the unity and sum total of things, Robert Browning has given by far the most powerful exposition in modern times of the soul's individual worth and power, and of man's boundless energy and freedom. *

* See Note 7, Appendix.

CHAPTER XII

BROWNING: ART AND LIBERALISM.

Browning was a liberal in art as well as in his philosophy of life. He was not satisfied with the conventional forms of art and proceeded to create new forms. He was dissatisfied with the usual metrical schemes for poems and experimented with new meters. He was daring in the use of phraseology that is heard in common speech and that is often near the improper. He took liberties with sentence construction by suppressing the less important words for the sake of condensation, and by collocating words in unusual ways. He was a liberal in introducing commonplace associations of life into his poetry and bringing in concrete imagery that is not traditionally considered beautiful.

Though his work shows irregularities and sometimes unpardonable license, the main effect of it has been to show the variety of uses to which our metrical system can be put, to enlarge the range of the English language in expression, to give wider scope to the use of concrete objects in poetry, to make poetry approximate more nearly to the real and detailed things of life than has been supposed to be possible, and to save to poetry such things as pins, axes, crowbars, umbrellas, creaking pianos, blind horses, and ragged thistle-stalks, with which some of our most common and sometimes deepest affections are associated.

This realistic attitude in Browning toward things actual is matched only by his transcendental attitude toward those same things. It is only when they can be set to the music of life that they are of value. It is only when they can be made to associate with a life that is filled with passion and power that they become significant. It is only when this life itself can be made to expand and dilate that it can be saved to art and to truth. Poetry is the art by which we give a new and higher evaluation to both the outer and inner life of things. The finite everywhere, and the finite of Browning always means something very realistic and often something very homely, must partake of the infinite. It must be filled with the power and glory of heaven, like Boehme's rose, celebrated in the verse of some stout John of Halberstadt:

He with a 'look you!' vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,

Buries us with a glory, young once more,

Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.1

This way of conceiving a thing at once as actual and ideal, realistic and transcendental, of exercising the seeing eye upon it with great definiteness, and yet perceiving in it inexhaustible life and beauty without allowing it to lose its identity one whit-this is an absolute requisite for great art. Let great art be realistic if it pleases, (and it is often terribly realistic in no juggling sense of that term, more truly than the art that calls itself realistic), but it must also be creative and idealizing. There is no contradiction in the seeming paradox that it can be at

1 "Transcendentalism."

once the most realistic and the most transcendental. It has a hunger for facts and also for new idealizations. And it is large enough to represent in itself a great deal of both. It is really dilating and expansive, for it possesses abundant life. There perhaps has never been an actual human character in the Anglo-Saxon race, unless it were Shakespeare himself, with as full a life of power and will and passion as, say, the character, Othello. So that though this character makes an impression on us of actuality, of flesh and blood qualities, he impresses us too as having something additional, the created energy and power the artist gave him-something more than fact.

But the largeness of mould into which great art casts its characters and the passion and will and freedom which it displays and the liberty it takes confound the prudent and the wise. It shatters their little matter-offact systems to pieces. Dying for love, and happily too, as some of Browning's characters do, seems in the eyes of these persons an outrage to humanity. No doubt the smug and learned pharisee was astounded beyond all measure at the extraordinary liberties the Teacher took who first uttered the words "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you," etc., for this seemed to reach the extreme limit of imprudence and to be against all tradition and convention. No doubt the prudential and the compromising have little sympathy for poor Desdemona in the play who blessed him that cursed her and who meekly submitted to her fate and died for love without as much as raising a hand to assert her rights and dignity as a woman. No doubt prim makers of systems feel like clenching their teeth at such similar perversions of their

systems as are implied in the following suggestions of Browning on the secret of becoming a master of men:

Resolve, for first step, to discard

Nine-tenths of what you are! To make, you must be

marred,—

To raise your race, must stoop,—to teach them aught,
must learn

Ignorance, meet halfway what most you hope to spurn
I' the sequel........ So may you master men.2

To brush aside traditions and conventions, to assert the maxims of the simple which confound the wise, to insist on stooping in order to rise, to penetrate through. the show of things into things themselves, to reach the original sources of life and love and to find life and love in abundant overflow, to live for love rather than for fame, to will mightily to die for love if need be—these are the paradoxical but inspiring ideals of the masters of life and of men. It is first eminently worth while to become thoroughly alive-alive in body and brain and mind and soul, and then to accept cheerfully the consequences that this kind of living may bring. Alive in two senses—in the common, practical sense of living and in the idealistic creative sense, which is dilating and expansive. And to meet these latter and higher demands of life the artist is constantly impelled, as Wordsworth said, to create intuitions and passions and volitions in the universe where he does not find them. And in the interest of more abundant life, Browning is a grand fulfillment of the statement of Wordsworth. By the sheer power and intensity of passion and will Wordsworth in his best moments penetrated the hearts of men and the universe more deeply perhaps than Browning ever did.

2 "Fifine at the Fair."