ABSTRACT
If Mr. Arnold is the poet of our times who as poet could least resist la maladie du siècle in its subtler forms, he whose energy of heart and soul most absolutely rejects and repels its influence is Mr. Browning. To him this world appears to be a palæstra in which we are trained and tested for other lives to come; it is a gymnasium for athletes. Action, passion, knowledge, beauty, science, art-these are names of some of the means and instruments of our training and education. The vice of vices, according to his ethical creed, is languor of heart, lethargy or faintness of spirit, with the dimness of vision and feebleness of hand attending such moral enervation. Which of us does not suffer now and again from a touch of spiritual paralysis? Mr. Browning’s poetry, to describe it in a word, is a galvanic battery for the use of spiritual paralytics. At first the shock and the tingling frightened patients away; now they crowd to the physician and celebrate the cure. Which of us does not need at times that virtue should pass into him from a stronger human soul? To touch the singing robes of the author of Rabbi Ben Ezra and Prospice and The Grammarians Funeral, is to feel an influx of new strength. We gain from Mr. Browning, each in his degree, some of that moral ardour and spiritual faith and vigour of human sympathy which make interesting to him all the commonplace, confused, and ugly portions of life, those portions of life which, grating too harshly on Mr. Matthew Arnold’s sensitiveness, disturb his self-possession and trouble his lucidity, causing him often, in his verse, to turn away from this vulgar, distracting world to quietism and solitude, or a refined self-culture that lacks the most masculine qualities of discipline. To preserve those spiritual truths which are most precious to him Mr. Browning does not retreat, like the singer of In Memoriam, into the citadel of the heart; rather, an armed combatant, he makes a sortie into the world of worldlings and unbelievers, and from among errors and falsehoods and basenesses and crimes, he captures new truths for the soul. It is not in calm meditation or a mystical quiet
our complete humanity, Mr. Browning’s doctrine of life leaves no place; but if asceticism mean heroic exercise, the askesis of the athlete, the whole of human existence, as he conceives, is designed as a school of strenuous and joyous asceticism. ‘Our human impulses towards knowledge, towards beauty, towards love,’ it has been well said, ‘are reverenced by him as the signs and tokens of a world not included in that which meets the senses.’ Therefore, he must needs welcome the whole fulness of earthly beauty, as in itself good, but chiefly precious because it is a pledge and promise of beauty not partial and earthly, but in its heavenly plenitude. And how dare he seek to narrow or enfeeble the affections, when in all their errors and their never-satisfied aspirations, he discovers evidence of an infinite love, from which they proceed and towards which they tend? Nor would he stifle any high ambition, for it is a wing to the spirit lifting man towards heights of knowledge or passion or power which rise unseen beyond the things of sense, heights on which man hereafter may attain the true fulfilment of his destiny.
