment as to their relative beauty or sweetness until 
 I have accumulated all the possible material. I 
 will mingle diamonds and pebbles, unbiased by any 
 dogmatic mid-Victorian, bourgeois prejudices." 
 This is excellent if one is a naturalist, gathering 
 specimens for a museum, but it will hardly do if 
 one is a lover plucking flowers or choosing jewels 
 for his mistress. Such a declaration is a judg- 
 ment, not of nature but of men. 
 
 86
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 Browning starts with the conviction that life is 
 worth while. Whether the conviction had its 
 roots primarily in the poet's heart or his head is a 
 question that need not detain us. At any rate, 
 finding men lovable and interesting he finds it 
 easy to accept the philosophy upon which alone 
 such loving interest in mankind can rest. The 
 prior assumption that such a philosophy is un- 
 tenable cuts the nerve of a vital human interest. 
 The attempt to hold the judgment in suspense is 
 evidence of unfitness to judge. The man who 
 says he has not yet decided whether or not life 
 is worth living or has any discoverable significance, 
 simply bears witness to his spiritual blindness, his 
 utter incapacity for either seeing or judging life's 
 essential reality. 
 
 I have pleaded, it is true, for catholicity of 
 taste, for finding pleasure in the meticulous and 
 overwrought goldsmith's painting of Memmling 
 as well as in Sandro's delicate line or Buonarotti's 
 rugged modeling. By this canon one cannot 
 deny a place among artists to such masters of 
 form and style as I have mentioned above. They 
 are real makers of literature, interpreters of 
 their time, to be taken account of in the history 
 of the human spirit. But one may enjoy the 
 drawing and coloring of Andrea without being 
 estopped from pointing out his spiritual weakness, 
 or recognizing the loftier truth and deeper passion 
 which moved the pencil of Leonardo or Rembrandt. 
 One cannot rid oneself of the feeling that in both 
 
 87
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 art and literature tlie present a^e is marked by a 
 brilliance of color and a shallowness of treatment, 
 by an absence of sincere convictions and moral 
 earnestness, which offers a painful contrast to 
 the centuries immediately preceding. 
 
 In this no doubt the characteristics of the age 
 in which we live are reflected. Some months ago 
 I was returning from a brief Continental tour, 
 during which I had saturated myself with the art 
 of Rome and Florence, of the Louvre and the 
 National Gallery. Returning, I visited the Art 
 Museum in Boston and the Morgan Collection in 
 New York. Passing through Chicago, I went up 
 to the Art Institute, and found myself by chance 
 in the midst of a multitude of worthy folk pouring 
 tea-libations in honor of an exhibit of the local 
 Art Society. Such a welter of vivid greens and 
 blues and yellows, of hazy outlines and sketchy 
 drawing I never thought to see. I thought of the 
 horse in "Childe Roland" — "I never saw a brute 
 I hated so!" It was all highly decorative, and 
 here and there one came across a trace of sound 
 sentiment, a bit of genuine artistic feeling. But I 
 never felt so intensely the sketchiness and vivid 
 coloring of present-day existence, with its two- 
 rooms-and-kitchenette homes, its fifteen-cent mag- 
 azines and ten-cent movies, its Coney Island 
 mobs, its hordes of tourists, its divorce colonies, 
 its blase youths of seventeen — its utterly mean- 
 ingless busy-ness and restless fussy chase after 
 nothing and advance toward nowhere. 
 
 88
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 To be sure, this was Chicago — what could one 
 expect? Art? In Chicago? But it was Chicago 
 that built the Court of Honor in 1893. And 
 where is life more intense and modern than in 
 Chicago? If the art I saw was not typical modern 
 painting, where shall we look for it? At the 
 futurist exhibit? 
 
 There is another side, no doubt. Humanity 
 is sound at the core. There are plenty of plain 
 folk who fear God and keep his commandments, 
 who are busy doing the world's work and feeling 
 their way steadily to the solution of its business 
 and social problems, but who never get their 
 names in the papers. And there are writers of 
 magazine stories and newspaper poets, and young 
 men not experienced enough to find themselves, 
 who will yet carry the tradition of literary art to 
 a loftier achievement than any of which the smug 
 and complacent Victorian period ever dreamed. 
 But for the present we are fallen on evil days and 
 evil tongues, and we may as well acknowledge it. 
 Perhaps the present war, with its painful revela- 
 tion of the shallowness of our ideals, of the moral 
 nakedness of our boasted modern civilization, 
 may bear fruit in a new Renaissance of artistic 
 and spiritual power. 
 
 Ill 
 
 What is the matter with the world? What 
 is the reason our poets and novelists have no 
 message, our artists no feeling for form? The 
 
 89
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 answer simi)ly is that they have no spiritual 
 convictions. They have lost their faith in God, 
 and hence of necessity in man. Like Maeter- 
 linck's tragic folk, the priest who formerly led 
 them is dead of old age, and they are left to 
 wander about their desolate isle, the blind lead- 
 ing the blind, until death mercifully makes an 
 end. 
 
 Life, to the thorough modern, is mere gal- 
 vanism. The soul is a chemical reaction. The 
 mind is nothing more than the succession of 
 mental states, the stream of consciousness. God 
 is another name for Natural Law, and Right 
 for tribal custom. Human love is the iridescent 
 radiance of nascent physical passion, the "Dark 
 Flower" of man's life, to pluck which he is for- 
 ever tempted to turn aside from the path marked 
 out by the well-being of the social order. The 
 last term in this series is reached by Nietzsche's 
 apotheosis of self-assertion, whereby he erects a 
 generalization of biological theory into the ulti- 
 mate principle of the moral life, denying the 
 spiritual value of love and self-sacrifice, and 
 declaring Jesus Christ to have been the last 
 enemy of the human race. "Had he lived to 
 my age," wrote this disillusioned sage of thirty- 
 seven, "he would have discarded his own 
 doctrine." 
 
 I would be the last to deny the value of this 
 bitter and cynical criticism of mid-Victorian 
 tradition. The smug hypocrisy of Gladstone, 
 
 90
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 who would use Parnell, sending for him to the 
 home of Mrs. O'Shea whenever he wanted to 
 consult with him, but was surprised and shocked 
 forsooth to learn there had been scandal, and 
 forthwith repudiated his quondam associate, may 
 serve as a typical instance of the way in which 
 men had learned to hide their heads in the sand 
 in the presence of the ugly facts of human life. 
 Both religion and morals had grown sadly thin 
 and threadbare. The merciless criticism of 
 Nietzsche and Ibsen and Anatole France tore 
 these rags from the spiritual nakedness of the 
 world and set men to work to weave a more 
 enduring garment of righteousness and faith. 
 If in the meantime society has had to content 
 itself with fig leaves, we may endure to the end 
 not without hope. Only let us not make the 
 mistake of calling fig leaves cloth of gold and 
 damask drapery, much less of wantoning in puris 
 naturalihus. 
 
 The source of the thoroughgoing skepticism 
 with regard to spiritual values so characteristic 
 of the present day is to be found chiefly in the 
 enormous mass of information dumped upon the 
 human mind by the investigations of modern 
 science. Crates and packing cases fill the hall 
 and the parlor, crowd the piazza and overflow 
 the front yard onto the sidewalk and out into 
 the street. Until we can get this mass unpacked 
 and assorted and put into place we sleep in 
 
 91
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 our clothes uiul eat eanned victual off a box in 
 the kitchen. 
 
 While the roots of modern science lie far back 
 in the Copernican astronomy and the discoveries 
 of Galileo and Newton, it was not until the doc- 
 trine of evolution overturnetl man's whole thought 
 about himself iind his relation to nature that 
 the full force of the new scientific movement 
 began to be felt. The world which Kant under- 
 took to interpret did not differ materially from 
 that which formed the subject of Aristotle's 
 investigations or Plato's more intuitive reasoning. 
 It was somewhat larger, but scarcely more com- 
 plex. The latest thinkers stood on the shoulders 
 of the earliest. The groundwork of the thought- 
 life of humanity had not shifted. Small wonder 
 that many human problems had been thought 
 through, and poets and artists could interpret 
 their meaning in forms of undying beauty and 
 significance. 
 
 That world of ancient thought is gone, for 
 better or for worse. Whether we like it or not, 
 it has all been cast into the melting pot, and the 
 thinker of to-day must sit as the refiner of silver. 
 None of the pure metal will in the end be lost, 
 and much dross will be cast out. W^hen the 
 whole is recast in new forms there is no doubt 
 they will be other and better than those our 
 fathers have known. 
 
 More exact information has been brought 
 to light in the past fifty years than in the pre- 
 
 9S
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 ceding fifty centuries. An encyclopaedia five 
 years old is worthless; one fifty years old is a 
 curiosity. The first effect of all this is to stagger 
 the imagination and paralyze the reason. Faith 
 is really no more diflBcult to-day than it was in 
 the fifteenth century. It is no more unreason- 
 able to believe in a God big enough to run the 
 universe of modern science than it was to believe 
 in a smaller God for the Ptolemaic system. It 
 is altogether a matter of the imagination, not 
 of the logical intellect. The mind has simply 
 been clogged by the mass of undigested informa- 
 tion. Darwin, for example, saw as clearly as 
 anybody the enormous enlargement of the doc- 
 trine of final cause brought about by the evolu- 
 tionary hypothesis. He declared that the 
 testimony of evolution to the Divine Intelligence 
 infinitely surpassed that of Paley's curious co- 
 incidences. But he added (I quote from memory), 
 "When I consider that my own mind is the 
 mere product of evolution from the instinct of 
 the lower orders of animal life, I question my 
 right to make so stupendous a generalization." 
 It never occurred to him that it was the same 
 mind which had first made the equally stupendous 
 generalization that it was so descended; that if 
 it were competent for the one, it was equally 
 so for the other. But one was made, naturally, 
 before the far-reaching results which flow from 
 it could be evident; which results, when once 
 they had presented themselves to the imagina- 
 
 93
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 tion, made furtlior reasoning for the time being 
 impossible. In like manner John Burroughs has 
 somewhere said that it was easy enough to be- 
 lieve in (lod when the stars were mere points 
 of light and the sun revolved around the earth; 
 but that he eould not look up to the immensities 
 of space revealed by the telescope and the spec- 
 troscope and maintain his belief in a Providence 
 which looks after the individual life. Once more 
 it is the imagination that is overcome and which 
 paralyzes the logical faculty. 
 
 The interesting thing is that it should always 
 be the religious, not the scientific reason, which 
 is disabled. Darwin accepted the conclusions 
 of his reason regarding its pithecoid ancestry, 
 but declined to accept the further implication 
 of the Divine Intelligence. In the same way 
 Herbert Spencer's First Principles cut the ground 
 from under scientific no less than religious knowl- 
 edge; but he and his disciples proceeded to apply 
 his principles to religious matters and utterly 
 to ignore them in scientific discussions. It is 
 this peculiar twist in human nature that makes 
 one long to believe in a personal devil. 
 
 The deeper thinking of our own time has 
 already transcended the narrow limitations of 
 nineteenth-century scientific thought, and recog- 
 nizes the validity of the spiritual evaluation of 
 existence. But it takes a considerable time for 
 the conclusions of science and philosophy to 
 percolate down to the common consciousness of 
 
 94.
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 mankind. Moreover, knowledge must needs be 
 thoroughly assimilated, as clay must be thoroughly 
 tempered, before it becomes sufficiently plastic to 
 be used for artistic purposes. 
 
 For this reason the literary art of our day has 
 not yet emerged from the immediate influence 
 of Darwin and Spencer and Haeckel. It is 
 still clogged and hampered by the undigested 
 mass of information which science has placed 
 at its disposal. Finding this material too vast 
 and complex to be stowed away in the little 
 pigeonholes of traditional dogma, our novelists 
 and playwrights have broken these up to make 
 room for something new and larger in the way 
 of a filing cabinet — something elastic and readily 
 revised, like a sectional bookcase or a loose-leaf 
 encyclopaedia. What they have failed to see is 
 that, after all, the new material really is intended 
 to serve the same purpose as the old, and that 
 it is made up of pretty much the same sort of 
 stuff, so that the old classifications will serve. 
 
 To get away from the figure, the modern 
 man has not yet come to see that life has not 
 changed a whit in its essential needs and appetites; 
 that men still live by food, still work and play 
 and sleep and procreate their kind in exactly 
 the same fashion as they did in the days of old 
 Rameses; and that by the same token the lessons 
 of life and its meaning which humanity has so 
 painfully acquired through the long years are 
 valid for the twentieth century. 
 
 95
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 The conclusions of the older world regarding 
 the essential truth of things rested in reality on 
 something more than seienlitie induction. They 
 were, in effect, an evaluation of life, and while 
 they will no doubt be modified as the result of 
 our deeper investigations, they will be found in 
 the end to be more firmly established than ever. 
 In the meantime they may well be taken as at 
 least working principles, as the tentative basis 
 for the arrangement and interpretation of our 
 new material. The house — to go back to our 
 original figure — is, after all, our ancestral man- 
 sion into which we are to put all this new fur- 
 niture which so clogs the passageways and brings 
 disorder into our life. Perhaps when we get 
 to it we shall have to enlarge our dwelling, put 
 some rooms to new uses, tear down certain parti- 
 tions, cut new windows and doors; and as a 
 result we hope to find our life, in some new age 
 not too far off, at once simpler and more com- 
 modiously satisfying; but we need not burn the 
 house down after all. 
 
 IV ^ 
 
 It is the distinction of Browning that, coming 
 at the end of the former age and accepting its 
 fundamental traditions, he finds their justifica- 
 tion in life itself, in its manifold beauty and 
 interest. He shared the revolt which ushered 
 in the nineteenth century. He felt the impulse 
 
 96
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 of the romantic movement. His earliest poetical 
 writings — happily suppressed — were Byronesque. 
 His hero was Shelley. For a time he was, as Mrs. 
 Orr tells us, "a professing atheist and practicing 
 vegetarian." When asked by some one if he 
 were a Christian, he is said to have repelled 
 the suggestion with an energetic "God forbid!" 
 Nevertheless, he not only remained, as Chesterton 
 declares and Havelock Ellis echoes, essentially 
 mid-Victorian in his instinctive moral reactions, 
 but, carried by his art into a direct study of 
 life itself, of the needs and passions of the human 
 individual, his conviction that, in spite of every- 
 thing, life is worth living, drove him back upon 
 fundamental Christianity. 
 
 This phase of his teaching remains for further 
 consideration. What I want to reiterate at this 
 point is that it was the artist in him which led 
 him to the truth, as it was the truth which in 
 turn reacted upon his art to give it dignity and 
 power, which makes it so inspiriting, so spirit- 
 ually satisfying. His "optimism" is at bottom the 
 artist's joy in life. But he cannot maintain that 
 interest without finding himself driven to justify 
 it by convincing his readers that life is worth 
 while, and interesting because it is worth while. 
 It is here that the literature of the present day 
 fails. Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells cannot 
 maintain their enthusiasm for reform, because 
 they have no real faith in their fellows, and hence 
 none in any social order they may establish. 
 
 97
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 CJal-swortliy and Arnold Bennett imd Edith 
 Wharton try to (lispt^ise with the (|ueslion as 
 to lil'e's worth and nieanin<,', with tlie result tliat 
 they no loiii^^M- iiiid it particularly interesting. 
 They can only attract attention by sheer force 
 of self-assertion, or take refuge in a mysticism 
 which leaves one in doubt whether it may prove 
 to be the mist of the morning, or only the twi- 
 light of the gods, the precursor of ultimate chaos. 
 At any rate, at present it satisfies only those 
 whose souls are equally immersed in fog. 
 
 That Browning felt the darkening of the sun 
 no one who reads him thoughtfully can doubt. 
 He seemed for a time a stronghold for those whom 
 Professor James called the "tender-minded," who 
 sought to bolster up their faith in the midst of 
 the growing doubt and darkness of the world 
 — hence the Browning Society and the earnest- 
 ness of the women's clubs. Indeed, for years he 
 was regarded as the protagonist of "advanced 
 thought," and furnished texts for "liberal" ser- 
 mons by preachers who found the Bible old- 
 fashioned. At present I fear he is to many but 
 a stranded derelict, whose art was so clouded 
 and distorted by his hopelessly mid-Victorian 
 philosophy that both must presently be cast out 
 and trodden under foot of men. Nevertheless 
 one wonders if, after all, it may not be that 
 his passionate conviction of the worth of life 
 and the significance of human destiny shall prove 
 the starting point for a more courageous literary 
 
 98
 
 OF IDEAS AND FORMS 
 
 art which will some day emerge from the present 
 flux of human faiths and ideals for the guidance 
 of the new age which is to be. 
 
 My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
 
 The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; 
 
 That after last returns the first, 
 
 Though a wide compass round be fetched; 
 
 That what began best can't end worst, 
 
 Nor what God blest once prove accurst. 
 
 ("Apparent Failure.") 
 
 99
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 OF ORTHODOXY AND THE THEORY 
 OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Chesterton tells us that he set out, in com- 
 mon with all the other solemn little boys of his 
 age, to be in advance of his time, and to pro- 
 pound a new heresy which should be more pro- 
 gressive than them all. When he had put the 
 finishing touches to it he discovered to his aston- 
 ishment that it was orthodoxy. In other words, 
 when he seriously asked the new science and 
 philosophy what life demands to make it worth 
 living, he found that they had no answer; and 
 when, availing himself of so much of their teach- 
 ing as seemed to bear on the matter, he sought 
 to answer his own question, he found he had 
 been anticipated in this answer some nineteen 
 hundred years. Of course this discovery brought 
 him into direct conflict with some of the pet 
 notions of his contemporaries, and he has given 
 great offense by the cavalier fashion in which 
 he has treated the solemn pretensions of the 
 high priests of the new age. He has been re- 
 garded as a sort of etifani terrible, who asks all 
 manner of embarrassing questions and reveals 
 family secrets in the most disconcerting way; 
 and who, but for the restraints of good form 
 
 100
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 and the presence of company, would be sent 
 supperless to bed. One has yet to read any 
 serious and sufficient answer, however, to his 
 comments on modern thought. 
 
 It was doubtless this experience in the search 
 for satisfying answers to the questions of the 
 human spirit which made Chesterton so discern- 
 ing and sympathetic a commentator on Browning. 
 For the poet himself passed through much the 
 same movement of thought. As we have seen, 
 he shared the spirit of revolt with which the 
 nineteenth century began. The present is not 
 the first age which has paid tribute to the scien- 
 tific spirit or has questioned the teachings of 
 the fathers. The classicism which was displaced 
 by the romantic movement in literature and art 
 during the first quarter of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury was quite as smugly superficial as the mid- 
 Victorian period, and was as energetically repu- 
 diated by the generation which succeeded. Our 
 young men shrug their shoulders at any idea older 
 than Darwin; the French Revolution abohshed 
 the calendar and decreed that 1793 should be the 
 Year One. 
 
 No youth of sensitive soul, least of all a poet, 
 could escape the influence of such a period. 
 Byron was fairly Nietzschean in the abandon 
 with which he asserted himself and his right to 
 obey his impulses no matter what lesser beings 
 
 101
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 siittVrod tluTcby. Shelley's iittitiide toward mar- 
 riage iiuisl have satisfied the ideas of Inez Mil- 
 hoUand or Elinor (ilyn. It is not to be wondered 
 at (liat the young Browning, that slender youth 
 with clustering curls and lemon-colored gloves 
 whom Mrs. Orr describes, who was given to 
 flinging out of his Camberwell home at night 
 to follow the camp fires of gypsies, who lived for 
 two years on bread and potatoes, who made 
 his first trip to the Mediterranean the sole pas- 
 senger on a small sailing vessel, making friends 
 with the rough crew; this son of a middleclass 
 English home whose soul was always too big 
 for his body, and who lived, beneath so common- 
 place an exterior, such a volcanic inner life as I 
 have sought to describe — that such a youth 
 should have been a passionate admirer of Shel- 
 ley, and professed himself a freethinker and an 
 atheist. 
 
 But Browning was a greater poet than Byron 
 or Shelley. His soul was tuned to vaster har- 
 monies. He touched life at more points. His 
 nature was sounder and more wholesome. His 
 intense sympathy for the human spirit in its 
 inner struggles and aspirations enabled him to 
 extend a juster valuation to its external condi- 
 tions. Byron, with all his genius, was a spoiled 
 child, selfish and vain, whose shallow cynicism 
 was little more than the rage of such a youth 
 at a world which will not lend itself to his whims. 
 Shelley's infinitely finer nature was equally ill 
 
 10^
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 adapted to do battle with the workaday world, 
 whose prejudices he could never understand, 
 whose conventional laws seemed to him utterly 
 stupid, the inexorable conditions of life in which 
 stirred him to strenuous but ineffectual revolt. 
 Browning's saner spirit, equally conscious of the 
 shallowness of conventional morality and the 
 stupidity of social rules, nevertheless felt be- 
 neath the traditions of the world the instinctive 
 workings of the moral consciousness and recog- 
 nized in them the necessary conditions of life 
 in a social order. Less absorbed in himself, in 
 his own desires and emotions, yet impelled by 
 the intense individualism of his nature to find 
 in the soul-life of the individual the chief end and 
 purpose of human existence, he escaped, on the 
 one hand, the lawless selfishness of Byron and, 
 on the other, the equally lawless social anarchy 
 of Shelley. Life to him was full of meaning. 
 The conditions with which any man found him- 
 self surrounded were, after all, but a "stuff to 
 try the soul's strength on," and were of infinitely 
 less importance than the manner in which he 
 conducted himself under all conditions. Accord- 
 ingly, he wasted no time either in morbid self- 
 pity or in wild revolt, but set himself directly 
 to the task of understanding life as he found 
 it and asking himself how a man should set 
 about to get the most out of it. 
 
 The path thus chosen led him inevitably to 
 the spiritual problems which underlie all human 
 
 103
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 existence. He was concerned not with causes 
 but with purposes, not witli explanations and 
 classifications but with evaluations. The artist- 
 soul in him found life full of beauty, but he 
 found it full of couflict and contradiction withal. 
 He could no more describe the joys and sorrows, 
 the sins and struggles of men and women with- 
 out asking what all these things mean than 
 Turner could paint a sunset without analyzing 
 its colors into their primary tints, that he might 
 choose what pigments would reproduce them. 
 
 But when he undertook to find an answer 
 to these questionings the poet was led straight 
 to essential Christianity. The God whom he 
 thought he had discarded became the only sure 
 foundation for life. The Christ whom the churches 
 so feebly represented became the supreme guar- 
 anty for the primal Love, without which no 
 meaning or purpose to human existence can be 
 found. The moral conventions which the British 
 public obeyed in such narrow and superficial 
 fashion became the ultimate bases of the social 
 order. The orthodox notion of life as a "pro- 
 bation," where the soul's choice is made between 
 heaven and hell, became an interpretation of the 
 hardships and struggles whereby men and women 
 learn the lessons of this primary school and are 
 fitted for graduation into the larger life beyond, 
 while the crude pictures of a future state painted 
 by the preacluM-s became the broad opportunity 
 of an immortal destiny which alone can give 
 
 104
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 meaning to the brief and fragmentary existence 
 of the earthly years. 
 
 The moderns have discovered that, with all 
 his apparent breadth of sympathy and uncon- 
 ventional ethical interest, Browning remained 
 mid- Victorian in his instinctive moral reactions. 
 To be sure! It was this frank acceptance of the 
 main outlines of an interpretation of life which 
 set him free to work out its deeper meaning. 
 The poets of revolt were so absorbed in their 
 own emotions or in fulminating their bolts against 
 the abuses of the social order that they had no 
 time left to ask what it was all about or upon 
 what conditions a worth-while soul-life is possi- 
 ble. The moderns are equally self-absorbed. 
 When they turn from themselves and their 
 hysterical demand for "self-assertion" they be- 
 come pure empiricists, disinterested collators of 
 unrelated "facts," to ask the meaning of which 
 were an impertinence. Browning took the moral 
 framework for granted and turned his attention 
 to life itself; not as a museum of dried and 
 mounted specimens to be catalogued, but as a 
 world of eager and absorbing interest in which 
 everything bore some relation to everything else, 
 and whose manifoldness and complexity cried 
 aloud some great soul-stirring message, could 
 one but interpret its meaning. "To find that 
 meaning was his meat and drink." And when 
 he sought the key he founti it in the essential 
 teachings of that faith which was so crudely and 
 
 105
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 imperfectly held l)y the world about him, that 
 Christianily wliieh tlie Revohilion had "bowed 
 out with tluuiks for its provisioual services." 
 
 n 
 
 In this the poet has given double offense: he 
 has accepted the ancient traditions of religion, 
 and he has gone behind the empirical facts to 
 their essential meaning. This is being tender- 
 minded indeed! It is to be both orthodox and a 
 metaphysician. Of a truth this man was no 
 thinker! 
 
 Thus it appears that the suggestion that 
 Browning was primarily a poet rather than a 
 philosopher is one which may cut both ways. 
 It has been adopted with suspicious alacrity by 
 those who think thereby to discount his influence 
 in the world of thought. I read a vigorous edi- 
 torial in a Sunday paper the other day to the 
 effect that while it must be admitted that 
 Browning at times displays genuine poetic feel- 
 ing, as a thinker he ranks far below Wordsworth 
 or Shelley; he was, in fact, the peddler of a vague 
 German transcendentalism long since cast on the 
 rubbish heap. When his verse is real poetry 
 it is not without merit, but as for his philosophy, 
 pouf ! 
 
 I shall not discuss at this point either the 
 soundness of Browning's philosophy or its rela- 
 tion to German transcendentalism; but I venture 
 
 106
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 to suggest that the fact that his fundamental 
 conceptions of hfe rest on poetic insight rather 
 than on logical acumen does not necessarily dis- 
 credit them. The critic should reread his Hazlitt 
 and his Emerson. Doubtless a poet, in certain 
 moods, is but the weaver of entrancing fancies, 
 giving "to airy nothings a local habitation and 
 a name"; but in other moods he becomes the 
 organ of direct spiritual vision, declaring the 
 things which must be true whether logic has 
 arrived or is capable of arriving at them or not. 
 
 A good many years ago, in a Western State, a 
 sensible old farmer was elected to a quasi-judicial 
 office. He went to a friend who was a jurist 
 of experience and asked for some suggestions as 
 to the discharge of his new duties. "When any 
 matter is brought before you," said the judge, 
 "give your decision, but don't give your reasons 
 for it. The chances are your decision will be 
 right, but your reasons will be wrong." Of 
 course what he meant was that the old man's 
 judgment would be based on the direct working 
 of his common sense in the light of his long ex- 
 perience of life, while his scanty knowledge of 
 law and his lack of judicial training would render 
 his legal reasoning highly amateurish and un- 
 certain. 
 
 It does not require an extended acquaintance 
 with theological and devotional literature to find 
 in it a wide commentary on this principle. The 
 scholastic philosophy which afforded the frame- 
 
 107
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 work for tlic Divine Comedy has passed away 
 with the PtoK'iiKiie astronomy, but that does 
 not hinder motiern readers from finding im- 
 mense spiritual vahie in the study of Dante. 
 George Ehot was a devoted reader of Thomas a 
 Kempis. The two had httle in common on 
 the basis of theological theory', but the hungry 
 heart of a great woman found much spiritual 
 food in the insight of the mediaeval mystic. The 
 modern world has discarded most of John Bun- 
 yan's doctrines, but who has not been both 
 charmed and uplifted by Pilgrim's Progress? 
 Life makes its own impress on the soul of a deeply 
 spiritual man, and when he declares the lessons 
 he has learned they are valid for all time, whether 
 one can accept his logical and theological frame- 
 work or not. 
 
 But this is not all of the matter. When our 
 farmer friend had rendered his decisions his legal 
 9,dviser might have analyzed them and have 
 shown the principles of jurisprudence on which 
 they were really based. If, then, the decisions 
 were indeed just, they would bear convincing 
 witness to the soundness of the implicit legal | 
 doctrine. The same is true in literature. The S 
 formal dogmas of a Kempis or Bunyan may or 
 may not be important, but their spiritual judg- 
 ment of life was sound, as their power over men^, 
 in succeeding generations testifies. If, then, it 
 can be shown that this rested on certain funda- 
 mental convictions regarding life and its founda- 
 
 108
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 tions without which no such judgment could be 
 passed, we have the strongest possible testimony 
 to the abiding worth and the essential truth of 
 that fundamental intellectual basis. Whether 
 life rests at bottom on a material or a spiritual 
 foundation is an intellectual question, a matter 
 of philosophical or theological interpretation. If 
 it can be shown that on a materialistic basis 
 spiritual life is impossible and spiritual values 
 meaningless, and if, nevertheless, the character 
 and work of those who have seen most deeply 
 into life is such as to convince us of the abiding 
 worth of spiritual things, this becomes the high- 
 est possible witness to the truth of the spiritual 
 philosophy. If logic cannot lead us beyond the 
 material, so much the worse for logic. It is 
 not the spiritual universe which is discredited 
 thereby, but the logical instrument wherewith 
 we have sought to grasp reality. 
 
 This is the essential meaning of Bergson's 
 philosophy. In setting up intuition as the in- 
 strument of ultimate truth he does not discredit 
 logic in its own field of formal science. He merely 
 points out that the logical reason can never get 
 beyond the cinematographic reproduction of real- 
 ity, it can never give us reality itself. This 
 comes to us, if at all, only through the direct 
 grasp of life upon life which we call intuition. 
 A hotel in a Western city created Homeric merri- 
 ment a few months ago when it wrote letters 
 to all the actors named in a much-advertised 
 
 109
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 theatrical production inviting them to make its 
 hostelry their heuchiuarters during their stay in 
 the city, only to discover after the letters had 
 been sent that the performance was a moving- 
 picture show! The actors had disappeared be- 
 tween the films — nothing came to town but the 
 aj)pearance of reality. The criticism of Kant, 
 no less than that of Herbert Spencer, long ago 
 showed that logic can never get us any further 
 than such a lifeless reproduction of reality. Men 
 live and life goes forward not by the logical but 
 by the practical reason, which is nothing, after 
 all, but the frank acceptance of intuition. Achilles 
 overtakes the tortoise, Diogenes walks about. 
 So friendship and patriotism and love and re- 
 ligious faith maintain themselves in experience 
 and approve their right and worth to the heart 
 of man despite the limitations of his logical 
 faculty. In like manner flowers somehow escape 
 botany, as life eludes the surgeon's scalpel. 
 Logic can analyze and science record the bare 
 superficial facts, as that water turns to ice at 
 one temperature and to steam at another, or that 
 Columbus discovered America in 1492, or that 
 the invention of gunpowder hastened the over- 
 throw of feudalism. But the human values of 
 these facts, the emotions and purposes that grow 
 out of them or have been put into them, can 
 be given us only by the poet and the artist. 
 Apart from these human and spiritual values 
 the facts are as barren and useless as desert sand, 
 
 110
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 and the bare cataloguing of them an occupation 
 as significant as playing with spools in a home 
 for the feeble-minded. Science is of use to the 
 world only in so far as it becomes a vehicle 
 for the enrichment of life, for the heightening 
 of human values; and this larger enterprise 
 waits upon the spiritual evaluation of reality 
 which the intuition alone can render. If in the 
 progress of this discovery and interpretation of 
 human values certain fundamental ways of look- 
 ing at life are brought to light which alone can 
 give meaning to the events and experiences 
 which science records, the logical reason has 
 nothing to say further than to take these also 
 into account as material for interpretation and 
 to incorporate them into our total view of re- 
 ality. Their validity rests not on logic but on 
 life. 
 
 This is likewise the essential meaning of prag- 
 matism. Doubtless the pragmatists have con- 
 ceded too much when they have tried to do with- 
 out the concept of truth altogether, and to content 
 themselves with the moving film which looks 
 like life. But what they have meant to say is 
 that the mental and spiritual life exist in their 
 own right and are entitled to whatever they need 
 in the world; that what we mean when we say 
 that anything is true is that it ministers to such 
 a need, and conversely, that anything which so 
 ministers is entitled to be regarded as true. To 
 a mere layman it would seem that in order to 
 
 111
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 iiiJike their principle broad enough to cover all 
 hiniKin experience the pragnuitists will have 
 to include virtuully the very demands of reason 
 they have discarded; that they will have to take 
 into account both the moving film and the life- 
 movement which it records, and that provision 
 must, iifter all, be made at some hostelry for the 
 flesh-and-blood actors themselves. Bergson seems 
 to have come nearer to a sound statement of 
 the principle they were "ettling after," as the 
 Scotch say, than the pragmatists themselves; but 
 the pragmatist criticism has been immensely 
 useful in setting us free from the idols of the 
 den which threatened to deprive the soul of its 
 rights in a world so much bigger than logic as 
 this world in which we live. The significance of 
 pragmatism for the common life is this, that it 
 enlarges our conception of truth and gives us 
 courage to accept the validity of many things 
 which we need for our happiness, as Tyltyl 
 needed the Blue Bird, but which could never 
 be confined within the bars of our logical cage. 
 It sets us free to trust our intuitions, to accept 
 those immediate convictions of truth which 
 reason often seems to discredit; which at best 
 it can only confirm but never originate. 
 
 If certain ways of thinking about life have 
 proved useful to the progress of the race, if they 
 make life more worth living, if they have power 
 to lift men out of the sordidness of material aims 
 and to make them more truly and greatly men, 
 
 112
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 then these ways of thinking stand in their own 
 right, and anything in the teachings of science 
 and philosophy which seems to oppose them 
 must be discredited as at best but partial and 
 half -understood truth. 
 
 These spiritual convictions may in their turn 
 have been imperfectly understood and wrongly 
 applied. There is nothing in this line of reason- 
 ing which can properly be held to establish any 
 particular set of dogmas; to decide, for example, 
 between transubstantiation and consubstantia- 
 tion, or between supra- and infralapsarianism. 
 But it can and does bear witness to the creative 
 principles which the particular dogmas were 
 attempts to express and which must be taken 
 into account in any thoroughgoing interpretation 
 of human experience. 
 
 It is at this point that art in general and poetry 
 
 in particular becomes the handmaid of spiritual 
 
 truth. 
 
 k 
 
 , . . Ay, and while your common men 
 Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine, 
 And dust the flaunty carpets of the world 
 For kings to walk on, or our president. 
 The poet suddenly will catch them^ up 
 With his voice like a thunder — "This is soul. 
 This is life, this word is being said in heaven. 
 Here's God down on us! what are you about?" 
 How all those workers start amid their work. 
 Look round, look up, and feel, a moment's space. 
 That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade. 
 Is not the imperative labor after all! 
 
 (Mrs. Browning, "Aurora Leigh.") 
 
 113
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 III 
 
 It is noteworthy tluil when Browning does 
 iindortuko to forinuhite ii j)liilosophy he antici- 
 pjilos the attempt of pragmatism to discount 
 pliilosopliical scepticism at the counter of the 
 practical reason. The poet has given much 
 offense by dechiring the impossibihty of knowl- 
 edge and attempting to substitute love therefor. 
 Professor Lockwood devotes the most important 
 chapter in his little book on Browning as a Re- 
 ligious Teacher to a critique of the poet's reason- 
 ing at this point. I have already confessed that 
 his attempt to find philosophical justification for 
 his views of life leaves much to be desired; but 
 what Professor Lockwood fails to see is that 
 Browning was a pragmatist born out of due 
 time, before James and Bergson had made clear 
 the antinomy which lies at the heart of all log- 
 ical reasoning, and had justified intuition as an 
 organ of real knowledge. 
 
 What Browning felt, what all poets and prophets 
 have felt, was the profound limitations of the 
 scientific method, with its moving-picture repro- 
 duction of life masquerading as life itself. Brown- 
 ing proclaimed his right to feel his way into the 
 heart of life. He insisted that love has its own 
 organs of knowledge, which function when the 
 reason is powerless; that the honest heart can 
 find in itself the clew of life's maze, while the 
 heart which is blinded by its own moral weakness 
 
 114
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 is bound to go wrong in spite of the best guides 
 which knowledge and culture can afford. It 
 was the same truth which Tennyson felt no less 
 strongly : 
 
 A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part, 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 
 Stood up and answered, "I have felt!" 
 
 Browning was himself a splendid illustration 
 of his own philosophy, in that his logical reason 
 tends forever to lead him into the mists of spec- 
 ulation or the hair-splitting subtleties of casuistry, 
 but when he gives the rein to his spiritual in- 
 tuition he discovers for us a wealth of truth 
 which will forever enrich humanity and remain 
 a helpful guide to the interpretation of experience. 
 
 Thus, while maintaining my thesis that Brown- 
 ing was primarily a poet rather than a philosopher, 
 I am impelled to take back with the left hand 
 what I gave at the beginning with the right, 
 in that I have disclaimed the central importance 
 of his "teaching," urging, rather, the artistic 
 beauty and power of his poetry, its unrivaled 
 human interest, its marvelous portrayal of life 
 in its variety and complexity, its dignity and 
 worth, bidding the reader give himself up to the 
 spell of the artist and take no thought for his 
 philosophy; now, I make bold to declare that 
 it is his spiritual insight which is the supreme 
 contribution of his poetry to the life of men. 
 
 115
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 The mistjike men have made is in looking for 
 this insiglil'iii tlio ar<!:iimcnts of the pliilosopher 
 rather than in the art of the poet. Their instinct 
 was sound when they felt him to be a great 
 teacher, their error was in undertaking to divorce 
 his teaching from his art. It is his spiritual in- 
 sight which they have acknowledged when they 
 have talked about his philosophy. This is what 
 I myself found in him in those early days of my 
 enthusiastic discipleship, before the recognition of 
 his artistic power awakened me from my "dog- 
 matic slumber." It is this to which I come back 
 after having gained the broader vision of life 
 which the artist's universal sympathy and deep, 
 spontaneous gladness have created in my soul. 
 The jewel has gained new beauty from its setting, 
 the spiritual truth new significance from the 
 broader human interest out of which it grows. 
 
 What I have learned and what I desire to 
 teach others is that not only are we compelled 
 to find the meaning of Browning's poetry, not 
 in any simple and forthright statement of truth 
 in which the poet has summed up his intellectual 
 convictions, but, rather, by absorbing truths 
 which are held in solution throughout the whole 
 of his work; but the process by which the poet 
 himself came into possession of the truth is not 
 other than this. He gathers it out of life itself; 
 not by logical, which is akin to chemical, analysis, 
 a process whereby one element after another is 
 isolated and identified, but, rather, by synthesis, 
 
 116
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 by a sympathetic identification of himself with 
 his fellows until he has somehow gathered up 
 into his own experience all that life could teach 
 him, whence he distills it for us in the alembic 
 of his artistic genius. He nowhere gives us 
 
 pure, crude fact, 
 Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard 
 And brains high-blooded ticked. 
 
 Rather he everywhere fuses his own soul with 
 that crude inert stuff, whereby he rounds it 
 into a ring-thing fit to wear. And when it is 
 done and a spurt of the proper fiery acid of crit- 
 icism o'er its face removes all trace of alloy, we 
 have indeed pure virgin gold; not of mere fact 
 but of essential spiritual truth whereby we are 
 brought into a deeper understanding of our own 
 life, its hopes and fears, its meaning and its 
 destiny. 
 
 "The Ring and The Book," from which I have 
 just quoted, serves at once as the completest 
 embodiment of the poet's ripe thought and the 
 most perfect example of his method of arriving 
 at truth. I mentioned the poem to a youthful 
 literary friend the other evening. "Oh," he said, 
 "you must admit that it is frightfully long- 
 winded." The Sunday editorial to which I 
 referred a moment ago declared it "frankly a 
 bore." The learned editor of a certain many- 
 volumed encyclopaedia of universal literature, for 
 which I paid two dollars per month for an oppres- 
 
 117
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 sively long season, dismissed it with the remark 
 that tho poom is "twciity-lwo thousand lines long, 
 all about a Jionian nuu-der trial." Bui I think 
 of the arid stretches which lay an unbearable 
 burden on the soul of the determined reader 
 who will wade through all the second part of 
 "Faust"; no man has ever, unless he were a Ger- 
 man critic, read the entire second part of "Don 
 Quixote"; six books of the "Iliad" are regarded 
 as sufficient for the cultural needs of the average 
 youth, and I have myself never been able to 
 force my weary mind through the theological dis- 
 cussions of the "Paradiso." Remembering these 
 things, I turn with delight to the judgment of 
 Chesterton, who declared "The Ring and The 
 Book" an epic worthy of a place beside the classical 
 masterpieces of poetic genius. These were written, 
 he says, for an age when men fought with dragons; 
 Browning wrote for an age which fights with 
 microbes. "The Ring and The Book" is a micro- 
 scopic study of the significance of the infinitely 
 little. The poet shows us truth pieced together 
 in tiny fragments, like a thirteenth-century 
 stained-glass window. He will find for us moral 
 heroism and spiritual grandeur amid the dust 
 heap and ash bin of life. So he rescues this 
 forgotten woe out of the accumulated rubbish so 
 vividly described in the Square of San Lorenzo, 
 this sordid police-court record lost for centuries 
 amid the greater crimes which displaced it in 
 the world's gossip, and by it proves 
 
 118
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 Our human speech is nought. 
 Our human testimony false, our fame 
 And human estimation words and wind. 
 
 The pure in heart find in themselves the torch 
 whereby they walk in a plain path while others 
 wander in endless mazes lost. Shallow self- 
 interest and idle gossip-mongering remain blind 
 and unknowing even when the pure gold of 
 truth lies patent before their eyes. The pam- 
 pered servants of church and state prove dull- 
 witted and slow of heart in the crisis, while 
 child-wife and soldier-priest leap headlong to the 
 heart of reality. They pierce through the tissue 
 of lies wherewith they are surrounded and lay 
 hold unerringly on essential truth, both in each 
 other and in the demands of the situation. The 
 plants "imbedded yonder south, to mellow in 
 the morning, made fat by the master's eye," 
 yield such timid leaf. The one blossom which 
 glads the heart of the Pope-gardener, his "rose 
 he gathers for the breast of God," is but a "chance- 
 sown, cleft-nursed seed," "born mid the briers of 
 his inclosure." The plainest principles of right 
 and justice lose their power when committed to 
 the guardianship of logical systems and author- 
 itative dogmas, only to spring forth in pristine 
 splendor in the heart and mind made sensitive 
 by loyalty and obedience, 
 
 authentic to the experienced ear 
 O' the good and faithful servant. 
 
 In a word, goodness and truth are in this 
 119
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 world forever inextricably intermingled with the 
 evil and the false, the sordid and the common- 
 place. They are to be discovered and disen- 
 tangled, not by learning or skill in dialectic, not 
 by scientific investigation or philosophical argu- 
 ment, but by direct spiritual insight — a faculty 
 whose effectiveness is directly proportioned to 
 the purity and loyalty of the soul. These are 
 the things which are hid from the wise and pru- 
 dent and revealed unto babes. The pure in 
 heart see God, and they that do hunger and 
 thirst after righteousness walk unperplexed in 
 that path which shineth more and more unto 
 the perfect day. 
 
 Of course "The Ring and The Book" means 
 much more than this. It is a cross-section of 
 life itself, wherein we may find glimpses of almost 
 every phase of human experience, traces of every 
 variety of truth. I know of no other writing 
 of modern times which contains so much ripe 
 observation of life, so much wise understanding 
 of the human heart. As Goethe put the distilled 
 wisdom of a lifetime into the second part of 
 "Faust," so Browning has poured into this vessel 
 red wine of a mighty pulse trodden out of the 
 very heart of life. To find only one meaning, 
 or even one chief meaning, in such a poem is 
 akin to the attempt so often made to interpret 
 human history upon a single principle, like the 
 influence of climate or the working of economic 
 interest. The very complexity of the poem 
 
 120
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 itself, in its plan and structure, ought to be 
 sufficient warning against such an attempt. The 
 sordidness of greed, the strength of "the terrible 
 meek," the significance of "life's terrible choice," 
 the virtue of tolerance, the sweetness of true 
 womanhood and the elements of the strongest 
 and most virile manliness — these and many other 
 things are taught in the poem, up to the Pope's 
 analysis of the problem of doubt, the defense 
 of Christianity and the significance of faith. 
 Herein appears the futility of such a suggestion 
 as I recently came across, that Browning's mid- 
 Victorian middle-class conscience could not re- 
 cover its equanimity after so fearful a breach of 
 the conventions as his elopement with E. B. B., 
 and the poem was written to justify such an 
 occasional defiance of Mrs. Grundy! Such crit- 
 ical bosh inclines one to believe not only in a 
 personal devil but in a literal Inferno for critics. 
 
 The theory of knowledge which the poet thus 
 expounded in the greatest and ripest of his writings 
 does not differ essentially from the philosophy 
 set forth in his youth in "Paracelsus." The arch- 
 quack of the sixteenth century, whose name, 
 Bombastus, has been perpetuated in the word 
 which describes his most glaring characteristic, 
 was chosen by Browning to embody the passion 
 for pure science, for the absolute intellectual 
 mastery of life. It was impossible for Browning 
 not to make him human and lovable, but he 
 
 121
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 does not disguise liis intellectual iirrogance, his 
 contempt for humanity, and his resulting failure 
 to grasp essential truth. The (juiet Festus, the 
 gentle jNIichal, are infinitely nearer to the real 
 secret of life than the tempestuous genius whose 
 eager intellect wears out his body in the vain 
 attempt to master life through knowledge. Aprile 
 the poet fails equally and for the opposite reason. 
 He has tried to stretch mere sentiment into a 
 garment vast enough to clothe creation. The 
 unloveliness of tilings — and folks — which stirs 
 Paracelsus to rage and scorn drives the weaker 
 nature of the poet to madness. Even love, apart 
 from intellectual grasp and practical effort to 
 serve humanity, fails to attain to the true secret 
 of life; yet Paracelsus has somewhat to learn 
 from Aprile. None the less he continues to fail 
 when he undertakes to put his learning to the 
 service of his fellows, because he still despises 
 them. He has not yet become one with them. 
 He attempts to reach down to them from his 
 lofty height instead of stooping to share their 
 weakness and failure, and hence he still must 
 fail. Truth is attained only as one learns to 
 become one with all his fellow men in their struggle 
 and loss and sin, until, through the common 
 experience of life, he arrives at the deep wis- 
 dom of sympathy and love. 
 
 There is something Paracelsus-like in the 
 Bombastus of the modern world, Nietzsche, 
 with his immense scorn of all that mankind has 
 
 122
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 held sacred, his foreshadowing of the super- 
 man, who by the sheer force of his will-to-power 
 shall bend the universe to his own ends. Not 
 otherwise did Paracelsus shut his ears to the 
 pleadings of Michal, to match his will against 
 the powers of destiny. In Nietzsche's case it 
 was Paracelsus who was driven mad; and the 
 age which lent its ears to his demand for self- 
 assertion seems likely to beat its head against 
 the bars of the moral imperative until it shall 
 learn again the divine folly of love and sacrifice. 
 
 IV 
 
 With this recognition of a knowledge of life 
 to be attained through love, of the intuition of 
 the soul as affording an organ for the inter- 
 pretation of reality, we are, with Bishop Blou- 
 gram, back on Christian ground. For this is 
 in effect nothing less than religion's appeal to 
 faith. 
 
 Faith has been variously defined as "believing 
 what one knows isn't so"; as ^'credo quia im- 
 jyossihile^ ; as uncritical credulity, an attitude of 
 mind which accepts equally fairies and angels, 
 mediseval miracles and the wonder-stories of the 
 Gospels; as unquestioning obedience to ecclesi- 
 astical authority, the devout acceptance of the 
 creed, reliance upon the infallibility of the Scrip- 
 tures, and so on. 
 
 As a matter of fact, faith is none of these 
 123
 
 (XIXFESSIOXS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 things. Faith may exist in company witli super- 
 stitious credulity, or it may be as keenly critical 
 as the most empirical of sciences. It may render 
 submission to the church, or it may cast itself 
 boldly on the spiritual judgment of the humblest 
 individual. 
 
 For faith, at bottom, is nothing in the world 
 but the recognition of a realm of truth which 
 transcends both sense-perception and the log- 
 ical reason. It regards the normal demands of 
 life, soul and body, as checks drawn on the 
 Bank of Reality, whose assets are the universe; 
 and it presents them forthwith for payment, 
 refusing to believe that God is bankrupt. 
 
 That there is an element of faith in the opera- 
 tions of the mind itself a little reflection shows. 
 The science of Haeckel, the philosophy of Spencer, 
 are at bottom as mystical as the piety of Thomas 
 a Kempis. The only real difference between 
 them is with regard to the boundaries of this 
 realm which is reached through intuition. Haeckel 
 would establish the frontier to include the know- 
 ability of the material universe — its conformity 
 to the laws of thought, the axioms of mathe- 
 matics and the presuppositions of physical science. 
 He would exclude the abstractions of meta- 
 physics. Spencer would include the latter, but 
 would draw the line at the spiritual longings 
 of the human heart. Religion simply extends the 
 boundary to the uttermost limits of Reality, and 
 claims the right of the human sj^irit to hold the 
 
 124
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 whole realm of Existence in fief to the Father 
 of Spirits. 
 
 Even Chesterton has not always thought 
 clearly at this point. He seems to confuse faith 
 with the acceptance of authority. He reverses 
 Blougram's reasoning. The Bishop defended his 
 adherence to the Catholic tradition on the ground 
 that if one begins to examine and question, 
 there is no telling where to stop : 
 
 Cut the Naples liquefaction — what comes last 
 But Fichte's clever cut at God himself? 
 
 Chesterton says: "The church has shown me 
 the meaning of the highest spiritual realities; 
 perhaps I had better accept all her lesser doc- 
 trines as well. She has taught me to believe 
 in God, therefore I believe in ghosts and fairies." 
 This is to confuse the whole problem by stand- 
 ing the pyramid upon its apex. Of course, if 
 belief in God depends on nothing but the au- 
 thority of the church, then to question that 
 authority in the least things is to undermine it 
 in the greatest. But if, as it may be, we accept 
 the teaching of the church regarding God be- 
 cause that satisfies our spiritual hunger, it but 
 clouds the issue to lug in the discussion of lesser 
 matters which have not the force of this direct 
 spiritual appeal. Of a truth, belief in fairies is 
 not essential to belief in God — why then discuss 
 fairies? Since many men have actually accepted 
 the spiritual teachings of Christianity without 
 
 125
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 acknowledging the authority of the church, why 
 insist that there may possibly be something in 
 the Naples liquefaction or the celibacy of the 
 clergy? Granted the possibility, it but darkens 
 counsel to introduce debatable minutiae of doc- 
 trine in a discussion of fundamental questions. 
 Suppose the church to have been wrong in a 
 thousand particulars; cut the fairies and the 
 doctrine of transubstantiation, the cehbacy of 
 the clergy and the infallibility of the Pope if 
 you like; cut even the historical accuracy of the 
 New Testament records or the ultimate validity 
 of Saint Paul's interpretation of the crucifixion 
 of Jesus; still the fundamental historicity of the 
 Gospels, the spiritual significance of the char- 
 acter of Christ, the essential truth of his religious 
 and ethical teachings have not been touched — 
 much less the still deeper question of the spiritual 
 interpretation of Reality itself. Faith may accept 
 the last and deny the first and yet be entirely 
 within its rights. 
 
 It is noteworthy that, as a matter of fact, 
 Browning saw more clearly at this point than 
 most religious teachers of his day or our own. 
 Whenever he addressed himself to the funda- 
 mental problem of faith and doubt he stripped 
 it at once of all adventitious issues and struck 
 straight at the heart of the matter. In "A 
 Death in the Desert" Saint John foresees the 
 ultimate doubt of the coming centuries, to which 
 
 126
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 the traditions of the gospel story have become 
 not so much an aid to faith as additional matter 
 for question and debate. He hears men asking, 
 
 "Was John once, and did he say he saw? 
 Assure us, ere we ask what he might see." 
 
 With never a word about the evidence for the 
 historical truth of the story, he proceeds to point 
 out that without this conception of life as grounded 
 in Infinite Love all the larger values fall to the 
 ground; that either the story is essentially true, 
 or else man is left to feed his spiritual longings 
 on his own nature, which as the highest reality 
 in existence — the only spiritual reality — must 
 henceforth take the place of the God it has ruled 
 out; which is spiritual suicide. On the other 
 hand, 
 
 The acknowledgment of God 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. 
 
 In Hke manner the Pope, facing the spiritual 
 decay of his own time, when the externals of 
 faith were so implicitly accepted by men who 
 failed utterly to grasp their real significance, 
 asks whether a new age may not be about to 
 dawn, in which faith shall once more gain vital- 
 ity through having to fight for its very life against 
 a doubt which shall impeach its deepest con- 
 victions. In this manner did Browning inter- 
 pret the age of doubt and spiritual conflict which 
 
 127
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 this modern period has proved to be. The poet 
 and his Pope look forward iindaiinled to sucli 
 a contest, assured that liowever imperfect our 
 representations of spiritual truth, the story of 
 Divine Love and Sacrifice must inevitably com- 
 mend itself to the heart which unfeignedly seeks 
 for spiritual sustenance. 
 
 Two things in Browning's representation of 
 religious faith have a bearing on this matter 
 of the right of the soul to trust its intuitions. 
 The first is the insight that to make spiritual 
 truth as self-evident as the empirical truths of 
 everyday life would be to destroy its ethical 
 significance. Both Saint John and the Pope 
 employ this argument, which reappears in many 
 other passages. There is no moral value in the 
 recognition of the facts of nature. A burnt 
 child fears the fire, but there is no moral quality 
 to such fear. The obedience which is purchased 
 by a gift of candy or a day at the circus is not 
 ethical obedience. If spiritual truth were as 
 self-evident as the axioms of mathematics, then 
 no higher motive than self-interest would be 
 involved in its acceptance. The man who set 
 himself in opposition would simply be a fool. 
 But leave room for doubt, and at once the spir- 
 itual values become a touchstone to prove the 
 soul. The man who wants them to be true will 
 live by them, will make them at all cost the 
 working basis of his practical philosophy, while 
 the man who prefers a life of self-indulgence 
 
 128
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 can still find opportunity to excuse himself. 
 Thus life becomes once more a task, an achieve- 
 ment, and the just shall live by his faith. 
 
 The second is the kindred assertion that the 
 real seat of faith is the will rather than the log- 
 ical reason. Here Browning once more antici- 
 pates Professor James. The ultimate question 
 is not what we think about life, but what we 
 are going to do about it. This is the meaning 
 of "Christmas Eve and Easter Day." The first 
 is a study in tolerance. The subject of this 
 vision of the Christ is first taught not to despise 
 any form of faith, however crude, which really 
 brings the soul into contact with the Divine 
 and inspires love in the hearts of men; and then 
 he is warned not to rest in a mood of complacent 
 indulgence to which all faiths seem equally good, 
 but to make sure that he has himself acted up 
 to the level of his superior insight. The second 
 begins with the line, "How very hard it is to be 
 a Christian!" The poet then expounds the 
 vision whereby an easy-going and self-satisfied 
 soul is taught that faith is not the settlement 
 of intellectual problems, but the resolute choice 
 of the highest good; and that the difficulties 
 which beset the upward path are but the chal- 
 lenge of the Almighty to shake us out of our 
 sloth and self-indulgence and impel us to the 
 great adventure of making life worth while. 
 
 I thought. How dreadful to be grudged 
 No ease henceforth as one that's judged. 
 
 129
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Ho learns how degraded is the lot of one who 
 is given all this world has to offer because he 
 had i)roven unworthy the higher good of heaven, 
 "left in God's contempt apart," "tame in earth's 
 paddock as her jirize." 
 
 This is the significance of "The Statue and 
 The Bust," which has caused such heart-burnings 
 to two generations of moralists. There is more 
 hope for the soul which resolutely follows evil 
 than for one wliich failed to embrace a wrong 
 choice through lack of resolution to carry out 
 its evil desires. 
 
 The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
 
 Is — the unUt lamp and the ungirt loin, 
 Though the end in sight was a vice, I say. 
 
 You of the virtue (we issue join) 
 How strive you? De te, fabula! 
 
 The heart of the matter was perhaps never 
 so forcefully put as in Bishop Blougram's challenge 
 to the smug complacency of his skeptical inter- 
 locutor, 
 
 "\Miat think you of Christ, friend, when all's said? 
 Like you this Christianity or not? 
 It may be false, but will you wish it true? 
 Has it your permission to be so if it can?" 
 
 In a word, faith means not merely the calm, 
 philosophical acceptance of the intuitions of the 
 soul, but the resolute purpose to act upon them, 
 to live as though they were indeed true. Small 
 wonder that the easy-going age in which we 
 
 130
 
 OF ORTHODOXY 
 
 live, absorbed in playing with the countless new 
 and entertaining toys which modern invention 
 and discovery has placed in its hands; an age 
 which has agreed that moral standards have no 
 ultimate validity, but are mere social conven- 
 tions of doubtful value, and which seeks in its 
 art and music to be rid of the restraints of form 
 that it may express itself in the untrammeled 
 freedom of individualism, finds such a poet "mid- 
 Victorian" and no thinker! Nevertheless, there 
 are not wanting signs that even this age is begin- 
 ning to awaken to the emptiness of life on any 
 basis less than the spiritual. The prodigal cannot 
 forever fill his belly with husks. Others besides 
 Chesterton are beginning to discover that the 
 longings of the soul are no different in this latest 
 of all the centuries from those of the infancy of 
 mankind, and that the truths which were valid 
 once shall endure to all time. 
 
 131
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 OF STRUCTURAL vs. ORNAMENTAL 
 TRUTH 
 
 In our eagerness to find intellectual justification 
 for our attitude toward life few of us stop to 
 realize that in the order of importance, no less 
 tluin that of time, life itself comes first and theory 
 second. The digestion of food does not wait upon 
 the study of physiology, nor the enjoyment of 
 roses and violets upon a knowledge of botany. 
 
 Stonewall Jackson is said to have had in his 
 army an old man who had long experience as a 
 bridge-builder, but whose education was in the 
 school of hard work. On one occasion it became 
 necessary to replace a bridge which the Yankees 
 had destroyed, and there was no time to lose. 
 The General called the old man into his tent and 
 explained the situation. "We must have that 
 bridge at the earliest possible moment," he said. 
 "Get a plan from the chief engineer and set to 
 work at once." In the morning the general met 
 the bridge-builder coming to report, and asked, 
 "Did the chief engineer give you the plan?" 
 "Gin'ral," replied the old man, "the bridge is 
 done. I don't know whether the picter is or not." 
 Life is a practical matter, and the building of its 
 bridges will not wait. Few of us have our "picter" 
 
 132
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 done when it comes time to report to the Gen- 
 eral. 
 
 Herein, once more, Hes the significance of our 
 discussion of the artist in his relation to the 
 philosopher. The poet shows us the bridge in 
 process of building — the thinker draws the plan. 
 At bottom the two have to deal with the same 
 essential principles. The practical man who has 
 learned building by rule of thumb does many 
 things which experience teaches him to be nec- 
 essary; the engineer knows the reason for it, and 
 can adapt it to unheard-of situations. When it 
 comes to building, not temporary structures to 
 meet a sudden emergency, but great permanent 
 highways for the world's traffic, then the theoreti- 
 cal and technical knowledge of the engineer 
 becomes of the utmost importance. A mistaken 
 theory, an error in the tenth decimal place, may 
 wreck the whole work. 
 
 But when the Brooklyn Bridge is finished, or 
 the great bridge across the Firth of Forth, then 
 comes the artist. He draws a picture. From 
 thence he goes to a rude bridge across a highland 
 burn and draws another. And when the two are 
 put side by side we begin to see that the essentials 
 in both structures are the same. Both rest on the 
 same laws, both embody the same essential 
 elements. The practical sense of the farmer and 
 the theoretical training of the engineer both came 
 to the same thing in the end. The artist was 
 neither builder nor engineer, but his artistic in- 
 
 X33
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 stiiicl led him to the structural features in the 
 work of both; and so he revealed not only their 
 essential kinship but also those things in the 
 work of both which were necessary and funda- 
 mental. 
 
 The religious faith of which we have been speak- 
 ing, the reliance upon intuition as the touchstone 
 of essential truth, is in effect the necessity which 
 is laid upon every man to build his bridge, and 
 the necessary recognition of the validity of 
 structural principles. The theologian and phi- 
 losopher are the engineers who work out the 
 general laws of building. The work of the artist 
 and poet rests of necessity upon the same laws and 
 emphasizes the same essentials of structural 
 drawing. For practical purposes under the con- 
 ditions of ordinary life, where not great rivers but 
 simple brooks are to be spanned, the ordinary 
 man may learn quite as much from the artist as 
 from the technician. This is what people mean 
 when they talk about seeking guidance from 
 the poet in matters of faith. It is not the 
 poet's business to work out in detail the technic 
 of life or its fundamental theory; but he shows 
 life actually going on, and his work reveals the 
 truths which are of central importance as that 
 of an artist reveals the structural lines of a 
 bridge. Even though the drawing may cover but 
 a small fragment of the whole, and may be con- 
 cerned to display the grace of its ornamentation 
 or the spider-web delicacy of its intricate fabric, 
 
 134
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 the artist cannot avoid showing the bearings of 
 truss and span. The more perfect his art, the 
 more readily can the instructed teach even the 
 casual observer to learn from the picture some of 
 the essential laws of construction. 
 
 We come back, therefore, from yet another 
 angle upon our contention that Browning is 
 primarily an artist rather than a theologian. 
 That he was an adept in the literature of philos- 
 ophy and theology there can be no doubt, nor 
 that it was of great service to him in the prac- 
 tice of his art. Michelangelo and Leonardo 
 were both thorough students of anatomy; but 
 that did not make them anatomists rather than 
 artists, it merely rendered their art more perfect. 
 No one would think of going to them to learn 
 anatomy; none the less, if he wanted to know the 
 essential perfection of the human jBgure, he would 
 go to the Sistine Chapel rather than to the dis- 
 secting room. The significance of Browning's 
 religious philosophy lies in the skill with which he 
 has indicated the structural bases of human life. 
 His poems are not an engineer's blue prints but an 
 artist's sketches, like Whistler's Battersea Bridge. 
 But the wayfaring man can learn more about 
 bridges from Whistler than from a work on 
 structural engineering, and the open-hearted 
 reader may get more sound theology from Brown- 
 ing than from his minister. He may learn what 
 truths in life are necessary and vital and what are 
 subordinate and incidental; and he gets them not 
 
 135
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 in skeleton form, detached from all vital connection 
 with reality like the scale-drawing of a structural 
 detail, but in living relation to the actual condi- 
 tions of life, where he may not only recognize 
 tliem and identify them in his own experience, but 
 may learn how they are combined with all that 
 goes to make up the complexity of everyday life. 
 
 Seen from this point of view, these keystones 
 and trusses in Browning's poetry become not the 
 poet's personal opinions, which carry no more 
 weight than anybody's opinions; they become the 
 unconscious testimony of art to essential truth. 
 They reveal the terrible spans and arches of reality, 
 and make clear both the piers upon which they 
 rest and the ties and braces by which they are 
 held together. 
 
 We must make haste to get away from this 
 figure, w'hich is beginning to run upon all fours. 
 The upshot of the whole matter is that the poet's 
 principal stress seems to fall upon ideas which are 
 vital in human experience, which have power to 
 give meaning and color to life, and without which, 
 as the state of mind of the present generation 
 shows, life is empty and barren, a thing of shreds 
 and patches. Let us go on now to see what are 
 these structural truths in the poet's message. 
 
 The corner stone of Browning's thinking is the 
 idea of God. 
 
 136
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 Like practically everyone else before the last 
 quarter of the nineteenth century, Browning 
 takes God for granted. It is true the earlier 
 period of revolt denied the divine existence. 
 Comte had declared that the idea of Law had 
 come to fill the all-important place in human 
 thought; that it had "conducted God to the 
 frontiers of the universe and bowed him out, 
 with thanks for his provisional services." Never- 
 theless, Voltaire founded a church in the name of 
 God, and the Revolution invented a Deity for 
 the new age, to take the place of the one which 
 had been discarded. The spiritual interpretation 
 of life was grounded so deeply in human experience 
 and thought that it could be dislodged only by 
 some thoroughgoing revolution like that afforded 
 by the doctrine of evolution. 
 
 Browning felt the growing chill of scientific 
 impersonalism, and sought to meet it by argument 
 in the mouths of Blougram and Saint John and 
 the Pope. The gist of that argument, as we have 
 seen, consisted of a defense of faith as an organ of 
 knowledge, or at least of life — a mode of reasoning 
 in which Browning anticipated the apologetic 
 method of the present day. The argument, as I 
 believe, is both sound and unanswerable, but 
 belief is seldom produced by argument. Of im- 
 mensely greater spiritual value is the place held 
 by the idea of God as the presupposition of the 
 poet's work, the ground of his whole view of life. 
 In "La Saisiaz" Browning writes himself as one 
 
 137
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 who "Bdiovod in tlic Soul, was very sure of God," 
 and the lino, in cfl'ecl, sums up liis whole philos- 
 ophy. The eonviclion that life in its essence is no 
 barren and meaningless phantasmagoria of eva- 
 nescent npj)arilions, still less the crude by-product 
 of a blind and purposeless mechanism, is the back- 
 ground of all he wrote. 
 
 It is expressed in the eager assurance of Paracel- 
 sus: 
 
 "In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: 
 He guides me and the bird. In his good time!" 
 
 It is the faith that sings in the happy voice of 
 Pippa: 
 
 "God's in his heaven, 
 
 All's right with the world." 
 
 I liave heard parsons in sermons denounce this 
 sentiment, declaring that very much is wrong 
 with the world; and that, besides, God is not in 
 heaven at all, but is immanent in the whole crea- 
 tion. The good men failed to see that the second 
 part of their doctrine destroyed the first; and that 
 the very idea of God means that, however mighty 
 the storm, the ship of creation is not drifting 
 rudderless and masterless through Chaos, but 
 her Captain is on the bridge, and "All's well!" 
 The whole story of Pippa is a commentary on her 
 song, a suggestion of the God who ruleth all 
 things according to the counsels of his own will. 
 
 The same faith forms the groundwork of the 
 calm philosophy of the Pope, summed up in his 
 conviction that even incurable moral blindness 
 
 138
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 and willful rebelliousness cannot ultimately 
 thwart the infinite purpose for good in which the 
 human soul has its root. The positive "which 
 must not be" disposes even of ultimate moral 
 failure as unthinkable. 
 
 If sometimes the assertion of this faith seems 
 somewhat robustious, if it gives rise to an opti- 
 mism so thoroughgoing as almost to abolish the 
 distinction between good and evil, we must 
 remember the currents of thought which even 
 during the poet's lifetime were bearing the modern 
 world in the direction of a barren and mechanical 
 interpretation of reality. Tennyson, who was 
 much more sensitive than Browning to the 
 thought-world with which he was surrounded, 
 finds himself at times well-nigh swept off his feet, 
 and can only "faintly trust the larger hope." 
 The positive assurance of his brother poet that 
 the spiritual interpretation of life must be true, no 
 matter what difficulties of logic or of scientific 
 induction stand in the way, is a tonic and whole- 
 some influence in the spiritual life of the world. 
 
 In this Browning is something more than a 
 mere exponent of religious orthodoxy. With the 
 greatest among his contemporaries, Carlyle and 
 Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, he sets himself 
 definitely in opposition to the pietistic faith of the 
 mid-Victorian era. But equally with them he 
 maintains the essentially Christian view of life 
 and its foundations, and he does so with a serener 
 confidence in its stability. He knows nothing of 
 
 139
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 the unotisy misgivings, tlio pathetic spiritual 
 lonehness wliieh k'nds sucli a tragic air to their 
 \vrilings. Tlie inehinclioly of Arnold, the fierce- 
 ness of Carlyle, the gloom which often settles upon 
 Ruskin, had their birth in a haunting sense of 
 insecurity even as regards those truths which 
 they asserted most earnestly. To Browning's 
 healthier spirit, that life should not have a real 
 and vital meaning, was unthinkable. Such a 
 meaning nuist root in a spmtual interpretation 
 of the universe. Given that, and everything else 
 follows as a matter of course. 
 
 I reach into the dark, 
 Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands: 
 I can believe this dread machinery 
 Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, 
 Devised — all pain, at most expenditure 
 Of pain by Who devised pain — to evolve, 
 By new machinery in counterpart, 
 The moral qualities of man — how else? — 
 To make him love in turn and be beloved, 
 Creative and self-sacrificing too, 
 And thus eventually Godlike. 
 
 This same clearness of vision saved the poet from 
 a confusion of thought into which the modern 
 world has fallen. Browning insists that the 
 spiritual interpretation of life stands or falls with 
 the idea of God. Since his day there have not 
 been wanting those who have tried to concede the 
 impersonal mechanism demanded in the name of 
 science, but at the same time to maintain the 
 spiritual evaluation of life. Browning has small 
 I)atience with that sort of thing. He knows there 
 
 140
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 is in reality no middle ground between the per- 
 sonal and the mechanical. As Saint John declares, 
 if there be no God, then man himself takes the 
 place of God, which is unthinkable. 
 
 The poet knows as well as anyone else how 
 feeble is human speech when it comes to deal with 
 ultimate realities: 
 
 O Thou — as represented here to me 
 In such conception as my soul allows — 
 Under Thy measureless, my atom width! — 
 
 Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole; 
 Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense — 
 There (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus). 
 In the absolute immensity, the whole 
 Appreciable solely by Thyself. 
 
 It will be said that this is philosophy, not 
 poetry; but I maintain that it is the representation 
 of a mood, a spiritual emotion in the soul of the 
 Pope, rather than a piece of pure reason. It is 
 an attempt to voice the feeling that a truth too 
 big for words has notwithstanding made its own 
 ineffaceable impress on the soul. This recognition 
 of the limitations of human thought is very far 
 from the agnosticism which, starting from this 
 recognition, denies all validity to man's religious 
 aspirations. It is merely to declare, with the 
 apostle, that "No man hath seen God at any time," 
 that "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
 hath it entered into the heart of man." 
 
 There is no particular objection to the asser- 
 tion often met with nowadays that God must be 
 
 141
 
 (X)NFKSSI()NS OF A IJUOWNING LOVER 
 
 supra-i)orsoiKil. j)ic)vi(kMl this he not made the 
 starting point lor practical unl'aitli. What Brown- 
 ing everywhere insisted upon is that God must be 
 conceived as the Hving ground of all that is deepest 
 and best in man, and as such capable of entering 
 into some sort of direct and personal relation with 
 his creatures. He must be not only Power but 
 Love. To prate of an Impersonal Love is nothing 
 but confusion of thought. 
 
 The classical expression of the poet's viewpoint 
 is found in the "Epilogue" to "Dramatis Personae." 
 Here the First Speaker, as David, represents the 
 old anthropomorphism which found God in par- 
 ticular places and persons and not in others: 
 
 For the presence of the Lord, 
 In the glory of His cloud, 
 
 Had filled the House of the Lord. 
 
 The Second Speaker, as Renan, represents the 
 agnostic chill that had fallen upon the nineteenth 
 century as the purported revelation of God to 
 the Hebrew nation faded into the mist of history, 
 and men began to ask whether, if there were any 
 such God, he ever had or, indeed, could make 
 himself known to men: 
 
 Watchers of twilight, is the worst averred? 
 
 We shall not look up, know ourselves are seen, 
 Speak, and be sure that we again are heard? 
 
 dread succession to a dizzy post. 
 
 Sad sway of scepter whose mere touch appalls. 
 Ghastly enthronement, cursed by those the most 
 
 On wliose repugnant brow the crown next falls. 
 
 142
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 The poet himself, as the Third Speaker, then 
 proclaims his larger faith. As the sea, however 
 boundless and universal, is nevertheless in par- 
 ticular and individual contact with each rock, so 
 the Universal Soul has actually entered into 
 personal relations with the individual human 
 soul even in constituting it an individual: 
 
 When you acknowledge that one world could do 
 All the diverse work, old yet ever new. 
 Divide us each from other, me from you, 
 
 Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls 
 O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls 
 From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet-calls? 
 
 That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 Or decomposes but to recompose. 
 Become my universe that feels and knows. 
 
 This is in reality all that Christianity has ever 
 meant by the "personality" of God. No thinking 
 man has ever believed in Haeckel's "gaseous ver- 
 tebrate," an old man with a white beard. But 
 Christianity has refused to believe that the human 
 consciousness is the only or the highest form of 
 spiritual existence. It insists on finding in the 
 loftiest characteristics of humanity only the 
 Divine image, and turns trustingly toward the 
 Father of Spirits, confident that in him men will 
 find their heavenly Father. ^ 
 
 II 
 
 Of course there is an element of danger in this 
 proceeding. There is always the possibility that 
 
 143
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 men will read their own liinitalions and imper- 
 fections into the idea of Go<l, and make him of 
 like passions witli themselves. Not paganism 
 alone has suil'ered from this false and fatal anthro- 
 pomorphism. In "Caliban upon Setebos" Brown- 
 ing has given us an elaboration of the text, "Thou 
 thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as 
 thyself." 
 
 Those conmientators who see in this poem an 
 attempt to make a serious contribution to the 
 science of anthropology and to indicate how the 
 idea of God arose in the soul of the cave man may 
 be right; but if so, it is the only poem in all the 
 work of a long life which has this abstract scien- 
 tific character. It seems to be rather an exposi- 
 tion of the truth that "an honest God's the 
 noblest work of man," and that when a beastly 
 man reads his own beastliness into the character 
 of God the result is grotesque enough to furnish 
 its own refutation. One cannot but suspect that 
 the poet had in mind certain forms of theology 
 which have actually been current at various times 
 in Christian history. 
 
 The story is well known of the retort courteous 
 made by John Lord, afterward famous for "The 
 Beacon-Lights of History," to the committee which 
 was examining him for ordination over a church 
 in Connecticut. Among other questions put to 
 him was that one which was a favorite with our 
 Puritan ancestors, whether he was willing to be 
 damned for the glory of God. The young man 
 
 144
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 replied that he had not attained to that lofty state 
 of grace, but that he was perfectly willing the 
 committee should be! Needless to say, he was 
 not ordained. 
 
 The theological conception represented by that 
 famous question was comparable to Caliban's 
 thought that the favor of Setebos was as capricious 
 as the monster's own attitude toward the soldier- 
 crabs which marched past him to the sea: 
 
 'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first. 
 Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 
 'Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots 
 Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off; 
 'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, 
 And two worms he whose nippers end in red; 
 As it likes me each time, I do: so he. 
 
 Small wonder that Caliban hopes that such a 
 god may eventually "doze, doze, as good as die!" 
 Such conceptions fall by their own weight before 
 the criticism of life itself. Already the germs of 
 a loftier truth are present in Caliban's soul in the 
 conception of the Quiet, whose greater power 
 must in the end overcome the sinister will of 
 Setebos and give room for all creatures to live 
 joyously in the world. 
 
 Caliban's notion that Setebos is on the lookout 
 for those who give evidence of any enjoyment or 
 pleasure, and that he will inevitably make them 
 suffer for it, has also found its counterpart in pop- 
 ular religious thinking, if not in formal theology. It 
 used to be quite the thing to warn mothers not to 
 
 145
 
 (ONFKSSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVl'.H 
 
 lovo llu'ir hahios overmuch, lest they otfciul the 
 jeulous majesty of the Ahiiighty. 
 
 Over a|;aiiisl Lhis God who "kippers souls for 
 sport," and can find his glory m the damnation of 
 infants a span lon.<,^ Browning sets his conviction 
 of a Love as boundless as it is all-powerful. It 
 is precisely at this point that the supreme necessity 
 for faith becomes apparent. It requu'cs no faith 
 to recognize the Infinite Power which works in 
 creation. Spencer declared the one unshakable 
 conclusion of human experience to be the insight 
 that we are "in the presence of an Infinite and 
 Eternal Energy from which all things proceed." 
 The supreme Wisdom displayed in the manifold 
 adjustments whereby the universe is transformed 
 from a chaos to a cosmos is equally evident- — 
 even though men confuse themselves with the 
 notion of unconscious intelligence. But that the 
 character of the Infinite is essential Love is not 
 so clear. In the face of the contradictions of 
 experience Mill concluded that either God is not 
 perfectly good or he is not all-powerful. Tenny- 
 son finds that 
 
 Nature, red in tooth and claw 
 ^^'illl ra\ine, shrieks against liis creed 
 
 of love. We shall return later to the consideration 
 of Browning's treatment of the problem of evil; 
 but the basis of his life-jjhilosophy is his conviction 
 that, despite ail seeming, (iod Is good, and the 
 life of man n rooted in perfect Love. 
 
 146
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 In defense of the reasonableness of this faith, 
 he begins with the same thought which we have 
 seen in a more general form in the mouth of Saint 
 John, who declares, in "A Death in the Desert," 
 that if God does not actually exist, then man is 
 the only God, which is the supreme reductio ad 
 absurdum. 
 
 In "Saul,'* David sees, with a sudden burst of 
 rapture, that man's feeble and impotent affection 
 must be but the faint image of the perfect Love, 
 else in this one point the creature transcends his 
 Creator. In all else man's powers are but the 
 feeble reflection of the Infinite: 
 
 Have I knowledge? Confounded it shrivels at Wis- 
 dom laid bare; 
 
 Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the 
 Infinite Care! 
 
 Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? 
 
 I but open my eyes — and perfection, no more and no less. 
 
 In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is 
 seen God 
 
 In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and 
 the clod. 
 
 Are we to suppose, then, in the face of this 
 universal experience, that an exception is to be 
 made in this one field of love? 
 
 Behold, I could love if I durst! 
 But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake 
 God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for 
 
 love's sake. 
 — What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when 
 
 doors great and small 
 Nine and ninety flew ope at our touch, should the 
 hundredth appall? 
 
 147
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BHOWNINCi LOVER 
 
 III the least things have faith, yet distrust in the great- 
 est of all? 
 
 Do I find K)\e so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
 
 'I'liat I doubt his own love can compete with it? here, 
 the parts shift? 
 
 Here, the creature surpass the Oeator — the end, what 
 Began? 
 
 Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this 
 man. 
 
 And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet 
 alone can? 
 
 m 
 
 It is at this point that the poet comes upon the 
 fundamental part played by Christianity in the 
 religious history of mankind. What is there in 
 human experience to indicate that this love is a 
 reality? 'J'he power and wisdom of the Infinite 
 are manifest; no sane man has ever doubted them: 
 but where is the equally convincing evidence of 
 love? The Christian answer is the Incarnation. 
 
 What lacks then of perfection fit for God 
 
 But just the instance which this talc supplies 
 
 Of love without a limit? So is strength, 
 
 So is intelligence; let love be so. 
 
 Unlimited in its self-sacrifice, 
 
 Then is the tale true, and God shows complete. 
 
 So the Pope. It is the fiishion just now in polite 
 circles to regard the doctrine of the Godhead of 
 Christ as an invention of priestcraft, grafted on 
 the simple religion of Jesus as a means of fostering 
 the ambitions of worldly-minded ecclesiastics. 
 It avails nothing to reply that this is to ignore the 
 facts of Christian history; the opponents of Chris- 
 
 148
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 tianity have never been hampered by regard for 
 facts. But it is apropos to ask them where, if 
 this tale is an invention, they will find the evidence 
 for the goodness of God. It is possibly not an 
 accident that the decay of faith in the Christian 
 revelation has been accompanied bj^ so widespread 
 disbelief in the essential goodness of creation, and 
 a recrudescence of the doctrine of force. 
 
 The statement of the Christian viewpoint in 
 "Saul" is peculiarly forcible because the poet has 
 put it in the form of a prophecy in the mouth of 
 David. Lifted by the exaltation of his own 
 yearning and unselfish love for the king to the 
 insight that God's love must be yet more tender 
 and all-compelling, the youthful psalmist bursts 
 out: 
 
 "Would I suffer for him that I love? so wouldst thou 
 — so \\alt thou! 
 
 So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, utter- 
 most crown — 
 
 And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor 
 down 
 
 One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no 
 breath, 
 
 Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue 
 with death! 
 
 As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be 
 proved 
 
 Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Be- 
 loved ! 
 
 He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall 
 stand the most weak. 
 
 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh 
 that I seek 
 
 149
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A HllOWNING LOVER 
 
 III the Godhead! I srek and find il. () Snul, it 
 
 shall he 
 A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like 
 
 to me 
 'IMuni shalt love and he lov(>d l)y forever: a Hand like 
 
 this hand 
 Sliall throw open the gates of new life to thee! 
 See, the Christ stand!" 
 
 I know of no passage in all the literature of 
 theology which declares so eloquently and con- 
 vincingly the truth which Christianity has from 
 the beginning regarded as the most central and 
 fundamental thing in her evangel. Here is no 
 abstract reasoning about substance and nature, 
 but a powerful statement of the yearning of 
 luimanity for understanding and sympathy in 
 God. Doubtless the simple l)ut profound truth of 
 the gospel lias not infre(juently been overlaid with 
 metaphysical speculation. More than once has 
 humanity complained of the theologians, "They 
 have taken away my Lord, and I know not where 
 they have laid him." The worship of Mary and 
 the saints was at bottom nothing but the instinc- 
 tive attempt of the human heart to find humanity 
 in God when the Christ had become but a theo- 
 logical abstraction, an uidcnown quantity in a 
 metaphysical equation. Tlie Liiitarianism of 
 Channing had its root in tlie same essential protest 
 against a wooden and mechanical theology in 
 which the Son of man had disappeared in a mist 
 of speculation. Nevertheless, the greatest power 
 of the Christian gospel over the hearts and imagi- 
 
 150
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 nations of mankind has lain in its conception of 
 the suffering Love of God which stopped not at 
 the supreme sacrifice for his creatures. 
 
 A God who could do no more for men than to 
 inspire prophets and martyrs to die for them 
 would be no more worthy of adoration than the 
 rich man who hires a substitute to fight in his 
 stead for the flag. Nothing less than a gospel of 
 incarnation will ever satisfy the religious longings 
 of the human soul. And as Dr. McClure, in Ian 
 Maclaren's story, said of the faith of a dying 
 child, "The Almichty wad see the wee lassie 
 wesna pit tae shame, or else . . . that's no his 
 name." A Christian minister may be forgiven, 
 therefore, if this passage in "Saul" stirs his soul 
 to deeper depths than any other in literature. 
 
 It is the same truth which grips the heart of 
 "Karshish." This man of science, traveling in the 
 interest of learning, is writing to his friend Abib 
 of his chance meeting with Lazarus, mysteriously 
 resuscitated from supposed death by a learned 
 leech of his tribe who later perished in a popular 
 tumult, doubtless because he was unable to stop 
 the earthquake. The man and his story have 
 made a strange impression upon Karshish. He 
 tries in vain to shake it ofiF. He speculates on the 
 peculiar outlook on life displayed by this rude 
 peasant, as though, indeed, he had access to a 
 secret hid from the rest of mankind; but this is 
 not the thing which has aft'ected him most deeply. 
 He tries to drop the subject, to avoid the main 
 
 151
 
 C0NFESS1()N\S 01" A IHUnVMNC; T.OVEU 
 
 issue. He apologizes to his fiieiul for bothering 
 
 liim with sucli trivial matters. He endeavors 
 
 once and again to bring his letter to a close. But 
 
 certain things Lazarus has said cling to his memory 
 
 and disturb his soul to its depths, until, against 
 
 his will, he makes a clean breast of it, and lays 
 
 the whole matter before his friend: 
 
 "This man so cured, regards the curcr then 
 As, God forgive mcl who but God himself, 
 (^reator and sustainer of the world, 
 That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile! 
 
 The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think.^ 
 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 fashioned, see it in myself! 
 Thou hast no jjower, nor niay'st conceive of mine, 
 But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
 And thou nuist love me who have died for thee!" 
 
 IV 
 
 So Browning finds at once the supreme evidence 
 for the reality of the divine existence and the 
 complete manifestation of the divine character 
 in the personality of Jesus Christ. To a genera- 
 tion which accepted implicitly the infuIHbility of 
 the Bible and the finality of the Augustinian 
 theology, Browning's liberality on many doctrinal 
 points seemed radical enough, and he became 
 the patron saint of the revolt against orthodoxy. 
 When a strict evangelical desired to bring a 
 railing accusation against one of his more pro- 
 gressive brethren, he charged him with preaching 
 
 152
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 Browning instead of the Bible. But the tide of 
 battle has surged to another part of the field, and 
 we begin to see that Browning was in reality 
 defending the very citadel of the faith. So far 
 from being an exponent of Unitarianism, his 
 religious convictions rest on the central importance 
 of the Incarnation in the spiritual history of the 
 race. Saint John declares that 
 
 "The acknowledgment of God 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." 
 
 Caponsacchi sees this much hope in his judges: 
 
 "You are Christians; somehow, no one ever plucked 
 A rag, even, from the body of the Lord, 
 To wear and mock with, but, despite himself. 
 He looked the greater and was the better." 
 
 True, Browning does not insist on the literal 
 accuracy of the gospel narrative or the historicity 
 of all the events therein described. The Pope 
 questions whether the story be absolute, objective 
 fact, or "truth reverberate, changed, made pass a 
 spectrum into mind, the narrow eye": 
 
 "So my heart be struck, 
 What care I — by God's gloved hand or the bare? 
 Nor do I much perplex me with aught hard. 
 Dubious in the transmitting of the tale — 
 No, nor with certain riddles set to solve. 
 This life is training and a passage; pass — 
 Still, we march over some flat obstacle 
 We made give way before us; solid truth 
 In front of it, what motion for the world? 
 The moral sense grows but by exercise." 
 153
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 This is pure pragnuitism. Doubtless it does 
 not cover all the ground, but it recognizes a thing 
 whicli theology has not always sufficiently con- 
 sidered, namely, the impossibility of nuiking 
 spiritual truth absolutely dependent upon his- 
 torical information. When a truth has been 
 borne into the human consciousness through an 
 historical event, it becomes thereafter an un- 
 alienable possession of the soul. It "dies, revives, 
 goes to work in the world," and henceforth 
 possesses a validity independent of the particular 
 happening in time and space through which it 
 was first made known. Should the human race 
 survive ten thousand years, it will doubtless be 
 increasingly difficult to verify the historical truth 
 of the four Gospels. But if the revelation of 
 God in Christ is a permanent addition to the 
 spiritual riches of the race, then it must have 
 power in some sort to verify itself in conscious- 
 ness, even to those to whom the historical events 
 seem but an idle tale. This frank dismissal of 
 the historical problem is, therefore, a real contri- 
 bution to the problem of making Christianity 
 both intelligible and credible to a critical age; and 
 Browning becomes one of those who have aided 
 most in furthering the transition from the naive 
 faith of the past to the assured and independent 
 spiritual conviction of the future. 
 
 The significant thing is that the poet saw in the 
 story of One whose love was the visible expression 
 of the Love of God, and in whose death God 
 
 154
 
 OF TRUTH 
 
 somehow entered into the experience of human 
 woe and sorrow, the most powerful and vital 
 religious conception that ever entered into the 
 heart of man. And founding his whole religious 
 philosophy on the conviction that anything which 
 answers a fundamental human need must be 
 essentially true, he thus became a bulwark of 
 spiritual faith against the assaults of modern im- 
 personalism. The only God he knows is the 
 Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; and the deepest 
 thing in God he finds to be the love that stopped 
 not at the ultimate sacrifice for the redemption 
 of the race, 
 
 The divine instance of self-sacrifice. 
 That never ends and aye begins for man. 
 
 This is essential Godhood. Pompilia, in a rush 
 of tenderest mother-love for her babe, says, 
 
 *T never realized God's birth before, 
 How he grew likest God in being born"; 
 
 and Balaustion, describing the joyous weariness 
 and robust tenderness of Herakles, declares, 
 
 "I think this is the authentic sign and seal 
 Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad. 
 And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts 
 Into a rage to suffer for mankind. 
 And recommence at sorrow." 
 
 If this religious thinking rests on concepts 
 which are foreign to our modern philosophy, so 
 much the worse for philosophy. The old debates 
 over homo-ousion and homoi-ousion are vacated by 
 
 155
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 our belter psyehology; but the thing which the 
 Niceno Creed undertook to express remains tlie 
 one religious truth which has power to make God 
 real and vital to hunum experience, and thus to 
 satisfy the deepest longings of the soul. In 
 making this the foundation stone in his art 
 Browning becomes perhaps the most significant 
 spiritual teacher of the nineteenth century. 
 
 166
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 The orbit of human experience is an elliptical 
 one, and the sun around which it revolves is the 
 idea of God. The other focus of this ellipse is the 
 idea of man. The two bear a constant relation 
 to each other, and vary according to a fixed 
 ratio. 
 
 We have nothing wherewith to measure our 
 conception of the divine save our own loftiest 
 ideals; hence it comes to pass that man inevitably 
 creates God in his own image. During the long 
 ages when the individual had not yet emerged 
 from the human mass, and life was subject to the 
 capricious tyranny of irresponsible despots, God 
 was conceived as the supreme Tyrant, equally 
 lawless and unmoral. Caliban can know no 
 other God than Setebos. A scientific age which 
 has learned that life moves in obedience to dis- 
 coverable laws must conceive of God as moved 
 by the same fundamental principles of order. 
 As human life gains in dignity and power God 
 must inevitably cease to be the irresponsible 
 Despot and become the infinite Source of all 
 wisdom and grace, the Fountain of light and life. 
 When, however, the consciousness of man's 
 subjection to his environment overpowers his 
 
 157
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 sense of freedom amd responsibility, then the 
 idea of God is re(hiced to thai of a vast, impersonal 
 Law, moving blindly toward unforeseen ends. 
 
 But the converse of this proposition is equally 
 true. The idea of God, once conceived, reacts 
 upon the human consciousness to heighten it. 
 Vague impressions of life, dimly felt and half 
 comprehended, are projected by the religious im- 
 pulse upon the scale of the infinite, to become 
 thereby the determining factors in the interpre- 
 tation of life. The irresponsible deities of the 
 pagan pantheon were not consciously the products 
 of the imagination, but were the instinctive re- 
 actions of the religious consciousness in the pres- 
 ence of actual conditions. Once conceived, they 
 had the effect of emphasizing the factors in 
 experience of which they were the expression, and 
 life became the more capricious and impotent. 
 The God which mediaeval Christianity inherited 
 from Saint Augustine was simply a magnified 
 Roman emperor, the shadow of the irresponsible* 
 tyranny to w^hich every human life was subject 
 but the effect of the Latin theology was still 
 further to depress the human consciousness. 
 Man was conceived as totally depraved, as 
 spiritually impotent, a worm of the dust, deserving 
 nothing but eternal misery. Life as a whole was 
 a failure, to be cast as rubbish to the void; and only 
 a few might hope to be chosen by divine caprice 
 to be the nucleus of a new heaven and a new 
 earth. 
 
 158
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 It is worthy of note that the Reformation in 
 religion followed the Renaissance in life. The 
 growing sense of the worth and dignity of life 
 made the old theology untenable. The individual 
 began to emerge and to become conscious of his 
 individual right and responsibility. The first 
 effect was to heighten the individuality of God, 
 so to speak; the sense of the absoluteness of the 
 divine sovereignty. But the God of Calvinism 
 was no longer pure Irresponsibility. The in- 
 fluence of the older thinking still persisted, but 
 God was conceived essentially as infinite Right- 
 eousness and Justice and Truth, and he who 
 feared God no longer feared the face of man. 
 The result was to increase the independence of 
 the individual, and Calvinism became the re- 
 ligion of democracy. No earthly king could 
 tyrannize over the subjects of the Throne of 
 Heaven. 
 
 At the same time the sternness and unbending 
 justice of God were reflected in the character 
 of the Puritans, with their harsh, unlovely con- 
 ceptions of life and their rigid and uncharitable 
 religion. 
 
 The inevitable correlation between these two 
 factors in human thinking thus becomes ap- 
 parent. They vary in a constant ratio. Progress 
 comes sometimes from one side and sometimes 
 from the other. A Prophet arises with a new 
 conception of God, and old injustices and cor- 
 ruptions in human civilization are doomed. A 
 
 159
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 refornuT ;ii)i)cars in the political world, or new 
 forces are broii^^iil to hear on society through 
 invention and tliscovery, and old theologies grow 
 too petty and cramped for the expanding soul 
 of man. 
 
 The recognition of this relation between re- 
 ligious thinking and human experience does not 
 by any means invalidate either religion or reve- 
 lation. It is nothing more than the frank recog- 
 nition that thought is a social product, that 
 ideas can only be interpreted through experience 
 and cannot arise until experience has prepared 
 the way for them. Revelation itself is conditioned 
 upon the receptive power of the human mind, 
 and the times of ignorance God winks at. 
 
 That when once spiritual conceptions have 
 emerged they exert an immeasurable influence 
 upon life in reality bears incontrovertible witness 
 to their essential truth. The ideas of God and 
 man are as inseparable as the two ends of a 
 stick. They react on each other and cannot 
 be dissociated. Not until a factor in human 
 experience has been erected into a fundamental 
 principle of philosophy does it attain its highest 
 degree of usefulness and power. 
 
 But when it has been so wrought into our 
 deepest thinking and has reacted upon our con- 
 ceptions of daily life and its meaning, then its 
 limitations likewise become apparent, and it 
 tyrannizes over us until it has been purified and 
 corrected by the discovery of yet other phases 
 
 160
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 of truth. Thus Puritanism crystaHized into a 
 hard and mechanical type of religious Pharisaism, 
 and the spiritual heroism in which it had its 
 root was lost in the harsh bitterness of its despotic 
 narrowness. 
 
 The working of this principle of the inevitable 
 correlation between our conception of the ulti- 
 mate Reality and our interpretation of human 
 life may be seen in the shallow and mechanical 
 thinking of which we have complained in the 
 literature of the present day, and which has 
 its root in the mechanical philosophy of modern 
 science. Scientific writers are fond of accusing 
 the theologians of "anthropomorphism," which 
 they regard as the root vice of religious thinking, 
 and from which they imagine themselves to be 
 entirely free. As a matter of fact, the philosophy 
 of Haeckel is nothing but the projection of the 
 idea of law which has been found so useful in 
 correlating the results of scientific induction. 
 In itself it is as mystical and quite as anthro- 
 pomorphic as the religious idea of love. The 
 human mind is given to systematizing its expe- 
 rience, to grouping facts together for convenience 
 in handling them. Hence arises the idea of laws, 
 in accordance with which the facts hang together 
 in such convenient groups. Modern science has 
 simply extended this principle to include all 
 experience, even such as has thus far proved 
 intractable to scientific interpretation. 
 
 Among the generalizations of recent science, 
 161
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 oiu> whic'li lias i)r()vo(l in soino respects most useful 
 is lliat whicli relates lo tlie influence of environ- 
 ment upon the organism. This fits in with so 
 much in the experience of mankind that it has 
 captured the inuigination of our time. This is 
 the one among all the factors in human life 
 which to-day is erected into the governing prin- 
 ciple of reality. Everything which seems to con- 
 tradict it is either ignored or explicitly de- 
 nied. 
 
 To the lay mind it would seem that the oppo- 
 site principle of the influence of the organism 
 upon its environment is quite as universal in its 
 operation and quite as significant for the inter- 
 pretation of experience, but it does not exist for 
 the cock-sure scientist. It is too intractable to 
 the idea of law to fit in with the other concep- 
 tions upon which the scientific interpretation 
 rests, so he will have none of it. 
 
 The underived remainder in the human per- 
 sonality whicli lies at the basis of all progress, 
 the power whereby man reacts upon his environ- 
 ment to transform it, and which is the most 
 central fact in human experience, has been flatly 
 denied. The projection of the opposite prin- 
 ciple upon the scale of the universal has become 
 the corner stone of scientific thinking. The free 
 Creative Power which earlier ages took for granted 
 has thus disappeared, and in its stead we have 
 Nature, which is only another name for the to- 
 tality of Environment, working all things accord- 
 
 162
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 ing to the inevitableness of its mechanical ne- 
 cessity. 
 
 This mechanical system of metaphysics has 
 reacted on our understanding of human nature 
 as inevitably as did the Calvinistic theology. 
 The doctrine of foreordination, which threw its 
 baleful influence athwart the lives of the Puritans, 
 was as nothing beside the deterministic psy- 
 chology of the past twenty years. The earth 
 has been peopled with automatic puppets who 
 when the strings are properly worked outdo Mr. 
 Punch himself in vigor of speech and action, 
 but in whom there is not an emotion nor an 
 aspiration which is not the outcome of "motor 
 excitations in the ganglia." Love, hate, am- 
 bition, purpose, are secreted, like the bile or 
 the pancreatic juice. Truth there is none. Sin 
 and virtue have alike disappeared. Life itself 
 is reduced to chemical reactions and galvanic 
 spasms, and the light that never was on sea or 
 land to a phosphorescent glimmer which there 
 are none truly left to observe. 
 
 It is worthy of note that already there is a 
 reaction in the scientific world from this extreme 
 position, though it will doubtless be twenty years 
 before the literary world will find it out. Psy- 
 chologists are not so sure as they were even 
 five years since that the Ego can be reduced to 
 the "stream of consciousness." They are redis- 
 covering the soul. Biology is losing its power 
 to tyrannize over the world of thought, and there 
 
 163
 
 CONB^ESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 are signs of a new daj' when humanity may come 
 again to its own. 
 
 The "philosophy" of Browning centers inev- 
 itably around these two poles of all serious think- 
 ing. His idea of God grows out of his concep- 
 tion of humanity. It is the necessary ground and 
 guaranty of that dignity and worth which the 
 poet finds in human nature, of the destiny which 
 alone can satisfy the longings of the human 
 spirit. The chief interest of the poet is not in 
 the divine but in the human side of this equation. 
 He has been taxed with undue interest in meta- 
 physical speculation, when, in fact, metaphysics 
 has no interest for him except as it gives him 
 breathing room, as it affords an adequate back- 
 ground for the varied and entrancing interest 
 of the human drama plaj'ed out before his eyes. 
 
 The extent and variety of this human interest 
 in Browning we have seen. It is worth while 
 to analyze the conception of human life in which 
 it finds expression and justification. To go back 
 to a figure which we have employed before: one 
 end of the poet's bridge rests on his conception 
 of the wisdom and loving purpose of God; the 
 other rests on the freedom and essential divinity 
 of man, as evidenced by his capacity for love, 
 by his progress toward the ideal to which he 
 forever aspires, and supremely by the destiny 
 which religious faith demands and which alone 
 can complete and satisfy the fragmentary ex- 
 perience of the earthly years. 
 
 164
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 To begin with, Browning insists on the essen- 
 tial divinity of human nature. Having acknowl- 
 edged that his conception of God is derived from 
 his interpretation of life, this seems like reasoning 
 in a circle. In fact, it is nothing more than that 
 which we have seen to be characteristic of all 
 human experience, the return of a philosophical 
 conception upon the life in which it has its root, 
 to heighten and perfect it. Browning believes 
 in God because he finds man godlike. God 
 forthwith becomes the source and ground of the 
 loftiest human characteristics and the supreme 
 reason for faith in the outcome of life. "Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra" finds man, 
 
 for aye removed 
 From the developed brute; a God though in the germ. 
 
 Nearer we hold of God 
 
 Who gives, than of his tribes that take, I must believe. 
 
 The poem was published in 1865, six years 
 after Darwin's Origin of Species, and antedates 
 The Descent of Man by several years. There 
 is no doubt that it echoes the fierce controversies 
 to which Darwin's epoch-making work gave rise. 
 The poet takes the ground that man is at once 
 the crowning glory of the animal creation and 
 the beginning of a spiritual kingdom. This is 
 his answer to the philosophy which reduces hu- 
 manity to the level of its brute ancestry. 
 
 165
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 This, by the way, is the root error of the biolog- 
 ical school of thought. Taking his cue from 
 Herbert Spencer, the true modernist can never 
 rise above the study of origins. If consciousness 
 is foreshadowed in the cell-affinities of the physical 
 organism, then the mind is nothing but a chem- 
 ical reaction. If religion had its rise in ghost 
 worship, then it can never be anything more 
 than crude superstition. If the moral intuitions 
 grew out of, or were developed by, the experience 
 of primitive tribes, then morality is nothing more 
 than expediency. If love has its root in sex- 
 instinct, then it is sentimental balderdash to find 
 in it anything loftier than physical passion. The 
 most recent attempts to construct a psychology 
 of religion can find nothing but sex-emotion at 
 the basis of the loftiest spiritual impulses. 
 
 Bosh! It is by its fruit, not its roots, that a 
 tree is judged. Not origins, but ends, constitute 
 the most important study for the human mind. 
 Such speculations as I have cited are nothing 
 but subtlety run mad. An oak tree is not an 
 acorn, a man is other than a newborn babe, and 
 some philosophers at least are greater than apes. 
 
 It is noteworthy that Browning himself antici- 
 pated the essential truth in Darwin's doctrine. 
 "Paracelsus" was published in 1835, nearly a 
 quarter of a century before the Origin of Species. 
 In it we have such a spiritual interpretation of 
 the doctrine of evolution as might have been 
 furnished by a liberal theologian of the fin de 
 
 166
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 siecle. Paracelsus finds one thought and purpose 
 everywhere. God 
 
 dwells in all. 
 From life's minute beginnings, up at last 
 To man — the consummation of this scheme 
 Of being, the completion of this sphere 
 Of Hfe. ... All tended to mankind. 
 And, man produced, all has its end thus far: 
 But in completed man begins anew 
 A tendency to God. 
 
 We shall return to this thought again from 
 another angle when we come to speak of Brown- 
 ing's conception of human progress. Here the 
 important thing to note is that the poet goes 
 behind the natural origin of humanity to find 
 its essential root in the Power that lies behind 
 the natural world — in the words of the Pope, 
 "What I call God and fools call Nature." Man 
 is, indeed, a part of nature, but he is more than 
 that. He stands a handsbreadth removed from 
 the rest of creation, that he may return to God 
 "His creation's approval or censure." 
 
 Man therefore stands on his own stock 
 
 Of love and power as a pin-point rock; 
 
 And, looking to God who ordained divorce 
 
 Of the rock from his boundless continent, 
 
 Sees, in his power made evident. 
 
 Only excess by a millionfold 
 
 O'er the power God gave man in the mold. 
 
 Who speaks of man, then, must not sever 
 Man's very element from man, 
 Saying, "But all is God's" — whose plan 
 Was to create man and then leave him 
 
 167
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Able, his own word saitli, to grieve him. 
 
 But al)le to glorify him too. 
 
 As a mere machine could never do, 
 
 That j)rayed or j)raiscd, all unaware 
 
 Of its fitness for aught but i)raise or prayer, 
 
 Made perfect as a thing of course. 
 
 — ("Christmas Eve.") 
 
 This insistence that man is essentially some- 
 thing more than result, that he is himself a cause, 
 and so far free, was no doubt directed in large 
 measure at the Calvinistic theology, whose shadow 
 darkened the lives of Macaulay and Ruskin and 
 Carlyle. But it serves no less in our own day as 
 a challenge to the mechanical doctrines of recent 
 science. Aut libertas aut nulliis. Either religion 
 is right in its insistence on the freedom of the 
 mind and soul to work out their own destiny 
 in the light of the loftiest ideals which it hath 
 entered into the heart of man to conceive, or 
 science no less than faith is doomed, for the 
 conception of truth becomes as meaningless as 
 that of right and duty, and the whole conscious 
 experience of the race is reduced to a phantastic 
 chaos. "Love, hope, fear, faith, these make 
 humanity." 
 
 Arnold and Clough might roam forever in the 
 darkness, seeking light and moaning the decay 
 of faith. Tennyson might "grope, and gather 
 dust and chaff." The younger generation which 
 has succeeded may seek to content itself with 
 a world from which spiritual faith has dis- 
 appeared and to which it has become meaningless. 
 
 168
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 But Browning has never a moment's misgiving. 
 With serene and cheerful confidence he takes 
 his stand upon the essential worth of humanity's 
 loftier spiritual traits and bids defiance to doubt 
 and fear. 
 
 II 
 
 The first element in the divinity of human 
 nature, the first evidence of its essential freedom, 
 the poet finds in the capacity for love. This 
 is of the very essence of Godhood, 
 
 For the loving worm within its clod 
 Were diviner than a loveless God 
 Amid his worlds, I will dare to say. 
 
 Therefore a humanity capable of love is akin 
 to God, and the whole purpose of human existence 
 is "to glorify God and enjoy him forever." And 
 love is, indeed, as central and fundamental in the 
 life of man as it is in the character of God. 
 
 There is no good of life but love — but love! 
 What else looks good is some shade flung from love; 
 Love gilds it, gives it worth. Be warned by me. 
 Never you cheat yourself one instant! Love, 
 Give love, ask only love, and leave the rest! 
 
 —("In a Balcony.") 
 
 For Hfe, with all it yields of joy and woe. 
 And hope and fear — believe the aged friend — 
 Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love. 
 How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is; 
 And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost 
 Such prize, despite the envy of the world. 
 And having gained truth, keep truth: that is all. 
 —("A Death in the Desert.") 
 
 169
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Paul Elmer More objects that as often as not 
 it is mere blind human passion which Browning 
 celebrates as a saving spiritual grace, and whose 
 dawning rapture he likens to that new birth 
 which transforms the soul — whence Mr. More 
 concludes that the poet "dresses a worldly and 
 easy philosophy in the forms of spiritual faith 
 and so deceives the troubled seekers after the 
 higher life." 
 
 I confess my mental faculties are paralyzed 
 by such criticism as this. Can it be that all the 
 earnest and spiritually-minded souls who have 
 found inspiration in Browning have been misled, 
 and that they must be set right by the literary 
 critic.'^ Mr. More confesses that he has no idea 
 what the mystical experience of the new birth 
 may be, but he is quite certain it must be other 
 and more significant than the birth of human 
 passion with which the poet seems to identify it. 
 
 But is it so certain that Browning reduces 
 the spiritual life to human love? There can be 
 no doubt that his attitude toward such love is 
 quite different from that of mediaeval Cathol- 
 icism. He does not regard it as a snare of the 
 soul, but, rather, as a gift of God. But it would 
 be more nearly correct to say that he exalts 
 love to the plane of a spiritual impulse than that 
 he reduces spiritual experience to the level of 
 human passion. His whole treatment of love 
 is a protest against the essential animalism of 
 that view of life which can see nothing loftier 
 
 170
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 in the love of a man for a woman than sheer 
 physical instinct. Love, to Browning, meant 
 something quite different from what it meant 
 to Swinburne or Oscar Wilde. There is nothing 
 ethereal about it. He deals quite frankly and 
 sympathetically with all its phases. He knows 
 the love of the wronged girl in "The Confessional," 
 the guilty passion of Ottima and Sebald, no less 
 than the the lofty purity of "James Lee's Wife," 
 of "Any Wife to Any Husband," of Pompilia and 
 Caponsacchi. Indeed, it is only fair to say that 
 he undertakes to find spiritual significance even 
 in love which has scarcely risen above the 
 physical. He has puzzled his most ardent de- 
 votees by his apparent defense of sexual license 
 in "Fifine at the Fair." But all this is precisely 
 because he is so sure that the physical basis of 
 human love is but the starting point, and that 
 in its inmost essence it is a spiritual experience, 
 not altogether remote from that creative impulse 
 in which the Divine Love finds expression. 
 
 It is for this reason that he so often couples 
 it with the dawn of spiritual insight, as in the 
 case of Caponsacchi. Herein, despite Mr. More, 
 he has anticipated modern psychology. But he 
 has seen more deeply than the psychologists, 
 who confound the spiritual vision with the human 
 instinct in which it had its birth. Browning 
 makes love the force which quickens the soul 
 and leaves it open to those higher influences 
 from the divine which transcend all human 
 
 171
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 power and lift man to tlie loftiest levels of spir- 
 itual insiglit. Other forces in human life may 
 serve the same end. Tiiere are spiritual awaken- 
 ings whose source is remote from the sex im- 
 pulse, as there are sins which lie outside the 
 realm of sex relations. The spiritual life itself 
 is on quite another plane than that of simple 
 human emotion, and love must pass over into 
 something quite different before one can be said 
 to have entered the spiritual realm. 
 
 No one knew this better than Browning him- 
 self. To charge him with identifying the spiritual 
 life with human passion is to ignore whole masses 
 of his most significant work. But love, to Brown- 
 ing, is the very flower of human experience, the 
 purest and best thing in life, next to the love 
 of the divine. If one can be true to this human 
 impulse, if he love loyally and without reserve, 
 his love becomes an instrument of God whereby 
 a way is opened for the understanding of spiritual 
 things. If a man prove false to his love, he has 
 betrayed the best thing in his manhood, which 
 is to lose his soul. 
 
 Thus it comes to pass that love, rightly taken, 
 becomes an instrument of spiritual enlightenment. 
 To understand this is at once to dignify human 
 love and to assert the essential kinship between 
 the human and the divine. It is at bottom a 
 protest against the philosophy of dirt which 
 reduces all human experience to the level of 
 the brute. So far from being a denial of spiritual 
 
 172
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 birth, it is a reminder that such rebirths, in 
 their deepest nature spiritual, are a part of com- 
 mon human experience. That there may be one 
 such transformation of the soul's inmost life 
 which transcends all other events in the history 
 of spiritual progress is not denied. Indeed, it 
 is to be inferred from the fact that a similarly 
 unique and transcendent experience comes to the 
 heart in the birth of a great love. The poet does 
 not identify the two experiences, but he points 
 out that the one may be the instrument of the 
 other. It is not given to every man to love 
 supremely. Neither is it given to every man 
 to pass through a vivid and striking spiritual 
 experience. But to every man love comes in 
 some fashion, and if he proves himself worthy 
 of it, it becomes to him a means of grace, purify- 
 ing his soul and sweetening his whole life. And 
 so to every man there may come the softening 
 and purifying influences of the Divine Spirit, 
 lifting him above the things that are of the earth 
 earthy. But this divine grace can come only 
 as he proves obedient to such spiritual impulses 
 as are ministered to the soul through the com- 
 mon life. 
 
 Current philosophy does not believe in the 
 transformation of the soul through the birth of 
 spiritual insight. Browning insists that a man 
 cannot truly love a woman without catching 
 glimpses of a life on a higher level, where spiritual 
 values rule. He bids us look on the world about 
 
 173
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 us witli upon oyos, iind see that there are new 
 soul-births, whellicr a inechaiiicul j)liilosopljy Hkes 
 it or not. Though they take phicc on the i)huie 
 of human passion, they are not without spiritual 
 significance. Browning could never have written 
 "The Dark Flower," where one passion after 
 another sears the heart with its flame, leaving 
 the man no wiser or stronger or sweeter than 
 it found him. Browning saw more deeply into 
 human life than that. He knew that such ex- 
 periences utterly transform a man for better or 
 worse; that they are soul-revealing crises, whence 
 a man emerges saved or lost, according as he 
 has made "the terrible choice." 
 
 Oh we're sunk enough here, God knows! 
 
 But not quite so sunk that moments, 
 Sure though seldom, are denied us. 
 
 When the spirit's true endowments 
 Stand out plainly from its false ones, 
 
 And apprise it if pursuing 
 Or the right way or the wrong way. 
 
 To its triumph or undoing. 
 
 There are flashes struck from midnights. 
 
 There are fire-flames noondays kindle. 
 Whereby piled-up honors perish, 
 
 Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, 
 WTiile just this or that poor impulse. 
 
 Which for once had play unstifled. 
 Seems the sole work of a lifetime, 
 
 That away the rest have trifled. 
 
 — ("Cristina.") 
 
 That human love may prove the instrument 
 of such a spiritual awakening any man who will 
 
 174
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 come out of the closet and look at real life with 
 his eyes open must know. That human passion 
 quite as often proves the soul's undoing and 
 leads to irretrievable ruin and loss is equally 
 evident. This is only to say that all the deeper 
 experiences of life are fraught with meaning, 
 and that the spiritual world impinges at every 
 point upon the common life of men. 
 
 It is the glory of Browning as the poet of hu- 
 man love that no man has ever written of human 
 passion with so broad a sympathy, so lofty an 
 ideal of its spiritual power, with so great delicacy, 
 such passionate tenderness. Tennyson is more 
 virginal, Browning more human. To his mind, 
 however, love is worlds removed from sublimated 
 animalism; it is more nearly akin to the divine 
 love. 
 
 This interpretation of human experience does 
 not, of course, cover all the ground of the spiritual 
 life, nor did the poet so intend it; but it is infinitely 
 more wholesome and more true than the refined 
 brutality of current literature. It reveals a 
 sounder insight into essential values. Love in 
 the poet's own experience brought him near to 
 the gates of heaven — he would go to the old 
 Marylebone church where they were wed and 
 kiss the stone steps where his Love's foot fell — 
 and he has challenged the world with an ideal 
 of love which must forever rebuke the shallow 
 sentiment and easy self-indulgence of men; and 
 point to an interpretation of life which values 
 
 175
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 liiinianity not by the brute out of which it has 
 emerged, but by the God into which the Creator 
 will have it develop through all the experiences 
 of life. 
 
 Lovers, therefore, will go back to "The Last 
 Ride Together," to "Love Among the Ruins," to 
 "Rudel," and "Cristina," and "Evelyn Hope," 
 to "Love in a Life" and "Life in a Love," to the 
 story of Pompilia and her "soldier-saint," and, 
 above all, to "By the Fireside" and "One Word 
 More," to find an interpretation of their love 
 more completely satisfying than anything else in 
 literature outside of Shakespeare. And the spir- 
 itually-minded will continue to read "Abt Vogler" 
 and "Rabbi Ben Ezra" and "A Death in the 
 Desert," "Karshish" and "Cleon" and "The 
 Pope," to say nothing of all the poems of life 
 and character which have thrown so vivid a light 
 on the working of human motives and impulses, 
 undisturbed by the fear that the poet will prove 
 in all these things a "false prophet." whose easy- 
 going optimism has "dressed a worldly philosophy 
 in the forms of spiritual faith." 
 
 Ill 
 
 It would not be fair, however, wholly to identify 
 the love which Browning finds to be the supreme 
 measure of life with the love of man and woman. 
 This universal passion, at once so lofty and so 
 human, tends continually to pass over into the 
 
 176
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 broader spiritual grace of which it is the type. 
 In such a poem as "Life in a Love" no thought- 
 ful reader can fail to feel that love has become 
 the symbol of that ever-growing, ever-vanishing 
 Ideal which is the flying goal of life's deepest 
 endeavor. 
 
 So in that poignant reference to Dante in "One 
 Word More," 
 
 Dante, who loved well because he hated, 
 Hated wickedness that hinders loving, 
 
 the poet is half-unconsciously moved by the 
 spirit of Dante himself, whose love for the woman 
 Beatrice was inseparable from his passionate de- 
 votion to the spiritual ideal of which she became 
 the type. 
 
 Love, for Browning, is the supreme lesson of 
 life. In the passage which I have quoted from 
 "In a Balcony," the Queen is led by her sudden 
 radiant vision of human love to understand the 
 larger significance of the spirit of love, and when 
 she speaks, her words bear witness not only to 
 the supreme place of human passion in life, but 
 no less to the ultimate worth of ethical love, the 
 spirit of devotion and service. When Saint John 
 speaks, in "A Death in the Desert," it is not 
 human affection which he has in mind at all, 
 but that supreme spiritual passion which Saint 
 Paul celebrates in the thirteenth chapter of First 
 Corinthians. If it be true that there are not a 
 great number of specific passages in which Brown- 
 
 177
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 ing inculcates lliis spiritual grace, it is equally 
 true that it is taken for granted throughout his 
 work as the only adecjuale ethical motive and 
 the supreme fulfillnienl of life. It must not be 
 forgotten that the object of "Paracelsus," the 
 work in whicli the young poet poured out his 
 boy heart, is to set forth the utter failure of a 
 life moved by any lesser spirit. Not until he has 
 learned the lesson of love as a spiritual grace 
 does Paracelsus attain. He explains his own 
 earlier failure on this ground: 
 
 "In my own heart love had not been made wise 
 To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, 
 To know even hate is but a mask of love's. 
 To see a good in evil, and a hope 
 In ill success; to sympathize, be proud 
 Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim 
 Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies. 
 Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts; 
 All with a touch of nobleness, despite 
 Their error, upward tending all though weak, 
 Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 
 But dream of him and guess where he may be. 
 And do their best to climb and get to him." 
 
 "The Ring and The Book," the colossal epic 
 which embodies the ripe wisdom of the poet's 
 maturity, teaches many varied lessons, but the 
 warp into which this many-colored pattern is 
 woven is the essential Christian ethic of love and 
 service. The great-hearted charity of the Pope is 
 the expression of it; the patience of Pompilia is the 
 outcome of it; the sordidness and greed of Guide 
 are thrown into relief upon this background. 
 
 178
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 Perhaps one of the finest expressions of this 
 ideal in all Browning's poetry is to be found in 
 his transcriptions from Euripides — introduced 
 with Mrs. Browning's tribute: 
 
 Our Euripides the Human 
 
 With his droppings of warm tears, 
 
 And his touches of things common 
 Till they rose to touch the spheres. 
 
 The protagonist of both these poems is Herakles, 
 the Greek Christ, the incarnation of the loving- 
 kindness of God. "Gladness go with thee, Helper 
 of our world!" cries Balaustion, as the god sets 
 forth on his mission to wrestle with death for 
 the shade of Alkestis; and the spirit that breathes 
 through both poems is the recognition of self- 
 sacrificing love as at once the highest expression 
 of godhood and the whole duty of man. 
 
 IV 
 
 To the intense social consciousness of the 
 present age it seems almost incomprehensible that 
 a poet with Browning's all-embracing human 
 sympathies should have seemed so entirely un- 
 conscious of social problems. It cannot be said 
 that these problems had not emerged, for Brown- 
 ing was of the generation that produced Maurice 
 and Kingsley and William Morris, and the publi- 
 cation of "Fors Clavigera" was begun only three 
 years after "The Ring and The Book." Even 
 Mrs. Browning displayed a keener interest in 
 these matters than her husband: witness "The 
 
 179
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Cry of the Children," and "Aurora Leigh" itself. 
 It must not be forfj^otten, however, that Browning 
 was a eonsistent Liberal, that he wrote "The 
 Lost Leader" because of Wordsworth's defection 
 in 1832, and that he displayed the warmest 
 sympathy with the struggles of his beloved Italy 
 against Austrian tyranny. 
 
 But Browning was both by temperament 
 and philosophy an individualist. The outward 
 conditions of life seemed to him but "A stuff 
 to try the soul's strength on, educe the 
 man." He realized, what reformers are con- 
 tinually forgetting, that society is made up 
 of folks, and that all social progress rests, 
 in the last analysis, on the development of 
 individual character. The chief obstacles in 
 its path are not bad laws and imperfect social 
 machinery so much as bad men and imperfect 
 human character. Though the aim of reform be 
 to assure to all men comfortable homes, sufficient 
 food and clothing, the opportunity for culture, 
 and the like, yet the immediate effort of reform 
 is always to protect men from the injustice and 
 inhumanity of their more powerful neighbors. 
 The so-called "progressive program" in American 
 political life is concerned mainly with proposals 
 for restraining the cupidity or guarding against 
 the incompetence of men. Tariff reform is in- 
 tended to prevent the unscrupulous manufacturer 
 from charging too much for his goods. The recall 
 is a device for getting rid of dishonest or incom- 
 
 180
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 petent oflBcials. Political bossism, the bad trust, 
 unreasonable restraint of trade, all are the fruit 
 of greed and lack of common honesty. It is the 
 capitalist who is unwilling to pay a fair wage 
 and the laborer who is not worthy of his hire 
 who together create the labor problem. It is 
 selfishness which breaks up homes. It is self- 
 indulgence which gives rise to the problems of 
 vice and intemperance. If the money spent for 
 the present hideous war, the outgrowth of mutual 
 envy, greed, and distrust among the leading 
 nations of Europe, had been turned into chan- 
 nels of legitimate production; if it might be aug- 
 mented by the money spent during the last ten 
 years in needless extravagance and vicious self- 
 indulgence and by the cost during the same 
 period of the enforced waste of idleness, ineflS- 
 ciency, and crime; and if the resulting gain might 
 be honestly and fairly distributed among men, 
 there would be an end of poverty and distress. 
 The problem of character is the root-problem 
 of social progress. 
 
 It is worthy of note that the characters in 
 human history who have exerted the most power- 
 ful influence for the uplift of the race have been 
 open to the same charge as Browning — of being 
 individualists, and viewing with indifference the 
 social struggles of mankind. Gotama, Socrates, 
 Luther, Wesley, were individualists, bending their 
 energies to the solution of the spiritual problem 
 of the individual soul. In the degree of their 
 
 181
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 success in this direction was the power they 
 exerted in behalf of human progress. All the 
 ingenuity of Bouck White and kindred inter- 
 preters has not been able to make of Jesus Christ 
 a political agitator and social reformer. In a 
 world more than half slave he never mentioned 
 slavery. So far from attacking the drink evil, 
 he is said to have made wine for a wedding feast, 
 and was called by his enemies a winebibber. If 
 he attacked wealth and enjoined almsgiving, it 
 was less in behalf of the poor than to save the 
 souls of the rich. Though his zeal for righteous- 
 ness led him into conflict with the grasping and 
 powerful political leaders of his nation, and he 
 was condemned to death as an agitator, the 
 falsity of the charge is evident on its very face. 
 He was the King of Truth, and walked through 
 the world sublimely indifferent to the external 
 conditions of life which enslave the soul and bring 
 it into subjection to the things which are seen 
 and temporal. 
 
 It is because Browning was moved by the 
 same spirit, because he regarded the soul's in- 
 terests as paramount and held the outward cir- 
 cumstances of life to be nothing but 
 
 Machinery, just meant 
 
 To give thy soul its bent. 
 
 Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed, 
 
 that he seemed so indifferent to the movements 
 in the world about him which aimed at the im- 
 provement of social conditions. 
 
 182
 
 OF LIFE AND LOVE 
 
 The same thing is equally true of Kipling in 
 our own day. No man of our time has seen more 
 deeply into life, or held to the truth more sanely 
 and steadfastly. In story and verse he has taught 
 great, fundamental truths of democracy, of loyalty, 
 of zest and meaning in the day's work; but the 
 social movements which absorb the interest of 
 Shaw and Wells might be nonexistent so far as 
 he is concerned. For all that, his work will live 
 when their names will have been forgotten. 
 
 We pass over the charge, therefore, that Brown- 
 ing was so absorbed in metaphysical speculations 
 that he was indifferent to the great human prob- 
 lems of our time. On the contrary, it was be- 
 cause he was so concerned with the essential 
 progress of the race that he devoted himself 
 so assiduously to the consideration of those 
 fundamental spiritual factors upon which all 
 true progress must rest. What he sought was 
 an evaluation of human nature, a ground broad 
 and firm enough for a world to stand on. He was 
 far in advance of his own day — in advance even of 
 ours — in his sure confidence in the spiritual worth 
 and dignity of humanity, and his belief in the in- 
 evitable triumph of the spiritual over the temporal. 
 
 Poor vaunt of life indeed, 
 Were man but formed to feed 
 
 On joy, to solely seek, and find, and feast. 
 Such feasting ended, then 
 As sure an end to men — 
 
 Irks care the cropful bird, frets doubt the maw- 
 crammed beast? 
 
 183
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Then, wt'loonie oac-h rohulf 
 
 Thai turns earth's smoothness rougli, 
 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! 
 Be our joys three parts pain! 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
 Learn, nor account the pang; dare never grudge 
 the throe. — ("Rabbi Ben Ezra.") 
 
 Thus the poet's attitude toward those hard- 
 ships and difficulties in humfui life which give 
 rise to the social problem leads us directly to the 
 consideration of his interpretation of the problem 
 of evil, and of the relation of struggle to progress 
 — a matter which requires a chapter to itself. 
 
 184
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 I REMEMBER professing at the outset that 
 these papers did not assume to discuss Browning's 
 "philosophy," nor to analyze his "message." 
 Nevertheless I am conscious of having got into 
 rather deep water. My only justification is that 
 these are still "confessions," and that what I 
 am trying to do is not so much to set forth what 
 Browning intended to teach as to declare what 
 in my own thinking finds illustration and con- 
 firmation in his work. This is what Browning 
 means to me. At the same time I am confident 
 that I do not entirely misapprehend the poet's 
 own point of view. This, as it seems to me, is 
 how life looked and what it meant to him. 
 
 The recognition of the poet's essential indi- 
 vidualism, and of his interpretation of life's 
 hardships and diflficulties as "a stuff to try the 
 soul's strength on," has brought us to the whole 
 problem of evil, and to a closer examination of 
 the poet's "optimism." 
 
 The problem is as old as Job and Ecclesiastes, 
 or for that matter, as the Book of the Dead; 
 as new as John Stuart Mill, as Nietzsche, or the 
 Russian novelists. Whence come the limitations 
 
 185
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 and contradictions of life, its sins, its tragedies 
 and sorrows, its brutal cynicisms, its glowing 
 promises and heartless refusals, its deadly monot- 
 onies and ghastly terrible contrasts? Is it all 
 illusion, whence the only escape is the cessation 
 of desire? Is it a blind and cruel fate, to which 
 we can only as blindly submit? Are the gods 
 indifferent to human joys and sorrows, dwelling 
 in the passionless calm of their infinite elevation? 
 Or is the Almighty intent on his own glory, to 
 enhance which men must be content to suffer 
 and fail and be damned? May it not be that 
 God is not the Almighty, after all, but that he 
 is caught in the web of his own devising? That, 
 having brought into existence a world of sentient 
 creatures, he finds himself powerless to solve the 
 contradictions of their lot, and can only help- 
 lessly await the outcome of their struggles? Or 
 must w^e not say tliat for man to ask the mean- 
 ing of life is simple folly; that so far as human 
 knowledge goes, man is only a by-product of the 
 operation of laws and forces whose workings he 
 can dimly trace, but whose origin and whose 
 outcome lie far beyond the scope of his feeble 
 imaginings? Let him content himself within the 
 limitations of his lot, using such discoveries as 
 he may stumble upon in his daily experience to 
 alleviate his condition as far as may be, with no 
 questions asked as to anything beyond. 
 
 Such are some of the answers that have been 
 suggested from time to time to the riddle of the 
 
 186
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 universe. Greek philosophy issued in stoical sub- 
 mission. Oriental pessimism looks only for 
 annihilation or its equivalent in Nirvana. Modern 
 science abandons the problem as insoluble. The 
 latest suggestion is that of Bergson, who finds 
 the Creative Power forever experimenting, feeling 
 its way to ends which may and doubtless will 
 prove good, but which are in no wise foreseen 
 or predetermined. Or if the ultimate end may be 
 regarded as purposed, the means thereto are the 
 product of momentary activity and choice, as a 
 practiced orator may know clearly the thought 
 he desires to convey, but leaves the form in which 
 it is cast to be determined by the accident of the 
 moment, choosing his words and sentences and 
 even his illustrations impromptu. Thus the 
 spoken address is the product of the creative 
 evolution of his thought, though the total im- 
 pression upon his audience has been foreknown 
 and predestined by his will. 
 
 There is much that is suggestive and helpful 
 in this way of thinking. It relieves the Almighty 
 to some extent of responsibility for the particular 
 accidents of experience, and leaves room for the 
 variety and freedom of real life. It helps to 
 solve, for our feeling if not for our insight, the 
 eternal contradiction between the sovereignty of 
 the Infinite Purpose and the freedom of the indi- 
 vidual will. But it assumes, as religion must 
 forever assume, the rightness and worth-whileness 
 of the whole process. We must at least believe 
 
 187
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 tliat the Etornal Orator lius ii meaning which he 
 seeks at all hazard to convey. 
 
 This original assumption is a matter of prime 
 importance. We may call the chessboard white 
 or black: in either case the opposite squares are 
 to be accounted for. As a matter of fact, few 
 persons in the world have ever been really thor- 
 oughgoing pessimists. The very fact that the 
 problem is universally recognized as the "problem 
 of evil" instead of the "problem of good" indicates 
 the underlying assumption that life is essentially 
 right and just. The chessboard is white — it is 
 the black squares that give us pause. 
 
 As we have seen, Browning not only takes 
 the worth-whileness of life for granted, but he 
 heartily accepts all the implications that go with 
 it. It is the robustness of his assertion of life's 
 values that has given him the title of "opti- 
 mist." 
 
 This world's no blot for us or blank, 
 It means intensely and means good; 
 To find its meaning is my meat and drink. 
 
 — ("Fra Lippo Lippi.") 
 
 That this is only a preliminary assumption 
 Bishop Blougram frankly admits, but he points 
 out with equal clearness the instability of the 
 opposite assumption. Suppose we deny the 
 validity of faith? 
 
 188
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 . . . All we've gained is, that belief, 
 As unbelief before, shakes us by fits. 
 Confounds us like its predecessor. Where's 
 The gain? How can we guard our unbelief. 
 Make it bear fruit to us? — the problem here. 
 Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, 
 A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
 A chorus-ending from Euripides — 
 And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
 As old and new at once as nature's self. 
 To rap and knock and enter in our soul. 
 Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring. 
 Round the ancient idol, on his base again — 
 The grand Perhaps! 
 
 This is a matter not sufficiently considered by 
 our modern pessimists. Given the sun, it is 
 easy enough to account for shadow. If we fix 
 our minds on shadow as the ultimate reality, it 
 is not so easy to account for light. Given reason, 
 we may readily appreciate the folly of ignorance 
 or childishness; but what shall we say of the 
 triumphs of reason if unreason be the ground of 
 reality? Given goodness as the sum of things, 
 we understand how willfulness may sin against 
 the truth. But if reality is, after all, nothing 
 but the chance by-product of hidden necessities, 
 whence the immeasurable significance of justice 
 and love? 
 
 The problem of evil is dark enough. Progress 
 through the suppression of the unfit, life sup- 
 ported through the death of the innocent, nature 
 red in tooth and claw; history drenched with the 
 blood of endless strife; civilization resting on the 
 
 189
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 bowed necks of serfs — these things shriek against 
 our creed. The man who lias not felt the un- 
 speakable tragetly of exislenee, whose heart has 
 not stood still before the horror of this bottomless 
 Inferno which we call human life, has no right 
 to speiik. The rosewater gospel so attractive to 
 many modern folk, which blithely shuts its eyes 
 and says there is no evil, represents only the 
 despair of feeble minds. 
 
 Nevertheless, there are only two alternatives. 
 Life either means something or it does not. 
 Either there lies behind it a sleepless wisdom, 
 and "through the ages an increasing Purpose 
 runs," or it is "a tale told by an idiot, full of 
 sound and fury, signifying nothing." Neither 
 view may be demonstrated beyond a peradventure. 
 Either one is a faith, a working hypothesis, chosen 
 because it seems to fit in with the greater number 
 of facts. If, then, we assume the eternal Wis- 
 dom, we may find hints regarding the significance 
 of evil which at least may "stop our despair." 
 If we deny this assumption, we not only are left 
 without any tangible clew, but goodness and 
 truth themselves are left meaningless and void. 
 
 The conviction that even the darkest problems 
 of sin and pain are not utterly opaque to the 
 infinite Wisdom and Love is nothing more than 
 the application to the realm of the spirit of the 
 principle which Hes at the very foundation of 
 science, namely, that no part of creation, how- 
 ever baffling, can prove ultimately intractable to 
 
 190
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 reason. The assumptions of science are every 
 whit as mystical as those of religion. The un- 
 solved problems of science are as perplexing. 
 The affirmations of science quite as often as 
 those of theology seem to the wayfaring man to 
 smack of mythology. We are wont to visit our 
 scorn on the futility of mediaeval scholasticism, 
 wasting itself in such bootless discussions as, 
 "how many angels can dance on the point of a 
 cambric needle?" The affirmations of recent 
 physics concerning the ether, rapt descriptions of 
 the dance of electrons within the orbit of an atom 
 of hydrogen, and various similar matters familiar 
 to the reader of recent scientific literature, are in 
 point of fact quite as remote from the tangible 
 realities of every day, and quite as dependent on 
 the supposed exigencies of a system of logical 
 reasoning, as scholasticism itself. 
 
 Far be it from a mere layman so much as to 
 express an opinion on these high matters. One 
 must endeavor to exercise a modesty and self- 
 restraint which, alas! is quite foreign to the 
 magazine scientist — sometimes, indeed, to his 
 masters. But the layman is quite within his 
 rights to protest that if science requires these 
 abstruse mythologies as the background of her 
 practical discoveries, she has no right to object 
 if the man of God claims equal right to make 
 those assumptions which his experience and study 
 have shown him are needful for the interpreta- 
 tion of spiritual problems. 
 
 191
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 II 
 
 The question has often been raised whether 
 Browning's optimistic view of life did not rest 
 at bottom on temperament and unbroken physical 
 hejUth, ratluT tlian on superior insight or a 
 successful working philosophy. We are told that 
 his bodily vitality afi'ected others like an electric 
 shock. He seemed to radiate health and good 
 spirits. He drew Elizabeth Barrett out of the 
 shadow of death by the sheer force of his will 
 to live and to make her live. 
 
 Why, it is asked, should not a man who was 
 never sick a moment in his life, whose vital energies 
 were always above par, take a cheerful view of life.'^ 
 How could he help being an optimist? As Henry 
 Ward Beecher declared, when asked whether life 
 is worth living, "That depends on the liver." 
 
 It is nothing to the point to reply that Browning 
 was subject to terrible headaches which inter- 
 rupted his work for days at a time, and gave 
 his sympathetic correspondent much anxious con- 
 cern; since a modern doctor would doubtless 
 have attributed these sufferings to eyestrain, 
 caused by that unequal vision to which we have 
 elsewhere referred. Headaches due to a sluggish 
 liver might cause hypochondria, but those due 
 to eyestrain do not usually affect either the 
 general health or the mental attitude. 
 
 The real answer to this contention is that 
 those who make it by the same token admit 
 
 192
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 that optimism is the sane and normal attitude, 
 and that pessimism is the product of disordered 
 nerves and low physical vitality. The proper 
 place for its advocates is the sanitarium. Let 
 us cheerfully grant that Browning was a vigorous 
 and healthy Englishman who took a perfectly 
 simple attitude toward life, neither rebelling at 
 its limitations nor whimpering at its hardships, 
 but resolutely striving to make the best of it, 
 and to discover what way of thinking about it 
 yielded the broadest and most enduring founda- 
 tions for such an attitude. The very presence 
 of such a vigorous and wholesome personality 
 in our literature has a tonic effect. 
 
 I shall never forget hearing a literary friend 
 tell of his real introduction to Browning. He 
 had studied him perfunctorily, of course, as a 
 part of his college work, but nothing in the poet 
 as presented in the classroom had especially ap- 
 pealed to him. One day, in a mood of great 
 depression, he was browsing aimlessly through 
 the college library, when he picked up a volume 
 of Browning. The book opened at the last page, 
 and his eyes fell on the "Epilogue" to "Asolando": 
 
 What had I on earth to do 
 With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? 
 Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel, 
 — Being — who ? 
 
 One who never turned his back but marched breast 
 forward. 
 Never doubted clouds would break, 
 
 193
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Never tlrrainoil, lhoiii,fli right were worsted, wrong 
 
 would triunii)li, 
 Held we fall to rise, arc baffled to fight better, 
 Sleej) to wake. 
 
 Tiic lines rang in his ears like a trumpet-call. 
 His mood of despondency vanished like mist 
 before the morning sun, and in its place came 
 a resolve to face life with the courage and re- 
 sourcefulness of which the poet sang. Afterward 
 he found that this keynote resounds through the 
 whole of Browning's poetry, and he discovered 
 he had made a new literary friend. 
 
 I am quite ready to grant that Browning's 
 attitude toward life is the triumph of person- 
 ality over the outward conditions of existence. 
 Such triumph is perhaps more obvious in the 
 case of a man who, like Stevenson, maintains 
 his cheerful courage in the face of disease and 
 death, but Browning's healthful vigor bears no 
 less powerful witness to the essential sanity of 
 those who believe in the best of life. It is be- 
 cause he "was ever a fighter" that he could 
 hold even failure as but "a triumph's evidence 
 for the fullness of the days," and treat the ills 
 that flesh is heir to wuth such disdain. His poetry 
 is a constant challenge to emulate the same daunt- 
 less courage. When Mr. ]\Iore desires to discover 
 the secret of Browning's undiminishing popularity 
 he would do well to take this into account. 
 
 I admit that at times Browning's assertion 
 of his courage is almost robustious. I fear that 
 
 194.
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 sometimes he doth protest too much. For all 
 that he is a fighter, and he never wields his sword 
 so doughtily as when his back is to the wall 
 and the odds are against him. Like Childe 
 Roland, it is when the apparitions of evil about 
 him have done their utmost to terrify him, and 
 the "Round squat turret, blind as the fool's 
 heart," confronts him at last, that "dauntless 
 the slug-horn to his lips he sets," and blows 
 defiance to the powers of darkness. 
 
 He has learned that God is, after all, not on 
 the side of the heaviest battalions — Napoleon 
 spoke too soon; at Saint Helena he might have 
 made a different remark. 
 
 "Instans Tyrannus" is a study of the power- 
 lessness of evil in the face of simple truth and 
 faith. The most malevolent power quails in 
 the end before the might of innocence. God 
 and one are a majority. 
 
 When sudden — how think ye, the end? 
 
 Did I say, "without friend"? 
 
 Say rather, from marge to blue marge 
 
 The whole sky grew his targe 
 
 With the sun's self for visible boss, 
 
 While an Arm ran across 
 
 Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast. 
 
 Where the wretch was safe prest! 
 
 Do you see? Just my vengeance complete. 
 
 The man sprang to his feet, 
 
 Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed! 
 
 — So, I was afraid! 
 
 As I have said in an earlier chapter, I am 
 quite willing to grant that Browning's philosophy 
 
 195
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 of optiniisin is the oiitconic rather than the 
 cause of his optimistic attitude. He believes 
 in life because he cannot help himself — because 
 to him it "did and does smack sweet." His 
 reasons for this attitude are an afterthought. 
 He believes them because, if they are not true, 
 his whole life-structure falls to the ground. 
 
 But, as I have argued before, all this is but 
 greater evidence of their essential validity. If 
 life must be meaningless without certain great 
 faiths, then let us hold that truth against the 
 world. It is no answer to say that merely wish- 
 ing things to be true does not make them so. 
 In the greatest things it does. Or, perhaps 
 better, in all the deeper experiences of life the 
 desire and its supply are necessary correlatives. 
 The hunger of the babe no more surely indicates 
 the breast than the hunger of the soul for friend- 
 ship and love prophesies its fulfillment. To go 
 on and apply the same principle to the loftiest 
 ideals of life, and even to the soul's yearning 
 for God and immortality, is but the conviction 
 that life is all of one piece. 
 
 In a very true sense the largest meanings of 
 life have their ultimate validity in nothing in 
 the world but the will to make them real. If 
 it be true that beneath all this lies the structure 
 of Creation itself, or, as our fathers would have 
 said, the will of God, yet so far as we are con- 
 cerned the will that truth and love shall be is 
 essentially creative — these things do not and 
 
 196
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 cannot exist for us except as we desire them. 
 They exist only in our desire, and the strength 
 of that desire is the measure of our power to 
 bring them to pass. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It is evident, therefore, that the underlying 
 ground of the poet's interpretation of the prob- 
 lem of evil is his conviction of the worth and 
 significance of human life, and his reliance on 
 the reality and power of the Infinite Wisdom 
 and Love in which that life has its root. He 
 maintains this faith, not by shutting his eyes to 
 the sorrow and sin and pain of life, but by hold- 
 ing fast to his conviction in the face of all the 
 
 facts. 
 
 Is God love indeed. 
 And will ye hold that truth against the world.'* 
 — ("A Death in the Desert.") 
 
 Like Saint John and the Pope, Browning 
 sees all "this dread machinery of sin and sorrow, 
 would confound me else," against the back- 
 ground of this Love. For him as for Lowell, 
 "Standeth God within the shadow, keeping 
 watch above his own." 
 
 It is in this light that he seeks to interpret 
 the darker places of experience. He brings 
 forward a number of suggestions, none of which 
 is intended to cover all the ground, but all of 
 which indicate that even for our feeble insight 
 the problem is not altogether opaque. 
 
 197
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 His first suggestion is that evil is intended 
 to ailord llial resistance to the soul's efforts 
 througli which alone strength can be attained. 
 We have already remarked that his feeling of 
 the necessity of such soul-discipline rendered him 
 almost oblivious to the social movements which 
 aim at the alleviation of human misery. Even 
 the moral weaknesses which cause the religious 
 thinker so much concern Browning sees as the es- 
 sential condition of true moral freedom and worth. 
 The friction which checks the working of our ma- 
 chinery is the necessary condition of its working. 
 The resistance of the atmosphere which hinders 
 the flight of the bird is essential to its flight. 
 
 Let us not always say, 
 "Spite of this flesh to-day 
 
 I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole." 
 As the bird wings and sings, 
 Let us cry, "All good things 
 
 Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps 
 soul." —("Rabbi Ben Ezra.") 
 
 No, when the fight begins within himself, 
 
 A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head, 
 
 Satan looks up between his feet — both tug — 
 
 He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes 
 
 And grows. Prolong that battle through his life! 
 
 Never leave growing till the life to come! 
 
 — ("Bishop Blougram's Apology.") 
 
 Was the trial sore? 
 Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! 
 Why comes temptation but for man to meet 
 And master and make crouch beneath his foot, 
 And so be pedestal'd in triumph? Pray, 
 "Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!" 
 
 198
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold, 
 Lead such temptations by the head and hair, 
 Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, 
 That so he may do battle and have praise. 
 
 —("The Pope.") 
 
 Closely akin to this is the suggestion of Bishop 
 Blougram that God must needs thus hide him- 
 self behind the darkness of human experience, 
 because the naked soul is too feeble to bear the 
 shock of clear insight : 
 
 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 disemprisoned heart 
 
 Less certainly would wither up at once 
 
 Than mind, confronted with the truth of him. 
 
 Another phase of the same principle is the 
 idea that man can truly learn only through 
 experience, which implies mistake and failure. 
 
 When a soul has seen 
 By the means of Evil that Good is best. 
 And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's 
 serene, — 
 When our faith in the same has stood the test — 
 Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, 
 
 The uses of labor are surely done; 
 There remaineth a rest for the people of God. 
 
 — ("Old Pictures in Florence.") 
 
 This is the ground of David's hope for Saul: 
 
 The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest 
 to make sure; 
 
 199
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 By the pain throh triumphantly winninf^ intensified 
 bHss, 
 
 And the next world's reward and repDse by the strug- 
 gles of this. 
 
 There are always two ways of learning the 
 force of any law — one is by obedience, the other 
 by disobedience. The former is more direct 
 and jjerfect— happy the world if men had never 
 chosen any other path. Nevertheless, the path 
 of disobedience no less surely teaches the errant 
 soul the worth and significance of truth. The 
 burnt child fears the fire. It may be that in the 
 long run those who have tasted the dire effects 
 of lawlessness and self-will, and have been driven 
 thereby to renewed allegiance to the eternal 
 Right, shall prove of superior spiritual power 
 and worth to those whose sober wishes never 
 learned to stray. Is it not written of the elect, 
 "Ye shall judge angels"? 
 
 Still another kindred notion is that of Abt 
 Vogler, that evil forms the necessary background 
 of good, the contrast without which goodness 
 itself could not be understood and appreciated. 
 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound. 
 
 Why was the pause prolonged but that singing might 
 
 issue thence.^ 
 Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should 
 
 be prized? 
 
 We need not pause upon the doctrine that 
 evil is in itself essentially negative. Our Chris- 
 tian Science friends have rung the changes upon 
 
 200
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 this notion. They have not always sufficiently 
 considered that a negative evil may be just as 
 disastrous as a positive one. A hole may be 
 said to be negative, a disease germ positive: 
 nevertheless a hole will sink a boat quite as 
 successfully as tuberculosis will destroy a man. 
 Browning for one has no illusions on this head. 
 He knows full well the power of evil in human 
 experience, but he is so confident of the greater 
 power of good to overcome it that in comparison 
 the evil seems negligible. 
 
 The other doctrine, that without the con- 
 trast of evil good could not be truly experienced, 
 requires a word. John Fiske made much of 
 this doctrine in his suggestive little book, Through 
 Nature to God. In so far as it contains a germ 
 of truth, it undoubtedly contributes to a theodicy. 
 Rest is sweet after toil, and freedom from pain 
 is bliss after sore anguish. But as I have else- 
 where written in this connection, "Silence does 
 not of necessity imply sound, for there is a silence 
 which results from the smashing of the violin, 
 the wreck of the organ. Discord sometimes has 
 no meaning, when sweet bells become 'jangled, 
 out of tune and harsh.' Moreover, when we 
 get away from the metaphor, evil, so far as it 
 is moral evil and not mere ignorance and mis- 
 take, is the deliberate choice of a will acting in 
 opposition to its own best impulses. From this 
 point of view sin is as positive as righteousness. 
 The personality of the man who sins is as active 
 
 201
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 in liiite as in love. Hate may be a wrong use of 
 the power to love, but a use it is, not mere failure 
 to use. The hate is as positive as the love. 
 Whetlier or not it shall be as eternal must be 
 determinetl on other grounds than mere figures 
 of speeeh" ("The Poet's Vision of Man," p. 23). 
 If the principle of contrast should be erected 
 into an eternal and fundamental law, it would 
 justify the teaching of Tertullian that the joys 
 of heaven will be enhanced by the sight of the 
 torments of the damned, and God himself might 
 be suspected of being incapable of essential good- 
 ness unless he had first passed through an expe- 
 rience of infinite sin. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the principle of contrast, 
 when pushed to such extremes, rests on a false 
 psychology. It is the echo of English sensa- 
 tionalism, the philosophy of Locke and Hume, 
 of Mill and Spencer, which regarded the mind 
 as a tabula rasa, the passive recipient of impres- 
 sions forced upon it from without. In such a 
 process we might conceive that contrast would 
 give effect to sensations of opposite character, 
 and that each would be interpreted purely in 
 terms of the other. Yet even then it is permitted 
 to ask how contrasted experiences could ever in 
 a passive mind give rise to an experience of 
 contrast. But, as a matter of fact, sweet and 
 sour, dark and light are 7wt interpreted in terms 
 of each other. Each is an independent expe- 
 rience, having its own peculiar quality. When 
 
 202
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 we reach the insight that all experience is simply 
 the mind reacting according to its own inherent 
 nature to the stimuli which reach it from the 
 world without, we begin to see that every par- 
 ticular experience, whether of pleasure or of 
 pain, of good or of evil, stands in its own right. 
 It is an ultimate fact. The mind has all these 
 various kinds of experience because, like the 
 bears and lions of Isaac Watts's nursery rhyme, 
 "it is its nature to," and there is nothing more 
 to be said. 
 
 What is true with regard to these pairs of 
 opposites in sensation and experience is that 
 contrast heightens their effect in consciousness. 
 From this point of view we may agree that pain 
 helps us to appreciate the value of health, and 
 evil bears powerful witness to the worth of that 
 which is good. So long as we keep it steadily 
 in mind that this single principle does not cover 
 all the ground and must not be erected into an 
 absolute truth, we may find many instances 
 where it helps us to a real understanding of 
 life's mysteries. As we shall see, it requires a 
 further principle to complete it; for, so far as 
 this world goes, evil is often the last word, and 
 if the contrasted good is to be attained, it must 
 be in some future life, where the discords may 
 be resolved. It is only fair to say that it is pre- 
 cisely in this connection that Browning employs 
 the doctrine, as heightening the demand for the 
 life beyond. 
 
 203
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 III 
 
 All these lesser principles for the understanding 
 of the problem of human suffering and sin are 
 subordinate, liowever, to the supreme law wherel)y 
 Browning interprets the whole of life, namely, that 
 of Progress. As the evolutionist finds in the strug- 
 gle for existence the chief instrumentality through 
 which the higher and more significant forms of 
 life have been developed, so the poet sees in the 
 limitations and inequalities of human experience 
 the essential factors in the growth of the soul. 
 
 We have seen how the fact that life is a con- 
 tinuous development of which man is the crown- 
 ing glory finds expression in "Paracelsus": 
 
 All tended to mankind. 
 And, man produced, all has its end thus far: 
 But in completed man begins anew 
 A tendency to God. 
 
 The same truth finds illustration in all Brown- 
 ing's most significant work. Saint John declares 
 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. 
 
 I say that man was born to grow, not stop. 
 
 — Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve, 
 A master to obey, a course to take. 
 Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become. 
 Grant this, then man must pass from old to new. 
 From vain to real, from mistake to fact. 
 From what seemed good to what proves best. 
 How could man have progression otherwise? 
 
 204
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra finds the end of life to be, that one 
 
 shall 
 
 Pass, approved 
 A man, for aye removed 
 From the developed brute; a God though in the germ. 
 
 It is from this point of view that all the ex- 
 periences of life are to be judged. Is man's 
 mind feeble of grasp, his will warped, his judg- 
 ment imperfect? How else.^^ Man is but a 
 child. His distorted notions of truth are but 
 the groping of an undeveloped mind after reality. 
 His superstitions are only faiths half-understood. 
 Even his sins are in the main but childish will- 
 fulness and folly. He is put into this world 
 to learn and grow. 
 
 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. 
 —("A Death in the Desert.") 
 
 An interesting putting of this truth is found 
 in "Old Pictures in Florence," where the crude 
 attempts of the earlier mediaeval artists to paint 
 the things they saw are preferred to the highest 
 perfection attained by Greek sculpture, simply 
 because they point to progress. Greek art marked 
 absolute perfection. 
 
 So, you saw yourself as you wished you were. 
 As you might have been, as you cannot be; 
 
 Earth here, rebuked by Olympus there: 
 And grew content in your poor degree 
 205
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 With y(Mir little junvor, by Ihoso statues' godhead, 
 Anci your little scope, hy their eyes' full sway, 
 
 And your little grace, by their grace embodied, 
 Aud your little date, by their forms that stay. 
 
 So, testing your weakness by their strength, 
 
 Your meager charms by their rounded beauty. 
 Measured by Art in your breadth and length. 
 
 You learned — to submit is a mortal's duty. 
 — ^Tien I say "you" 'tis the common soul. 
 
 The collective, I mean: the race of Man 
 That receives life in parts to live as a whole, 
 
 And grow here according to God's clear plan. 
 
 Growth came when, looking your last on them all. 
 
 You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day 
 And cried with a start — What if we so small 
 
 Be greater and grander the while than they? 
 Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? 
 
 In both, of such lower types are we 
 Precisely because of our wider nature; 
 
 For time theirs — ours for eternity. 
 
 To-day's brief passion limits their range; 
 
 It seethes with the morrow for us, and more. 
 They are perfect — how else? they shall never change: 
 
 We are faulty — why not? we have time in store. 
 The Artificer's hand is not arrested 
 
 With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished: 
 They stand for our copy, and, once invested 
 
 With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished. 
 
 *Tis a lifelong toil till our lump be leaven — 
 
 The better! \Miat's come to perfection perishes. 
 Things learned on earth we shall practice in heaven: 
 
 Works done least rapidly. Art most cherishes. 
 Thyself shalt afford the example, Giotto! 
 
 Thy one work, not to increase or diminish, 
 Done at a stroke, was just (was it not?) "O!" 
 
 Thy great Campanile is still to finish. 
 
 206
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 On which I conclude, that the early painters, 
 
 To cries of "Greek art and what more wish you?" — 
 Replied, "To become now self-acquainters. 
 
 And paint man, man, whatever the issue! 
 Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, 
 
 New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: 
 To bring the invisible full into play! 
 
 Let the visible go to the dogs — what matters?" 
 
 This doctrine, that life is to be interpreted 
 not by what it is but by what it promises, may 
 be applied to many different phases of human 
 experience. It enables us to rest content in our 
 imperfect insight, striving ever for more per- 
 fect understanding, yet nowise disheartened by 
 our failure to penetrate the baffling mystery of 
 existence; since our very failure bears witness 
 to the vastness of the truth we would compre- 
 hend, while the unsatisfied hunger for truth pro- 
 claims our kindred greatness. 
 
 The same principle makes it possible for us to 
 recognize clearly our moral weakness and folly 
 without sinking into the impotence of despair, 
 since we are assured that if we persist, our moral 
 struggles must be crowned with victory. 
 
 'Tis not what man does that exalts him, but what man 
 would do. —("Saul.") 
 
 What I aspired to be 
 And was not, comforts me: 
 
 A brute I might have been but would not sink i' the 
 scale. —("Rabbi Ben Ezra.") 
 
 As the efforts of a child are valued, not for 
 what they accomplish but for what they promise, 
 
 207
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 and because tliey afford training and experience, 
 so humanity's attainments are far less important 
 than the efl'ort tliey called forth. 
 
 Here work eiitough to watch 
 
 The Master work, and catch 
 
 Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. 
 
 Above all, it is the aspiration after truth, the 
 desire to achieve, the hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness, that are the real measure of man's 
 value, not only to society, but to himself and 
 to God. 
 
 Not on the vulgar mass 
 
 Called "work," must sentence pass. 
 
 Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 
 
 O'er which from level stand 
 
 The low world laid its hand. 
 
 Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice. 
 
 But all the world's coarse thumb 
 And finger failed to plumb. 
 So passed in making up the main account; 
 All instincts immature, 
 All purposes unsure. 
 
 That weighed not as his work yet swelled the man's 
 amount. 
 
 Thoughts, hardly to be packed 
 Into a narrow act. 
 
 Fancies, that broke through language and escaped; 
 All I could never be. 
 All, men ignored in me. 
 
 This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
 shaped. — (Ibid.) 
 
 This principle likewise affords some measure 
 of meaning to the experience of disappointment 
 
 208
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 and suffering. If a man may believe that his 
 own character gains in wisdom and strength 
 through such experiences, then he can afford 
 to "be patient and proud and soberly acquiesce." 
 The Pope bids Caponsacchi 
 
 "Be glad thou hast let light into the world, 
 Through that irregular breach o' the boundary — see 
 The same upon thy path and march assured. 
 Learning anew the use of soldiership, 
 Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear. 
 Loyalty to the life's end! Ruminate, 
 Deserve the initiatory spasm — once more 
 Work, be unhappy but bear life, my son!" 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra goes still further, and declares 
 all life to be nothing but 
 
 "Machinery, just meant 
 To give thy soul its bent, 
 Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed." 
 
 In the same mood Saint John says, in a passage 
 we have quoted before, 
 
 "For life, with all it yields of joy and woe 
 And hope and fear — believe the aged friend — 
 Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love. 
 How love might be, hath been indeed, and is; 
 And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost 
 Such prize despite the envy of the world. 
 And, having gained truth, keep truth: that is all." 
 
 One further consideration appears in the poet's 
 interpretation of the character of Christ, namely, 
 that suffering often becomes a revelation of the 
 Infinite love, and so becomes an instrument in 
 furthering the growth of another's soul. Even 
 
 209
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A IJUOWNING LOVEll 
 
 liuinan .siitt'orinf^ may boar that quality, as Poin- 
 pilia declares when she bids her soldier-saint 
 
 "Wait God's instant men call years; 
 Meantime hold hard by Irnth and his great soul, 
 Do out the duly! Through such souls alone 
 God stooping sliows sufficient of his light 
 For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise." 
 
 It is evident that progress in such a world 
 is no mere matter of mechanical reactions, the 
 by-product of economic forces, a function of 
 climate and food supply. It is in its very nature 
 a function of character, of spiritual develop- 
 ment, born of the power of the human mind and 
 soul to react upon its environment, to turn upon 
 the conditions by which it is surrounded and 
 under which it lives, to modify and improve them. 
 
 Rejoice we are allied 
 To that which doth provide 
 And not partake, effect and not receive! 
 A spark disturbs our clod; 
 Nearer we hold of God 
 
 Who gives, than of his tribes that take, I must believe. 
 
 — ("Rabbi Ben Ezra.") 
 
 Even social progress depends on the develop- 
 ing and perfecting of the individual. It is one 
 of the strange contradictions of human experience 
 that those who prate most of progress and pro- 
 fess themselves most devoted to the welfare 
 of mankind should in these days be so largely 
 the devotees of the "philosophy of dirt," of 
 the mechanical interpretation of human life. 
 In point of fact, a mechanical philosophy is in 
 
 210
 
 OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 itself the chief barrier to progress. If man is 
 nothing but result, and nowhere cause, then it 
 is folly to exhort him to efiFort. If he is the vic- 
 tim of circumstances, if his character is inevitably 
 determined by the quality of his food, the cubic 
 air space in his sleeping chamber, then education 
 is a waste of time, and the attempt to further 
 political justice by extending democracy is the 
 height of absurdity. The well-fed and well- 
 housed are by hypothesis the only ones who 
 can be regarded as good or intelligent, and it 
 is for them, in the exercise of the impulses which 
 the working of mechanical necessity creates in 
 them, to lord it over the rest of mankind in 
 such manner as seemeth them good. 
 
 But our practice, as always, is infinitely su- 
 perior to our theories, and we go on striving for 
 political and social progress, resolute, in spite 
 of our philosophy, in the conviction of the per- 
 fectibility of human nature and the supremacy 
 of character over circumstances. High thinking 
 still has power to lend spice to plain living, and 
 the love of justice wars against man's inhumanity 
 to man until the world shall find its highest 
 social order in ''righteousness and peace and 
 joy in holiness of spirit." Such a world must 
 of necessity be filled with sorrow and disappoint- 
 ment, with pain and wrong, so long as the end 
 remains unattained. But these things not only 
 challenge the will to struggle onward toward 
 that divine event, but afford the discipline and 
 
 211
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 1 raining wluTohy men sliiill become worthy and 
 al)le to achieve that high destiny. 
 
 It is evident, liowever, lluit such faith in 
 human progress, resting, as it does, on the hope 
 of individual no less than of social perfection, 
 requires for its fulfillment Browning's further 
 faith in an ultimate future for the individual 
 beyond the limits of earthly experience. Cer- 
 tainly, few of our ideals are attained here. If 
 life is a probation — and this is the real meaning 
 of progress, though theology has generally em- 
 phasized the peril of failure, whereas the poet 
 has laid chief stress on the hope of success — if 
 we are placed between good and evil, "Life's 
 business being just the terrible choice," then 
 there must of necessity be some future sphere 
 where the award shall be made, and "every 
 winter turn to spring." It remains, therefore, to 
 consider the poet's faith in immortality, which 
 all his readers have recognized as the keystone 
 in his arch of truth. 
 
 212
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 PROSPICE 
 
 My friend the Professor of Psychology — the 
 saints be good to him, for he is altogether one 
 of the rarest souls that ever trod this planet, 
 a modest and gentle spirit, a patient and pains- 
 taking scholar in fields where I am but a dabbler 
 — listens in tolerant amazement to the passion 
 with which I discuss the problem of immortality. 
 For his own part he professes the most languid 
 interest in the matter. Life is good. He has 
 worked, and loved, and gathered a friend or two, 
 and if death should make an end of all, still he 
 feels that it has been worth while. 
 
 Of quite another kidney is a youthful literary 
 dilettante of my acquaintance — he who confided 
 to me one day the distress occasioned in his 
 artistic soul by the crudeness of nature: to wit, 
 that while in the autumn she does succeed in 
 blending the most violent contrasts of color 
 into a not-unpleasing harmony, in the spring 
 the greens clash! In a book of Paris sketches 
 published some years ago my young friend tells 
 a pathetic tale of a little lad, the son of the 
 concierge, who died after a brief illness; when my 
 friend felt constrained through pitying sym- 
 pathy to offer the bereaved father the consola- 
 
 gl3
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 tions of a heaven in which his own enlightened 
 mind had long ceased to believe. 
 
 Somewhere between these two points of view 
 — the frankly empirical, content to take life as 
 it is, and leave the question of its outcome for 
 the future to take care of in its own way; and the 
 sentimental, feebly clinging to the pleasant feelings 
 stirred in the disillusioned heart by its outgrown 
 faiths— the mind of the age seems to oscillate. 
 
 Individual reactions, naturally, vary widely. 
 Professor Miinsterberg felt that unending exist- 
 ence would be an unmitigated bore. Maeterhnck 
 weaves beautiful spells of vague mysteries, wooing 
 us from the love of life and the desire for indi- 
 vidual persistence to a misty grandiose dream 
 of some higher spiritual identity. The British 
 novelists, each after his kind, seek to lose them- 
 selves in the study of the endless complex variety 
 of human life here and now, asking no questions 
 as to its larger meaning and outcome. Scores 
 of busy men and women on every hand have, 
 like my friend the Professor, so filled their lives 
 with useful labor and their consciousness with 
 the sense of social solidarity that the individual 
 problem loses its poignancy, and they profess 
 themselves content with 
 
 that choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In lives made better by their presence, 
 
 — a point of view characterized by Tennyson as 
 "Faith as vague as all unsweet." 
 
 214
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 But for all this surface content with the things 
 that are seen and temporal, no thoughtful ob- 
 server of the times can fail to feel, despite this 
 apparent absorption in the life that now is, a 
 restless impatience with the limitations of human 
 experience, and a deep-lying sense of the tragedy 
 of a life as futile as frail. On the one hand the 
 ever-growing materialism of our civilization, the 
 refusal of the modern man to postpone the en- 
 joyment of his desires, the mad rush of work 
 and play in which he drowns the possibility of 
 thought and reflection, bear witness to an unsat- 
 isfied yearning which refuses to be stilled. On 
 the other hand we find the "tender-minded" 
 even among empirical scientists manifesting a 
 growing interest in "psychic research," in the 
 attempt to find some material proof of spiritual 
 existence. 
 
 The essential pessimism of current philosophy 
 points in the same direction. These things all 
 testify to the place which the immortal hope 
 holds in our total view of things. Here and 
 there an exceptionally strong and valiant soul 
 may hold to the worth of life despite its uncer- 
 tainty and the gloom of its everlasting Night; 
 but the great majority of the voices which cry 
 aloud to the present world are mainly conscious 
 of nothing save that "there is no work, nor de- 
 vice, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave 
 whither thou goest." No man can go among his 
 fellows as a spiritual adviser, seeking to find 
 
 215
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 for them comfort in their sorrows jiiul strengtli 
 in their temptations, and not reahze the pall 
 which the modern donbt has drawn over the 
 face of the sky. 
 
 Now and then the dull submission — too tamed 
 and stolid to be called resignation — with which 
 the modern man foots the treadmill of existence 
 breaks out into open revolt. Even the exquisite 
 loveliness of Omar's melodious melancholy, with 
 which the modern world has felt so much sym- 
 pathy, and which tends all the while to shade 
 off into a grimly playful Epicureanism, occasion- 
 ally flashes up into a momentary defiance of the 
 Fate from which there is no appeal: 
 
 Into this Universe, and Why not knowing. 
 Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
 And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
 I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. 
 
 What, without asking, hither hurried Whence? 
 And, without asking, Whither hurried hence! 
 
 Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine 
 Must drown the memory of that insolence! 
 
 Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, 
 And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake: 
 
 For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man 
 Is blacken 'd — Man's forgiveness give — and take! 
 
 The spirit of the twelfth-century Persian, 
 handed down to our time through the kindred 
 genius of Fitzgerald, finds a like expression in 
 the mouth of the anthologist of an American 
 country town. Edgar Lee Masters' "Scholfield 
 
 216
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 Huxley" seems to me to voice the inner revolt of our 
 whole modern life against the blank curtain which 
 our philosophy has dropped at the end of it all: 
 
 God! ask me not to record your wonders, 
 
 I admit the stars and the suns 
 
 And the countless worlds. 
 
 But I have measured their distances 
 
 And weighed them and discovered their substances. 
 
 I have devised wings for the air, 
 
 And keels for water. 
 
 And horses of iron for the earth. 
 
 I have lengthened the vision you gave me a million 
 
 times; 
 I have leaped over space with speech. 
 And taken fire for light out of the air. 
 I have built great cities and bored through the hills, 
 And bridged majestic waters. 
 I have written the Iliad and Hamlet; 
 And I have explored your mysteries. 
 And searched for you without ceasing. 
 And found you again after losing you 
 In hours of weariness. 
 And I ask you: 
 
 How would you like to create a su!n, 
 And the next day have the worms 
 Slipping in and out between your fingers? 
 
 Not in many a day has any poem so stirred 
 me. Here we have the whole tragedy of modern- 
 ity — its sureness of itself, its consciousness of 
 masteries manifold, its triumphs over the lim- 
 itations of fate, its disillusionment, its dumb 
 despair, its bitter revolt. This is the passion 
 that stirs in my own heart, and which my placid 
 friend, the Professor, finds it so hard to under- 
 stand. He, God bless him, has lived a somewhat 
 
 217
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 slu'ltorod life, surroiiiKkHl with Iiis books and 
 liis stiidenls; and absorbed in his intellectual 
 pursuits, has had small contact with the passion- 
 ate, desperate, heart-hungry world of eager youth 
 and disillusioned mid-age and sad, empty-hearted 
 eld that ebbs and flows in never-ceasing tide 
 under the white lights of Broadway and surges 
 through Ludgate Circus and laughs in the Bois 
 de Boulogne and is heaped in rotting mounds 
 of shredded flesh between the trenches of the 
 titan armies in Flanders. 
 
 What is it all about? What does it mean — 
 not for Humanity, not for Civilization, but for 
 Tommy and Fritz and Adolph and Ivan, for 
 Mary and Gretchen and Elise and Anna? What 
 does it mean for the murdered babes of Belgium 
 and the dying exiles of Armenia; for the mothers 
 of Europe and the cash-girls of America? What 
 does it mean for folks — for plain, everyday men 
 and women who are born and live and suffer 
 and sorrow and die, and the worms slip in and 
 out between their fingers? 
 
 Don't talk to me of the Race; of the contribu- 
 tion of the Individual to the progress of the 
 Whole! Men don't live as a Race, as a Whole, 
 as Civilization. They live as individuals. There 
 is no human experience except individual expe- 
 rience. Every joy is some one's joy, every sorrow 
 breaks some one heart. Granted that all these 
 myriads of human individuals are, like the States 
 of the American Union, constituted in mutual 
 
 218
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 dependence on each other, nevertheless humanity 
 has no existence except in its individual units. 
 Either Hfe must have a meaning for the single 
 human soul in the infinite isolation of its indi- 
 viduality, cut off as remotely from all its neigh- 
 bors as the stars in their courses or the ions in 
 their orbits within the atoms — else it has no 
 meaning for the race, whatever it may have 
 for some hypothetical God who watches over 
 the whole farcical tragedy. 
 
 And he, shall he, 
 
 Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, 
 Such splendid purpose in his eyes, 
 Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies. 
 
 Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer. 
 
 Who trusted God was love indeed 
 And love Creation's final law — 
 Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw 
 
 With ravine, shrieked against his creed — 
 
 Who loved, who suffered countless ills, 
 Who battled for the True, the Just, 
 Be blown about the desert dust, 
 
 Or sealed within the iron hills.'' 
 
 No more? A monster, then, a dream, 
 A discord. Dragons of the prime. 
 That tare each other in their slime. 
 
 Were mellow music matched with him. 
 
 O hfe as futile, then, as frail! 
 
 — {Tennyson, "In Memoriam.") 
 
 It is the fashion just now to call this an ego- 
 istic, not to say selfish, point of view. The 
 individual is bidden to sink this self-centered 
 longing for personal fulfillment, in devotion to 
 
 219
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 tlu* wdfaro of his fellows, and in hope for some 
 future blessing in store for his remote descend- 
 ants, to whieh glorious divine event his own life 
 shall have been some small contribution. 
 
 Nonsense! If the future holds no meaning for 
 the individual of to-day, it will hold no more for 
 the individual of a thousand ages hence. When 
 some modern Realist shall bring me, not apples 
 and pears, but fruit-in-general, I will believe in 
 some blessedness for Man which does not come to 
 consciousness and have its abiding worth in men. 
 
 Selfish? Yes, as selfish as a mother's joy in 
 her babe, as the bridegroom's joy in his bride. 
 Selfish as the wish to live to-morrow that I may 
 finish this book. Selfish as to comply with the 
 laws of health, to call a doctor when I am sick, 
 to look forward with joy to the possibilities of 
 the new year, and hope to meet at home the 
 friends I parted with in Paris last week. 
 
 All this talk with which we are regaled by the 
 moderns is but whistling to keep their courage 
 up. There are those who, like the Professor, 
 fancy they have no interest in the question — 
 though I have never been quite convinced that 
 their hearts are so different from my own. But 
 the loud-voiced assertion of the superior spiritual 
 worth of the attitude which no longer desires a 
 future existence has a hollow sound. Mr. Masters 
 comes nearer being entirely ingenuous and frank: 
 God! How would you like it? 
 
 Through the sickly atmosphere of our modern 
 220
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 life the "great interrupting" voice of Browning 
 sounds its robust, cheerful courage, like the voice 
 of his own Herakles before the palace of Admetus: 
 
 Even so, 
 Sudden into the midst of sorrow, leapt 
 Along with the gay chfeer of that great voice, 
 
 Hope, joy, salvation. — ("Balaustion's Adventure.") 
 
 Amid the restless doubt and bhnd despair of the 
 time his joyous confidence refreshes the soul like a 
 healing draught from springs in the desert. Ten- 
 nyson may "faintly trust the larger hope." Arnold 
 may listen sadly to the "melancholy, long, with- 
 drawing roar" of the sea of faith. 
 
 Retreating, to the breath 
 
 Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
 
 And naked shingles of the world. 
 
 —("Dover Beach.") 
 
 The scientific world may announce the death 
 of all spiritual existence and men may sink in 
 the gloom of despair, but Browning heeds not. 
 
 God's in his heaven — 
 All's right with the world. 
 
 He who created the demand must of necessity 
 also create the supply, else his name is not God. 
 
 What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? When 
 doors great and small 
 
 Nine and ninety flew ope at a touch, shall the hun- 
 dredth appall? 
 
 In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the great- 
 est of all? —("Saul.") 
 
 Browning does not attempt to prove immor- 
 tality. Others may trifle with the fooleries of 
 
 221
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Sludge if they will — the poet's faith rests on no 
 such i)recarious foiindalion. He cheerfully admits 
 tliat it is only a working hypothesis. But its im- 
 mense superiority over all other interpretations of 
 life is that it is a workiuq hypothesis — and none 
 other will work. Saint Paul declared it, and Omar 
 and Masters reecho it. Why, then, stop halfway? 
 
 Was it not great? did he not throw on God, 
 
 (He loves the burthen) — 
 God's task to make the heavenly period 
 
 Perfect the earthen? 
 Did not he magnify the mind, show clear 
 
 Just what it all meant? 
 He would not discount life, as fools do here. 
 
 Paid by installment. 
 He ventured neck or nothing — heaven's success 
 
 Found, or earth's failure: 
 "Wilt thou trust death or not?" He answered "Yes! 
 
 Hence with life's pale lure!" 
 
 — ("A Grammarian's Funeral.") 
 
 The poet lives in no fool's-paradise of closet 
 speculation. He has fought with doubt no less 
 than his contemporaries, but he drags it captive at 
 his chariot wheels. All evil is to him an obstacle to 
 the heights, an enemy to be overcome; and doubt, 
 and death itself, belong with the rest of the brood 
 of hell. So he sings for "one fight more, the best 
 and the last," and bids his friends ask no better 
 thing for him at the end than that he may 
 
 at noonday, in the bustle of man's work-time. 
 
 Greet the Unseen with a cheer! 
 
 Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
 
 "Strive and thrive!" cry, "Speed,— Fight on, fare ever 
 
 There as here!" 
 
 222
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 Confronted with the question, Why was not 
 the reahty of the future life made plain to us? 
 he answers, in "La Saisiaz," that such unmis- 
 takable revelation would destroy spiritual free- 
 dom — an argument we have met before in "A 
 Death in the Desert." Even in this poem, called 
 forth by the sudden death of a dear friend, and 
 the only one in which he argues the question 
 of immortality, he does not attempt to prove 
 the life beyond — he only asserts that without it 
 life, to him, is meaningless: 
 
 Nay, were fancy fact, were earth and all it holds illu- 
 sion mere, 
 
 Only a machine for teaching love and hate and hope 
 and fear 
 
 To myself, the sole existence, single truth 'mid false- 
 hood — well ! 
 
 Still — with no more Nature, no more Man as riddle to 
 
 be read. 
 Only my own joys and sorrows now to reckon real 
 
 instead — 
 I must say — or choke in silence — "Howsoever came 
 
 my fate, 
 Sorrow did and joy did nowise — life well weighed — 
 
 preponderate." 
 
 The mood is that of one who has found life 
 more prodigal of promises than of satisfactions. 
 The revolt of modern life represents the sense 
 of the futility of human achievement confronted 
 by the brevity of life and the certainty of death. 
 It is the protest of the man to whom life has 
 brought all good gifts. There is another and 
 
 223
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 perhaps more poignant protest in the heart of 
 llie man to whom Hfe has brought nothing but 
 the hunger for joy without its fulfiUment. 
 
 There may be those to whom life has been 
 such a tragedy that death seems a welcome re- 
 lease. As a matter of fact, however, this is a mood 
 of despair, born of the collapse of faith in a future 
 opportunity. The only thing that could really 
 meet the need of such a heart would be some new 
 state of existence in which the deep desires which 
 are inborn in human nature might be met. 
 
 There are very many eager and capacious souls 
 to whom life has denied her chief est treasures. 
 She has kept her promises to the ear, to break 
 them to the hope. One by one the ideals and 
 aspirations, the loves and friendships and achieve- 
 ments and successes with which she lures us to 
 pour out the deepest life within us prove as we 
 attain them to be but apples of Sodom, which 
 turn to ashes in our grasp. How shall such 
 souls be satisfied to pass out of existence into 
 nothingness, having tasted nought that filled 
 their hearts, or having found, along with much 
 deep joy, such abysses of sorrow as left them 
 broken and stricken by the wayside.'' Nothing 
 can answer such need except a "new life alto- 
 gether," and it is this which Browning sings. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There are three classical expressions of the 
 poet's attitude toward the whole problem — 
 
 224
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 "Cleon," "A Grammarian's Funeral," and "Abt 
 Vogler," though the spirit which rises to its 
 height in these poems runs Hke a golden thread 
 throughout the whole body of his work. 
 
 The first expresses the same sense of the futil- 
 ity of human achievement, the same attitude 
 toward life and death as we have found to be 
 characteristic of the most sensitive spirits among 
 the moderns. 
 
 The world of later Greek culture had much 
 in common with the modern period. There was 
 the same confidence in the discoveries of science 
 and the triumphs of the intellect, the same dis- 
 illusionment and ennui before the emptiness of 
 life, the same agnosticism regarding the deeper 
 realities of the spirit. The half-gods had gone, 
 but the gods had not yet arrived. Pilate was 
 a child of his time, with his half-weary, half- 
 cynical, but wholly skeptical query, "What is 
 truth?" In art as well as in literature and philos- 
 ophy the period was one of decadence, in which 
 form had taken the place of spirit, and was 
 accompanied by a certain patronizing deference 
 to the Golden Age gone by, much as Bernard 
 Shaw in our own day patronizes Shakespeare. 
 
 Cleon the poet, writing to the tyrant Protus 
 to express his appreciation of a certain munificent 
 gift, answers at the same time two or three 
 questions the king has propounded. To begin 
 with, he modestly admits that he has attained 
 the summit of human greatness, not in one field 
 
 225
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 of endeavor but in all. Poet, painter, sculptor, 
 architect, philosoplier — in all these directions 
 achievement can no farther go. Since this is 
 simple truth, and tlie gift of the gods, why allow 
 a false modest^' to deprecate the fact? In all 
 this he feels that he has surpassed the greatest 
 of the ancients, in that, though they may have 
 surpassed him at the single point wherein each 
 was supreme, he has touched all the heights of 
 excellence. 
 
 This being granted, does it not follow, as Protus 
 suggests, that Cleon must be accounted the hap- 
 piest of mortals, since he cannot die, his spirit 
 living on forever in these great works which bless 
 the world? For answer the poet asks what step 
 or stage in progress might have been suggested 
 to the gods, when in the process of creation they 
 had reached the point where mechanical and 
 physical perfection was supreme. Would not the 
 next step be the creation of self-consciousness, 
 wherein perfection may bear witness to itself 
 and find pleasure in its own contemplation? 
 But, alas! the finite cannot be perfect, and self- 
 consciousness, accordingly, becomes the supreme 
 tragedy, since it means nothing more than the 
 consciousness of limitation. The more plainly 
 man sees the perfection of God, the more pro- 
 found must be his despair at the pitiful weakness 
 and failure of his own life. 
 
 Should not the artist prove an exception, 
 however, since he at least shares the divine pre- 
 
 226
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 rogative of creation, and can image forth the 
 perfection he cannot attain? The disillusioned 
 poet assures his friend that this is to trip upon 
 a merely verbal fallacy. The artist merely sees 
 life more clearly than another — he does not live: 
 
 I can write love-odes: thy fair slave's an ode. 
 I get to sing of love, when grown too gray 
 For being beloved : she turns to that young man, 
 The muscles all a-ripple on his back. 
 I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king! 
 
 But at least, the king may rejoin, the poem 
 lives, and the poet lives in his song, while mere 
 kings die. 
 
 Sappho survives, because we sing her songs. 
 And iEschylus, because we read his plays. 
 
 Here we have precisely the quality of immor- 
 tality commended to us by the moderns. Why 
 should it not content the soul.'* I counsel those 
 whose minds are befogged on this point to con- 
 sider thoughtfully the passionate protest of the 
 Greek poet. Again he declares that all this is 
 to trip on a mere word. Do iEschylus and Sappho 
 indeed live.'* Then 
 
 let them come and take 
 Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup, 
 Speak in my place. 
 
 The very essence of life is conscious experience. 
 The keener, more intense the consciousness, the 
 more abundant the life. Cleon does not make 
 the point, but we readily see it: The sponge and 
 the oyster may be said to live, but who would 
 
 227
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 compare the life of tlie oyster for value and 
 significance with that of an alert and vigorous 
 human spirit? If it be said that having lived 
 intensely and keenly one should be content to 
 pass out of existence, the only answer is, Then 
 why should we have been so made that we desire 
 to prolong this eager experience, and what is 
 the use of having been made at all if it be but 
 for a moment? 
 
 The heart of the tragedy, as Cleon declares, 
 lies in this: that the keener and more intense 
 the life, the more insatiable is the yearning for 
 yet more and fuller life. This is the supreme 
 agony of human existence, against which he 
 protests with all his soul — though he can find 
 no clear path out of the darkness. 
 
 "Say, rather, that my fate is deadlier still 
 In this, that every day my sense of joy 
 Grows more acute, my soul (intensified 
 By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; 
 While every day my hairs fall more and more, 
 My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase— 
 The horror quickening still from year to year, 
 The consummation coming past escape, 
 WTien I shall know most, and yet least enjoy- 
 When all my works wherein I prove my worth, 
 Being present still to mock me in men's mouths. 
 Alive still in the praise of such as thou, 
 I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man. 
 The man who loved his life so over-much, 
 Sleep in my urn." 
 
 This is the very revolt of "Scholfield Huxley." 
 It is the passion of Omar: 
 
 228
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 "When You and I behind the Veil are past. 
 Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last." 
 
 "Ah Love ! could you and I with Him conspire 
 To grasp this sorry Scheme of things entire. 
 Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
 Remold it nearer to the Heart's desire!" 
 
 The heart of Cleon refuses to rest in this con- 
 clusion, though he can find no standing ground 
 for faith. 
 
 "It is so horrible, 
 I dare at times imagine to my need 
 Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
 Unlimited in capability 
 For joy, as this is in desire for joy, 
 — To seek which the joy -hunger forces us: 
 That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait 
 On purpose to make prized that life at large — 
 Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death. 
 We burst there as the worm into the fly. 
 Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no ! 
 Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, 
 He must have done so were it possible!" 
 
 And then follows a passage in which Brown- 
 ing has at once caught the spirit of first-century 
 Greek culture and the self-sufficiency of modern 
 scientific thought. The King has heard of one 
 called Paulus, who is said to have tidings of 
 just such a revelation as the poet longs for. 
 Cleon answers an inquiry: 
 
 "Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew, 
 As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised. 
 Hath access to a secret shut from us? 
 Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King, 
 In stooping to inquire of such an one. 
 As if his answer could impose at all! 
 
 229
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 lit' wrilotli, (loth lu'? WoU, and lio may write! 
 Oh, tlir -lew liiidcth schohirs! certain slaves 
 Who touched on this same isle, preached him and 
 
 Christ ; 
 And (as I gathered from a bystander) 
 Their doctrine could be held by no sane man." 
 
 Not otherwise would Maeterlinck and MUn- 
 sterberg, Hauptmann and Galsworthy, pass over 
 the suggestion that the Christian faith might 
 prove indeed a message from the Infinite! 
 
 IV 
 
 "Cleon," as we have seen, represents the 
 futility of human achievement in the face of the 
 great fact of death. It is Browning's one chief 
 assertion of the negative side, the tragedy of a 
 life which holds no outlook beyond this present 
 world. "A Grammarian's Funeral" comes at the 
 matter from the opposite angle, and asserts the 
 supreme worth of a life lived on a scale so vast 
 that death becomes a negligible incident. 
 
 The poem is of interest from many points of 
 view. It finds an inspiring idealism beneath a 
 drudging devotion to the dry-as-dust trivialities 
 of grammar. It interprets the inner side of 
 humanism, the genuine enthusiasm for truth 
 which was awakened by the Revival of Learning, 
 and no less the enlarged scope which it gave to 
 life itself. But the deepest thing in the poem 
 is its recognition of the true proportions of the 
 human soul, its character as belonging not to 
 
 230
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 time but to eternity. The modern man says, with 
 Tom Moore on the cigar signs, "As we journey 
 through hfe let us live by the way." He is so 
 afraid that this life is the only opportunity he 
 will have for joy, that he is unwilling to let the 
 slightest pleasure escape. The days and years 
 spent in drudgery, however valuable they may 
 have been for the development of the soul, he 
 counts wasted. Only yesterday an eager woman, 
 a suffrage leader, told me how she regretted the 
 ten years she spent rearing her children in a 
 small town — not unhappy, but missing all the 
 opportunities for travel and enjoyment that she 
 might have had but for marriage and its respon- 
 sibilities. She counted those years lost. 
 
 Over against this attitude toward life is set the 
 spirit of a man who is so sure that life is worth 
 living that he is willing first to learn how to live — 
 
 No end to learning: 
 Earn the means first — God surely will contrive 
 
 Use for our earning. 
 Others mistrust and say, "But time escapes: 
 
 Live now or never!" 
 He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! 
 
 Man has Forever!" 
 
 That low man seeks a little thing to do, 
 
 Sees it and does it: 
 This high man, with a great thing to pursue. 
 
 Dies ere he knows it. 
 That low man goes on adding one to one, 
 
 His hundred's soon hit: 
 This high man, aiming at a million. 
 
 Misses an unit. 
 
 231
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 That, has the world here — should he need the next, 
 
 Ia'X the work! mind him! 
 This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed 
 
 Seeking, shall find him. 
 
 Small wonder the disciples of such a man 
 refuse to bury their master where darkling 
 thorpe and croft sleep, "safe in their tether," 
 on the bosom of the "unlettered plain"; that 
 they will rather seek sepulture 
 
 On a tall mountain, citied to the top, 
 Crowded with culture! 
 
 Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: 
 
 Wait ye the warning? 
 Our low life was the level's and the night's; 
 
 He's for the morning. 
 
 Here's the top peak; the multitude below 
 
 Live, for they can, there: 
 This man decided not to Live but Know — 
 
 Bury this man there? 
 Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, 
 
 Lightnings are loosened. 
 Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, 
 
 Peace let the dew send! 
 Lofty designs close in like effects: 
 
 Loftily lying, 
 Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects, 
 
 Living and dying. 
 
 When we turn to "Abt Vogler," all question 
 and doubt are swallowed up in the exuberant 
 faith that every discord must be resolved, and 
 the complete fulfillment of the soul's longings 
 
 232
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 assured. Music is, after all, the one creation 
 ex nihilo in our experience: 
 
 But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, 
 Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo, they 
 are! 
 And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to 
 man. 
 That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, 
 but a star. 
 
 But music is essential optimism, for the ear 
 is not satisfied until it shall end in perfect har- 
 mony, no matter what dissonances may be en- 
 countered on the way. Therefore the heart of 
 the musician, thrilled to its depths by the power 
 of the music he has poured forth out of his own 
 soul, turns trustfully to Him who likewise is 
 the builder and maker of houses not made with 
 hands — confident that in him our good shall 
 live forever and our evil be transformed to his 
 perfect will. 
 
 There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall 
 live as before; 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; 
 What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much 
 good more; 
 On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect 
 round. 
 
 All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall 
 exist; 
 Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, 
 nor power 
 Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the 
 melodist 
 When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
 
 233
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 Tlie liigli that i)rovcd too high, the heroic for earth too 
 liard. 
 The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the 
 sky. 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; 
 Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by 
 and by. 
 
 Even our weaJoiesses and sins and failures are 
 but captives to be dragged at our chariot wheels 
 to show how great were the enemies over whom 
 we have triumphed: 
 
 And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence 
 For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or 
 agonized? 
 Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing 
 might issue thence? 
 Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should 
 be prized? 
 Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear. 
 Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and 
 woe: 
 But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; 
 The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians 
 know. 
 
 Surely, no sensitive soul can listen to the vast 
 sorrow of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic Symphony, or 
 the surging passion of the Tannhaeuser Overture, 
 or the triumphant joy with which Beethoven 
 closes the Fifth Symphony without recogniz- 
 ing what the poet meant, and feeling with him 
 that Creation's chorus itself must end in its 
 "Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reign- 
 eth!" 
 
 234.
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 VI 
 
 With these three chief expressions of Browning's 
 faith we must place such outbursts of confident 
 hope as may be found in *'Rabbi Ben Ezra," 
 "Evelyn Hope," and "Life in a Love." The great 
 teacher of the Ghetto challenges those who bid us 
 seize the passing moment lest joy escape: 
 
 Fool! All that is, at all. 
 
 Lasts ever, past recall; 
 Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 
 
 What entered into thee. 
 
 That was, is, and shall be: 
 Time's wheel runs back or stops : Potter and clay endure. 
 
 In "Evelyn Hope" the busy man of middle 
 age, sitting by the dead form of the lovely girl 
 whose sweetness and innocence had meant so 
 much to him, though she scarcely knew his name, 
 feels that his love for her nevertheless has its 
 own meaning and must have its own fruition: 
 
 "Delayed, it may be, for more lives yet, 
 
 Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few; 
 Much is to learn, much to forget, 
 Ere the time be come for taking you. 
 
 "I have lived (I shall say) so much since then, 
 
 Given up myself so many times. 
 Gained me the gains of various men, 
 
 Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; 
 Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, 
 
 Either I missed or itself missed me: 
 And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!" 
 
 So in the two brief poems which embody 
 perhaps the profoundest interpretation of human 
 
 235
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 love to be found in tiny literature, **Love in a 
 Life" and "Life in a Love," the poet recognizes 
 the elusiveness of life's loftiest ideals so far as 
 our human experience goes: "Still the same 
 chance! she goes out as I enter." Yet it is worth 
 while to spend the whole of our day in the quest; 
 and though twilight falls 
 
 — with such suites to explore. 
 Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune, 
 
 the love and life we pursue can never in the 
 end utterly escape us: 
 
 But what if I fail of my purpose here? 
 It is but to keep the nerves at strain. 
 
 To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall. 
 And baffled, get up and begin again, — 
 
 So the chase takes up one's life, that's all. 
 ^\Tiile, look but once from your farthest bound 
 
 At me so deep in the dust and dark. 
 No sooner the old hope goes to ground 
 
 Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark 
 I shape me — 
 Ever 
 Removed ! 
 
 This is the spirit in which Robert Browning 
 faced life. He "believed in the Soul, was very 
 sure of God." He was confident that everything 
 in life which baffles and perplexes is but a part 
 of the discipline and training of spiritual man- 
 hood. Disappointment and sorrow, hardship and 
 struggle, pain and loss, all are relative to the 
 larger meaning and purpose of existence. 
 
 Such a human life as he conceives must of 
 236
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 necessity be of larger scope than this brief expe- 
 rience of the earthly years can afford. It is tuned 
 to Eternity. This life must be probationary, 
 the "initiatory spasm." Earth is but the vesti- 
 bule of God's great temple, whose grandeur and 
 excelling beauty the chiefest of earth's treasures 
 can but suggest. To live as though the pleasure 
 and joy of human experience were the supreme 
 ends is to lose one's soul. To count not one's 
 life dear unto oneself in the pursuit of those 
 ideals which transcend time and place is to 
 attain. 
 
 Death, in such a life, is a mere incident, the 
 gateway into the larger experience. To question 
 the soul's life after death is to deny the meaning 
 of it all, to overthrow the foundations of a life- 
 philosophy based on the worth of the ideal. 
 Therefore Browning will give no place to doubt 
 or fear. He casts himself boldly on the good- 
 ness of God and the veracity of human instincts, 
 and lives in the length and breadth of the Infinite. 
 
 How all the petty trivialities of present-day 
 thought are dwarfed by such an outlook on the 
 universe! How deep and calm and broad is such 
 a life compared with the hot and restless pas- 
 sion of the moderns, with their defiance of fate 
 and their denunciations of the moral law. Mid- 
 Victorian it may be, and orthodox, not to say 
 Christian; but, at least, it gives room for the 
 soul to live and stretch itself, to spread its wings 
 and fly in the deep empyrean of a life great enough 
 
 237
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 to be worth wliile and full enough to satisfy 
 the most insatiable hunger for fulfillment and 
 self-expression. 
 
 With such a faith a man can afford to keep 
 under his body and bring it into subjection to 
 the higher ends of thought and feeling. He can 
 be content with a small measure of what men 
 call success and achievement, laying up for him- 
 self treasures where neither moth nor rust doth 
 corrupt. He can be sick and poor and friendless 
 and yet possess a wealth greater than the treas- 
 ures of Ind, because he lives in the eternal uni- 
 verse as a son in his Father's house. He can 
 love with all the strength of his soul, and see 
 his loved ones laid in the ground, and look for- 
 w^ard to the day when for him as well the worms 
 will be slipping in and out between his fingers, 
 and his heart will not break, because he looks 
 for a city that hath foundations, whose builder 
 and maker is God. 
 
 This, therefore, as it seems to me, is the deep- 
 est thing in the message of Browning. At least 
 it is that which speaks most deeply to my own 
 heart, and by reason of which I turn to him in 
 hours of discouragement, 
 
 when my light is low. 
 When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick 
 And tingle; and the heart is sick, 
 And all the wheels of Being slow. 
 
 Always I find him tonic and inspiring. I love 
 the joy in life which he always feels, the fresh- 
 
 238
 
 PROSPICE 
 
 ness of his interest in common humanity, the 
 vigor of his enthusiasm, the robust courage of 
 his everyday philosophy. But most of all I 
 find help in his unconquerable faith in life and 
 its ultimate outcome, in the spirit that could 
 sing its cheeriest song of hope through the midst 
 of his sorrow for the Love which had been life's 
 richest gift. 
 
 Fear death?— -to feel the fog in my throat, 
 
 The mist in my face, 
 When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 
 
 I am nearing the place, 
 The power of the night, the press of the storm. 
 
 The post of the foe; 
 Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, 
 
 Yet the strong man must go: 
 For the journey is done and the summit attained. 
 
 And the barriers fall, 
 Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, 
 
 The reward of it all. 
 I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more, 
 
 The he^ and the last ! 
 I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and 
 forebore. 
 
 And bade me creep past. 
 No ! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers 
 
 The heroes of old. 
 Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears 
 
 Of pain, darkness, and cold. 
 For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave. 
 
 The black minute's at end. 
 And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 
 
 Shall dwindle, shall blend. 
 Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again. 
 
 And with God be the rest! 
 
 239
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A BROWNING LOVER 
 
 And his last word to the world is the ringing 
 cliallengc of the "Epilogue" to "Asolando": 
 
 At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time. 
 
 When yon sot yonr fancies free, 
 Will they pass to whcrt — by death, fools think, im- 
 prisoned, 
 I^w he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, 
 — Pity me? 
 
 Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken ! 
 
 ^^^lat had I on earth to do 
 With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? 
 Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel 
 — Being — who? 
 
 One who never turned his back but marched breast 
 forward. 
 
 Never doubted clouds would break. 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong 
 
 would triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake. 
 
 No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time 
 
 Greet the Unseen with a cheer! 
 Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
 "Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed, — fight on, fare ever 
 There as here!" 
 
 ie4o
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abraham, 32. 
 
 "Abt Vogler." 40, 48, 61, 65, 
 176. 200, 225, 232ff. 
 
 Andrea del Sarto, 40, 61, 87. 
 
 "Andrea del Sarto," 41, 81. 
 
 "Angelus, The," 70ff. 
 
 Anthropomorphism, 1 4 4 ff., 
 157ff. 
 
 "Apparent Failure," 99. 
 
 Aristotle, 92. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 27, 40, 60, 
 139, 168, 221. 
 
 Art and Artists, 24ff., 29, 3 Iff., 
 49ff., 87ff. 
 
 "Asolando, Epilogue to," 193, 
 222, 240. 
 
 "At the Mermaid," 86. 
 
 Augustine, Saint, 54, 58, 158. 
 
 "Aurora Leigh" (Mrs. Brown- 
 ing), 73, 113. 
 
 B 
 
 Bach, 47. 
 
 "Balaustion," 21, 155, 179, 
 
 221. 
 Beauty, 28, 34, 42ff., 55ff. 
 Beecher, 192. 
 
 Beethoven, 34, 47, 53, 234. 
 Bennett, Arnold, 84, 98. 
 Benson, A. C, 80. 
 Bergson, 109ff., 187. 
 "Bishop Blougram's Apology," 
 ,31, 38, 65, 81, 125, 130, 
 188-9, 198, 199. 
 
 "Bishop Orders His Tomb, 
 
 The," 38, 67. 
 "Blot in the 'Scutcheon, The," 
 
 21, 28. 
 "Blue Bird, The," 112. 
 Booth, Edwin, 71. 
 Botticelli, 29, 62, 87. 
 Bridge-building, 132ff. 
 British Novelists, 83, 214. 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 
 
 72, 73, 77, 78, 113, 121, 179. 
 
 Browning, Robert — as Artist, 
 19ff., 24ff., 39ff., 46ff., 66, 
 135, 192; as Philosopher, 16, 
 19, 21, 26, 28, 29, 73, 87ff., 
 144ff., 164; as Religious 
 Teacher, 18ff., 103ff., 135ff.; 
 Health, 192; Human Inter- 
 est, 36, 63ff.; Message, 15, 
 50; Obscurity, 17, 77ff.; 
 Optimism, 66, 97, 192ff.; 
 Orthodoxy, 97, 102; Range 
 of Interest, 10; Revolt, 96, 
 lOlff. 
 
 Browning, Robert, Poems 
 
 Quoted: 
 Abt Vogler, 200, 233, 234. 
 Andrea del Sarto, 41. 
 Apparent Failure, 99. 
 Asolando, Epilogue to, 193, 
 
 222, 240. 
 At the Mermaid, 86. 
 Balaustion's Adventure, 155, 
 
 221. 
 
 ^1
 
 INDEX 
 
 Bishop BlougDun's Apology, 
 
 88. 07, \i:>, l;U), IS!). 1!)8. 
 
 19!) . 
 Caliban Iptin St'lol)os, 145. 
 Cl.iUlc Uolaud, li)l. 
 (Miristmas Eve ami Kaster 
 
 Day, 1(57-108. 100. 
 rieon, ii7. US. iid, iSO. 
 Cristina, 174. 
 Death in the Desert, A, 127, 
 
 153, 169, 1!)7, 204, 205, 
 
 209. 
 Dramatis Persona^, Epilogue 
 
 to, 142, 143. 
 Epistle of Karshish, 152. 
 Evelyn Hope, 235. 
 Ferishtah's Fanries, 67. 
 Fra Lippo Lippi, 21, 24, 33, 
 
 44, 188. 
 Grammarian's Funeral, A, 
 
 222, 231, 232. 
 Holy Cross Day, 47. 
 In a Balcony, 169. 
 Instans Tyrannus, 195. 
 La Saisiaz, 223. 
 Love in a Life, Life in a 
 
 Love, 236. 
 Old Pictures in Florence, 
 
 205-207. 
 One Word More, 59. 67. 81, 
 
 177. 
 Paracelsus, 14, 138, 166, 
 
 178, 204. 
 Pippa Passes, 138, 221. 
 Popularity, 47. 
 Prospice, 239. 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra, 47, 165, 
 
 182, 183-184, 198, 205, 
 
 207, 208, 209, 210, 235. 
 
 Ring and The Book, The: 
 
 Introduction, 28, 117. 
 
 Capousacchi, 15.3. 
 
 Ponipilia. 155, 210. 
 
 The Pope, 67. 119, 140. 
 141. 148, 15.3, 198-199. 
 209. 
 
 Guido, 68. 
 
 The Book and the Ring, 
 81, 119. 
 Saul. 18, 45, 147, 148, 149, 
 
 199, 207. 221. 
 Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, 
 
 23, 24. 
 Statue and the Bust, The, 
 
 130. 
 Browning, Robert, Poems Dis- 
 cussed: 
 Abt Vogler, 232ff. 
 Balaustion, 179. 
 Bishop Orders His Tomb, 
 
 The, 67. 
 Christmas Eve and Easter 
 
 Day, 129fr. 
 Cleon, 225ff. 
 Death in the Desert, A, 
 
 126f., 177. 
 Epistle of Karshish, 151f. 
 Grammarian's Funeral, A, 
 
 230flF. 
 In a Balcony, 177. 
 In a Laboratory, 39. 
 Paracelsus, 121f. 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra, 207. 
 Ring and The Book, The, 82, 
 
 117ff., 178. 
 Saul, 147. 
 Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, 
 
 22ff. 
 
 242
 
 INDEX 
 
 Statue and the Bust, The, 
 130. 
 
 Browning Robert, Poems Re- 
 ferred to: 
 Abt Vogler, 40, 48, 65, 176. 
 Andrea del Sarto, 40, 81. 
 Any Wife to Any Husband, 
 
 171. 
 Balaustion, 21. 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology, 
 
 31, 38, 65, 81, 137. 
 Bishop Orders His Tomb, 
 
 The, 38. 
 Blot in the 'Scutcheon, The, 
 
 28. 
 By the Fireside, 176. 
 Caliban upon Setebos, 31, 
 
 46, 65, 157. 
 Childe Roland, 88. 
 Cleon, 15, 31, 48, 65, 81, 176. 
 Confessional, The, 171. 
 Count Gismond, 65. 
 Cristina, 176. 
 Death in the Desert, A, 65, 
 
 128, 137, 141, 147, 176, 
 
 223. 
 
 Epistle of Karshish, 40, 65, 
 
 176. 
 Evelyn Hope, 176. 
 Face, A, 38. 
 
 Fifine at the Fair, 65, 171. 
 Forgiveness, A, 46. 
 Fra Lippo Lippi, 38. 
 Garden Fancies, 22. 
 Gold Hair, 65. 
 Holy Cross Day, 46. 
 How They Brought the 
 
 Good News, 18. 
 In a Laboratory, 38. 
 
 Incident of the French Camp, 
 
 18. 
 Ivan Ivanovitch, 65. 
 James Lee's Wife, 171. 
 Johannes Agricola, 65. 
 La Saisiaz, 137. 
 Last Ride Together, 39, 176. 
 Lost Leader, The, 35, 180. 
 Love Among the Ruins, 38, 
 
 44, 176. 
 Master Hugues, 46. 
 Memorabilia, 44. 
 Men and Women, 38. 
 Mr. Sludge the Medium. 46, 
 
 65, 222. 
 My Last Duchess, 38, 67. 
 My Star, 44. 
 Ned Bratts, 65. 
 One Word More, 44, 77, 
 
 176. 
 Paracelsus, 28, 38, 44. 
 Pied Piper, The, 18. 
 Pippa Passes, 171. 
 Porphyria's Lover, 65. 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra, 28, 65, 176. 
 Ring and The Book, The, 21, 
 31, 38, 40, 65, 79, 128, 137, 
 167, 171, 176. 
 Rudel, 176. 
 Saul, 18, 44, 48. 
 Soliloquy of the Spanish 
 
 Cloister, 46. 
 Sordello, 17, 35. 38, 44, 79. 
 Two Poets of Croisic, 28. 
 Bunyan, 108. 
 Burns, 35, 41. 
 Burroughs, John, 94. 
 Byron, 30, lOlff. 
 "By the Fireside," 176. 
 
 £43
 
 INDEX 
 
 Caliban, SI. 46. 65. Uo. 157. 
 Carlo Dolci. 40. 
 Carlylc. 36, 139. 168. 
 Cavr Man. 57. 
 Chambrrs. HoIktI W ., S6. 
 "Chai)niau's Iloiucr" (Keats). 
 
 IS. 
 Chostcrton. ii, 47, 51, 97, 100, 
 
 118, l!25, 131. 
 "Childe Roland," 88, 194. 
 Chinese Proverb, 60. 
 "Choir Invisible" (George 
 
 Eliot), 214. 
 Christ, Person of, 152ff. 
 "Christmas Eve and Easter 
 
 Day," 129f., 167-168, 169. 
 Cimabue, 40, 62. 
 "Cleon," 15, 31, 48, 65, 81, 176, 
 
 225ff. 
 Clifford, Professor, 85. 
 "Cloud, The" (Shelley), 42. 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 168. 
 Coleridge, 43. 
 Comte, 137. 
 Corson, Professor, 65. 
 "Count Gismond," 65. 
 "Cristina," 174, 176. 
 Cromwell, 54. 
 Cubist, 34. 
 
 "Daffodils" (Wordsworth), 35. 
 
 Dante, 26, 37, 42, 108, 177. 
 
 "Dark Flower, The," 90, 174. 
 
 Darwin, 12, 93ff., 101, 165, 166. 
 
 Dead Dog, A, 66. 
 
 "Death in the Desert, A," 65. 
 126. 137, 141, 153, 169, 176, 
 177, 197, 204, 205, 223 
 
 Debu.ssy, 47. 
 Dickens, 85. 
 
 "Dover Beach" (Arnold), 221. 
 "Dramatis Persona-, Epilogue 
 to," 132f. 
 
 E 
 Edinburgh Review, 28. 
 Eliot, George, 108, 214. 
 Ellis, Havelock, 97. 
 Emerson, 60, 107. 
 "Epistle of Kar.shish," 40, 65, 
 
 151f., 176. 
 "Evelyn Hope," 176, 235. 
 Evil, Problem of, 185ff. 
 
 "Face, A," 38. 
 
 Faith, 123ff. 
 
 "Faust" (Goethe), 118, 120. 
 
 "Ferishtah's Fancies," 67. 
 
 "Fifine at the Fair," 65, 171. 
 
 Fifth Symphony (Beethoven), 
 
 34, 234. 
 Fiske, John, 201. 
 Fitzgerald, 216, 229. 
 "Forgiveness, A," 46. 
 Fra Angelico, 29. 
 "Fra Lippo Lippi," 21, 24, 33, 
 
 38, 44, 61, 188. 
 France, Anatole, 83, 91. 
 Freedom, 163, 169. 
 Futurist, 32, 89. 
 
 Galileo, 92. 
 
 Galsworthy, 90, 98, 174, 230. 
 
 "Garden Fancies," 22. 
 
 Gladstone, 90. 
 
 God, Idea of, 136. 
 
 244
 
 INDEX 
 
 Goethe, 26, 37, 120. 
 
 "Gold Hair," 65. 
 
 Gorky, 83. 
 
 "Grammarian's Funeral, A," 
 
 230ff. 
 "Grecian Urn, Ode to" 
 
 (Keats), 44. 
 
 H 
 
 Haeckel, 95, 124, 143, 161f. 
 
 Hamlet, 32, 71. 
 
 Hauptmann, 84, 230. 
 
 Hazlitt, 107. 
 
 "Holy Cross Day," 46, 47. 
 
 Homer, 31, 47. 
 
 "How They Brought the Good 
 
 News," 18. 
 Human Nature, 165flF. 
 Hume, 202. 
 Huxley, 13. 
 Hymnology, 25. 
 
 Ian Mclaren, 151. 
 
 Ibsen, 91. 
 
 "Idylls of the King" (Tenny- 
 son), 36. 
 
 Iliad, 31. 
 
 "In a Balcony," 169, 177. 
 
 "In a Laboratory," 38, 39. 
 
 "Incident of the French 
 Camp," 18. 
 
 Incarnation, 64, 148fif. 
 
 Individualism, 180ff. 
 
 "In Memoriam" (Tennyson), 
 72, 115, 146, 219, 238. 
 
 "Instans Tyrannus," 195. 
 
 "Intimations of Immortality" 
 (Wordsworth), 27, 59. 
 
 "Ivan Ivanovitch," 65. 
 
 Jackson, Stonewall, 132. 
 
 James, Professor, 132. 
 
 "Jean Christophe" (Roland), 
 
 83. 
 "Johannes Agricola," 65. 
 
 K 
 
 Kant, 92, 110. 
 Keats, 18, 30, 43, 44, 49, 80. 
 Kempis, Thomas a, 108, 124. 
 Kingsley, Charles, 36, 179. 
 Kipling, 43, 48, 84, 183. 
 "Kubla Khan" (Coleridge), 43. 
 
 "La Saisiaz," 137, 223. 
 
 "Last Ride Together," 39, 176. 
 
 Le Gallienne, Richard, 76, 83. 
 
 Leonardo, 87, 135. 
 
 Literature, Modern, 11, 13, 82f. 
 
 Locke, 202. 
 
 "Locksley Hall" (Tennyson), 
 
 36. 
 Lord, John, 144. 
 "Lost Leader, The," 35, 180. 
 Love, 169ff. 
 "Love Among the Ruins," 44, 
 
 176. 
 "Love in a Life, Life in a 
 
 Love," 40, 176, 177, 236. 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, 168. 
 
 Maeterlinck, 84, 90, 112, 219, 
 
 230. 
 Mark Twain, 85. 
 Masefield, John, 13. 
 "Master Hugues," 46. 
 
 ^d
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mastors. Kdgar Loo, ■ill, iiO. 
 
 Hi, as. 
 
 "Maud" (Tennyson), 36. 
 Maiiriro, F. 1)., 179. 
 Mi'inniling, 87. 
 " M<'iu<>ral)ilia," 44. 
 Morcdith, (toorpo, 85. 
 Micliaelangdo, 41, 46, 48, 63, 
 
 87, 135. 
 "Midsummer Night's Dream" 
 
 (Shakespeare), 42. 
 Mid-Victorian Spirit, 90, 97, 98, 
 
 101, 105, 121, 131, 139. 237. 
 Mill, J. S., 140, 185, 202. 
 Millet, 62, 70ff. 
 Milton, 30, 42. 
 "Mr. Sludge the Medium," 46, 
 
 65, 222. 
 Modernism, 11, 86ff., 89ff., 
 
 105ff., 166, 173, 215, 231. 
 More, Paul Elmer, 28, 29, 30, 
 
 170f., 194. 
 Morris, William, 36, 61, 179. 
 MUnsterberg, 214, 230. 
 "My Last Duchess," 38, 39. 
 "My Star," 44. 
 
 N 
 
 "Ned Bratts," 65. 
 
 Nero, 51. 
 
 Nettleship, 65. 
 
 New Birth, 170ff. 
 
 Newton, 92. 
 
 Nietzsche, 83, 90, 91, 122, 185. 
 
 "Nightingale, Ode to" (Keats), 
 43. 
 
 Nominalist, 33, 220. 
 
 "Northern Farmer" (Tenny- 
 son), 36. 
 
 Noyes, Alfred, 13, 94. 
 
 O 
 
 "Old Pictures in Florence," 
 
 199, 205ff. 
 Omar Khayyam, 216, 222, 229. 
 "One Word More," 44, 59, 176, 
 
 177. 
 Orbit of Life, 157ff. 
 Orr, Mrs., 65, 97, 102. 
 
 Paley, 93. 
 
 "Paracelsus," 14, 38, 44, 121f., 
 
 138, 166, 178, 204. 
 "Paradise Lost" (Milton), 30. 
 "Pied Piper, The," 18. 
 "Pippa Passes," 138, 171, 221. 
 Plato, 50, 53, 55. 58, 61, 92. 
 Poe, 41. 
 "Poet's Vision of Ma n" 
 
 (Powell), 202. 
 "Popularity," 47. 
 "Porphyria 's Lover," 65. 
 Pragmatism, 11 Iff., 154. 
 "Prometheus, Unbound" 
 
 (Shelley). 31. 
 Progress, 204ff. 
 "Prospice," 239. 
 Psychology, 29, 163. 171. 202f. 
 Psychology, Professor of. 213, 
 
 214, 217, 220. 
 Puritanism, 54, 58, 64, 158f., 
 
 168. 
 
 Q 
 
 Quotations from Other Poets: 
 Arnold, Matthew, "Dover 
 
 Beach," 221. 
 Browning, E. B., 
 
 "Aurora Leigh," 73, 113. 
 
 "Wine of Cyprus," 179. 
 
 246
 
 INDEX 
 
 Coleridge/'Kubla Khan," 43. 
 
 Eliot, George, "Choir In- 
 visible," 214. 
 
 Fitzgerald, "Omar Khay- 
 yam," 216, 229. 
 
 Keats, "Chapman's Homer," 
 18; "Grecian Urn," 44; 
 "Nightingale," 43. 
 
 Masters, Edgar Lee, "Schol- 
 field Huxley," 217. 
 
 Shelley, "Cloud," 42. 
 
 Tennyson, "In Memoriam," 
 72, 115, 146, 219, 238. 
 
 Wordsworth, "Immortality," 
 59, 63; "Tables Turned," 
 74; "DafiFodils," 35; "Tin- 
 tern Abbey," 36. 
 
 R 
 "Rabbi Ben Ezra," 38, 47, 65, 
 
 165, 176, 182, 183-184, 198, 
 
 235. 
 Raphael, 34, 40, 41, 45, 48, 50. 
 
 62. 
 Rembrandt, 62, 87. 
 Riley, James Whitcomb, 41. 
 "Ring and The Book, The," 21, 
 
 28, 31, 38, 40, 65, 67, 68, 79, 
 
 117. 119, 128, 137. 138, 140, 
 
 141, 148, 153, 155, 167, 176, 
 
 178, 198-199. 
 Rodin, 48. 
 
 Rolland, Romaine, 83. 
 Rubens, 41. 
 "Rudel," 176. 
 Ruskin, 36, 61, 139, 168, 179. 
 
 Saintsbury, Professor, 21. 
 Sappho, 31. 
 
 "Saul," 18, 44, 46, 48, 147, 148, 
 149, 199, 221. 
 
 Schoenberg, 47. 
 
 "Scholfield Huxley" (Masters), 
 
 217, 228. 
 Science, Modern, llff., 82, 
 
 91flF., 161ff., 190-191. 
 Scott, 85. 
 Shakespeare, 22, 26, 32, 37, 42, 
 
 47, 49, 50, 71, 80. 
 Shaw, G. Bernard, 52, 97, 183, 
 
 225. 
 Shelley, 31, 51, 97, 102, 106. 
 "Sherwood" (Noyes), 84. 
 "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," 
 
 22, 23, 24. 
 "Skylark" (Shelley), 31. 
 Social Problems, 36, 179ff. 
 "Soliloquy of the Spanish 
 
 Cloister," 46, 67. 
 "Sordello," 17, 35, 38, 44, 79, 
 
 225. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 94, 95, 110, 
 
 124, 165, 202. 
 "Statue and the Bust, The," 
 
 130. 
 Stevenson, 194. 
 Strauss, Richard, 47. 
 Sudermann, 83. 
 Swinburne, 171. 
 
 "Tables Turned" (Words- 
 worth), 74. 
 
 "Tannhauser" Overture, 234. 
 
 Tennyson, 16, 29, 35, 46, 47, 
 72, 79, 80, 84, 115, 139, 146, 
 168, 175, 214, 219, 221, 238. 
 
 Thackeray, 85. 
 
 247
 
 INDEX 
 
 "Tiutoru Abbey" (Words- 
 worth), 35. 
 Tolstoy, 50, 54, 58, 61. 
 Trout, Professor, i'3. 
 Tscliaikowsky, ■iSi. 
 Tiiruor, 104. 
 
 *'Two Poots of Croisic," 28 
 Tyndall, 13. 
 
 U 
 
 Unitarianism, 150, 153. 
 
 V 
 
 Voltaire, 137. 
 Von Moltkc, 76. 
 
 w 
 
 181. 
 
 War in Europe, 13, 89, 
 218. 
 
 Wells, H. G., 97, 183. 
 
 Wharton, Edith, 98. 
 
 Whistler, 135. 
 
 White, Bouek, 182. 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, 53, 171. 
 
 "Wine of Cyprus" 
 
 Browning), 179. 
 Wordsworth, 26f., 35, 46, 47 
 
 59, 61, 62, 106, 180. 
 
 (Mrs. 
 
 248
 
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