wise. What is most characteristic and original, and most identified with his genius, could not have been given to us in the true Browning manner without the metaphysics. Their use has led him long journeys, carried him into subtle labyrinths of inquiry, it is true; and that is always to be regretted, for it makes the reading of his poems a process far too difficult. Yet, in the whole body of his work, taken as the product of one mind, there is an amount of poetic beauty and thought combined not to be found in the work of any other recent poet. After all is said by way of praise of the metaphysics on the part of a few, and by way of criticism on the part of those who do not like the philosophy, Browning is, in the habit and trend of his mind, a poet. It is through emotion and imagination he reads the world, not through logic and the understanding. Balanced as his mind is, the direction of it is poetward, and towards an artistic apprehension of the world. VII. BROWNING has been described as a poet of doubt. Like all other half-statements, this one is based on a misconception of his true attitude towards religion. He doubts in regard to certain traditional and historic phases of Christianity, because he believes in regard to what is of fundamental importance in the religion of the soul. Browning is familiar with modern doubts and skepticism, knows their arguments and their force, and he has wrestled with them himself; but he is not overcome by them. In some of his poems Browning would seem to be without reverence, to be a bold and daring speculator, as well as wanting in trust and faith. He asks the most perplexing questions; he scorns all conventional answers; he deals with the most solemn problems of life as if they were every-day matters of little moment, and even in what seems to be a mocking vein; and he has little respect for many of the externals of religion, which are of so much moment to many. In regard, how ever, to that which he conceives to be essential, his position is not one of doubt, but of the intensest and most confident faith. His faith is so deep and assured that he does not fear to face, and to deal plainly with, what other persons shrink from, and to demand other answers of his faith than those which are conventional. Browning doubts concerning the externals of religion only, and in the name of that inward evidence which alone brings assured conviction. His faith rests on God's revelation of himself to the world; his doubts grow out of his disinclination to accept a traditional report of man's communion with God. He has put into the mouth of the Pope in the "Ring and the Book" an explicit statement of his own conception of the nature and value of true faith, of that faith which grows out of a direct intuition of God: As we broke that old faith of the world Recognized truths, obedient to some truth Unrecognized yet but perceptible? Correct the portrait by the living face, Man's God, by God's God in the mind of man? No more definite description of Browning's attitude towards the religion of his time could be given than is contained in these words. They indicate that he is a transcendentalist, and that he finds the authenticity and proof of religious truth in the soul's intuitions. He would have faith in the thing; that is, faith that God speaks directly to the soul of whatever man will listen to that still, small voice of the Infinite Truth within; and not faith in the mere report that men once had such a revelation. We must needs disbelieve the report for the sake of that truth which is about to break forth from the word of God. We may even reject the historic evidences of Christianity, because of that higher evidence which comes of a living contact with God through the intuitions of the soul. Like all other idealists, Browning ignores the external and historic, and lays all stress on the inward and intuitive. He doubts at those points where science and history touch the problems of religion; he believes where faith is made stronger through intuition and philosophy. In "Paracelsus" he speaks of "just so much doubt" as would enable him to "plant a surer foot upon the sunroad." In "Easter-Day" he declares that You must mix some uncertainty With faith, if you would have faith be. Not by any demonstration, that puts doubt entirely away, is true faith to be gained, but by the glow of nature without inviting man on, and by the aspiration within that gives him sight of an infinitely wider and more beautiful world. Intuition does not give absolute proof, so that certainty is made sure; but it attracts by glimpses and foregleamings, and by the vision of a world transcendently above and beyond the present. The only proof of that higher world is to be found in the soul's craving for it, and in its correspondence with that which intuition demands. This is the position of Browning, as it is the position of all men who have touched the deepest and most sacred things of the soul with the fresh insight of genius. It is not in the nature of those things which are most loftily spiritual to be "demonstrated" by the methods of history or of science. They offer their own methods and their own evidences. Their demonstration is that of life and that of the soul's experiences. We must climb these mountains for ourselves, with the help of a guide, to be sure, but not by the aid of railway or telegraph. |