Some critics have said that Browning rarely attributes emotions to the stars and makes God commingle with the activities of the external universe itself, and that generally he speaks of the external universe as existing independently. But the essential point here to seize is that, whether the external universe be conceived as a piece of machinery to give the soul its bent, or as a screen which is to hide God's effluence from us somewhat, or as being such a piece of machinery or screen, the spirit of God shines through it and seems to commingle with it,-whatever way it be conceived, the point to seize is that David's moment of experience in this poem of "Saul" was an exceptional one and that to Browning the external universe itself is never a fixed thing but something flexible and plastic to the influence of conscious beings-God and man.

The external universe may indeed be conceived as the habit of God in reflex and mechanical action. There is ordinarily not much consciousness of any sort in it, but God can renew his consciousness in it at will. Just as a man may keep throwing a ball in a purely reflexive and unconscious manner and as he may, on the other hand, become thoroughly alive in mind and body in the throwing of the ball, so God who usually represents the mechani、 cal side of his acts in the external universe may in favorable moments renew his ancient rapture and intenser life in it:

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.”

21 "Paracelsus."

Likewise in "By the Fireside" the powers were at play in the forests at the propitious moment and mingled two souls together:

The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play;
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done-we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood.

And man in his higher moments can also renew his own raptures on the hither side of the external universe. In fact, it is man and not the outward and visible world that God himself is primarily interested in, and it is God and not his outward works that man is primarily interested in; and when man's own deeds glorify himself, as in David's case, his own face shines through to God and God's face shines through to him, and the world between becomes an iridescent medium. The outer world, moreover, always receives its significance from

the fact that God's face shines from behind it and through it, that the life in the world seems to be walled about with disgrace until God's smile is seen shining through a human face:

Such a starved bank of moss

Till, that May-morn,

Blue ran the flash across:

Violets were born!

Sky-what a scowl of cloud

Till, near and far,

Ray on ray split the shroud:

Splendid, a star!

World-how it walled about

Life with disgrace

Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face!22

22 "The Two Poets of Croisic."

CHAPTER XI

BROWNING: FREEDOM AND TRANSCENDENT

ALISM.

I

We have now seen that Browning laid great stress on the power of free choice in the soul, the self-directing, creative, and expansive power of it; that he held that if a man can only take the right attitude toward life, in which all the activities of body and mind and soul are employed, there need be no restraint laid on these activities; and that by the principle of gain life may be made a process of constant growth, addition, and expansion. But a deeper and more fundamental principle than any of these-a principle closely bound up with these in their practical working, a principle which finds the fullest and most frequent statement everywhere in Browning's poetry, is the principle of the incompleteness of the world and the imperfections of man. It is the purpose here in particular to point out, what seems never to have been clearly pointed out before, the relation this principle has to the principle of the freedom of the will. Why does Browning everywhere in his poetry never tire of inveighing against the "finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark," and of constantly insisting on the facts that "a man's reach should exceed his grasp" and that on the

earth are "the broken arcs," if it is not that, outside of the suggestions of immortality which they contain, they suggest that this universe is not a block universe and its system not a closed system; that this world is not so absolutely fixed and predestined in its existence as it has heretofore seemed, but is hung together more or less loosely with many possiblities of improvement, and that man with his power to repeat "God's process in man's due degree" and with his resuscitating and creating powers is a co-partner with God and is mightily responsible for the future wellbeing and final winding up of the world?

In his remarkable book on "Pragmatism," Professor William James says: "Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: 'I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own "level best." I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. It's safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?'...... There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exacly fit. We would therefore accept the offer........It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way." Had Professor James had Browning's conception of a rational world in mind he could not have described that conception more accurately, for Browning believed that the world we live in is just such an unfinished and im

perfect world as Professor James describes, a world hanging in the balance and depending for its salvation on whether men will do their 'level best' in pulling it through. Even the external world of nature is full of these imperfections and gross misfits. When Childe Roland turned aside into that ominous tract which hides the Dark Tower he found

Now blotches rankling, colored gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

But in spite of the grotesque and terrifying objects that lay in this ominous tract Childe Roland did his 'level best' to find the Tower. He found it, and blew his slug-horn as a token of his victory. Similar misfits, incongruities, and improbabilities exist in the essence of a man's religious faith:

So, I would rest content
With a mere probability,

But, probable; the chance must lie
Clear on one side,-lie all in rough,
So long as there be just enough
To pin my faith to, though it hap
Only at points: from gap to gap
One hangs up a huge curtain so,
Grandly, nor seeks to have it go
Foldless and flat along the wall.
What care I if some interval
Of life less plainly may depend

On God? I'd hang there to the end.1

All the way in life from the blotches and patches of the scrubby things of external nature to the wrinkled

1 "Easter Day."