BROWNING AND DOGMA

LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS
PORTUGAL ST. LINCOLN’S INN, W.C.
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.
BOMBAY: A. H. WHEELER & CO.

BROWNING AND DOGMA

SEVEN LECTURES ON BROWNING’S ATTITUDE
TOWARDS DOGMATIC RELIGION

BY
ETHEL M. NAISH
(FORMERLY SCHOLAR OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMB. HIST. TRIPOS)

LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1906

CONTENTS

SYNOPSIS

ERRATA

Page 32, line 21, for “four hundred years” read “five hundred.”

Page 39, line 11, for “men to become” read “man.”

Page 71, line 30, for “interval of six years, in 1847” read “four years, in 1845.”

Page 71, line 31, for “1853” read “1851.”

LECTURE I
INTRODUCTORY, AND CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS

BROWNING AND DOGMA

LECTURE I
INTRODUCTORY, AND CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS

He at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God.[1]

To this faith, to this assurance, is largely attributable the influence unquestionably possessed by Browning as a teacher in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the intentionally didactic element in the work may not honestly be ignored in whatever degree it is held to militate against artistic merit. Amid the throng of seekers after Truth in the world of poetry, Browning stands pre-eminent as one who not only sought Truth, but, having gained what he held to be Truth, kept it as “the sole prize of Life.” Poets of the school of thought of which Matthew Arnold and A. H. Clough may perhaps be regarded as among the more prominent exponents, are able to give no even approximately satisfying answer to the questionings bound inevitably to arise, at some time or other, in all minds whose energies are not dissipated by a too ready compliance with the demands of the hour. In certain moods their work appeals to us irresistibly, but the appeal is one of sympathy with doubt rather than of suggestion of solution. The author of Obermann may indeed in “hours of gloom” remind us that there have been “hours of insight”; that the individual soul, though through prolonged struggle and effort alone, may “mount hardly to eternal life.” The consolation he would offer to spiritual depression is that of self-dependence. Nature may soothe, but is powerless to satisfy; the appeal to her is answered by that which, although “severely clear,” is but “an air-born voice,” directing the enquirer back upon himself—

Resolve to be thyself, and know that he
Who finds himself loses his misery.[2]

So, too, Clough, sympathizing fully with doubt, may in his more inspired moments speak of hope and of the assurance

’Tis better to have fought and lost
Than never to have fought at all.

Although from his pen has come at least one short poem[3] worthy in invigorating force of the faith of Browning himself, yet the note of defeat rather than the ring of triumph is more generally characteristic of his language. Tennyson had splendid glimpses of the Truth, passing visions of glory; yet here, too, the vision was but transitory, the full glory evanescent.

The continued popularity of In Memoriam is undoubtedly due in large measure to the fact that the author has there given poetic utterance to those questionings and aspirations of the human soul, peculiar to no time or place, to no nation or form of creed—to the cry wrung from the heart when inexorable Death brings with it the hour of separation. There is in truth a triumphant note towards the close of In Memoriam: the child of the fifty-fourth stanza “crying in the night, and with no language but a cry,” though yet crying in the night, becomes in the final section (stanza cxxiv) a child “who knows his father near.” But even when the heart rises triumphantly, and in defiance of the arguments of reason asserts “I have felt,” the faith so expressed is not the faith of Browning. Beyond all the temporary darkness of La Saisiaz we recognize that the author of Asolando is speaking nothing more than the truth when he tells us that he “never doubted clouds would break.” The dispersal of the clouds gathered over La Salève added confidence to the Epilogue which constitutes so fitting a close to the life’s work. The assertion “I believe in God and Truth and Love,” expressed through the medium of the lover of Pauline, finds its echo in the more direct personal assertion of the concluding lines of La Saisiaz, “He believed in Soul, was very sure of God.” This was the irreducible minimum of Browning’s creed. How much more he held as absolute, soul-satisfying truth it is the design of this and the six following lectures to determine.

And here at once on the threshold of our investigation we are confronted by the difficulty inseparable from any consideration of Browning’s literary work; the difficulty of eliminating the dramatic and gauging the extent of the purely personal element. Although, as was inevitable, such difficulty has been universally recognized by critics and students, yet the very strength of the dramatic power has in many cases proved misleading. Browning has too completely lost himself in his subject. In the writings of the man capable of merging his personal identity in that of an Andrea and a Pippa, of a Caliban and a S. John; of assuming positions as opposed as those of a Guido and a Caponsacchi, it is a sufficiently simple matter to discover opinions supporting directly or indirectly any individual line of thought. To him who seeks with intent to obtain such confirmation may the promise be fairly made

As is your sort of mind
So is your sort of search; you’ll find
What you desire.[4]

Moreover, whilst the obscurity of the writing has been the subject of too general comment, the frequently elusive character of the meaning may be liable to escape notice. A certain course of thought having been detected is accepted to the exclusion of an even more important undercurrent only now and again rising to the surface. Despite the difficulties attendant upon a genuine study of Browning, both from the frequently recondite character of the subject and the amount of literary or historical knowledge demanded of the reader, comparatively slight attempt has so far been made towards a detailed treatment of individual poems such as that, for example, accorded to the plays of Shakespeare. And yet such concentrative labour possesses the highest value as a protection against misconstruction arising from a too hastily formed conception of the relative proportions of personal intention and dramatic presentation. Having once fallen into the error of accepting an under-estimate (an over-estimate is rarely possible) of the histrionic element in certain avowedly dramatic soliloquies, there is danger lest the temptation of seeking amongst others confirmation of the theory thus suggested should prove too strong for our literary honesty.

Any investigation as to Browning’s attitude towards religion in the wider acceptation of the term—as that which relates to the spiritual element in human nature and life—must of necessity be co-extensive with his work. For him to whom “the development of a soul” was the object alone worthy the devotion of the intellectual faculties, it was inevitable that to the consideration of this spiritual element his mind should continually revert. From Pauline to Asolando it is hardly too much to say such consideration is never absent. With the addition to the title of our subject of the term dogmatic, the scope of the inquiry is at once narrowed, whilst the difficulty of ascertaining fairly the position is possibly proportionately increased, since the writer, who has been designated “the most Christian poet of the century,” is claimed by Unitarians as their own. It is, therefore, of especial importance in dealing with the subject that no assumption be made, no assertion advanced, unsupported by adequate proof. The direct statements of the few non-dramatic poems afford us, however, some vantage-ground whence to begin our advance: for the rest, progress must be made through careful comparison of the dramatic poems as to subject and treatment, (we may not judge of one poem apart from the rest) recognizing that the dramatic character of the soliloquy does not necessarily exclude, as it does not necessarily imply, an expression of the author’s own opinions. When, therefore, we find the same theme perpetually treated through the medium of different externals, when we are met by similar expressions of belief emanating from the various soliloquists of the Dramatis Personae and the Men and Women Series, we may not unreasonably hold ourselves to possess fair prima facie evidence that in a theory so treated is centred much of the interest of the writer; in the arguments deduced is to be accepted a more or less definite expression of the writer’s own belief, or at least of that form of creed to which he is most strongly attracted.

Of the five poems chosen as illustrative or explanatory of Browning’s attitude towards that which we have designated dogmatic religion, one only, La Saisiaz, the latest in point of time, is non-dramatic in character. Between the other four a line of connection is easily established, since all deal with different aspects of the same subject regarded through different media. If, then, beginning with the lowest link of the chain, we gain by means of a consideration of Caliban some realization of the dramatic feats which Browning could accomplish at pleasure, we shall find less difficulty in distinguishing between the dramatic and personal elements in Christmas Eve and Easter Day where the line of demarcation is more finely drawn.

In Caliban upon Setebos (from the Men and Women Series of 1855) is presented the lowest conception of a Deity and of his dealings with the world and humanity, as evolved by a being incapable of aspiration, satisfied with existing conditions in so far, although in so far only, as they afford opportunity for material gratification. With Cleon follows the substitution of the Greek conception of life at the beginning of the Christian era, speculations as to the design of Zeus in his intercourse with man. The speculator, at once poet, musician, artist, to whom have been accessible all the stores of Greek philosophy and Greek culture, feels inevitably the necessity for the existence of a Deity differing from that of the monster of Prospero’s isle. Nevertheless to the Greek thinker the immortality of the soul is not yet more than a vague suggestion, the outcome of desire. His world has come into touch, but at its extreme edge, with the recently promulgated tenets of Christianity. To this inhabitant of “the sprinkled isles” the teaching of the Apostles of Galilee is so far “a doctrine to be held by no sane man”: and yet his very yearning, nay, even his reasonable deductions from the experience of life, point to the need of “doctrines” such as those which he now deems impossible of credence. Of the character of the changes separating the world of religious thought of Blougram from that of Cleon, suggestions are afforded by the Epilogue to the Dramatis Personae. The Christianity which Cleon criticized from afar has, by the date of the Bishop’s Apology, become the creed of the civilized world. Not only has the time passed when

The Temple filled with a cloud,
Even the House of the Lord,
Porch bent and pillar bowed:
For the presence of the Lord,
In the glory of His Cloud,
Had filled the House of the Lord. (Epilogue, Dram. Pers.)

But more than this, the simplicity of the earlier faith is at an end. Past, too, are those mediaeval days when the faith of a prelate of the Church would have been assumed without question by the lay world. Both stages of development have been left behind, but the yet later condition has not been attained when scepticism shall cause as little comment as did the childlike faith of the Middle Ages: a condition defined by the lament of Renan—

Gone now! All gone across the dark so far,
Sharpening fast, shuddering ever, shutting still,
Dwindling into the distance, dies that star
Which came, stood, opened once! (Epilogue, Dram. Pers.)

Bishop Blougram’s Apology is a possible exposition of the religious attitude of a professing Christian of the nineteenth century. It matters little whether his form of creed be that of Anglican or Roman Catholic: his position as a dignitary of the Church alone compels apology. From these unquestionably dramatic poems we pass to one, the classification of which appears to be usually regarded as less obvious, judging from the criticisms of commentators. How far the decision of the soliloquist in Christmas Eve may be justly held as that of Browning himself is a question requiring separate and careful consideration (to be given in the Sixth Lecture). Here it is sufficient to notice that, entering the confines of dogmatic religion, in this poem has found more immediate expression that which we may fairly deem one principle, at least, of the teaching which its author would impress upon his public; that in no one form of creed is the Divine influence to be exclusively found; that wherever love dwells, in however limited a degree, there, too, may with confidence be sought the Presence of the Supreme Love. In Easter Day the discussion is again transferred to a wider plane and deals with the individual difficulties involved in an unconditional acceptance of Christianity itself—difficulties in the end not only acknowledged as inevitable, but thankfully accepted by the speaker as essential to the strengthening of personal faith, to the advancement of individual development. Finally, with La Saisiaz we are brought face to face unmistakably with the struggle, with the doubts and yearnings of Browning himself at a critical hour of life, twelve years before the end—a struggle whence he was ultimately to issue with faith in the fundamental articles of his belief confirmed and deepened.

Of other poems bearing more or less directly upon the subject, the most notable as well as the most familiar, are probably Rabbi Ben Ezra, An Epistle of Karshish, and A Death in the Desert. Of these, Rabbi Ben Ezra, in its treatment of the theory of asceticism and of the working out of the design of the perfect unity of the individual human life, goes further afield and carries us beyond the limits of any definite dogma: though on the ascetic side it may serve as comment on some of the conclusions of Easter Day. An Epistle of Karshish embodies two of Browning’s favourite themes: (1) the essentially probationary character of human life as exemplified by the attitude of Lazarus towards things temporal, an attitude at once becoming super-human through a revelation obviating the necessity for faith; (2) the collateral suggestions contained in the estimate of Christianity conceived by the Arab physician. Of these, the first may be well employed as a comparison with the final decision of Easter Day, the second with the references of Cleon to the Apostolic teaching. A Death in the Desert offers but another form of refutation of the results of the German methods of Biblical criticism represented by the teaching of the Göttingen Professor of Christmas Eve. Direct declarations of faith such as those contained in Prospice and the Epilogue to Asolando serve but as confirmation of the assertion standing at the head of this Lecture.

To a superficial consideration the first of the dramatic poems is not pre-eminently attractive, nor as a soliloquist is Caliban attractive in the ordinary acceptation of the term as an appeal to the senses affording distinctly pleasurable sensations. But the attraction peculiar to the grotesque in any form is here present in a marked degree: an attraction frequently stronger than that exerted by the purely beautiful, involving as it does a more direct intellectual appeal; since grotesqueness, whether in Nature or in Art, does not usually denote simplicity. And Caliban is by no means a simple being, rather is he a singularly remarkable creation even for the genius of Browning. As we know, the idea suggested itself whilst the poet was reading The Tempest, when there flashed through his mind the passage from the Psalms (l, 21) which stands beneath the title: “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself.” In a recognition of the full significance of this fact may be found the key to all seeming inconsistencies which have evoked criticisms describing the poem from its theological aspect as a “monstrous Bridgewater treatise,”[5] and “a fragment of Browning’s own Christian apologetics,” the “reasoning” of Caliban as “an initial absurdity,”[6] whilst Caliban himself is designated “a savage with the introspective powers of a Hamlet and the theology of an Evangelical clergyman”[7]—the entire scheme of this “wonderful” work being even summarized as a “design to describe the way in which a primitive nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them.”[8] There is perhaps more to be said for the poem than the suggestions involved in any or all of these comments. A protracted investigation as to how far Browning’s Caliban is an immediate development of the Caliban of The Tempest would be beside the main object of these Lectures; but for an understanding of the value to be reasonably attached to the soliloquy it is essential to estimate as fairly as may be possible the character, intellectual and moral, of the soliloquist, since Caliban’s conception of his Creator must necessarily be influenced by the limitations of his own powers, whether physical or mental. For here, as elsewhere in the dramatic poems, Browning has completely identified himself with his soliloquist. How far, therefore, we are justified in claiming for Caliban’s theology the title of “a fragment of Browning’s own Christian apologetics” can only be decided by a careful consideration and a comparison with work not avowedly dramatic in character.

Reading again those scenes of The Tempest, in which Caliban plays a part, we become more than ever convinced that the Caliban of the poem is but the Caliban of the play seen through the medium of Browning’s phantasy. This, however, is not equivalent to the admission of simplicity as a characteristic of this strange being, merely is it a recognition that the potentialities existent in Shakespeare’s Caliban are nearer to becoming actualities in the Caliban of Browning. Caliban’s may, indeed, be the nature of a primitive being, but the nature is not, therefore, simple; to the peculiarly complex character of his personality is due the main interest of the poem—curiously undeveloped in some departments of his nature, the moral sense appears to be almost non-existent, he is, nevertheless, an imaginative creature with a distinct poetic and artistic vein in his composition. Whilst Prospero’s estimate of him seems to have been a fairly accurate one:

The most lying slave
Whom stripes may move, not kindness;

as Mr. Stopford Brooke has pointed out “his very cursing is imaginative”[9]—

As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both. (Act I, Sc. ii.)

And it is Caliban who appreciates the music of Ariel which to Trinculo and Stephano, products of civilization so-called, is a thing fearful as the work of the devil.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. (Act III, Sc. ii.)

Such is the re-assurance offered by the “man-monster” of Shakespeare. But the Caliban of Browning is yet in his primitive condition, untouched by contact with the outer world as represented even by these dregs of a civilization which, whilst checking the expression of the brutish instinct, increases by repression the force of passions struggling for an outlet to which conventionality bars the way.

To the Caliban of The Tempest Prospero rather than Setebos is the immediate author of the evils of his environment. He has not yet reached the stage of formulated speculation with regard to the character of his mother’s god—to which Browning’s Caliban shows himself to have attained. And it is worthy of notice that the Caliban of the poem does not accept without examination such information as he has received from Sycorax concerning Setebos. Only after due consideration does he advance his own ideas (not according with those of Sycorax) on the subject; proving himself thus capable not merely of imagination but of reasoning; his intellect is alive whatever limitations may be assigned to its capacity for exercise. Although no immediate evidence is afforded of the capabilities of Shakespeare’s Caliban in the regions of abstract thought, yet of the potential existence of the ratiocinative faculty sufficient testimony is afforded by his attitude towards the supernatural powers of Prospero, by his scheme for rendering the new-comers instruments, subserving his own interests in his designs against his employer and tyrant—all this clearly the outcome of something more than a mere brute cunning.

With these aspects of the character of Caliban before him as ground-work, Browning has developed his poem; and in the twenty-three opening lines, introductory to the definite reflections concerning Setebos, are discoverable evidences of all the characteristics of the Caliban of The Tempest. Browning has done nothing without intention, and we are here prepared, or should be prepared, for what is to follow later in the poem. Here the “man-monster” is described as sprawling in the mire, in the enjoyment of such comfort as may be derived from the sunshine in the heat of the day: the sensuous side of the nature finding its satisfaction in

Kicking both feet in the cool slush

and feeling

About his spine small eft things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh. (ll. 5, 6.)

At the same time is recognizable the artistic element in the composition—for not only does he enjoy

A fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,

but he

Looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times.) (ll. 11-14.)

Here is assuredly the language of no mere savage! Compare with this the later descriptions of the inhabitants of the island as assigned to Setebos (ll. 44-55). No mere dry category of animal life, it suggests the result of the observations of a mind at once poetic and imaginative.

Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech,
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants: the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole.

Not because this is the work of a poet, but because it is the work of a dramatic poet do we get these lines: and Browning has unquestionably, I think, given its character to this earlier passage with intention. He would suggest that this element—poetic and imaginative—in Caliban’s nature must of necessity influence his conception of his Deity.

But whilst emphasis is thus given to the sensuous and artistic aspects of the character of this most complex being, by these introductory lines is more than suggested the obliquity of the moral nature—this, too, influencing, as is inevitable, its theology. Deception is to the Caliban of Browning as to the Caliban of Shakespeare, the very breath of life. His pleasure in inactivity is vastly intensified by the consciousness that he is thereby defrauding Prospero and Miranda of the fruits of his labours.

It is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech. (ll. 22, 23.)

Immediately combined with this is the form of cowardice distinctive of the lowest moral grade, the cowardice which would insult whilst occupying a position of security, but which grovels before the object of its antipathy as soon as it sees reason to fear approaching vengeance. To the mere physical pleasure of basking in the sunlight is added not alone the negative gratification of the consciousness of defrauding his employer, but the more active enjoyment of soliloquizing concerning “that Setebos whom his dam called God.” And why? With the sole purpose of affording him annoyance. In the winter-time such discussion might prove dangerous to the speaker, as Caliban possesses an insurmountable dread of that “cold” so powerful a weapon in the hands of his Deity. Even in summer he deems it desirable to avoid a too openly offered challenge to Setebos; hence the employment throughout his soliloquy of the third person, singular, in a curious attempt to mislead his hearer.

And what according to Browning’s theory as expressed elsewhere are we to expect of the god of this untaught, half-savage being, morally undeveloped, with artistic and poetic faculties already awakening? More or less will it necessarily be the outcome of his own experiences. A commentary on that familiar passage which S. John in A Death in the Desert (ll. 412-419) puts into the mouth of the objector to the truth of the facts of Christianity, who would regard the conception of the Godhead as subjective rather than objective in character. First in the history of the race came the ascription to the Deity of hands, feet, and bodily parts; then followed the human passions of pride and anger. Finally, all yield to the higher attributes of “power, love, and will,” these succeeding to and supplanting the earlier characteristics. In his imaginary answer the Evangelist is represented as attributing these changes of conception to the necessity of growth in human nature whereby man uses such aids to his development as may be attainable. The Truth itself remaining unaltered and unalterable, man obtains from time to time fuller glimpses thereof, the greater superseding, even apparently falsifying, the less. Caliban, uniting the two earlier conceptions of the Deity—as a being possessed of bodily parts and human passions—offers but the merest suggestion of any further and higher development. Yet there are such indirect, should we rather say negative, suggestions observable towards the close of the poem.

To Setebos is assigned as a dwelling-place “the cold o’ the moon,” possibly because the speaker feels it satisfactory that the god whom he fears should be at what he deems a distance sufficiently remote from his own habitation; partly also because to him “the cold o’ the moon” or, indeed, any cold, is suggestive of intensely disagreeable sensations, and to his unsatisfactory environment he ascribes the attempts of Setebos towards creation as designed to effect a change in his own condition. All things animate or inanimate inhabiting the island have been, according to Caliban, the work of Setebos. What still lies beyond the range of his creative power? Not the sun, as might have been anticipated, since to Caliban its agency is purely beneficial, and its influence apparently of limitless extent; not the sun, “clouds, winds, meteors,” but the stars. These “came otherwise,” how or by what means the soliloquist is unable to determine.

Then arises the further question. If, indeed, Setebos is the author of the visible creation, what has been the motive instigating him to the work? In accordance with Caliban’s experience of his own nature, it is impossible that any motive other than self-interest in some form or another should have actuated the Creator: hence he attributes the design to the discomfort of the dwelling-place “in the cold o’ the moon.” Nevertheless, even after the creation of the sun its warmth proved insufficient for comfort, the god failed to enjoy “the air he was not born to breathe.” Again, in the constitution of the animate beings inhabiting the island he strove to realize (so says Caliban) “what himself would fain in a manner be.” Hence the creatures made by Setebos are “weaker in most points” than is the god himself, yet “stronger in a few.” A theory suggesting an interesting comparison with the arguments by which David in Saul deduces the necessity of an Incarnation. Caliban ascribes to Setebos the power of originating faculties which he does not himself possess, and which in the nature of things he might, therefore, be deemed incapable of realizing. The illustration or comparison offered is that of Caliban’s own imagined occupation in an idle moment, when the idea occurs to him to make a bird of clay, endowing it with the power of flight, a power not numbered amongst his own capabilities. Thus he holds that Setebos, too, may create living beings, bestowing upon them faculties which he is himself incapable of exercising, making them, though, “weaker in some points, stronger in a few.” To the more cultivated intelligence of the Hebrew psalmist, as represented by Browning, such theory is untenable. That “the creature [should] surpass the Creator—the end what Began”[10] is as incomprehensible as it is illogical. Love existent in the creature is to David proof sufficient of the existence of love in the Creator. So thinks not Caliban. And yet with the curious inconsistency marking the reasoning of the slowly developing intellect, Setebos is represented as mocking his creatures whilst envying the capabilities with which he has gifted them. Thus:

So brave, so better though they be,
It nothing skills if He begins to plague. (ll. 66, 67.)

As the creation has been the result of mere wantonness, so the recognition of all appeal from created beings to the Creator will be governed by the same caprice. As with Caliban’s imagined dealings with his clay bird, he would do good or ill accordingly

As the chance were this might take or else
Not take my fancy. (ll. 90-91.)

So also is the action of the Deity towards his creation in all relations of life. He has elected Prospero for a career of “knowledge and power,” and, as his servant judges, one of supreme comfort, whilst he has appointed Caliban, equally deserving—in his own estimation—to hold the position of slave.

He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why? (ll. 202-203.)

Power which is irresponsible is exercised in a manner wholly capricious. There is no more satisfactory explanation of the dealings of Setebos with his creatures than that which Caliban can offer for his own treatment of the crabs

That march now from the mountain to the sea,

when he may

Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. (ll. 101-103.)

Of one thing the savage deems himself assured, again judging from the pettiness which he finds existent in his own nature. Of one thing he is assured—that the wrath of the god is most readily to be kindled through envy, envy of the very objects of his own creation. A display of happiness is the surest method of incurring his vengeance; therefore

Even so, ’would have Him misconceive, suppose
This Caliban strives hard and ails no less,
And always, above all else, envies Him: (ll. 263-265.)

a belief inherent in all pre-Christian creeds in intimate connection with the doctrine of sacrifice, the place of which in the theology of Caliban must receive separate consideration. So does Herakles warn Admetus against indulgence in a supreme happiness,

Only the rapture must not grow immense:
Take care, nor wake the envy of the Gods.[11]

Thus will Caliban in spite kill two flies, basking “on the pompion-bell above,” whilst he gives his aid to

Two black painful beetles [who] roll their ball
On head and tail as if to save their lives. (ll. 260-261.)

Such are, according to Browning, some of the main features of the “Natural Theology in the Island,” suggesting conditions of life at once depressing and degrading: no satisfaction for the present but in deception of the over-ruling power, the sole hope for the future, that this dread being may tire of his early creation and hence relax his malicious watch in favour of a new and distant world, made “to please him more.” It is not difficult to conceive of such a creed as the outcome of deductions from the teaching of Sycorax, who held that “the Quiet” was the virtual creator, the work of Setebos being limited to disturbing and “vexing” these creations of the Quiet. In this aspect Setebos would appear as representative of the powers of evil. And of great interest in any study of Browning are the suggestions resulting from Caliban’s treatment of the subject. (1) He holds that the author of evil must be supreme. That the Quiet, had he been the creator, could unquestionably, and, therefore, would most certainly have rendered his creatures of strength sufficient to be impervious to the attacks of Setebos. Therefore he attributes the weaknesses of humanity to design on the part of a creator who would wantonly torment.

His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: ’holds not so.
Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex.
Had He meant other, while His hand was in,
Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,
Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,
Or overscale my flesh ’neath joint and joint,
Like an orc’s armour? Ay,—so spoil His sport! (ll. 170-177.)

(2) Again, and later in the poem, he treats Setebos—or Evil—not merely as a negative aspect of good, but as that which may in time become transmuted into good. He may

Surprise even the Quiet’s self
Some strange day—or, suppose, grow into it
As grubs grow butterflies. (ll. 246-248.)

(3) One further alternative suggests itself—and this yet more probable—that evil may finally be overcome of good, or may of itself become inoperative.

That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier He
Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die. (ll. 281-283.)

Two or three less obvious thoughts may not be omitted in any consideration of a poem containing much which is characteristic of Browning’s work wherever found. From the theology of Caliban inevitably results the doctrine of sacrifice, though in its lowest, crudest form. Since that condition most likely to excite the wrath of Setebos, as we have already had occasion to notice, is the happiness of his creations, Caliban would, therefore, present himself as a creature full of misery, moaning even in the sun; only in secret rejoicing that he is making Setebos his dupe. Should he be discovered in his deception, in order to avoid the greater evil attendant on the expression of the god’s wrath, he would of his own will submit to the lesser ill;

Cut a finger off,
Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,
Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree,
Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste. (ll. 271-274.)

A sacrifice the outcome of fear. Spare me, and I will do all to appease thy wrath. Into the midst of the meditations of Caliban breaks the thunder-storm, and what he has depicted as a possible event of the future has become a present danger.

White blaze,
A tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him! (ll. 289-291.)

The prospective vows are now made in earnest.

’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this mouth
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape. (ll. 292-295.)

Sacrifice as distinguished from or opposed to the principle of self-sacrifice. Whilst self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-suppression—call it what we may—marks the crowning height of spiritual attainment, scaled alone by the few, and those the pioneers and saviours of the race, all early forms of religion bear witness to the existence of this belief in sacrifice—the propitiation of the Deity—as an element inherent in human nature, whether embodied in the legend of Polycrates, in the vow of Jacob at Bethel,[12] or in that condition of his descendants when in accordance with the prophetic denunciation[13] sacrifice had superseded mercy and burnt-offerings constituted a substitute for the knowledge of God. Again and again on different soil, amid men of alien races, the principle of sacrifice is found reappearing throughout history. As the enthusiasm of self-sacrifice becomes enfeebled, by a retrograde process of moral development the barren growth of sacrifice would appear to thrive. The echo of the unquestioning outcry, “God wills it,” had died away when, in the crusading vows of the later era of the movement, expression was too frequently given to the theory of sacrifice. How far may the one be regarded as the outcome of the other, the higher the development of the lower instinct? When man has learned

To know even hate is but a mask of love’s
To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill-success;[14]

then, too, may the links between sacrifice and self-sacrifice become apparent. Along this line of connection we have to pass in traversing the ground between Caliban and Easter Day.

And what place does the creed of the unwilling slave of Setebos accord to the life beyond the grave? Will the future, if future there be, prove but an indefinite prolongation of the present? From the evils of this life the groveller in the mud sees no escape. He has discarded that tenet of his mother’s creed which included a theory of retribution after death when Setebos “both plagued enemies and feasted friends.” Such theory would indeed have been wholly inconsistent with that which represented the god as indifferent to his creatures, as utterly capricious in his dealings for good or ill—whereby he may be said to have neither enemies nor friends. No, poor Caliban, brutal and selfish, can but hold that “with the life, the pain shall stop.” What satisfaction to be derived from the continuance of a loveless existence? Without love, life to the author of Caliban upon Setebos would have lost its use, would be fearful of contemplation; the “can it be, and must, and will it?” of La Saisiaz[15] finds no faintest echo on Prospero’s isle. In the one case the utterances are the utterances of Caliban, in the other those of Browning himself. From the calculations of the one the doctrine of immortality is as inevitably excluded as it is inevitably included in those of the other.

Finally, whilst in the various scattered references to “the Quiet” are to be found some of the most striking evidences of the existence of the artistic element in Caliban’s nature—“the something Quiet” which he deems resting “o’er the head of Setebos”

Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief.
········
[The] stars the outposts of its couch; (ll. 132-138.)

yet far more than this is involved in the suggestions of the relations subsisting between the Quiet and Setebos and the creation to which Caliban belongs. The Quiet too far from Caliban’s sphere of existence for him to be in any way affected by it. He only surmises as to its possible influence upon, and ultimate triumph over, Setebos, who partakes sufficiently of his own nature to call forth fear and enmity, who lives in a proximity to His creations which renders advisable the avoidance of any action calculated to excite His wrath. The Quiet, the impersonation of supreme power, is beyond the reach of all the ills attendant upon this lower phase of existence, hence is equally incapable of experiencing joy and grief, since both alike are relative terms. Although here suggested as incidental to Caliban’s reflections, the theory involved is one appearing more or less frequently elsewhere in Browning’s work, notably in A Death in the Desert, and again in Cleon, when it is, however, applied to “the lower and inconscious forms of life.” To the Supreme Power beyond man, as to the world of animal life below, is denied “man’s distinctive mark,” progress. Thus incidentally in these references to the Quiet may be traced a suggestion foreshadowing in a degree, however remote, the necessity of an Incarnation. Not that this outcome of his theories would appear to have found any place in Caliban’s mind; it may possibly indeed be an assumption, wanting sufficient warrant, to assign to Browning himself any definite intention in the matter. Nevertheless, even the suggestion, remote as we may admit it to be, leads up to the argument used by David in Saul in the extremity of his anxiety to relieve the sufferings of the object of his affections. Through sympathy alone may suffering be relieved, and genuine sympathy may be best attained through personal experience of suffering. Humanity suffers, but is unequal to the task of aiding effectively its fellow-sufferers. The Deity, whilst possessing the necessary power, is yet untouched by the sympathy resultant from fellow-feeling. A suffering God! Can this be? Only, therefore, through union of the human with the Divine, through an Incarnation alone, can the relief of human suffering be fully accomplished. Even Caliban feels the need of contact between the Creator and His creatures. The Quiet, incapable of experiencing joy or grief, is also beyond the reach of mortal intercourse or worship. He cannot be God even in the sense in which Setebos is God until, through an approach to His creatures. He experiences something of the sorrows as of the joys of humanity. This in brief is the general course of Browning’s arguments for the reasonable necessity of an Incarnation. The suggestion, if suggestion we may call it, here made constitutes the lowest rung in the ladder which leads us to the confession of S. John.

The acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it.[16]

LECTURE II
CLEON

LECTURE II
CLEON

Between Caliban and Cleon a wide gulf is fixed: between the savage sprawling in “the pit’s much mire,” gloating over his powers of inflicting suffering, at once cowering before and insulting his god: and the cultured Greek, inhabitant of “the sprinkled isles,” poet, philosopher, artist, musician, sitting in his “portico, royal with sunset,” reflecting on the purposes of life, his own achievements and the design of Zeus in creation, which, though inscrutable, he yet must hold to have been beneficent. Could contrast be anywhere more striking than that suggested by these two scenes? And yet amidst outward dissimilarity there is a point towards which all their lines converge. On one subject of reflection alone, this man, the product of Greek intellectual life and culture, has hardly passed beyond that of the savage awakening to a “sense of sense.” To both alike death means the end of life, to neither does any glimpse of light reveal itself beyond the grave. And death to the Greek is infinitely more terrible than to the son of Sycorax. To Caliban the belief that “with the life the pain will stop,” affords a feeling akin to relief in the present, when the mental discomfort arising from fear of Setebos temporarily over-powers the physical satisfaction to be derived from basking in the sun. To Cleon, possessed of the capacity for “loving life so over-much,” the idea of death affords so terrible a suggestion that its very horror forces upon him at times the necessity of the acceptance of some theory involving belief in the immortality of the soul. Thus we have moved onwards one step, though one step only, in the ladder of thought, of which Caliban’s soliloquy constitutes the lowest rung. The inert conjectures, the vague surmises of the savage are succeeded by the reflections and subsequent logical deductions of the man of intellectual culture, culminating in the anguished cry:

I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man.
······
Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus.
······
... But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it, and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible! (Cleon, 11. 321-335.)

Different as are the modes of contemplating death, differing as the character and environment of the soliloquist, one is yet in a sense the outcome of the other, an exemplification of Cleon’s own assertion:

In man there’s failure, only since he left
The lower and inconscious forms of life. (ll. 125-126.)
······
Most progress is most failure. (l. 272.)

With the opening out of wider possibilities to the mind comes the consciousness of the gulf between actuality and ideality. To Caliban, whose pleasurable conceptions of life are bounded by the prospect of defrauding Prospero of his services, lying in the mire

Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,
Making and marring clay at will; (Caliban, 11. 96-97.)

to such a being not long endowed with a capacity for the realization of his own individuality, with the “sense of sense,” the Greek appreciation of life is a sheer impossibility. By the mind capable of entering into sympathy with Homer, Terpander, Phidias, the joys of life are felt too keenly to be relinquished without a struggle, and that a bitter one. Death and the grave cast a chilling shadow over the brightness of the present.

Before analysing the arguments contained in the reflections of Cleon, it may be well to inquire what were the influences to which the poet had been subjected, and which resulted in the condition of mind in which the messengers of Protus found him. The Greece in which Cleon lived was the Greece to which S. Paul addressed himself from the Areopagus, the character of which is sufficiently indicated by the circumstances leading to the assembly on that memorable occasion. The Athenians, we are told by the writer of the Acts, “spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.”[17] The age was then, it would appear, not one of action or of practical thought. All had been done in the past that could be done in the departments of artistic achievement, of poetry, of philosophy. Now creative power would seem to have disappeared from amongst Greek thinkers, all that remained being the natural restlessness which ultimately succeeds satiety. Much had been accomplished in the past: What remained to the future? It is in accordance with this spirit of the age that Cleon writes to Protus:

We of these latter days, with greater mind
Than our forerunners, since more composite,
Look not so great, beside their simple way,
To a judge who only sees one way at once,
One mind-point and no other at a time,—
Compares the small part of a man of us
With some whole man of the heroic age,
Great in his way—not ours, nor meant for ours. (ll. 64-71.)

Hence the poet of modern times, though he has left the “epos on [the] hundred plates of gold,” the property of the tyrant Protus, and the little popular song

So sure to rise from every fishing-bark
When, lights at prow, the seamen haul their net; (ll. 49, 50.)

yet admits freely that he has not “chanted verse like Homer.” What though he has “combined the moods” of music, “inventing one,” yet has he never “swept string like Terpander,” his predecessor by some seven centuries. What though he has moulded “the image of the sun-god on the phare,” or painted the Pœcile its whole length, yet has he not “carved and painted men like Phidias and his friend”—his forerunners by something like four hundred years. With these mighty achievements in poetry and art of those giants amongst men to be contemplated in retrospect, what hope remains for the future? What greater attainments may be possible to the human intellect? Here again life—this mortal life—would seem to have become all that it is capable of becoming; the powers of mind and body have alike been developed to the full. Thus on this side too is satiety. The yearning for growth, for progress, inherent in human nature, seeks instinctively further heights of attainment. When for the time being all visible peaks appear to have been scaled, then, in the phraseology of S. John, “man [turns] round on himself and stands.”[18] And then arises the enquiry into the purposes of existence, an enquiry unheard in the earlier days of practical activity and struggle. Is this the end of all? No progress being possible along the old tracks, we must hear or see some new thing. The late Dr. Westcott in comparing the dramatic work of Euripides with that of Æschylus, and remarking that Euripides (only a generation younger) had to take account of all the novel influences under which he had grown up, adds, “Once again Asia had touched Europe and quickened there new powers. Greece had conquered Persia only that she might better receive from the East the inspiration of a wider energy.”[19] Once more in the days of Cleon might it be said that Asia had touched Europe and quickened there new powers. But this time the positions of conquered and conquerors were reversed. Asia was to conquer Europe, but the conquest effected by the sword of Alexander was to be avenged by weapons forged in another armoury. This time Asia invaded Europe when Paul of Tarsus responded to the appeal “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” So far that invasion had borne small fruit: “certain men” had believed, including Dionysius the Areopagite, whilst others, whose attitude Protus would appear to have shared, desired to hear further on the subject of the Resurrection.[20] Cleon is represented as ranking among the sceptics with reference to the new Christian teaching. The special influence of Greek thought upon his philosophy and creed, as expressed in the poem, may be best noticed in a closer consideration to which we now turn.

I. The opening lines (1-18) present, with Browning’s usual power of delineation, the environment of the speaker. Cleon, the poet, as well as his correspondent, Protus, the tyrant, seem alike to be imaginary personages. With lines 19-42 the soliloquist at once strikes the key-note of the poem. By the act of munificence which showers gifts upon the poet, “whose song gives life its joy,” the king evinces his “recognition of the use of life”: and by this recognition proves himself no mere materialist. He is ruling his people, not with exclusive attention to their material needs, though they may not themselves look beyond the gratification of these. Whilst he is building his tower, achieving his life’s work, the beauty of which is sufficient to the “vulgar” gaze, he, the builder, is looking “to the East”; and looking to the East in a sense not intended by the Greek when he makes enquiry through his messengers for the “mere barbarian Jew,” “one called Paulus.”

II. The following section of the poem (ll. 42-157) is an interesting elaboration of Cleon’s theory of the development, not only of the individual (Browning’s favourite theme), but of the growth of the race. The Greek holds that where individual members of humanity have attained in their several departments to the greatest heights, nothing further in that direction is possible of accomplishment. What then remains for the advancement of the race? When the “outside verge that rounds our faculties” has been reached, “these divine men of old” must remain unsurpassed by their successors in that particular department of work or thought.

Where they reached, who can do more than reach?

What then remains? How may the contemporary of Cleon excel “the grand simplicity” of Homer, of Terpander, and in later times of Phidias? It is to the growing complexity of the human mind that Cleon looks for an answer. Although in one intellectual department he may fall short of that which has been attained in the past, he is yet capable of appreciating all that his predecessors have achieved to a degree impossible to an earlier generation of mankind. All the faculties are developed, not one to the exclusion or limitation of the others; hence is obtained a more completely sympathetic union of the intellectual capacities. Thus the further development of the race is to be sought in a greater complexity of being rather than in an advance along any individual line of progress. Three several illustrations of his theory Cleon adduces (1) That suggested by the mosaic-work of the pavement before him: and (2) the more unusual one of the sphere with its contents of air and water: yet again (3) the comparison between the wild and cultivated plant. (1) Each individual section of the mosaic was in itself perfect—thus with the great ones of old. This perfection having been attained, all that should succeed would be at best but a reproduction of the already perfect forms, a repetition, a renewal of that which had gone before. A higher, because more complex beauty might, however, be created by a combination of these separate perfections, producing thus a new form, that, too, perfect in itself. And this synthetic labour must prove an advance on the almost exclusively analytic which had preceded it; since new and more complex forms should be thus evolved, “making at last a picture” of deeper meaning and finer interests than those offered by any number of individual chequers uncombined, however perfect in symmetry and colour. Hence there might still remain a goal towards which human energy should direct its efforts. Though man may have attained to perfection in part, to continue the simile, he has now to develop towards the attainment of a perfect complex whole, resulting from a composition and adjustment of perfect individual parts, united by a bond of sympathetic intellectual appreciation non-existent in past ages. When Cleon shall have “chanted verse like Homer,” “swept string like Terpander,” “carved and painted men like Phidias and his friend,” then, not only will the individual of recent times have surpassed each of his forerunners in the variety and comprehensiveness of his powers, but he will have attained in each individual department of his being to that greatness for the development of which man’s entire faculties were of old required. To this Cleon has by no means yet attained. Such growth, change, and expansion in the individual character is not, he would suggest, readily recognized by the world, and the second illustration here applies: (2) water, the more palpable, material element, is estimated at its worth, whilst air, with its subtler properties,

Tho’ filling more fully than the water did;

though holding

Thrice the weight of water in itself. (ll. 106-107.)

is yet accounted a negligible quantity, and the sphere is pronounced empty. Of the deeper, more subtle, thoughts and workings of the soul in Cleon and his fellows, the outcome of the labours of humanity in past generations, thoughts too deep for expression, ideas only destined to bear fruit in the years to come; of all these, and such as these, the contemporary world takes little heed. To the gods alone Cleon would refer for his appreciation. With David he would exclaim:

’Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do![21]

With Ben Ezra he would triumph

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;

(“ignored” because incapable of the understanding essential to appreciation);

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.[22]

For Cleon, equally with the Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, accepts the entire subserviency of man to his creator. Both alike recognize the value of life, human life; its unity, its perfection in itself: both alike realize that this life means growth. “Why stay we on the earth unless to grow?” asks the Greek. “It was better,” writes the Jew as age approaches,

It was better, youth
Should strive, through acts uncouth,
Towards making, than repose on aught found made.[23]

Thus progress! Nevertheless, the Rabbi, whilst recognizing to the full the value of the present life as a thing per se, bearing its peculiar uses, its perfect development advancing from youth through manhood until age shall “approve of youth, and death complete the same!” with the unity yet recognizes also continuity; and at the close of the old life can stand upon the threshold of the new “fearless and unperplexed,” “what weapons to select, what armour to indue,” for use in the renewed struggle he foresees awaiting him. To the Greek life was equally, nay, surpassingly beautiful, the human faculties equally worthy of cultivation. As in Nature, so with man (and here is employed the third of his illustrations): (3) the wild flower, i.e., according to his interpretation, the possessor of the single artistic faculty—Homer, Terpander, Phidias—

Was the larger; I have dashed
Rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup’s
Honey with wine, and driven its seed to fruit,
And show a better flower if not so large:
I stand myself. (ll. 147-151.)

Whilst the Rabbi esteems himself as clay in the hands of the potter, the Greek admits no personal pride in the multiplicity or magnitude of his gifts. All alike he refers to “the gods whose gift alone it is,” continuing the reflection—

Which, shall I dare
(All pride apart) upon the absurd pretext
That such a gift by chance lay in my hand,
Discourse of lightly, or depreciate?
It might have fallen to another’s hand: what then? (ll. 152-156.)

So far with Ben Ezra. But where the Rabbi can say with confidence

Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute: a god though in the germ. (xiii.)

With Arthur

I pass but shall not die,

merely shall I

Thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new (xiv.)

for the Greek is no such confidence possible. He, too, shall pass—“I pass too surely.” His hope, if hope it be, lies in the development of a humanity of the future which shall have profited by the experience of its individual members in the past—“Let at least truth stay!”

Incidentally is introduced in this section of the poem a reference to the yearning of the correspondent of Protus for some revelation of the gods to be made through man to men. Through an Incarnation alone can the purposes of Zeus in creation be fully and comprehensibly revealed to man. Truth may indeed stay, but its revelation is progressive in character; according thus with the nature of the human intelligence (a favourite theme with Browning). For any more complete realization of Truth absolute, a direct revelation of the Deity is essential. God, in man, may show that which it is possible for men to become, hence the design of Zeus in placing him upon earth. So had Cleon “imaged,” and “written out the fiction,”

That he or other god descended here
And, once for all, showed simultaneously
What, in its nature, never can be shown,
Piecemeal or in succession;—showed, I say,
The worth both absolute and relative
Of all his children from the birth of time,
His instruments for all appointed work. (ll. 115-122.)

Through this revelation, too, may be proved the immanence of the Deity, a doctrine even now accepted by the Greek. The speaker on the Areopagus[24] needed only to remind his hearers of this their belief, when he assured them that the God of whom he preached was not one who dwelt in temples made with hands—but is “not far from every one of us,” since “in him we live and move and have our being.” Even, in the words of Aratus, “we are his offspring.” But this theory of an incarnation which “certain slaves” were teaching in a fuller, more satisfying form, than that presented by the imagination of the Greek philosopher, might be to him but “a dream”: his sole hope rested, as we have seen, on an advance of the race through the higher development of individual members.

No dream, let us hope,
That years and days, the summers and the springs,
Follow each other with unwaning powers. (ll. 127-129.)

III. With line 157 we pass to a consideration of the more intensely personal question, yet one involving in its answer much that has gone before; the question put by Protus in the letter accompanying his gifts: is death (which king and poet alike esteem the end of all things), is death to the man of thought so fearful a thing in contemplation as it must be to the man of action? To Protus, the man of action, who has enjoyed life to the full, whose portion has been wealth, honour, dignity, power, physical and mental appreciation of all the privileges attendant on his station and environment; to the possessor of life such as this death, as not an interruption merely, but as an end to all joy, all gratification, must perforce bring with it nothing but horror. The horror which Browning represents elsewhere as falling momentarily upon the Venetian audience listening to the weird strains of Galuppi’s music,[25] when an interpolated discord suggests to the onlooker the question, “What of soul is left, I wonder?” when the pleasures of life are ended? and the answer is given, with its note of hopeless finality, “Dust and ashes.” To Protus, too, recurs the answer, “Dust and ashes.” Although his work as a ruler has been of that character which has caused him to seek the intellectual and moral, as well as the material welfare of his people (so much we saw Cleon recognizing in his introductory message), yet he regretfully, and probably unjustly, in a moment of depression, estimates his legacy to posterity as “nought.”

My life,
Complete and whole now in its power and joy,
Dies altogether with my brain and arm,
Is lost indeed; since, what survives myself?
The brazen statue to o’erlook my grave,
Set on the promontory which I named.
And that—some supple courtier of my heir
Shall use its robed and sceptred arm, perhaps,
To fix the rope to, which best drags it down. (ll. 171-179.)

(An estimate suggesting a truth of practical experience: schemes of absolute government not infrequently bearing within themselves the seeds of their own decay: the “sceptred arm,” originally the symbol of its strength, becoming in good sooth the chief agent in the work of destruction.)

To Protus, whose life has been thus spent in activity, forgetfulness seems the one thing most terrible of contemplation. He must pass, and in the words of the dying Alcestis, “who is dead is nought”; of him shall it be said, “He who once was, now is nothing.” But for the man whose life “stays in the poems men shall sing, the pictures men shall study,” for him may not death prove triumph, since “thou dost not go”? Yet Cleon deals with the question as might have been anticipated. Genius, even in its highest form, culture, art, learning, alike fail to satisfy the restless soul, tossed upon the waves of uncertainty, unanchored by any reasonable hope for the future. All these fail where the satisfaction derivative from wealth and power honourably wielded has already failed. The genius ruling in the kingdom of intellectual life has no consolation to offer the sovereign ruling the outer life—the material and moral welfare—of his subjects. Poet and tyrant alike bow before the inevitable approach of death, taking “the tear-stained dust” as proof that “man—the whole man—cannot live again.”

The entire poem has been happily designated “the Ecclesiastes of pagan religion.” At the outset we have remarked Cleon admitting that Protus equally with himself has recognized, not only that joy is “the use of life,” but that joy may not be found in material gratification alone, but rather in the cultivation of the higher faculties of man.

For so shall men remark, in such an act [i.e., in the munificence displayed by the gifts bestowed upon the poet]
Of love for him whose song gives life its joy,
Thy recognition of the use of life. (ll. 20-22.)

The poet had so estimated “joy.” It is in truth a higher estimate than that based upon a recognition of material good. Nevertheless, he is now to confess that from this, too, but an empty and transitory satisfaction is obtainable. His answer to Protus affords an analysis of his own reflections on the subject, since the thoughts have clearly not arisen now for the first time. And in the arguments immediately following we cannot but recognize Browning’s own voice. The theory advanced is reiterated constantly throughout his writings, dramatic and otherwise. Cleon directs the attention of Protus to the perfections of animal life as created by Zeus in lines suggesting an interesting comparison with that remarkable and frequently quoted passage from the concluding Section of Paracelsus (ll. 655-694).

The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
········
········
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms
Like chrysalids impatient for the air,
The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run
Along the furrows, ants make their ado;
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 sand 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: whose attributes had here and there
Been scattered o’er the visible world before,
Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant
To be united in some wondrous whole,
Imperfect qualities throughout creation,
Suggesting some one creature yet to make,
Some point where all those scattered rays should meet
Convergent in the faculties of man.

So writes Cleon:

If, in the morning of philosophy,
Ere aught had been recorded, nay perceived,
Thou, with the light now in thee, could’st have looked
On all earth’s tenantry, from worm to bird,
Ere man, her last, appeared upon the stage—
Thou would’st have seen them perfect, and deduced
The perfectness of others yet unseen.
Conceding which,—had Zeus then questioned thee
“Shall I go on a step, improve on this,
Do more for visible creatures than is done?”
Thou would’st have answered, “Ay, by making each
Grow conscious in himself—by that alone.
All’s perfect else: the shell sucks fast the rock,
The fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims
And slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight,
Till life’s mechanics can no further go—
And all this joy in natural life is put
Like fire from off thy finger into each,
So exquisitely perfect is the same.” (ll. 187-205.)

But the Teuton of the Renascence passes beyond the Greek in his history of the evolution of man—as the outcome, the union, the consummation of all that has gone before. In his description of human nature so evolved, he continues by enumerating power controlled by will, knowledge and love as characteristics, hints and previsions of which

Strewn confusedly about
The inferior natures—all lead up higher,
All shape out dimly the superior race,
The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false,
And man appears at last.[26]

To Cleon such hopes, but vaguely suggested, leading upwards and onwards towards a recognition of the soul’s immortality, are too fair for truth, their very beauty leads him to question their reality.

Admitted then that in “all earth’s tenantry, from worm to bird,” perfection is to be found, in what direction may advance be made? Impossible in degree, it must, therefore, be in kind: some new faculty shall be added to those which man, the latest born of the creatures, shall share in common with his predecessors in the world of animal life—the knowledge and realization of his own individuality.

In due time [after leading the purely animal life] let him critically learn
How he lives.

And what shall be the result of the new gift? To him who, inexperienced in its uses, lives “in the morning of philosophy,” it must be indicative of an increase of happiness. With the greater fulness of life, resultant from extended knowledge, must surely follow also an extension of enjoyment. But such a belief, says Cleon, living in the eve of philosophy, could have existed only in its morning “ere aught had been recorded.” Experience, that prosaic but infallible instructor, has taught man otherwise. The simplicity of mere animal life, though involving not the conscious happiness of a reasoning being (if indeed happiness there be for such) served to impart “the wild joy of living, mere living.” A joy from which Caliban was to be found awakening to a realization of his own individuality, and also to a realization that joy and grief are relative terms: that joy, equally with grief, was impossible to the Quiet, the possessor of supreme power, as it was impossible to

Yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea.[27]

To Cleon, oppressed by a profound sense of discouragement in life, the cynical suggestion presents itself that the semi-conscious vegetating existence of the animal may be more desirable than the yearnings and aspirations inevitably attendant on human life, with its joys keen and intensified, but, alas! all too brief.

Thou king, hadst more reasonably said:
“Let progress end at once,—man make no step
Beyond the natural man, the better beast,
Using his senses, not the sense of sense.” (ll. 221-224.)

It is a purely pagan view of life.

In man there’s failure, only since he left
The lower and inconscious forms of life. (ll. 225-226.)

So man grew, and his widening intelligence opened out vast and ever-increasing possibilities of joy. But with the realization of possibilities came also the consciousness of his limitations. So long as the flesh had remained absolutely paramount, the restrictions it was capable of imposing upon the workings of the soul had been unfelt. Now, when the soul has climbed its watch-tower and perceives

A world of capability
For joy, spread round about us, meant for us,
Inviting us.

When at this moment the soul in its yearning “craves all,” then is the time of the flesh to reply,

Take no jot more
Than ere thou clombst the tower to look abroad!
Nay, so much less as that fatigue has brought
Deduction to it. (ll. 239-245.)

In other words, the ever-recurring conflict between flesh and spirit. In human nature, as at present constituted, one is bound to suffer at the expense of the other; the sound mind in the sound body is unfortunately a counsel of perfection too rarely attainable in practical life. The poet is conscious of the growing vitality of the spirit as well as that of the intellect (although he does not admittedly recognize that this is so, his use of the term “soul” being seemingly synonymous with “intellect”), the decreasing power of the flesh. In vain the struggle to

Supply fresh oil to life,
Repair the waste of age and sickness. (ll. 248-249.)

Thus the fate of the man of genius, of keener perceptions, of wider capacities for enjoyment, becomes proportionately more grievous than that of the less complex nature of the man of action.

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
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy. (ll. 309-317.)

A recognition of the emptiness of life, necessarily hopeless when thus viewed in relation to its sensuous and intellectual possibilities only. To these things the end must come. Thus Browning leads us on, as so frequently elsewhere, to an admission of the inevitableness of immortality.

An estimate of life curiously opposed to this simple pagan aspect is that afforded by the conception of Paracelsus, a poem containing no small element of the mysticism which offered so powerful an attraction to its author. In a familiar passage at the close of the First Section we find Paracelsus describing the methods he proposes to pursue in his search for truth; truth which he deems existent within the soul of man, and acquired by no external influence.

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception—which is truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and to KNOW
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.[28]
········
See this soul of ours!
How it strives weakly in the child, is loosed
In manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled
By age and waste, set free at last by death.[29]

In S. John’s reflections in A Death in the Desert, a similar suggestion of mysticism is modified by the medium through which it has passed. The Christian teacher who wrote that “God is Love,” and that in the knowledge of this truth immortality itself consists, propounds for himself a question similar to that which has so hopeless a ring when issuing from the mouth of the Greek.

Is it for nothing we grow old and weak?

A suggestion of the character of the answer is found in the conclusion of the question, “We whom God loves.”

Can they share
—They, who have flesh, a veil of youth and strength
About each spirit, that needs must bide its time,
Living and learning still as years assist
Which wear the thickness thin, and let man see—
With me who hardly am withheld at all,
But shudderingly, scarce a shred between,
Lie bare to the universal prick of light?[30]

True is the lament of the reply to Protus.

We struggle, fain to enlarge
Our bounded physical recipiency,
Increase our power, supply fresh oil to life,
Repair the waste of age and sickness. (ll. 244-247.)

All too true. But if, as we are assured, there is no waste in Nature, whence comes the apparent destruction wrought by age and sickness? What the design of which it is the evidence? In the words of the Christian mystic, but to admit “the universal prick of light,” to effect the union of the individual soul with that central fire of which it is an emanation; when the training and development inseparable from suffering shall have done their work, since “when pain ends, gain ends too.”

Thy body at its best,
How far can that project thy soul on its lone way?[31]

The decay, it must be, of its temporal habitation which shall bring to the soul eternal freedom. To the Greek, on the other hand, with the decay of the body, passed not only all that made life worth living, but the life itself. The keener the appreciation of life, the harder, therefore, the parting of soul from body. He, indeed,

Sees the wider but to sigh the more.

“Most progress is most failure.” Failure absolute if death is the end of life; failure relative and indicative of higher, vaster potentialities of being, if that dream of a moment’s yearning might be true, if death prove itself but “the throbbing impulse” to a fuller life; if, freed by it, man bursts “as the worm into the fly,” becoming a creature of that future state

Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy.

But to the Greek the door of actuality remains fast closed.

Before concluding an examination of this section of the poem which has suggested, as was inevitable, a comparison between the pagan and the Christian conception of life; between an estimate into which physical and intellectual considerations alone enter, and that in which spiritual also find place, it may not be unprofitable to recall the method by which Browning has treated the same subject elsewhere, in a different connection. Old Pictures in Florence, published originally in the volume of the Men and Women Series, which likewise contained Cleon, is one of the few poems in which the author may be assumed to speak in his own person. The contrast there drawn is that between the products of Greek Art which “ran and reached its goal,” and the works of the mediaeval Italian artists. Having pointed to the Greek statuary, to the figures of Theseus, of Apollo, of Niobe, and Alexander, the speaker recognizes therein a re-utterance of

The Truth of Man, as by God first spoken,
Which the actual generations garble,
... Soul (which Limbs betoken)
And Limbs (Soul informs) made new in marble.[32]

Here all is perfection, man sees himself as he wishes he were, as he “might have been,” as he “cannot be.” In such finished work no room is left for “man’s distinctive mark,” progress,—growth. When, then, according to Browning, did growth once more begin? When was the depression of Cleon’s day out-lived? Vitality, he asserts, once more became apparent when the eye of the artist was turned from externals to that which externals may denote or conceal, not outwards but inwards, from the form betokening the existence of Soul to Soul itself. The mediaeval painters started on a new and endless path of progress when in answer to the cry of

Greek Art, and what more wish you?

they 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?[33]

Browning’s estimate of Art, as of all departments of work, was necessarily one which would lead him to sympathize with that form which strives, however imperfectly, to bring “the invisible full into play,” though the achievement must be effected, not by neglect of, but rather by the fullest treatment of the visible. The avowed function of Art, in the most comprehensive acceptation of the term, was with him to achieve “no mere imagery on the wall,” but to present something, whether in Music, Poetry, or Painting, which should

Mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.[34]

The more distinctive artistic function (commonly so accepted) of gratifying the senses is not to be neglected, although it may not—as with the Greek—be cultivated to the exclusion, whole or partial, of that which is in its essence more enduring. The monkish painter (1412-69), whilst defending his realistic methods, yet perceives in vision the immensity of possible achievement if he “drew higher things with the same truth.” To work thus were “to take the Prior’s pulpit-place, interpret God to all of you.”[35] In so far, then, as he strives towards this realization of the spiritual, the early Italian painter holds, according to Browning, higher place in the ranks of the artistic hierarchy than the Greek who had attained already to perfection in his particular department, feeling that “where he had reached who could do more than reach?” No such perfection of attainment was possible to him who would “bring the invisible full into play.” His glory lay rather “in daring so much before he well did it.” Thus

The first of the new, in our race’s story,
Beats the last of the old.[36]

As with the artist, so with the spectator, growth had only begun when

Looking [his] last on them all,
[He] turned [his] 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.[37]
········
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.[38]

Bitter as is to Cleon the realization that “What’s come to perfection perishes,” to the Christian artist the same axiom serves but as incentive to more strenuous effort. In imperfection he recognizes the germ of future progress.

The help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.[39]

As imperfection suggests progress, so to “the heir of immortality” is failure but a step towards ultimate attainment. With confidence he may inquire

What is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence[40]
For the fulness of the days?

The Greek, with his bounded horizon, realizes but the first aspect of the truth: that

In man there’s failure, only since he left
The lower and inconscious forms of life.

That

Most progress is most failure.

The horizon being bounded by the grave, progress cut short by the approach of death, failure may become failure absolute, irremediable. What wonder, then, that the horror should “quicken still from year to year”; until the very terror itself demands relief in the imaginative creation of a future state. But for this there is no warrant; for the Greek all attainable satisfaction must be sought through the present phase of existence alone.

IV. Cleon’s answer to the question of Protus with regard to Death’s aspect to the man of thought, whose works outlast his personal existence (ll. 274-335), is but an utterance of the cry of human nature in all times and in all places. Individuality must be preserved! In a moment of artistic fervour the poet may acquiesce in the fate by which his friend has become “a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely,”[41] but such acquiescence can only hold good where poetic imagination has overborne human affection. The soul of the man first, the poet afterwards, demands that

Eternal form shall still divide
Eternal soul from all beside,

and that

I shall know him when we meet.[42]

And what he claims for his friend, man requires also for himself. The individual soul, as at present constituted, cannot conceive of divesting itself of its own individuality, of becoming “merged in the general whole.” As easy almost is it to conceive of annihilation. In hours of abstract thought such theories may be evolved, and in accordance with the mental constitution of the thinker, be rejected or honestly accepted; but when brought face to face with the issues of Life and Death, the heart, freeing itself from the trammels of intellectual sophistries, cries out, “I have felt”; and yearns for a creed which shall allow acceptance of a tenet involving future recognition and reunion, hence, by implication, preservation of individuality, and identity. Whatever his nominal creed, experience teaches us that man at supreme moments of life craves for some such satisfaction as this.

It is, indeed, the Greek, materialist here rather than artist, who points out to Protus that, in his estimate of the joy of leaving “living works behind,” he confounds “the accurate view of what joy is with feeling joy.” Confounds

The knowing how
And showing how to live (my faculty)
With actually living. Otherwise
Where is the artist’s vantage o’er the king?
Because in my great epos I display
How divers men young, strong, fair, wise, can act—
Is this as though I acted? If I paint,
Carve the young Phoebus, am I therefore young?
Methinks I’m older that I bowed myself
The many years of pain that taught me art!
········
········
I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king! (ll. 281-300.)

All the Greek love of life, of physical beauty is here, intensified by the consciousness of the brief and transitory character of its existence. If death ends all things, then the poet and philosopher, whilst acquiring the knowledge “how to live,” has sacrificed the power of living. Yet a sacrifice even greater than this is enthusiastically welcomed by the Grammarian of the Revival of Learning, greater since in this case the devotion of a lifetime leaves behind it no monument of fame. Yet, having counted the cost,

Oh! such a life as he resolved to live,
When he had learned it.
······
Sooner, he spurned it.[43]

We can almost detect the voice of Cleon in the urgency of the student’s contemporaries. “Live now or never,” since “time escapes.” In the reply lies the clue to the immensity of difference between the two positions—

Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.[44]

In the one instance, life being lived in the light of the “Forever,” it is possible to perceive with Pompilia that “No work begun shall ever pause for death”:[45] and life, whatever its trials and limitations, becomes to the believer in immortality very well worth the living. Thus the Christian conception of human life transcends the pagan as the designs of the Italian painters surpass in their suggestive inspiration the perfection of the more purely technical achievements of Greek art. The whole discussion is so peculiarly characteristic of Browning’s work that it seemed impossible to omit this comparison in the present connection, even though we shall be again obliged to revert to the Grammarian, and the theory exemplified in his history, in analyzing the defence of Bishop Blougram.

In passing, then, to the concluding section of Cleon’s reply to Protus, we are met by no exclusively Greek utterance; the voice is the voice of humanity unfettered by limitations of race or mental training.

“But,” sayest thou ...
... “What
Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die:
Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,
And Æschylus, because we read his plays!”
Why, if they live still, let them come and take
Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup,
Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive? (ll. 301-308.)

It is self-abnegation, carried to an extent rendering impossible the preservation of the race, which can look to happiness, or even to satisfaction, in the prospect of annihilation so long as posterity shall enjoy the fruits of a life of labour—which may express all its yearnings towards immortality in the petition:

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: ...
·······
So to live is heaven:
·······
This is life to come
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven ...
·······
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense.

Yet the mind which originated these nobly philosophic lines found it impossible to continue literary work when severed from the human comradeship and sympathy, criticism and inspiration to which the heart, even more than the brain, had grown accustomed. After the death of Mr. G. H. Lewes we are told—in the author’s own words—that “The writing seems all trivial stuff,” ... and that work is resorted to as “a means of saving the mind from imbecility.”[46] We shall find Browning himself refusing, in the hour of bereavement, to admit the satisfaction to be derived from a contemplation of the progress of the race through individual sacrifice and loss of personal identity; the satisfaction of the knowledge that

Somewhere new existence led by men and women new,
Possibly attains perfection coveted by me and you;
·········
[Whilst we] working ne’er shall know if work bear fruit.
Others reap and garner—
We, creative thought, must cease
In created word, thought’s echo, due to impulse long since sped!

Poor is the comfort

There’s ever someone lives although ourselves be dead.[47]

Something more than this, more even than “the thought of what was” is demanded for the satisfaction of the soul, yet this is all the Greek has to offer to his correspondent.

Before leaving this section of the poem, one further comparison of striking interest claims at least a brief consideration—a comparison also of the life of the man of action with that of the man of thought: of Salinguerra, the Ghibelline leader and Sordello, the poet and dreamer, Ghibelline by antecedents, Guelph by conviction; the visionary and dreamer, but the dreamer whose dreams should remain a legacy to posterity, the visionary who held that “the poet must be earth’s essential king.” The comparison is especially interesting, since in this case also it is drawn (Bk. iv) by the poet himself. To Sordello, however, the recognition of a future existence has at times a very potent influence upon the present. For him, moreover, in his moments of insight, service not happiness, is the inspiration of life. Lofty as is the estimation in which he holds the office of poet, he yet deems Salinguerra

One of happier fate, and all I should have done,
He does; the people’s good being paramount
With him.[48]

Here is

A nature made to serve, excel
In serving, only feel by service well![49]

To the poet of the Middle Ages then, as to the Greek, though for different reasons, the man of action has the happier fate. But where the Greek shudders before the approach of death, the Italian issues triumphantly from the final struggle of life—the supreme temptation—through the realization

That death, I fly, revealed
So oft a better life this life concealed,
And which sage, champion, martyr, through each path
Have hunted fearlessly.[50]

Only he would crave the consciousness which served as inspiration to sage, champion, martyr, and he, too, will hunt death fearlessly, will demand, “Let what masters life disclose itself!”

V. The concluding lines of the poem (336-353) contain a curiously suggestive contrast between the influences of an effete pagan culture, and of Christianity in its infancy. On the one hand, the Greek philosopher surrounded by evidences of marvellous physical and intellectual achievements, admitting the experience of an overwhelming horror, in face of the approach of “a deadly fate.” On the other hand, “a mere barbarian Jew” and “certain slaves,” pioneers of that faith which should offer solution to the problems before which Greek learning shrank confessedly powerless. A contrast between two stages of that development in the life of man, indicated by the theory of St. John’s teaching, given in the interpolated note introductory to the main arguments of A Death in the Desert:

The doctrine he was wont to teach,
How divers persons witness in each man,
Three souls which make up one soul.

(1) The lower or animal life, distinguished as “What Does,” (2) The intellect inspiring which “useth the first with its collected use,” and is defined as “What Knows,” that which Cleon calls Soul. (3) Finally, the union of both for the service of the third and highest element, which is in itself capable of existence apart from either:

Subsisting whether they assist or no,

designated as “What Is,” that which Browning calls Soul in Old Pictures in Florence.

Life, in the person of Cleon, would appear to have reached the second of the stages thus distinguished—physical development, combined with intellectual pre-eminence, marking “an age of light, light without love.” With Paulus life has passed beyond, and the spiritual energy has attained to its position of predominance over the lower elements constituting this Trinity of human nature. The barbarian Jew heralds a new phase in the world’s history. The entire conclusion may well serve as commentary on the lines already quoted from Old Pictures in Florence:

The first of the new in our race’s story
Beats the last of the old.[51]

LECTURE III
BISHOP BLOUGRAM’S APOLOGY

LECTURE III
BISHOP BLOUGRAM’S APOLOGY

In Bishop Blougram’s Apology we are afforded yet another striking illustration of Browning’s methods of working by means of dramatic machinery. On some occasions we have already found him relying on the arguments of his imaginary soliloquists to support an apparently favourite theory, on others we have noticed him employing these arguments to expose the weak points of a system of which he personally disapproves. More rarely two conflicting theories are placed side by side, the decision as to the author’s own relation to either being left to the judgment of the reader. Thus with the Bishop and the Journalist of the present instance—who may assert with confidence to which side Browning’s sympathies incline? How are we to judge of his actual feelings in the case? Would he hold up to severer opprobrium the representative of honest scepticism or the advocate of opportunism? Does he intend us to accept the scepticism of the Journalist as genuine, the justification of the Bishop as offered in entire good faith? Do his sympathies indeed belong wholly to either side? To hold that he necessarily sets forth a direct expression of his own opinions is to misunderstand the spirit in which he is accustomed to approach his subject. As well believe Caliban to give utterance to his conception of a Supreme Being as the personification of irresponsible and capricious power; and Cleon to estimate his recognition of Christianity as “a doctrine to be held by no sane man.”

This and the two foregoing dramatic poems have been chosen as leading step by step from the earlier and cruder forms of religious belief, to the later and more complex: before approaching the debatable ground of Christmas Eve and Easter Day, and the unquestionably personal expression of feeling in La Saisiaz. A wide gulf seemed indeed, at first sight, to be fixed between Caliban and Cleon, but yet wider is the actually existent distance dividing Cleon from Blougram. Less marked the change in outward circumstances, the inherent difference becomes the more striking. The beauties of Greek art and culture are but replaced by the nineteenth century luxury surrounding a dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church. “Greek busts, Venetian paintings, Roman walls, and English books ... bound in gold”; the central figures, the Bishop and his companion dallying with the pleasures of the table, discoursing of momentous truths over the wine and olives. Surely the distance between this and Cleon is less to traverse than that between the Greek, surrounded by the proofs of the munificence of Protus, and Caliban revelling in his mire. The superficial difference less, the inherent difference so wide that the idea at first suggested itself of taking as an intermediate and connecting link the poem immediately preceding this in the collected edition of the works, The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church. On more mature consideration it would seem, however, that the prelate of the nineteenth century sufficiently approaches the type of the Renaissance churchman to render the added link unnecessary. All, therefore, that remains for consideration before analyzing the Bishop’s Apology, is a brief survey of the changes effected in the outlook of the civilized world, in so far as they relate to the subject before us, during the eighteen centuries which had elapsed between the letter of Cleon to Protus and the monologue of Blougram addressed to the unfortunate owner of the name of Gigadibs. In the first century of the Christian era in which Cleon wrote, the Greek world had, as we have noticed, come into contact with Christianity only at its extreme edge: to Cleon, student and representative of Greek philosophic thought, its tenets were impossible of credence. The difficulty of faith then was that involved in the acceptance of any formulated theory which should include an assertion of the immortality of the soul and its future state of existence. The difficulties which demand the defence of Blougram are of a character wholly different. Christianity has become the creed of the civilized world: during the intervening centuries the simplicity of the mediaeval faith has given place to the more logical reasoning following the freedom of thought which accompanied the Renaissance; whilst this has, in its turn, been superseded by the more purely critical attitude of mind, resulting in the scepticism, and consequent casuistry, attendant on the dogmatism of the earlier years of the nineteenth century. The Bishop’s definition of his position is sufficiently descriptive of the situation. He is put upon his defence, in truth, solely on account of the peculiar conditions of the environment in which his lot has fallen. Three centuries earlier who would have questioned the genuineness of his faith? Twice as many decades later who would require that his acceptance of the creed he professes should be implicit and detailed? His defence is made merely before the tribunal of his fellow men; the character of this tribunal having changed from the warmth of unquestioning faith to the barren coldness of scepticism, the nature of the attack has likewise changed.

Your picked twelve, you’ll find,
Profess themselves indignant, scandalized
At thus being unable to explain
How a superior man who disbelieves
May not believe as well: that’s Schelling’s way!
It’s through my coming in the tail of time,
Nicking the minute with a happy tact.
Had I been born three hundred years ago
They’d say, “What’s strange? Blougram of course believes;”
And, seventy years since, “disbelieves of course.”
But now, “He may believe; and yet, and yet
How can he?” All eyes turn with interest. (ll. 407-418.)
········
I, the man of sense and learning too,
The able to think yet act, the this, the that,
I, to believe at this late time of day!
Enough; you see, I need not fear contempt. (ll. 428-431.)

In short, the Bishop’s is a figure claiming the interest of his contemporaries in that his position is one not readily definable: he may be a saint and a whole-hearted churchman; it is yet more probable, so says the world, that his conventional orthodoxy may be but the cloak of an underlying scepticism.

The identity of Bishop Blougram with Cardinal Wiseman was, as every one knows, established from the first. That this should have been so was inevitable from the various external indications introduced with obvious intention into the poem; to the unprejudiced student it does not, however, appear equally inevitable that the character sketch thus outlined should be commonly estimated as conceived in a spirit hostile to the original. Yet such would seem to be the case. In his Browning Cyclopaedia, Dr. Berdoe quotes from a review contributed to The Rambler of January, 1856, “which,” he adds, “is credibly supposed to have been written by the Cardinal himself.” This article referred to the Bishop’s portrait as “that of an arch-hypocrite and the frankest of fools.” Apparently accepting this criticism, the author of the Cyclopaedia not unnaturally observes that “it is necessary to say that the description is to the last degree untrue, as must have been obvious to any one personally acquainted with the Cardinal.” A similar opinion is expressed by no less an authority than Mr. Wilfrid Ward, who characterizes the portrait as “quite unlike all that Wiseman’s letters and the recollections of his friends show him to have been. Subtle and true as the sketch is in itself, it really depicts someone else.”[52] Is this so? May it not rather be the case that the true character of Browning’s prelate has not been fairly estimated? Does the Bishop occupy the position assigned him by Mr. Ward when he continues, “Blougram acquiesces in the judgment that Catholicism and Christianity are doubtful, and yet that they are no more provable as false than as true; that in one mood they seem true, in another false; that either the moods of faith or the moods of doubt may prove to correspond with the truth, and that in this state of things circumstances and external advantage may be allowed to decide his vocation, and to justify him in professing consistently as true, what in his heart of hearts he only regards as possible?”[53] Again, “The sceptical element which had tried Wiseman in his early years was something wholly different from Blougram’s scepticism.”[54] Is there not something more than this to be said for the Bishop’s Apology? It is, indeed, the main difficulty of the poem to decide to what extent the speaker is, or is not, serious in his assertions; but if we come to the conclusion that he is either “an arch-hypocrite,” or “the frankest of fools,” we shall assuredly be very far from having read the defence aright. Browning himself has, according to report, had something to say on this subject.[55] When accused by Sir Charles Gavin Duffy and Mr. John Forster of abhorrence of the Roman Catholic faith on the grounds of the then recent publication of this poem, containing, as was alleged, a portrait of a sophistical and self-indulgent priest, intended as a satire on Cardinal Wiseman, Browning met the charge with what would appear to have been genuine astonishment; and, whilst admitting his intention of employing the Cardinal as a model, concluded, “But I do not consider it a satire, there is nothing hostile about it.” And, looked at more closely, it is questionable whether much of the alleged hostility is to be detected. At least our feelings towards the Bishop contain no element of either aversion or contempt as we conclude our study of his defence!

The external indications of identity are scattered, as if incidentally, throughout the poem, according to the method habitual to Browning. (1) Cardinal in 1850, Wiseman had been already consecrated bishop in 1840, and sent to England as Vicar Apostolic of the Central District in conjunction with Bishop Walsh. The year of his appointment as Cardinal was also the date of the papal bull assigning territorial titles to Roman Catholic bishops in England, a measure, rightly or wrongly, attributed popularly to the influence of Wiseman. His episcopal title from 1840 had been that of “Melipotamus in partibus infidelium,” hence

Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus
Episcopus, nec non—(the deuce knows what
It’s changed to by our novel hierarchy). (ll. 972-974.)

(2) The reference in lines 957-960 to the Bishop’s influence in the literary world, in particular with the editors of Reviews, “whether here, in Dublin or New York,” recalls the fact that The Dublin Review had been founded by Cardinal Wiseman in 1836.

(3) Again, in the opening lines, the allusion to Augustus Welby Pugin, the genius of ecclesiastical architecture of the last century. When Wiseman, in 1840, became President of Oscott College, Pugin was alarmed for the results of his influence in architectural matters; since the Cardinal’s tastes had been formed in Rome, whilst the design of Pugin included a Gothic revival in ecclesiastical architecture and vestments, as well as the universal adoption of Gregorian chants in the services of the Church. In spite, however, of the architect’s fears, and some preliminary collisions, the two men subsequently succeeded in preserving amicable relations. Hence the Bishop’s tolerant, but half-satirical comment,

We ought to have our Abbey back, you see.
It’s different, preaching in basilicas,
And doing duty in some masterpiece
Like this of brother Pugin’s, bless his heart!
I doubt if they’re half-baked, those chalk rosettes,
Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere. (ll. 3-8.)

(4) Any considerations of internal evidences, especially those touching the question of scepticism, will necessarily be repeated in following the Bishop’s arguments: but it may be well to refer briefly in this place to the most noted characteristics of the Cardinal as estimated by the contemporary world.

(a) By some, even among his own clergy, he is reported to have been opposed on account of his ultramontane tendencies and innovating zeal, in particular with regard to the introduction of sacred images into the churches, and the adoption of certain devotional exercises not hitherto in use amongst English members of the Roman Catholic community. Thus we find the Bishop asserting, “I ...

... would die rather than avow my fear
The Naples’ liquefaction may be false,
When set to happen by the palace-clock
According to the clouds or dinner-time. (ll. 727-730.)

Browning thus suggests the fact obvious to the world at large,—the apparently implicit acceptance by the Cardinal of miracles which to the average mind are impossible of credence; at the same time he allows opportunity for an explanation of the position: the prelate fears the effect upon the main articles of his faith of questioning that which is least.

First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last
But Fichte’s clever cut at God himself? (ll. 743-744.)

(b) Whilst, however, preserving these extreme views with regard to the position and tenets of the Church, the Cardinal, with statesmanlike wisdom, recognized that, in accordance with its genius as implied in the attribute Catholic, it must likewise keep pace with the intellectual advance of the age, not holding aloof from, but, where possible, assimilating the highest results of contemporary thought. Now it is easy to perceive that the onlooker of that day may have found these apparently conflicting tendencies in the Cardinal’s mind difficult of reconcilement, and only to be accounted for by the supposition already suggested that the man capable of assuming such an attitude towards his creed must be, if not a fool, then an arch-hypocrite. It has been the work of Browning to show how, without detriment to his intellectual capacity, the Bishop may justify his position. To what extent, if at all, his moral character is affected thereby must depend upon the degree of sincerity which we allow to the entire exposition.

It is no part of the present plan to attempt a vindication of Browning’s treatment of the character of Cardinal Wiseman; the issues suggested by the Apology lie deeper, and are far broader than those involved in such a discussion. One object, at least, of the design would appear to be that of a defence of belief in those tenets of a creed which transcend the powers of reason; the particular religious body to which the speaker belongs being of little import to the real issue. It seemed, however, that any treatment of the poem would be incomplete which did not contain some brief comparison such as has been here attempted. And even now there is danger lest the attempt may prove misleading. Whether or not Browning has given us the true character of the Cardinal is not the question; the only fact in that connection which we shall do well to bear in mind is that, working from the materials at his command—the outward and visible manifestations afforded by Wiseman’s life as known to his contemporaries—the author of the Apology has given what may be a possible interpretation of character, sufficiently reasonable, at any rate, to account for, and to reconcile seeming inconsistencies, without laying its owner open to the charge of either folly or knavery.

In approaching a more detailed examination of the poem we must not neglect to take into account the peculiar conditions of religious life and thought prevailing in England at the time of the publication, 1855. Fourteen years earlier had appeared the celebrated No. 90 of Tracts for the Times. After an interval of six years, in 1847, had followed the secession of J. H. Newman to the Church of Rome, in 1853 that of Cardinal Manning. It was a time of anxiety and sorrow amongst all those most deeply attached to the Church of England, and of general unrest and uneasiness throughout the country. Sufficient evidence of the universal unsettlement and anxiety is afforded by the alarm, amounting almost to panic, excited by the Bull of 1850 announcing the territorial titles scheme. In a letter to Dean Stanley on the question of the Oxford University Reform Bill of 1854, Mr. Gladstone wrote, “The very words which you have let fall upon your paper ‘Roman Catholics,’ used in this connection (i.e., of extending full University privileges to students other than members of the Church of England) were enough to burn it through and through, considering we have a parliament which, were the measure of 1829 not law at this moment, would, I think, probably refuse to make it law.”[56] Such was the spirit of the times in England at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, and the existence of this spirit must not be left out of account in dealing with Bishop Blougram and his Apology.

That Browning did not wholly escape its influence, even though removed from direct contact, is readily conceivable. And in spite of his own expressed surprise at the suggestion that he did not favourably regard the Roman Catholic creed, his natural sympathies would certainly appear to have inclined towards a Puritanic form of worship rather than to a more ornate ritual; setting aside questions of doctrine of which these may be the outward manifestations. This being the case, ample reason is at once discoverable for the resolve to examine the position more thoroughly, ascertaining how far it was possible to make out a case for the other side. For, whilst on the one hand, we have every right, despite his cosmopolitanism and his Italian sympathies to claim the author of the Apology as a genuine Englishman, with a fair proportion of the Englishman’s characteristics, on the other hand, we may exonerate him, if not wholly, yet to a very large extent, from insular prejudices and narrow-minded judgments. Had he designed to present Blougram either as fool or hypocrite, he might assuredly have attained his object with equal certainty by writing something less than the thousand and odd lines devoted to the work of psychological analysis: for, in making his defence, the Bishop is likewise revealing himself—to him who has eyes to see. Here, as elsewhere, it is Browning’s intent to present to his readers not what man sees but “what this man sees”; to lead them to judge of cause rather than of effect, of motive rather than of action, or of action by the recognition of motive. We may attempt to classify his characters, if we will: a Browning society may write and read papers on the “villains” or the “hypocrites” of Browning as distinguished from his saints. Such a classification is perhaps fairly possible in the case of a character delineator such as Dickens, whose lines of demarcation are stronger and broader, purposely so, than those of actual life; but it is questionable whether Browning himself could have thus labelled his people and separated them into distinct compartments. For if the complexity of human nature and character is fully recognized by any writer whether poet, novelist, or biographer, it has surely been so recognized by the author of Paracelsus, of Sordello, of The Ring and the Book. It has been so frequently remarked that it seems but reiterating a truism to repeat the assertion that he writes of the individual, not of the race, not of man but of men; of men with much indeed which is common to the race, but with peculiar attention also to those idiosyncrasies which establish individuality. Hence the choice of soliloquists for the dramatic poems is most frequently made amongst those the interpretation of whose actions has presented special difficulty to the world at large. Thus to Browning was left the vindication of Paracelsus, and for the bombast, the quack, the drunkard, of contemporary biography has been substituted the pioneer and martyr of science, failing, but on account of the magnitude of his designs; recognizing even in defeat the divine nature of the mission entrusted to his charge. For an Andrea del Sarto—to a less profound student of character appearing as “an easy-going plebeian” satisfied with a social life among his compeers, as an artist “resting content in the sense of his superlative powers as an executant”—is offered the Andrea of the poem bearing his name; a sometime aspiring nature, now embittered by the struggle, wellnigh ended within the soul, between yearnings towards future greatness and the desire for present gain; a nature of insight sufficient to realize that the bonds of materialism are galling, of moral force inadequate to effect their rupture. The more subtle, the more outwardly misleading the character, the stronger the attraction it would appear to have borne for Browning. It is no matter for surprise that in Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau he should have devoted over 2,000 lines to a study of that mysterious, if disappointing, figure in European politics of the middle of the last century—“at once the sabre of revolution and the trumpet of order.” And if conflicting elements of character constituted the main attraction of the personality of Napoleon III, a similar cause of fascination, as we have already noticed, exists in the instance before us; viz., the possibility of reconciling the extreme opinions professed in matters of Church ritual and doctrine, with the erudition, the political ability, and width of intellectual outlook notably characteristic of Cardinal Wiseman.

I. For avoidance of misunderstanding as to the intention of the Apology it is well to read the Epilogue as Prologue, although, even with this introduction, it is not easy to decide how far the speaker is serious in his assertions—a definite answer to the question would probably have presented (so Browning would suggest) some difficulty to the Bishop himself.

For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke.
The other portion, as he shaped it thus
For argumentatory purposes,
He felt his foe was foolish to dispute.
Some arbitrary accidental thoughts
That crossed his mind, amusing because new,
He chose to represent as fixtures there,
Invariable convictions (such they seemed
Beside his interlocutor’s loose cards
Flung daily down, and not the same way twice)
While certain hell-deep instincts, man’s weak tongue
Is never bold to utter in their truth
Because styled hell-deep (’tis an old mistake
To place hell at the bottom of the earth)
He ignored these—not having in readiness
Their nomenclature and philosophy:
He said true things, but called them by wrong names.
“On the whole,” he thought, “I justify myself
On every point where cavillers like this
Oppugn my life: he tries one kind of fence,
I close, he’s worsted, that’s enough for him.
He’s on the ground: if ground should break away
I take my stand on, there’s a firmer yet
Beneath it, both of us may sink and reach.
His ground was over mine and broke the first.” (ll. 980-1004.)

II. Thus the Bishop believed himself to realize the weakness of his opponent; his superficiality in spite of his appeal to the ideal; the worldliness which would esteem this hour of intercourse with the prelate the highest honour of his life,

The thing, you’ll crown yourself with, all your days.

An incident which he would not fail to turn to

Capital account;
“When somebody, through years and years to come,
Hints of the bishop,—names me—that’s enough:
Blougram? I knew him”—(into it you slide)
“Dined with him once, a Corpus Christi Day,
All alone, we two: he’s a clever man:
And after dinner,—why, the wine you know,—
Oh, there was wine, and good!—what with the wine ...
’Faith, we began upon all sorts of talk!
He’s no bad fellow, Blougram; he had seen
Something of mine he relished, some review:
He’s quite above their humbug in his heart,
Half-said as much, indeed—the thing’s his trade.
I warrant, Blougram’s sceptical at times:
How otherwise? I liked him, I confess!” (ll. 31-44.)

Just or unjust, such is the Bishop’s estimate of his companion—(if the opportunist is “quite above their humbug in his heart,” not so the would-be idealist!) And, accepting this view, the futility of casting pearls before swine restrains him from a free expression of those deeper thoughts which rise to the surface only here and there throughout the monologue, evidence of the man beneath the prelate. There are problems which do not admit of discussion “to you, and over the wine.” Hence Blougram holds himself justified in exercising that “reserve or economy of truth” recognized[57] by a contemporary writer of his own community as permissible under given conditions, within one class of which he may reasonably account as falling, his interview with Gigadibs; viz., that in which the listener is incapable of understanding truth stated exactly, when it may be presented in the nearest form likely to appeal to his comprehension. The journalist is thus from the first accepted by the Bishop as representative of his world—that portion of the lay world to which the position of this particular prelate of the Roman Catholic Church is one requiring justification. Scepticism is so easy to this special intellectual type of man, faith so difficult, that it is to him incomprehensible that the Bishop may be genuine in his profession. On these grounds Blougram bases the necessity for his defence.

III. Taking himself then at his critics’ estimate, i.e., as a sceptic masquerading in the garb of an ecclesiastical dignitary, he opens his exposition by a comparison of his life as actually lived with the ideal life advocated by the critic and his compeers. Pursuing the subject—having attained even to the supreme honour to which his calling admits, having ascended the papal throne, the position would yet be but one of outward splendour, incomparable with “the grand, simple life” a man may lead; grand, because essentially genuine—“imperial, plain and true.” Nevertheless, he would submit, it is better for a man so to order his life that it may be lived to his satisfaction in Rome or Paris of the nineteenth century, rather than to dissipate his powers in the evolution of some ideal scheme, impossible of practical execution. As illustration, follows the incident of the outward-bound vessel in which are provided cabins of equal dimensions for the accommodation of all passengers. One would fain fill his “six feet square” with all the luxuries which the mode of life hitherto pursued has rendered essential to his comfort. His neighbour, meanwhile, has limited his requirements to the possibilities of the space allotted; with the result that the man content with little finds himself satisfactorily equipped for the voyage; whilst he of great, but impracticable aspirations, is left with a bare cabin, one after the other the articles of his proposed outfit having been rejected by the ship’s steward. Hence the deduction, that the man of moderate requirements is better fitted for life, as life now is, than he of the “artist nature.” Later on (l. 763) the speaker again reverts to the same simile, passing to the further illustration of the traveller providing his equipment in advance, in each case adapting it to a climate to be subsequently reached, rather than to that in which he is at the moment living.

As when a traveller, bound from North to South,
Scouts fur in Russia: what’s its use in France?
In France spurns flannel: where’s its need in Spain?
In Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers! (ll. 790-793.)

The question not unreasonably follows, “When, through his journey, was the fool at ease?”

Thus, according to the Bishop, he who can most completely accommodate himself to the exigencies of the present life, evinces his capability for adapting himself to that which is to come. A theory, in direct opposition, it would appear, to Browning’s usual doctrine, repeated in so many of the familiar poems. It is difficult to imagine a figure affording more striking contrast to the prosperous prelate than that of the Grammarian, once the “Lyric Apollo, electing to live nameless,” occupied with the pursuit of an abstract good; only paving the way for the attainment of his successors; and in death throwing on God the task of making “the heavenly period perfect the earthen,” that incomplete phase of existence, full of unsatisfied aspirations, of unfinished attempts. Of him the poet gives us the assurance that he shall find the God whom he has sought: whilst for the worldling who

Has the world here—should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!

In Cleon, in A Death in the Desert, in Dîs Aliter Visum, and perhaps above all in Abt Vogler (to refer to only a few illustrations out of the many possible), the fact that man is incapable of accommodating himself to his environment is treated as a proof that this is not his true sphere of existence; that he was designed, and is still destined, for something higher. So asks the lover of Pauline:

How should this earth’s life prove my only sphere?
Can I so narrow sense but that in life
Soul still exceeds it?

In Dîs Aliter Visum, the assertion

What’s whole, can increase no more,
Is dwarfed and dies, since here’s its sphere;

has especial reference to love,