But the moral significance of Browning in literature entirely eclipses the literary. Browning's literary method must have its effect upon the future of English poetry, and that effect will be in the direction of a less trammelled and ornate, a freer and more realistic, use of words. But where one reader catches some new inspiration from his method, a thousand will feel the overwhelming current of moral force which he has created. Here is a man who has tracked Nature home to her Inmost room, With lens and scalpel; who has been animated by vivid and potent interest in every form of human life, every mystery of human conduct; who has sought knowledge of man, alike in the splendid chambers where kings live delicately and in the deserts where great spirits nerve themselves to strenuous heroism; in the study of the artist, the organloft of the musician, the garret of the toiler, the warren of the outcast, the tents of great soldiers, and the cells of great mystics; among the flower-like purities of little children, the shrewd schemings of characters half sordid and half lofty, the soiled grandeurs of great spirits overthrown, the shameful secrets of souls plunged deep in infamies-who has, in fact, acknowledged no height too high and no depth too low for the demand of his noble curiosity. And at what result has he arrived? He himself has told us I have gone the whole round of creation: I saw and I spoke : again His creation's approval or censure; I spoke as I saw, I report as a man may on God's work-all's love, yet all's law. He alone of our great latter-day poets has performed this great pilgrimage of inquiry, and has returned with absolute and happy assurances of hope. He has descended, like another Dante, through all the dreadful circles of flame and darkness, amid the woe and travail of mankind, but has never lost his vision of God's immortal love and tenderness. Where others have been overwhelmed, their voices reaching us from the thick blackness only in wild cries of anguish, rage, sorrow, and despair, he has stood firm, and has sung out of the deeps a song of limitless faith. He has passed out of the Purgatory and Inferno into the Paradise. Is there any other of our great poets of whom so much can be affirmed? Is not one of the latest bequests of the most melodious, famous, and successful poet of our time a bequest of bitterness and despair? But where Tennyson has found food for hopelessness, Browning has found the seed, if not the fruit, of hope; where the one has been overwhelmed, the other has triumphed. Browning has not cast away faith because creeds are confused; nor expectation for his race because the haggard human army has been defeated oft and again in its onward march; nor patriotic hope because great movements and great reforms have failed, or seemed to fail to our bounded human vision. He teaches that each good deed done dies perhaps, but afterwards revives, and goes on to work endless blessing in the world. He believes that To only have conceived, Planned your great works, apart from progress O, never star Was lost here but it rose afar! And, believing thus, his voice rings out like a clarion blast of courage across the blank misgivings and confusions of our time, and it may be said of him as it was of Cromwell, "He was a strong man in the dark perils of war, and in the high places of the field hope shone in him like a pillar of fire, when it had gone out in others." The significance of Browning in literature is, then, that he is a strong, resolute, believing teacher, who, amid the sick contentions of a doubting generation, has bated no jot of heart or hope. He has had the courage of his originality in creating his own style—a style which, for reasons already indicated, sometimes becomes obscure and not seldom is eccentric, but which is, nevertheless, wonderfully strong, nervous, and powerful, possessed of a vast vocabulary, idiomatic, free, resonant, and striking. He has had the courage of individuality 1 also in resisting the Agnostic tendencies of his time, and amid the dismayed and doubtful has consistently delivered a testimony of hope. When the arrears of fame are paid, and the debts of praise are liquidated, as they will be in the just hands of Time, this and every succeeding generation will surely be acknowledged under heavy obligations to Robert Browning. The songs of mere loveliness charm us for a while, but it' is the outpourings and upsoarings of the strong men of humanity which become the real marching songs of the race in the long run. What Browning has missed in melody he has gained in thought, and if he be deficient in form he possesses a far nobler efficiency-the inspiration and moral power of the noble thinker. CHAPTER XXXI. ROBERT BROWNING-CONCLUDING SURVEY. THE HE prevalent impression which the work of Browning leaves upon the reader is twofold: he makes us feel the greatness of his mind, and the intensity and breadth of his sympathies. It is a vast world of thought to which Browning introduces his reader. He claims from him absolute attention, the entire absorption of the neophyte, whose whole moral earnestness is given to his task. Like all neophytes we have to submit to a process of initiation. In the world of Browning's thought there is much that is strange, much that is new, much that is grotesque. There is no problem of life that he does not attempt to solve, no mystery of life explain or reconcile. He insists that we take him seriously, for he himself is profoundly serious and earnest. He is not a singer, but a seer. In every line that he has written there is the vigorous movement of a strong and eager intellect. If his reader is incapable of sustained thought, or too indolent to rise into something like intensity of attention, then Browning has nothing to say to him. He demands our faith. in him as a master-teacher; he will work no miracle for him who has no belief. Sometimes this sense of the power of mind in Browning is almost oppressive. that he is not ready to We long for a little rest in the arduous novitiate he imposes on us. We feel that the vehicle he uses for the exposition of his thought is unequal to the vast strain he imposes on it. The verse moves stiffly beneath the tremendous weight of thought. The forms of poetry seem to cramp and fetter him. We feel that an occasional lapse into the loose and liberated style of Whitman's rhapsodies would be of equal service to Browning and ourselves. No poet who has ever written has ever so tired the minds of his readers. If Browning had possessed a less subtle and powerful intellect, if he had held a narrower view of life, he would have written with infinitely greater ease, and would have doubled and quadrupled his popularity. But the compensating gain of this breadth of view is a corresponding breadth of sympathy. There is a perfectly unique catholicity in his affinities. Life in its shame as well as its splendour, life in its baseness, its distorted aims, its tragic failures, its limitless follies, is still life to him, and is worthy of his compassionate scrutiny. His unconventionality is startling to ordinary readers; they never know where to find Browning, or can anticipate what he will say or teach. Thus, even for the Jew in the Roman Ghetto he has a good word. He interprets what may be the unspoken thought in the heart of many a Hebrew outcast. The Jew has slain Christ, and so has missed the one vast opportunity of Jewish history: but is there no excuse? Is there no room for pity or apology? This is what Browning makes the Jew in the Ghetto think and say -and no better example of the unconventional breadth of his sympathies could be found : Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came |