"the world,
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,"[A]

[Footnote A: _Fra Lippo Lippi_.]

lead him back to God, who made it all.

He is essentially a witness to the divine element in the world.

It is the rediscovery of this divine element, after its expulsion by the
age of Deism and doubt, that has given to this century its poetic
grandeur. Unless we regard Burke as the herald of the new era, we may
say that England first felt the breath of the returning spirit in the
poems of Shelley and Wordsworth.

"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments."[B]

[Footnote B: _Adonais_.]

"And I have felt," says Wordsworth,

"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."[C]

[Footnote C: _Tintern Abbey_.]

Such notes as these could not be struck by Pope, nor be understood by
the age of prose. Still they are only the prelude of the fuller song of
Browning. Whether he be a greater poet than these or not,--a question
whose answer can benefit nothing, for each poet has his own worth, and
reflects by his own facet the universal truth--his poetry contains in it
larger elements, and the promise of a deeper harmony from the harsher
discords of his more stubborn material. Even where their spheres touch,
Browning held by the artistic truth in a different manner. To Shelley,
perhaps the most intensely spiritual of all our poets,

"That light whose smile kindles the universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,"

was an impassioned sentiment, a glorious intoxication; to Browning it
was a conviction, reasoned and willed, possessing the whole man, and
held in the sober moments when the heart is silent. "The heavy and the
weary weight of all this unintelligible world" was lightened for
Wordsworth, only when he was far from the haunts of men, and free from
the "dreary intercourse of daily life"; but Browning weaved his song of
hope right amidst the wail and woe of man's sin and wretchedness. For
Wordsworth "sensations sweet, felt in the blood and felt along the
heart, passed into his purer mind with tranquil restoration," and issued
"in a serene and blessed mood"; but Browning's poetry is not merely the
poetry of the emotions however sublimated. He starts with the hard
repellent fact, crushes by sheer force of thought its stubborn rind,
presses into it, and brings forth the truth at its heart. The greatness
of Browning's poetry is in its perceptive grip: and in nothing is he
more original than in the manner in which he takes up his task, and
assumes his artistic function. In his postponement of feeling to thought
we recognize a new poetic method, the significance of which we cannot
estimate as yet. But, although we may fail to apprehend the meaning of
the new method he employs, we cannot fail to perceive the fact, which is
not less striking, that the region from which he quarries his material
is new.

And yet he does not break away abruptly from his predecessors. His
kinship with them, in that he recognizes the presence of God in nature,
is everywhere evident. We quote one passage, scarcely to be surpassed by
any of our poets, as indicative of his power of dealing with the
supernaturalism of nature.

"The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
The molten ore burst up among the rocks,
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright
In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask--
God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged
With foam, white as the bitter lip of hate,
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups
Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,
Staring together with their eyes on flame--
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride.
Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face.

*       *       *       *       *

"Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain--and God renews
His ancient rapture. Thus He 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 life."[A]

[Footnote A: _Paracelsus._]

Such passages as these contain neither the rapt, reflective calm of
Wordsworth's solemn tones, nor the ethereal intoxication of Shelley's
spirit-music; but there is in them the same consciousness of the
infinite meaning of natural facts. And beyond this, there is also, in
the closing lines, a hint of a new region for art. Shelley and
Wordsworth were the poets of Nature, as all truly say; Browning was the
poet of the human soul. For Shelley, the beauty in which all things work
and move was well-nigh "quenched by the eclipsing curse of the birth of
man"; and Wordsworth lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains,
meadows, hills and groves, while he kept grave watch o'er man's
mortality, and saw the shades of the prison-house gather round him. From
the life of man they garnered nought but mad indignation, or mellowed
sadness. It was a foolish and furious strife with unknown powers fought
in the dark, from which the poet kept aloof, for he could not see that
God dwelt amidst the chaos. But Browning found "harmony in immortal
souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay." He found nature crowned in
man, though man was mean and miserable. At the heart of the most
wretched abortion of wickedness there was the mark of the loving touch
of God. Shelley turned away from man; Wordsworth paid him rare visits,
like those of a being from a strange world, made wise and sad with
looking at him from afar; Browning dwelt with him. He was a comrade in
the fight, and ever in the van of man's endeavour bidding him be of good
cheer. He was a witness for God in the midmost dark, where meet in
deathless struggle the elemental powers of right and wrong. For God is
present for him, not only in the order and beauty of nature, but in the
world of will and thought. Beneath the caprice and wilful lawlessness of
individual action, he saw a beneficent purpose which cannot fail, but
"has its way with man, not he with it."

Now this was a new world for poetry to enter into; a new depth to
penetrate with hope; and Browning was the first of modern poets to

"Stoop
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
Strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky."

It is also a new world for religion and morality; and to understand it
demands a deeper insight into the fundamental elements of human life.

To show this in a proximately adequate manner, we should be obliged, as
already hinted, to connect the poet's work, not merely with that of his
English predecessors, but with the deeper and more comprehensive
movement of the thought of Germany since the time of Kant. It would be
necessary to indicate how, by breaking a way through the narrow creeds
and equally narrow scepticism of the previous age, the new spirit
extended the horizon of man's active and contemplative life, and made
him free of the universe, and the repository of the past conquests of
his race. It proposed to man the great task of solving the problem of
humanity, but it strengthened him with its past achievement, and
inspired him with the conviction of its boundless progress. It is not
that the significance of the individual or the meaning of his endeavour
is lost. Under this new view, man has still to fight for his own hand,
and it is still recognized that spirit is always burdened with its own
fate and cannot share its responsibility. Morality does not give way to
religion or pass into it, and there is a sense in which the individual
is always alone in the sphere of duty.

But from this new point of view the individual is re-explained for us,
and we begin to understand that he is the focus of a light which is
universal, "one more incarnation of the mind of God." His moral task is
no longer to seek his own in the old sense, but to elevate humanity; for
it is only by taking this circuit that he can come to his own. Such a
task as this is a sufficiently great one to occupy all time; but it is
to humanity in him that the task belongs, and it will therefore be
achieved. This is no new one-sidedness. It does not mean, to those who
comprehend it, the supplanting of the individual thought by the
collective thought, or the substitution of humanity for man. The
universal is _in_ the particular, the fact _is_ the law. There is no
collision between the whole and the part, for the whole lives in the
part. As each individual plant has its own life and beauty and worth,
although the universe has conspired to bring it into being; so also, and
in a far higher degree, man has his own duty and his own dignity,
although he is but the embodiment of forces, natural and spiritual,
which have come from the endless past. Like a letter in a word, or a
word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; _but the
sentence is meaningless without him_. "Rays from all round converge in
him," and he has no power except that which has been lent to him; but
all the same, nay, all the more, he must

"Think as if man never thought before!
Act as if all creation hung attent
On the acting of such faculty as his."[A]

[Footnote A: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]

His responsibility, his individuality, is not less, but greater, in that
he can, in his thought and moral action, command the forces that the
race has stored for him. The great man speaks the thought of his people,
and his invocations as their priest are just the expression of their
dumb yearnings. And even the mean and insignificant man is what he is,
in virtue of the humanity which is blurred and distorted within him; and
he can shed his insignificance and meanness, only by becoming a truer
vehicle for that humanity.

Thus, when spirit is spiritually discerned, it is seen that man is bound
to man in a union closer than any physical organism can show; while "the
individual," in the old sense of a being _opposed_ to society and
_opposed_ to the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought,
not discoverable anywhere, because not real. And, on the other hand,
society is no longer "collective," but so organic that the whole is
potentially in every part--an organism _of_ organisms.

The influence of this organic idea in every department of thought which
concerns itself with man is not to be measured. It is already fast
changing all the practical sciences of man--economics, politics, ethics
and religion. The material, being newly interpreted, is wrought into a
new purpose, and revelation is once more bringing about a reformation.
But human action in its ethical aspect is, above all, charged with a new
significance. The idea of duty has received an expansion almost
illimitable, and man himself has thereby attained new worth and
dignity--for what is duty except a dignity and opportunity, man's chance
of being good? When we contrast this view of the life of man as the life
of humanity in him, with the old individualism, we may say that morality
also has at last, in Bacon's phrase, passed from the narrow seas into
the open ocean. And after all, the greatest achievement of our age may
be not that it has established the sciences of nature, but that it has
made possible the science of man. We have, at length, reached a point of
view from which we may hope to understand ourselves. Law, order,
continuity, in human action--the essential pre-conditions of a moral
science--were beyond the reach of an individualistic theory. It left to
ethical writers no choice but that of either sacrificing man to law, or
law to man; of denying either the particular or the universal element in
his nature. Naturalism did the first. Intuitionism, the second. The
former made human action the _re_action of a natural agent on the
incitement of natural forces. It made man a mere object, a _thing_
capable of being affected by other things through his faculty of being
pained or pleased; an object acting in obedience to motives that had an
external origin, just like any other object. The latter theory cut man
free from the world and his fellows, endowed him with a will that had no
law, and a conscience that was dogmatic; and thereby succeeded in
stultifying both law and morality.

But this new consciousness of the relation of man to mankind and the
world takes him out of his isolation and still leaves him free. It
relates men to one another in a humanity, which is incarnated anew in
each of them. It elevates the individual above the distinctions of time;
it treasures up the past in him as the active energy of his knowledge
and morality in the present, and also as the potency of the ideal life
of the future. On this view, the individual and the race are possible
only through each other.

This fundamental change in our way of looking at the life of man is
bound to abolish the ancient landmarks and bring confusion for a time.
Out of the new conception, _i.e.,_ out of the idea of evolution, has
sprung the tumult as well as the strength of our time. The present age
is moved with thoughts beyond the reach of its powers: great aspirations
for the well-being of the people and high ideals of social welfare flash
across its mind, to be followed again by thicker darkness. There is
hardly any limit to its despair or hope. It has a far larger faith in
the destiny of man than any of its predecessors, and yet it is _sure_ of
hardly anything--except that the ancient rules of human life are false.
Individualism is now detected as scepticism and moral chaos in disguise.
We know that the old methods are no longer of use. We cannot now cut
ourselves free of the fate of others. The confused cries for help that
are heard on every hand are recognized as the voices of our brethren;
and we now know that our fate is involved in theirs, and that the
problem of their welfare is also ours. We grapple with social questions
at last, and recognize that the issues of life and death lie in the
solution of these enigmas. Legislators and economists, teachers of
religion and socialists, are all alike social reformers. Philanthropy
has taken a deeper meaning; and all sects bear its banner. But their
forces are beaten back by the social wretchedness, for they have not
found the sovereign remedy of a great idea; and the result is in many
ways sad enough. Our social remedies often work mischief; for we degrade
those whom we would elevate, and in our charity forget justice. We
insist on the rights of the people and the duties of the privileged
classes, and thereby tend to teach greed to those for whom we labour,
and goodness to those whom we condemn. The task that lies before us is
plain: we want the welfare of the people as a whole. But we fail to
grasp the complex social elements together, and our very remedies tend
to sunder them. We know that the public good will not be obtained by
separating man from man, securing each unit in a charmed circle of
personal rights, and protecting it from others by isolation. We must
find a place for the individual within the social organism, and we know
now that this organism has not, as our fathers seemed to think, the
simple constitution of a wooden doll. Society is not put together
mechanically, and the individual cannot be outwardly attached to it, if
he is to be helped, He must rather share its life, be the heir of the
wealth it has garnered for him in the past, and participate in its
onward movement. Between this new social ideal and our attainment,
between the magnitude of our social duties and the resources of
intellect and will at our command, there lies a chasm which we despair
of bridging over.

The characteristics of this epoch faithfully reflect themselves in the
pages of Carlyle, with whose thoughts those of Browning are immediately
connected. It was Carlyle who first effectively revealed to England the
continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual
action. Seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued
sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations
amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his
day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, and, amidst
much smoke and din, showed his English readers something of the
greatness of the moral world. He gave us a philosophy of clothes,
penetrated through symbols to the immortal ideas, condemned all
shibboleths, and revealed the soul of humanity behind the external modes
of man's activity. He showed us, in a word, that the world is spiritual,
that loyalty to duty is the foundation of all human good, and that
national welfare rests on character. After reading him, it is impossible
for any one who reflects on the nature of duty to ask, "Am I my
brother's keeper?" He not only imagined, but knew, how "all things the
minutest that man does, minutely influence all men, and the very look of
his face blesses or curses whom-so it lights on, and so generates ever
new blessing or new cursing. I say, there is not a Red Indian, hunting
by Lake Winnipeg, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must
smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical
fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of
gravity of the universe." Carlyle dealt the deathblow to the
"laissez-faire" theory rampant in his day, and made each individual
responsible for the race. He has demonstrated that the sphere of duty
does not terminate with ourselves and our next-door neighbours. There
will be no pure air for the correctest Levite to breathe, till the laws
of sanitation have been applied to the moral slums. "Ye are my
brethren," said he, and he adds, as if conscious of his too denunciatory
way of dealing with them, "hence my rage and sorrow."

But his consciousness of brotherhood with all men brought only despair
for him. He saw clearly the responsibility of man, but not the dignity
which that implies; he felt the weight of the burden of humanity upon
his own soul, and it crushed him, for he forgot that all the good of the
world was there to help him bear it, and that "One with God is a
majority." He taught only the half-truth, that all men are united on the
side of duty, and that the spiritual life of each is conditional on
striving to save all. But he neglected the complement of this truth, and
forgot the greatness of the beings on whom so great a duty could be
laid. He therefore dignifies humanity only to degrade it again. The
"twenty millions" each must try to save "are mostly fools." But how
fools, when they can have such a task? Is it not true, on the contrary,
that no man ever saw a duty beyond his strength, and that "man can
because he ought" and ought only because he can? The evils an individual
cannot overcome are the moral opportunities of his fellows. The good are
not lone workers of God's purposes, and there is no need of despair.
Carlyle, like the ancient prophet, was too conscious of his own mission,
and too forgetful of that of others. "I have been very jealous for the
Lord God of hosts; because the children of Israel have forgotten Thy
covenant, thrown down Thine alters, and slain Thy prophets, and I, even
I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away." He needed,
beside the consciousness of his prophetic function, a consciousness of
brotherhood with humbler workers. "Yet I have left Me seven thousand in
Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth
which hath not kissed him." It would have helped him had he remembered,
that there were on all sides other workers engaged on the temple not
made with hands, although he could not hear the sound of their hammers
for the din he made himself. It would have changed his despair into joy,
and his pity into a higher moral quality, had he been able to believe
that, amidst all the millions against whom he hurled his anathemas,
there is no one who, let him do what he will, is not constrained to
illustrate either the folly and wretchedness of sin, or the glory of
goodness. It is not given to any one, least of all to the wicked, to
hold back the onward movement of the race, or to destroy the impulse for
good which is planted within it.

But Carlyle saw only one side of the truth about man's moral nature and
destiny. He knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential
wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how
wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and
self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. That
morality is the essence of things, that wrong _must_ prove its
weakness, that right is the only might, is reiterated and illustrated on
all his pages; they are now commonplaces of speculation on matters of
history, if not conscious practical principles which guide its makers.
But Carlyle never inquired into the character of this moral necessity,
and he overlooked the beneficence which places death at the heart of
sin. He never saw wrong except on its way to execution, or in the death
throes; but he did not look in the face of the gentle power that led it
on to death. He saw the necessity which rules history, but not the
beneficent character of that necessity.

The same limitations marred his view of duty, which was his greatest
revelation to his age. He felt its categorical authority and its binding
force. But the power which imposed the duty was an alien power, awful in
majesty, infinite in might, a "great task-master"; and the duty itself
was an outer law, written in letters of flame across the high heavens,
in comparison with which man's action at its best sank into failure. His
only virtue is obedience, and his last rendering even of himself is
"unprofitable servant." In this he has much of the combined strength and
weakness of the old Scottish Calvinism. "He stands between the
individual and the Infinite without hope or guide. He has a constant
disposition to crush the human being by comparing him with God," said
Mazzini, with marvellous penetration. "From his lips, at times so
daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the Breton Mariner--'My
God protect me! My bark is so small, and Thy ocean so vast.'" His
reconciliation of God and man was incomplete: God seemed to him to have
manifested Himself _to_ man but not _in_ man. He did not see that "the
Eternity which is before and behind us is also within us."

But the moral law which commands is just the reflection of the
aspirations of progressive man, who always creates his own horizon. The
extension of duty is the objective counterpart of man's growth; a proof
of victory and not of failure, a sign that man is mounting upwards. And,
if so, it is irrational to infer the impossibility of success from the
magnitude of the demands of a moral law, which is itself the promise of
a better future. The hard problems set for us by our social environment
are recognized as set by ourselves; for, in matters of morality, the eye
sees only what the heart prompts. The very statement of the difficulty
contains the potency of its solution; for evil, when understood, is on
the way towards being overcome, and the good, when seen, contains the
promise of its own fulfilment. It is ignorance which is ruinous, as when
the cries of humanity beat against a deaf ear; and we can take a
comfort, denied to Carlyle, from the fact that he has made us awake to
our social duties. He has let loose the confusion upon us, and it is
only natural that we should at first be overcome by a sense of
bewildered helplessness. But this very sense contains the germ of hope,
and England is struggling to its feet to wrestle with its wrongs.
Carlyle has brought us within sight of our future, and we are now taking
a step into it. He has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died
there, and was denied the view from Pisgah.

Now, this view was given to Robert Browning, and he broke out into a
song of victory, whose strains will give strength and comfort to many in
the coming time. That his solution of the evils of life is not final,
may at once be admitted. There are elements in the problem of which he
has taken no account, and which will force those who seek light on the
deeper mysteries of man's moral nature, to go beyond anything that the
poet has to say. Even the poet himself grows, at least in some
directions, less confident of the completeness of his triumph as he
grows older. His faith in the good does not fail, but it is the faith of
one who confesses to ignorance, and links himself to his finitude.
Still, so thorough is his conviction of the moral purpose of life, of
the certainty of the good towards which man is moving, and of the
beneficence of the power which is at work everywhere in the world, that
many of his poems ring like the triumphant songs of Luther.




CHAPTER IV.

BROWNING'S OPTIMISM.


"Gladness be with thee, Helper of the World!
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."[A]

[Footnote A: _Balaustion's Adventure_.]

I have tried to show that one of the distinctive features of the present
era is the stress it lays on the worth of the moral life of man, and the
new significance it has given to that life by its view of the continuity
of history. This view finds expression, on its social and ethical side,
in the pages of Carlyle and Browning: both of whom are interested
exclusively, one may almost say, in the evolution of human character;
and both of whom, too, regard that evolution as the realization by man
of the purposes, greater than man's, which rule in the world. And,
although neither of them developed the organic view of humanity, which
is implied in their doctrines, into an explicit philosophy, still the
moral life of the individual is for each of them the infinite life in
the finite. The meaning of the universe is moral, its last might is
rightness; and the task of man is to catch up that meaning, convert it
into his own motive, and thereby make it the source of his actions, the
inmost principle of his life. This, fully grasped, will bring the finite
and the infinite, morality and religion, together, and reconcile them.

But the reconciliation which Carlyle sought to effect was incomplete on
every side--even within the sphere of duty, with which alone, as
moralist, he specially concerned himself. The moral law was imposed upon
man by a higher power, in the presence of whom man was awed and crushed;
for that power had stinted man's endowment, and set him to fight a
hopeless battle against endless evil. God was everywhere around man, and
the universe was just the expression of His will--a will inexorably bent
on the good, so that evil could not prevail; but God was not _within_
man, except as a voice of conscience issuing imperatives and threats. An
infinite duty was laid upon a finite being, and its weight made him
break out into a cry of despair.

Browning, however, not only sought to bring about the reconciliation,
but succeeded, in so far as that is possible _in terms of mere feeling_.
His poetry contains suggestions that the moral will without is also a
force within man; that the power which makes for righteousness in the
world has penetrated into, or rather manifests itself _as_, man.
Intelligence and will, the reason which apprehends the nature of things,
and the original impulse of self-conscious life which issues in action,
are God's power in man; so that God is realizing Himself in the deeds of
man, and human history is just His return to Himself. Outer law and
inner motive are, for the poet, manifestations of the same beneficent
purpose; and instead of duty in the sense of an autocratic imperative,
or beneficent tyranny, he finds, deep beneath man's foolishness and sin,
a constant tendency towards the good which is bound up with the very
nature of man's reason and will. If man could only understand himself he
would find without him no limiting necessity, but the manifestation of a
law which is one with his own essential being. A beneficent power has
loaded the dice, according to the epigram, so that the chances of
failure and victory are not even; for man's nature is itself a divine
endowment, one with the power that rules his life, and man must finally
reach through error to truth, and through sin to holiness. In the
language of theology, it may be said that the moral process is the
spiritual incarnation of God; it is God's goodness as love, effecting
itself in human action. Hence Carlyle's cry of despair is turned by
Browning into a song of victory. While the former regards the struggle
between good and evil as a fixed battle, in which the forces are
immovably interlocked, the latter has the consciousness of battling
against a retreating foe; and the conviction of coming triumph gives
joyous vigour to every stroke. Browning lifted morality into an
optimism, and translated its battle into song. This was the distinctive
mark and mission which give to him such power of moral inspiration.

In order, however, to estimate the value of this feature of the poet's
work, it is necessary to look more closely into the character of his
faith in the good. Merely to attribute to him an optimistic creed is to
say very little; for the worth, or worthlessness, of such a creed
depends upon its content--upon its fidelity to the facts of human life,
the clearness of its consciousness of the evils it confronts, and the
intensity of its realism.

There is a sense, and that a true one, in which it may be said that all
men are optimists; for such a faith is implied in every conscious and
deliberate action of man. There is no deed which is not an attempt to
realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously
he may misunderstand its nature. Final and absolute disbelief in an
ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the
sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an
impossibility in fact. The one stultifies action, and asserts an effect
without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other stultifies
intellectual activity: and both views imply that the critic has so
escaped the conditions of human life, as to be able to pass a
condemnatory judgment upon them. The belief that a harmonious relation
between the self-conscious agent and the supreme good is possible,
underlies the practical activity of man; just as the belief in the unity
of thought and being underlies his intellectual activity. A moral
order--that is, an order of rational ends--is postulated in all human
actions, and we act at all only in virtue of it,--just as truly as we
move and work only in virtue of the forces which make the spheres
revolve, or think by help of the meaning which presses upon us from the
thought-woven world, through all the pores of sense. A true ethics, like
a true psychology, or a true science of nature, must lean upon
metaphysics, and it cannot pretend to start _ab initio_. We live in the
Copernican age, which puts the individual in a system, in obedience to
whose laws he finds his welfare. And this is simply the assertion of an
optimistic creed, for it implies a harmonious world.

But, though this is true, it must be remembered that this faith is a
prophetic anticipation, rather than acquired knowledge. We are only on
the way towards reconstructing in thought the fact which we are, or
towards bringing into clear knowledge the elemental power which
manifests itself within us as thought, desire, and deed. And, until this
is achieved, we have no full right to an optimistic creed. The
revelation of the unity which pervades all things, even in the natural
world, will be the last attainment of science; and the reconciliation of
nature and man and God is still further in the future, and will be the
last triumph of philosophy. During all the interval the world will be a
scene of warring elements; and poetry, religion, and philosophy can only
hold forth a promise, and give to man a foretaste of ultimate victory.
And in this state of things even _their_ assurance often falters. Faith
lapses into doubt, poetry becomes a wail for a lost god, and its votary
exhibits, "through Europe to the AEtolian shore, the pageant of his
bleeding heart." The optimistic faith is, as a rule, only a hope and a
desire, a "Grand Perhaps," which knows no defence against the critical
understanding, and sinks dumb when questioned. If, in the form of a
religious conviction, its assurance is more confident, then, too often,
it rests upon the treacherous foundations of authoritative ignorance,
which crumble into dust beneath the blows of awakened and liberated
reason. Nay, if by the aid of philosophy we turn our optimism into a
faith held by reason, a fact before which the intellect, as well as the
heart, worships and grows glad, it still is for most of us only a
general hypothesis, a mere leap to God which spurns the intermediate
steps, a universal without content, a bare form that lacks reality.

Such an optimism, such a plunge into the pure blue and away from facts,
was Emerson's. Caroline Fox tells a story of him and Carlyle which
reveals this very pointedly. It seems that Carlyle once led the serene
philosopher through the abominations of the streets of London at
midnight, asking him with grim humour at every few steps, "Do you
believe in the devil _now_?" Emerson replied that the more he saw of the
English people the greater and better he thought them. This little
incident lays bare the limits of both these great men. Where the one
saw, the other was blind. To the one there was the misery and the
universal mirk; to the other, the pure white beam was scarcely broken.
Carlyle believed in the good, beyond all doubt: he fought his great
battle in its strength and won, but "he was sorely wounded." Emerson was
Sir Galahad, blind to all but the Holy Grail, his armour spotless-white,
his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and
heat. But his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory. His victory was
not won in the enemy's citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos,
but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination. And, in consequence,
Emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in
the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along
which burthened humanity meanly toils.

But Browning's optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or
dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher,
protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an
invisible garment of contemplative holiness. It is a conviction which
has sustained shocks of criticism and the test of facts; and it
therefore, both for the poet and his readers, fulfils a mission beyond
the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good. Its power will be felt and
its value recognized by those who have themselves confronted the
contradictions of human life and known their depths.

No lover of Browning's poetry can miss the vigorous manliness of the
poet's own bearing, or fail to recognize the strength that flows from
his joyous, fearless personality, and the might of his intellect and
heart. "When British literature," said Carlyle of Scott and Cobbett,
"lay all puking and sprawling in Wertherism, Byronism and other
Sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us two healthy men." And
he breaks out into a eulogy of mere health, of "the just balance of
faculties that radiates a glad light outwards, enlightening and
embellishing all things." But he finds it easy to account for the health
of these men: they had never faced the mystery of existence. Such
healthiness we find in Browning, although he wrote with Carlyle at his
side, and within earshot of the infinite wail of this moral fatalist.
And yet, the word health is inadequate to convey the depth of the joyous
meaning which the poet found in the world. His optimism was not a
constitutional and irreflective hopefulness, to be accounted for on the
ground that "the great mystery of existence was not great to him: did
not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to
be answered or to perish." There are, indeed, certain rash and foolish
persons who pretend to trace Browning's optimism to his mixed descent;
but there is a "pause in the leading and the light" of those wiseacres,
who pretend to trace moral and mental characteristics to physiological
antecedents. They cannot quite catch a great man in the making, nor,
even by the help of evolution, say anything wiser about genius than that
"the wind bloweth where it listeth." No doubt the poet's optimism
indicates a native sturdiness of head and heart. He had the invaluable
endowment of a pre-disposition to see the sunny side of life, and a
native tendency to revolt against that subjectivity, which is the root
of our misery in all its forms. He had little respect for the
_Welt-schmerz,_ and can scarcely be civil to the hero of the bleeding
heart.

"Sinning, sorrowing, despairing,
Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked--
Should I give my woes an airing,--
Where's one plague that claims respect?

"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.

*       *       *       *       *

"I find earth not grey but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."[A]

[Footnote A: _At the Mermaid_.]

Browning was no doubt least of all men inclined to pout at his "plain
bun"; on the contrary, he was awake to the grandeur of his inheritance,
and valued most highly "his life-rent of God's universe with the tasks
it offered and the tools to do them with." But his optimism sent its
roots deeper than any "disposition"; it penetrated beyond mere health
of body and mind, as it did beyond a mere sentiment of God's goodness.
Optimisms resting on these bases are always weak; for the former leaves
man naked and sensitive to the evils that crowd round him when the
powers of body and mind decay, and the latter is, at best, useful only
for the individual who possesses it, and it breaks down under the stress
of criticism and doubt. Browning's optimism is a great element in
English literature, because it opposes with such strength the shocks
that come from both these quarters. His joyousness is the reflection _in
feeling_ of a conviction as to the nature of things, which he had
verified in the darkest details of human life, and established for
himself in the face of the gravest objections that his intellect was
able to call forth. In fact, its value lies, above all, in this,--that
it comes after criticism, after the condemnation which Byron and Carlyle
had passed, each from his own point of view, on the world and on man.

The need of an optimism is one of the penalties which reflection brings.
Natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection
disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world.
The fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man;
he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force
Nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now
first felt. Optimism is the expression of man's new reconciliation with
his world; as the opposite doctrine of pessimism is the consciousness of
an unresolved contradiction. Both are a judgment passed upon the world,
from the point of view of its adequacy or inadequacy to meet demands,
arising from needs which the individual has discovered in himself.

Now, as I have tried to show, one of the main characteristics of the
opening years of the present era was its deeper intuition of the
significance of human life, and, therefore, by implication, of its wants
and claims. The spiritual nature of man, lost sight of during the
preceding age, was re-discovered; and the first and immediate
consequence was that man, as man, attained infinite worth. "Man was born
free," cried Rousseau, with a conviction which swept all before it; "he
has original, inalienable, and supreme rights against all things which
can set themselves against him." And Rousseau's countrymen believed him.
There was not a _Sans-culotte_ amongst them all but held his head high,
being creation's lord; and history can scarcely show a parallel to their
great burst of joy and hope, as they ran riot in their new-found
inheritance, from which they had so long been excluded. They flung
themselves upon the world, as if they would "glut their sense" upon it.

"Expend
Eternity upon its shows,
Flung them as freely as one rose
Out of a summer's opulence."[A]

[Footnote A:_Easter Day_.]

But the very discovery that man is spirit, which is the source of all
his rights, is also an implicit discovery that he has outgrown the
resources of the natural world. The infinite hunger of a soul cannot be
satisfied with the things of sense. The natural world is too limited
even for Carlyle's shoe-black; nor is it surprising that Byron should
find it a waste, and dolefully proclaim his disappointment to
much-admiring mankind. Now, both Carlyle and Browning apprehended the
cause of the discontent, and both endured the Byronic utterance of it
with considerable impatience. "Art thou nothing other than a vulture,
then," asks the former, "that fliest through the universe seeking after
somewhat _to eat,_ and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not
given thee? Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe."

"Huntsman Common Sense
Came to the rescue, bade prompt thwack of thong dispense
Quiet i' the kennel: taught that ocean might be blue,
And rolling and much more, and yet the soul have, too,
Its touch of God's own flame, which He may so expand
'Who measured the waters i' the hollow of His hand'
That ocean's self shall dry, turn dew-drop in respect