And we had reached a point whence to turn back Had not been far, when I, still touched with fear, Perceived a fire, that, struggling with the black, Made conquest of a luminous hemisphere.

The place was distant still, but I could see Cl.u.s.tered about the fire, as we drew near, Figures of an austere n.o.bility.

"Thou who dost honor science and love art, Pray who are these, whose potent dignity Doth eminently set them thus apart?"

The poet answered me, "The honored fame That made their lives ill.u.s.trious touched the heart Of G.o.d to advance them." Then a voice there came, "Honor the mighty poet;" and again, "His shade returns,--do honor to his name."

And when the voice had finished its refrain, I saw four giant shadows coming on.

They seemed nor sad nor joyous in their mien.

And my good master said: "See him, my son, That bears the sword and walks before the rest, And seems the father of the three,--that one Is Homer, sovran poet. The satirist Horace comes next; third, Ovid; and the last Is Lucan. The lone voice that name expressed That each doth share with me; therefore they haste To greet and do me honor;--nor do they wrong."

Thus did I see the a.s.sembled school who graced The master of the most exalted song, That like an eagle soars above the rest.

When they had talked together, though not long, They turned to me, nodding as to a guest.

At which my master smiled, but yet more high They lifted me in honor. At their behest I went with them as of their company, And made the sixth among those mighty wits.

Thus towards the light we walked in colloquy Of things my silence wisely here omits, As there 'twas sweet to speak them, till we came To where a seven times circled castle sits, Whose walls are watered by a lovely stream.

This we crossed over as it had been dry, Pa.s.sing the seven gates that guard the same, And reached a meadow, green as Arcady.

People were there with deep, slow-moving eyes Whose looks were weighted with authority.

Scant was their speech, but rich in melodies.

The walls receding left a pasture fair, A place all full of light and of great size, So we could see each spirit that was there.

And straight before my eyes upon the green Were shown to me the souls of those that were, Great spirits it exalts me to have seen.

Electra with her comrades I descried, I saw aeneas, and knew Hector keen, And in full armor Caesar, falcon-eyed, Camilla and the Amazonian queen, King Latin with Lavinia at his side, Brutus that did avenge the Tarquin's sin, Lucrece, Cornelia, Martia Julia, And by himself the lonely Saladin.

The Master of all thinkers next I saw Amid the philosophic family.

All eyes were turned on him with reverent awe; Plato and Socrates were next his knee, Then Herac.l.i.tus and Empedocles, Thales and Anaxagoras, and he That based the world on chance; and next to these, Zeno, Diogenes, and that good leech The herb-collector, Dioscorides.

Orpheus I saw, Livy and Tully, each Flanked by old Seneca's deep moral lore, Euclid and Ptolemy, and within their reach Hippocrates and Avicenna's store, The sage that wrote the master commentary, Averois, with Galen and a score Of great physicians. But my pen were weary Depicting all of that majestic plain Splendid with many an antique dignitary.

My theme doth drive me on, and words are vain To give the thought the thing itself conveys.

The six of us were now cut down to twain.

My guardian led me forth by other ways, Far from the quiet of that trembling wind, And from the gentle shining of those rays, To places where all light was left behind.

ROBERT BROWNING

There is a period in the advance of any great man's influence between the moment when he appears and the moment when he has become historical, during which it is difficult to give any succinct account of him. We are ourselves a part of the thing we would describe. The element which we attempt to isolate for purposes of study is still living within us. Our science becomes tinged with autobiography. Such must be the fate of any essay on Browning written at the present time.

The generation to whom his works were unmeaning has hardly pa.s.sed away.

The generation he spoke for still lives. His influence seems still to be expanding. The literature of Browning dictionaries, phrase-books, treatises, and philosophical studies grows daily. Mr. Cooke in his Guide to Browning (1893) gives a condensed catalogue of the best books and essays on Browning, which covers many finely printed pages. This cla.s.s of book--the text-book--is not the product of impulse. The text-book is a commercial article and follows the demand as closely as the reaper follows the crop. We can tell the acreage under cultivation by looking over the account books of the makers of farm implements. Thousands of people are now studying Browning, following in his footsteps, reading lives of his heroes, and hunting up the subjects he treated.

This Browningism which we are disposed to laugh at is a most interesting secondary outcome of his influence. It has its roots in natural piety, and the educational value of it is very great.

Browning's individuality created for him a personal following, and he was able to respond to the call to leadership. Unlike Carlyle, he had something to give his disciples beside the immediate satisfaction of a spiritual need. He gave them not only meal but seed. In this he was like Emerson; but Emerson's little store of finest grain is of a different soil. Emerson lived in a cottage and saw the stars over his head through his skylight. Browning, on the other hand, loved pictures, places, music, men and women, and his works are like the house of a rich man,--a treasury of plunder from many provinces and many ages, whose manners and pa.s.sions are vividly recalled to us. In Emerson's house there was not a peg to hang a note upon,--"this is his bookshelf, this his bed."

But Browning's palace craves a catalogue. And a proper catalogue to such a palace becomes a liberal education.

Robert Browning was a strong, glowing, whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life more intensely than any Englishman since Walter Scott. He was born among books; and circ.u.mstances enabled him to follow his inclinations and become a writer,--a poet by profession. He was, from early youth to venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, the very embodiment of spontaneous life; and the forms of poetry in which he so fully and so accurately expressed himself enable us to know him well.

Indeed, only great poets are known so intimately as we know Robert Browning.

Religion was at the basis of his character, and it was the function of religious poetry that his work fulfilled. Inasmuch as no man invents his own theology, but takes it from the current world and moulds it to his needs, it was inevitable that Robert Browning should find and seize upon as his own all that was optimistic in Christian theology. Everything that was hopeful his spirit accepted; everything that was sunny and joyful and good for the brave soul he embraced. What was distressing he rejected or explained away. In the world of Robert Browning _everything_ was right.

The range of subject covered by his poems is wider than that of any other poet that ever lived; but the range of his ideas is exceedingly small. We need not apologize for treating Browning as a theologian and a doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life in trying to show that a poet is always really both--and he has almost convinced us. The expositors and writers of text-books have had no difficulty in formulating his theology, for it is of the simplest kind; and his views on morality and art are logically a part of it. The "message" which poets are conventionally presumed to deliver, was, in Browning's case, a very definite creed, which may be found fully set forth in any one of twenty poems. Every line of his poetry is logically dedicated to it.

He believes that the development of the individual soul is the main end of existence. The strain and stress of life are incidental to growth, and therefore desirable. Development and growth mean a closer union with G.o.d. In fact, G.o.d is of not so much importance in Himself, but as the end towards which man tends. That irreverent person who said that Browning uses "G.o.d" as a pigment made an accurate criticism of his theology. In Browning, G.o.d is adjective to man. Browning believes that all conventional morality must be reviewed from the standpoint of how conduct affects the actor himself, and what effect it has on his individual growth. The province of art and of all thinking and working is to make these truths clear and to grapple with the problems they give rise to.

The first two fundamental beliefs of Browning--namely: (1) that, ultimately speaking, the most important matter in the world is the soul of a man; and (2) that a sense of effort is coincident with development--are probably true. We instinctively feel them to be true, and they seem to be receiving support from those quarters of research to which we look for light, however dim. In the application of his dogmas to specific cases in the field of ethics, Browning often reaches conclusions which are fair subjects for disagreement. Since most of our conventional morality is framed to repress the individual, he finds himself at war with it--in revolt against it. He is habitually pitted against it, and thus acquires modes of thought which sometimes lead him into paradox--at least, to conclusions at odds with his premises. It is in the course of exposition, and incidentally to his main purpose as a teacher of a few fundamental ideas, that Browning has created his masterpieces of poetry.

Never was there a man who in the course of a long life changed less.

What as a boy he dreamed of doing, that he did. The thoughts of his earliest poems are the thoughts of his latest. His tales, his songs, his monologues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his rage, his prayer, are all upon the same theme: whatever fed his mind nourished these beliefs. His interest in the world was solely an interest in them. He saw them in history and in music; his travels and studies brought him back nothing else but proofs of them; the universe in each of its manifestations was a commentary upon them. His nature was the simplest, the most positive, the least given to abstract speculation, which England can show in his time. He was not a thinker, for he was never in doubt. He had recourse to disputation as a means of inculcating truth, but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. His conclusions are fixed from the start. Standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as absolute as that of a martyr, he has never for one instant undergone the experience of doubt, and only knows that there is such a thing because he has met with it in other people. The force of his feelings is so much greater than his intellect that his mind serves his soul like a valet. Out of the whole cosmos he takes what belongs to him and sustains him, leaving the rest, or not noting it.

There never was a great poet whose scope was so definite. That is the reason why the world is so cleanly divided into people who do and who do not care for Browning. One real glimpse into him gives you the whole of him. The public which loves him is made up of people who have been through certain spiritual experiences to which he is the antidote. The public which loves him not consists of people who have escaped these experiences. To some he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which nothing else will replace. To others, who do not need him, he is a boisterous and eccentric person,--a Heracles in the house of mourning.

Let us remember his main belief,--the value of the individual. The needs of society constantly require that the individual be suppressed. They hold him down and punish him at every point. The tyranny of order and organization--of monarch or public opinion--weights him and presses him down. This is the inevitable tendency of all stable social arrangements.

Now and again there arises some strong nature that revolts against the influence of conformity which is becoming intolerable,--against the atmosphere of caste or theory; of Egyptian priest or Manchester economist; of absolutism or of democracy.

And this strong nature cries out that the souls of men are being injured, and that they are important; that your soul and my soul are more important than Caesar--or than the survival of the fittest. Such a voice was the voice of Christ, and the lesser saviors of the world bring always a like message of revolt: they arise to fulfil the same fundamental need of the world.

Carlyle, Emerson, Victor Hugo, Browning, were prophets to a generation oppressed in spirit, whose education had oppressed them with a Jewish law of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham and Malthus, of Clarkson and Cobden,--of thought for the million, and for man in the aggregate. "To what end is all this beneficence, all this conscience, all this theory?"

some one at length cries out. "For whom is it in the last a.n.a.lysis that you legislate? You talk _of man_, I see only _men_."

To men suffering from an age of devotion to humanity came Robert Browning as a liberator. Like Carlyle, he was understood first in this country because we had begun earlier with our theoretical and practical philanthropies, and had taken them more seriously. We had suffered more.

We needed to be told that it was right to love, hate, and be angry, to sin and repent. It was a revelation to us to think that we had some inheritance in the joys and pa.s.sions of mankind. We needed to be told these things as a tired child needs to be comforted. Browning gave them to us in the form of a religion. There was no one else sane or deep or wise or strong enough to know what we lacked.

If ever a generation had need of a poet,--of some one to tell them they might cry and not be ashamed, rejoice and not find the reason in John Stuart Mill; some one who should justify the claims of the spirit which was starving on the religion of humanity,--it was the generation for whom Browning wrote.

Carlyle had seized upon the French Revolution, which served his ends because it was filled with striking, with powerful, with grotesque examples of individual force. In his Hero Worship he gives his countrymen a philosophy of history based on nothing but worship of the individual. Browning with the same end in view gave us pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in France and Italy. He glorified what we had thought crime and error, and made men of us. He was the apostle to the educated of a most complex period, but such as he was, he was complete. Those people to whom he has been a poet know what it is for the heart to receive full expression from the lips of another.

The second thesis which Browning insists on--the ident.i.ty of spiritual suffering with spiritual growth--is the one balm of the world. It is said that recent physiological experiment shows that muscles do not develop unless exercised up to what is called the "distress point." If this shall prove to be an instance of a general law,--if the struggles and agony of the spirit are really signs of an increase of that spiritual life which is the only sort of life we can conceive of now or hereafter,--then the truth-to-feeling of much of Browning's poetry has a scientific basis. It cannot be denied that Browning held firmly two of the most moving and far-reaching ideas of the world, and he expanded them in the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole world of poetic disquisition.

It is unnecessary at this day to point out the beauties of Browning or the sagacity with which he chose his effects. He gives us the sallow wife of James Lee, whose soul is known to him, Pippa the silk-spinning girl, two men found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten, or misunderstood. He searches the world till he finds the man whom everybody will concur in despising, the mediaeval grammarian, and he writes to him the most powerful ode in English, the mightiest tribute ever paid to a man. His culture and his learning are all subdued to what he works in; they are all in harness to draw his thought. He mines in antiquity or drags his net over German philosophy or modern drawing-rooms,--all to the same end.

In that miracle of power and beauty--The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess--he has improvised a whole civilization in order to make the setting of contrast which shall cause the soul of the little d.u.c.h.ess to shine clearly. In Childe Roland he creates a cycle, an epoch of romance and mysticism, because he requires it as a stage property. In A Death in the Desert you have the East in the first century--so vividly given that you wish instantly to travel there, Bible in hand, to feel the atmosphere with which your Bible ought always to have been filled. His reading brings him to Euripides. He sees that Alcestis can be set to his theme; and with a week or two of labor, while staying in a country house, he draws out of the Greek fable the world of his own meaning and shows it shining forth in a living picture of the Greek theatre which has no counterpart for vitality in any modern tongue.

The descriptive and narrative powers of Browning are above, beyond, and outside of all that has been done in English in our time, as the odd moments prove which he gave to the Pied Piper, The Ride from Ghent to Aix, Incident in the French Camp. These chips from his workshop pa.s.sed instantly into popular favor because they were written in familiar forms.

How powerfully his gifts of utterance were brought to bear upon the souls of men will be recorded, even if never understood, by literary historians. It is idle to look to the present generation for an intelligible account of One Word More, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Prospice, Saul, The Blot on the 'Scutcheon. They must be judged by the future and by men who can speak of them with a steady lip.

It must be conceded that the conventional judgments of society are sometimes right, and Browning's mission led him occasionally into paradox and _jeux d'esprit_. Bishop Blougram is an attempt to discover whether a good case cannot be made out for the individual hypocrite. The Statue and the Bust is frankly a _reductio ad absurdum_, and ends with a query.

There is more serious trouble with others. The Grammarian's Funeral is false to fact, and will appear so to posterity. The grammarian was not a hero, and our calmer moments show us that the poem is not a great ode.

It gave certain people the glow of a great truth, but it remains a paradox and a piece of exaggeration. The same must be said of a large part of Browning. The New Testament is full of such paradoxes of exaggeration, like the parable of the unjust steward, the rich man's chance for heaven, the wedding garment; but in these, the truth is apparent,--we are not betrayed. In Browning's paradoxes we are often led on and involved in an emotion over some situation which does not honestly call for the emotion.

The most n.o.ble quality in Browning is his temper. He does not proceed, as liberators generally do, by railing and pulling down. He builds up; he is positive, not negative. He is less bitter than Christianity itself.

While there is no more doubt as to the permanent value of the content of Browning than of the value of the spiritual truths of the New Testament, there is very little likelihood that his poems will be understood in the remote future. At present, they are following the waves of influence of the education which they correct. They are built like Palladio's Theatre at Vicenza, where the perspective converges toward a single seat. In order to be subject to the illusion, the spectator must occupy the duke's place. The colors are dropping from the poems already. The feeblest of them lose it first. There was a steady falling off in power accompanied by a constant increase in his peculiarities during the last twenty years of his life, and we may make some surmise as to how Balaustion's Adventure will strike posterity by reading Parleyings with Certain People.

The distinctions between Browning's characters--which to us are so vivid--will to others seem less so. Paracelsus and Rabbi Ben Ezra, Lippo Lippi, Karshish, Caponsacchi, and Ferishtah will all appear to be run in the same mould. They will seem to be the thinnest disguises which a poet ever a.s.sumed. The lack of the dramatic element in Browning--a lack which is concealed from us by our intense sympathy for him and by his fondness for the trappings of the drama--will be apparent to the after-comers. They will say that all the characters in The Blot on the 'Scutcheon take essentially the same view of the catastrophe of the play; that Pippa and Pompilia and Phene are the same person in the same state of mind. In fact, the family likeness is great. They will say that the philosophic monologues are repet.i.tions of each other. It cannot be denied that there is much repet.i.tion,--much threshing out of old straw.

Those who have read Browning for years and are used to the monologues are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could not understand so readily. When the later Browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind,--over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,--we know just where we are coming out in the end. We know the place better than he did himself.

Nor will posterity like Browning's manners,--the dig in the ribs, the personal application, and _de te fabula_ of most of his talking. These unpleasant things are part of his success with us to whom he means life, not art. Posterity will want only art. We needed doctrine. If he had not preached, we would not have listened to him. But posterity evades the preachers and accepts only singers. Posterity is so dainty that it lives on nothing but choice morsels. It will cull such out of the body of Browning as the anthologists are beginning to do already, and will leave the great ma.s.s of him to be rediscovered from time to time by belated sufferers from the philosophy of the nineteenth century.

There is a cla.s.s of persons who claim for Browning that his verse is really good verse, and that he was a master of euphony. This cannot be admitted except as to particular instances in which his success is due to his conformity to law, not to his violation of it.