Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher - Sir Henry Jones

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of God in nature, is everywhere evident. We quote one passage, scarcely to be surpassed by any of our poets, as indicative of his power of dealing with the supernaturalism of nature.

      "The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,

      And the earth changes like a human face;

      The molten ore burst up among the rocks,

      Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright

      In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,

      Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask—

      God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged

      With foam, white as the bitter lip of hate,

      When, in the solitary waste, strange groups

      Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,

      Staring together with their eyes on flame—

      God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride.

      Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:

      But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes

      Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure

      Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between

      The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,

      Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face.

      "Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark

      Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;

      Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls

      Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe

      Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek

      Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews

      His ancient rapture. Thus He dwells in all,

      From life's minute beginnings, up at last

      To man—the consummation of this scheme

      Of being, the completion of this sphere of life."A

      A: Paracelsus.

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

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

      "Stoop

      Into the vast and unexplored abyss,

      Strenuously beating

      The silent boundless regions of the sky."

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

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

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

      "Think as if man never thought before!

      Act as if all creation hung attent

      On the acting of such faculty as his."A

      A: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

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

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

      The influence of this organic idea in every department of thought which concerns itself with man is not to be measured. It is already fast changing all the practical sciences of man—economics, politics, ethics and religion. The material,

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