our hard biscuits without Narbonne honey. He has not deigned in his later works to use the slighter tools of Fancy and the like, of which he showed himself a master in his earlier ones. With intense earnestness he has gone straight to his facts, his reasonings, his dealings with men's souls, the meaning of evil, the being of God, and has refused to dally with triflings on the road. He has also taken up some more repulsively diseased cases of corrupted souls than he did in earlier life. But they are only such as he finds here on earth, with which the God he believes in deals; and he thinks that the poet whose business is to strive to see things as God sees them, may lawfully set these crimes before his fellow-men, not for their enjoyment, but for their spirits' gain. If his clerical readers complain of the change, let the lay ones at least be content with it, even if they don't praise it. What they lose in Fancy and Beauty, they gain in Subtlety, Power, Penetration, and Depth. [From Dowden's "Studies in Literature." *] As we started with the assumption that Mr. Tennyson has a vivid feeling of the dignity and potency of law, let us assume, for the present, that Mr. Browning vividly feels the importance, the greatness and beauty of passions and enthusiasms, and that his imagination is comparatively unimpressed by the presence of law and its operations. . . . It is not the order and regularity in the processes of the natural world which chiefly delight Mr. Browning's imagination, but the streaming forth of power and will and love from the whole face of the visible universe. . . . But Mr. Browning's most characteristic feeling for nature. appears in his rendering of those aspects of sky or earth or sea, of sunset, or noonday, or dawn, which seem to acquire some sudden and passionate significance; which seem to be * Studies in Literature, by Edward Dowden, LL.D. (2d ed., London, 1882), p. 211 fol. charged with some spiritual secret eager for disclosure; in his rendering of those moments which betray the passion at the heart of things, which thrill and tingle with prophetic fire. When lightning searches for the guilty lovers, Ottima and Sebald [Pippa Passes], like an angelic sword plunged into the gloom, when the tender twilight, with its one chrysolite star, grows aware, and the light and shade make up a spell, and the forests by their mystery and sound and silence mingle together two human lives forever, when the apparition of the moon-rainbow appears gloriously after the storm, and Christ is in his heaven, when to David the stars shoot out the pain of pent knowledge and in the gray of the hills at morning there dwells a gathered intensity- then Nature rises from her sweet ways of use and wont and shows herself the Priestess, the Pythoness, the Divinity which she is. Or rather, through Nature, the Spirit of God addresses itself to the spirit of man. If Mr. Tennyson's thinking had any tendency in the direction vaguely named pantheistic, it would be towards identifying God with the order and wisdom of the universe; if Mr. Browning's thinking had such a tendency, it would be towards identifying him with the passion, so to speak, of nature. In the joy of spring-time God awakens to intenser life : "The lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain-and God renew's A law of nature means nothing to Mr. Browning if it does not mean the immanence of power and will and love. Mr. Browning, like Mr. Tennyson, is an optimist, but the idea of a progress of mankind enters into his poems in a comparatively slight degree. . . . He thinks much less of the future of the human race and of a terrestrial golden age than of the life and destiny of the individual, and of the heaven that each man may attain; and it is in his teaching with reference to the growth of the individual and its appropriate means that we find the most characteristic part of Mr. Browning's way of thought. It seems to him that the greatness and glory of man lie not in submission to law, but in aspiration to something higher than ourselves; not in self-repression, but in the passion which scorns the limits of time and space, and in the bright endeavors towards results that are unattainable on earth. Man here on earth, according to the central and controlling thought of Mr. Browning, man here in a state of preparation for other lives, and surrounded by wondrous spiritual influences, is too great for the sphere that contains him, while, at the same time, he can exist only by submitting for the present to the conditions it imposes; never without fatal loss becoming content with submission, or regarding his present state as perfect or final. Our nature here is unfinished, imperfect, but its glory, its peculiarity, that which makes us men—not God, and not brutes-lies precisely in this character of imperfection, giving scope as it does for indefinite growth and progress— 66 Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beasts'; God is, they are, And it is by a succession of failures, stimulating higher aspirations and endeavours, that we may reach at last "the ultimate angels' law, Indulging every instinct of the soul, There where law, life, joy, impulse, are one thing." A man may be guilty of either of two irretrievable errors: seduced by temptations of sense, denying the light that is in him, yielding to prudential motives, or to supineness of * A Death in the Desert, p. 129. heart or brain or hand, he may renounce his spiritual, his infinite life and its concerns. That is one error. Or he may try to force those concerns and corresponding states of thought and feeling and endeavor into this finite life-the life which is but the starting-point and not the goal. He may deny his higher nature, which is ever yearning upward to God through all noble forms of thought, emotion, and action; he may weary of failure which (as generating a higher tendency) is his peculiar glory; or else he may deny the conditions of finite existence, and attempt to realize in this life what must be the achievement of eternity. Hence it is not obedience, it is not submission to the law of duty, which points out to us our true path of life, but rather infinite desire and endless aspiration. Mr. Browning's ideal of manhood in this world always recognizes the fact that it is the ideal of a creature who never can be perfected on earth, a creature whom other and higher lives await in an endless hereafter. . . . Man must not rest content with earth and the gifts of earth; he must not aim at "thrusting in time eternity's concern ;" but he must perpetually grasp at things attainable by his highest striving, and, having attained them, find that they are unsatisfying, so that by an endless series of aspirations and endeavors, which generate new aspirations and new endeavors, he may be sent on to God, and his manifested love, and his eternal heaven. . . These ideas lead us to the central point from which we can perceive the peculiarity and origin of Mr. Browning's feeling with regard to external nature, art, religion, love, beauty, knowledge. . . ... Is it of external nature that Mr. Browning speaks? The preciousness of all the glory of sky and earth lies in its being the manifested power and love of God, to which the heart springs as fire. . . . [But] nature has betrayed and ruined us if we rest in it; betrayed and ruined us, unless it send us onward unsatisfied to God. And what are Mr. Browning's chief doctrines on the subject of Art? . . . The true glory of art is that in its creation there arise desires and aspirations never to be satisfied on earth, but generating new desires and new aspirations, by which the spirit of man mounts to God himself. The artist (Mr. Browning loves to insist on this point) who can realize in marble or in color or in music his ideal has thereby missed the highest gain of art. In Pippa Passes the regeneration of the young sculptor's work turns on his finding that in the very perfection which he had attained lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem, Andrea del Sarto, has been devoted to the exposition of this thought. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for ?"... A large number of Mr. Browning's poems have love for their theme; and here again we find the same recurring thoughts. . . . The dramatis persona of many of Mr. Browning's poems fall into two groups—the group of those whose souls are saved by love, and the group of those whose souls are lost by some worldliness, or cowardice, or faintness of heart. The old French academician, too prudent or selfrestrained to yield to the manifold promptings of nature and utter his love, has ruined four lives, which for that sin have been condemned to be henceforth respectable and passionless [Dis Aliter Visum]. . . . So again in Youth and Art the same lesson is enforced. Boy-sculptor and girl-singer afterwards to be each successful in the world, the one to be wife of "a rich old lord," the other to be "dubbed knight and an R. A.," are too prudent to yield to the summons of love. And therefore in the deepest sense each has failed: "Each life's unfulfilled you see; It hangs still patchy and scrappy; |