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THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY,
AS EMBODIED IN ROBERT BROWNING'S POETRY.
---sº-sº
BY HIRAM CORSON, LL.D., " ? - ?
PROFESSOR IN THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY, U.S.A.
(Read at the 8th Meeting of the Bromwning Society, June 23, 1882.)
Introduction, p. 293–301. I. The Idea of Personality in Bronning, p. 302-307.
II. Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality, p. 307-321.
“Subsists no law of Life outside of Life.
The Christ himself had been In O iawgiver, &
Unless he had given the life, too, with the law.”
THE importance of Robert Browning's poetry, as embodying the
profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and,
above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, as yet, with
the exception of a few special and devoted students, received but a
niggardly recognition. There are, however, many indications in the
poetical criticism of the day, that upon it will finally be pronounced,
though late, the verdict which has so long been its due. And the
recent founding of a Society in England “to gather together some, at
least, of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study and
discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them, and ex-
tracts from works illustrating them,” is an earnest that something ere
long will be done towards paying, in part, at least, a long-standing debt.
Mr. Browning's earliest poem, Pauline (he calls it, in the Preface to
the reprint of it, in 1868, “a boyish work,” though it exhibits the great
basal thought of all his subsequent poetry), was published in 1843, since
which time he has produced the largest body of poetry produced by any
one poet, in English literature; and the range of thought and passion
which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a
single exception, since the days of Shakspere. And he is the most
like Shakspere in his deep interest in human nature, in all its varieties of
good and of evil. Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless
intellect, he has, throughout his voluminous poetry, made the strongest
protest that has been made in these days, against mere intellect. And
294 xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
ſ
his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age like the present—
an age exhibiting “a condition of humanity which has thrown itself
wholly on its intellect and its genius in physics, and has done marvels
in material science and invention, but at the expense of the interior
divinity.” It is the human heart, that is, the intuitive, the non-
discursive side of man, with its hopes and its prophetic aspirations, as
opposed to the analytic, the discursive understanding, which is to him a
subject of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that
its deepest depths are “deeper than did ever plummet sound; ” but he
also knows, that it is in these depths that life's greatest secrets must be
sought. The philosophies excogitated by the insulated intellect, help
nothing toward even a glimpse of these secrets. In one of his later
poems, that entitled House, he has intimated, and forcibly intimated,
his sense of the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies
of this wondrous human heart, though assured as he is that all our
hopes in regard to the soul's destiny are warmed and cherished by what
radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem, from
Wordsworth's sonnet on the Sonnet, “With this same key Shakspere
unlocked his heart,” and then adds, “Did Shakspere? If so, the less
Shakspere he l’’
Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her Aurora Leigh, has given a
full and very forcible expression to the feeling which has caused the
highest dramatic genius of the present day to seek refuge in the poem
and the novel. “I will write no plays; because the drama, less sublime
in this, makes lower appeals, defends more menially, adopts the standard
of the public taste to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its
regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day, to
please the day; . . . 'Tis that, honouring to its worth the drama, I would
fear to keep it down to the level of the footlights. . . . The growing
drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face, and speech, it
also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation of the painted scene,
boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume ; and take for a worthier
stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial lights, with all its
grand orchestral silences to keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.”
Robert Browning's poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization of
what is expressed in the concluding lines of this passage: he has taken
for a worthier stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial
lights, more than any other poet of the age. And he has worked with
a thought-and-passion capital greater than the combined thought-and-
passion capital of the richest of his poetical contemporaries. And he
has thought nobly of the soul, and has treated it as, in its essence, above
the fixed and law-bound system of things which we call nature; in other
XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 295
words, he has treated it as supernatural. “Mind,” he makes the Pope
say, in The Ring and the Book,-and his poetry bears testimony to its
being his own conviction and doctrine,—“Mind is not matter, nor from ~<—
matter, but aboye.” With every student of Browning, the recognition
and acceptance of this, must be his starting-point. Even that which
impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled Tray (Dramatic Lyrics, First
Series), to rescue the beggar child that fell into the river, and then to
dive after the child's doll, and bring it up, after a long stay under
water, the poet evidently distinguishes from matter, regards as “not
matter nor from matter, but above :”
“And So, amid the laughter gay,
Trotted my hero off,-old Tray,+
Till somebody, prerogatived
With reason, reasoned : ‘Why he dived,
His brain would show us, I should say.
John, go and catch—or, if needs be,
Purchase that animal for me !
By vivisection, at expense
Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence,
How brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see l’”
In his poem entitled Halbert and Hob (Dramatic Lyrics, First Series),
quoting from Shakspere's King Lear, “Is there a reason in nature for
these hard hearts?” the poet adds, “O Lear, That a reason out of
nature must turn them soft, seems clear !”
Mind is, with Browning, supernatural, but linked with, and restrained,
and even enslaved by, the natural. The soul, in its education, that is,
in its awakening, becomes more and more independent of the natural,
and, as a consequence, more responsive to higher souls and to the
I)ivine. All spirit is mutually attractive, and the degree of attractive-
ness results from the degree of freedom from the obstructions of the
material, or the natural. Loving the truth implies a greater or less
degree of that freedom of the spirit which brings it into sympathy with
the true. “If ye abide in My word,” says Christ (and we must under-
stand by “word.” His own concrete life, the word made flesh, and living
and breathing), “if ye abide in My word” (that is, continue to live My
life), “then are ye truly My disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and
the truth shall make you free” (John viii. 32).
In regard to the soul's inherent possessions, its microcosmic poten-
tialities, Paracelsus is made to say (and this may be taken, too, as the \
poet's own creed), “Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from
outward things, whate'er you may believe: there is an inmost centre in
us all, where truth abides in fullness; and around, wall upon wall, the
gross flesh hems it in, this perfect, clear perception—which is truth.
296 xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh blinds it, and makes all error:
and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way whence the im-
prisoned splendour may escape, than in effecting entry for a light
supposed to be without.”
~ All possible thought is implicit in the mind, and waiting for release
—waiting to become ea:plicit. “Seek within yourself,” says Goethe,
“ and you will find everything; and rejoice that, without, there lies a
Nature that says yea and amen to all you have discovered in yourself.”
And Mrs. Browning, in the person of Aurora Leigh, writes: “The
cygnet finds the water; but the man is born in ignorance of his element,
and feels but blind at first, disorganized by sin in the blood, his spirit-
insight dulled and crossed by his sensations. Presently we feel it
quicken in the dark sometimes; then mark, be reverent, be obedient,
for those dumb motions of imperfect life are oracles of vital Deity
attesting the Hereafter. Let who says ‘The soul's a clean white paper,’
rather say, a palimpsest, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased, and
covered by a monk’s, the Apocalypse by a Longus ! poring on which
obscure text, we may discern perhaps some fair, fine trace of what was
written once, some off-stroke of an alpha and omega expressing the
old Scripture.”
This “fair, fine trace of what was written once,” it was the mission
of Christ, it is the mission of all great personalities, of all the concrete
creations of Genius, to bring out into distinctness and vital glow. It is
not, and cannot be, brought out, -and this fact is emphasized in the
poetry of Browning, it cannot be brought out, through what is born and
resides in the brain : it is brought out, either directly or indirectly, by
the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute
personality being the God-man, Christ, 6eáv6poros.
The human soul is regarded in Browning's poetry as a complexly
organized, individualized divine force, destined to gravitate towards the
Infinite. How is this force, with its numberless checks and counter-
checks, its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in
its necessarily oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry,
to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed
down with materialistic heaviness? How much certainty must it have
of its course, and how much uncertainty, that it may shun the “torpor
of assurance,” 4 and not lose the vigor which comes of a dubious
and obstructed road, “which who stands upon is apt to doubt if it's
indeed a road.” “Pure faith indeed,” says Bishop Blougram, to
Gigadibs, the literary man, “you know not what you ask naked belief
1 The Ring and the Book, The Pope, v. 1853.
* Bishop Blougram's Apology, vv. 198, 199.
xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA of PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 297
in God the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much the
sense of conscious creatures, to be borne. It were the seeing him, no
flesh shall dare. Some think, Creation's meant to show him forth : I
Say, it's meant to hide him all it can, and that's what all the blessed
Evil's for. Its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of
dew, with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress.
Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye and disim-
prisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once, than mind,
confronted with the truth of Him. But time and earth case-harden us
to live; the feeblest sense is trusted most : the child feels God a
moment, ichors o'er the place, plays on and grows to be a man like us.
With me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake
'neath Michael's foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.” +
There is a remarkable passage to the same effect in Paracelsus, in
which Paracelsus expatiates on the “just so much of doubt as bade him
plant a surer foot upon the sun-road.”
And in Easter Day :
“You must mix some uncertainty
With faith, if you would have faith be.”
And the good Pope in The Ring and the Book, alluding to the absence
of true Christian soldiership, which is revealed by Pompilia's case,
says: “Is it not this ignoble confidence, cowardly hardihood, that dulls
and damps, makes the old heroism impossible? Unless . . . what
whispers me of times to come 7 What if it be the mission of that age
my death will usher into life, to shake this torpor of assurance from our
creed, re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring the formidable danger back
we drove long ago to the distance and the dark?”
True healthy doubt means, in Browning, that the spiritual nature is
sufficiently quickened not to submit to the conclusions of the insulated
intellect. It will reach out beyond them, and assert itself, whatever be
the resistance offered by the intellect. Mere doubt, without any resist-
ance from the intuitive, non-discursive side of our nature, is the dry-rot
of the soul. The spiritual functions are “smothered in surmise.”
Faith is not a matter of blind belief, of slavish assent and acceptance,
as many no-faith people seem to regard it. It is what Wordsworth
calls it, “a passionate intuition,” and springs out of quickened and
refined sentiment, out of inborn instincts which are as cultivable as
are any other elements of our complex nature, and which, too, may be
blunted beyond a consciousness of their possession. And when one in
this latter state denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born
blind denying the reality of sight.
* Bishop Blougram's Apology, vv. 650-671.
~,~
298 XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
A reiterated lesson in Browning's poetry, and one that results from
his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernacle-life, and that
it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life; for only such a life is
compatible with the ever-continued aspiration and endeavour which is a
condition of, and inseparable from, spiritual vitality.
Domizia, in the tragedy of Luria, is made to say,
“How inexhaustibly the spirit grows
One object, she seemed, erewhile born to reach
With her whole energies and die content, —
So like a wall at the world’s edge it stood,
With naught beyond to live for, is that reached 1–
Already are new undream'd energies
Outgrowing under, and extending farther
To a new object;-there’s another world !”
The dying John in A Death in the Desert, says,
“I say that man was made to grow, not stop ;
* ! That help he needed once, and needs no more.
Having grown up but an inch by, is withdrawn :
; For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.
|This imports solely, man should mount on each
{ New height in view ; the help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.
Man apprehends him newly at each stage
* Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done;
,' ' | And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved.”
J * >
So Browning has given varied and beautiful expressions to this idea,
throughout his poetry.
The soul must rest in nothing this side of the infinite. If it does
rest in anything, however relatively noble that thing may be, whether
art, or literature, or science, or theology, even, it declines in vitality—
it torpifies. However great a conquest the combatant may achieve in
any of these arenas, “striding away from the huge gratitude, his club
shouldered, lion-fleece round loin and flank,” he must be “bound on
the next new labour, height o'er height ever surmounting—destiny's
decree l’l
But this tabernacle-life, which should ever look ahead, has its claims
which must not be ignored, and its standards which must not be too
much above present conditions. Man must “fit to the finite his
infinity” (Sordello, p. 203). Life may be over-spiritual as well as
over-worldly. “Let us cry, “All good things are ours, nor soul helps,
flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'”? The figure the poet employs
in the Ring and the Book to illustrate the art process, may be as aptly
~x. applied to life itself—the greatest of all arts. The life-artist must know
* Aristophanes' Apology, p. 35, American ed. * Rabbi Ben Ezra.
XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 299

how to secure the proper degree of malleability in this mixture of flesh
and soul. He must mingle gold with gold’s alloy, and duly tempering
both effect a manageable mass. There may be too little of alloy in
earth-life as well as too much—too little to work the gold and fashion
it, not into a ring, but ring-ward. “On the earth the broken arcs; in
the heaven a perfect round” (Abt Vogler). “Oh, if we draw a circle
premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure,
bad is our bargain" (A Grammarian's Funeral). ---
An Epistle containing the strange Medical Experiences of Karshish,
the Arab Physician, is one of Browning's most remarkable psychological
studies. It may be said to polarise the idea, so often presented in his
poetry, that doubt is a condition of the vitality of faith. In this
poem, the poet has treated a supposed case of a spiritual knowledge
“increased beyond the fleshly faculty—heaven opened to a soul while
yet on earth, earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven,” a spiritual
state, less desirable and far less favourable to the true fulfilment of the
purposes of earth-life, than that expressed in the following lines from
Easter Day — “A world of spirit as of sense
Was plain to him, yet not too plain,
Which he could traverse, not remain
A guest in :-else were permanent
Heaven on earth, which its gleams were meant -
To sting with hunger for full light,” etc.
|
_*
The Epistle is a subtle representation of a soul conceived with
absolute spiritual standards, while obliged to live in a world where
all standards are relative and determined by the circumstances and
Himitations of its situation.
The spiritual life has been too distinctly revealed for fulfilling aright
the purposes of earth-life, purposes which the soul, while in the flesh,
must not ignore, since, in the words of Rabbi Ben Ezra, “all good
things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.”
The poem may also be said to represent what is, or should be, the true
spirit of the man of science. In spite of what Karshish writes,
apologetically, he betrays his real attitude throughout, towards the
wonderful spiritual problem involved.
It is, as many of Browning's Monologues are, a double picture—one
direct, the other reflected, and the reflected one is as distinct as the
direct. The composition also bears testimony to Browning's own soul-
healthfulness. Though the spiritual bearing of things is the all-in-all,
in his poetry, the robustness of his nature, the fullness and splendid
equilibrium of his life, protect him against an inarticulate mysticism.
browning is, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, the healthiest
of all living poets; and in general constitution the most Shaksperian.
300 XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
Perhaps the most comprehensive passage in Browning's poetry, ex-
pressive of his ideal of a complete man under the conditions of earth-
life, is found in Colombe's Birthday, Act IV. Valence says of Prince
Berthold,
“He gathers earth's whole good into his arms, standing, as man,
now, stately, strong and wise—marching to fortune, not surprised by
her : one great aim, like a guiding star, above—which tasks strength,
wisdom, stateliness, to lift his manhood to the height that takes the
prize ; a prize not near—lest overlooking earth, he rashly spring to seize
it—nor remote, so that he rests upon his path content : but day by day,
while shimmering grows shine, and the faint circlet prophesies the orb,
he sees so much as, just evolving these, the stateliness, the wisdom and
the strength, to due completion, will suffice this life, and lead him at
his grandest to the grave.”
Browning fully recognizes, to use an expression of his Fra Lippo
Lippi, fully recognizes “the value and significance of flesh.” A healthy
and well-toned spiritual life is with him the furthest removed from
asceticism. To the passage from his Rabbi Ben Ezra already quoted,
“all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh
helps soul,” should be added what David sings to Saul in the poem
entitled Sawl. Was the full physical life ever more beautifully sung'ſ
} “Oh! our manhood's prime vigour ! no spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.
Qh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool’s living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How-good is man's life, the mere living Lhow.fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the Senses for eyer in joy!”
** ---------
Though this is said in the person of the beautiful shepherd-boy,
David, whoever has lived any time with Browning, through his poetry,
must be assured that it is also an expression of the poet's own experience
of the glory of flesh. He has himself been an expression of the fullest
physical life: and now, in his one and seventieth year, since the 7th
of last May, he preserves both mind and body in a magnificent vigour.
If his soul had been lodged in a sickly, rickety body, he could hardly
have written these lines from Saul. Nor could he have written Caliban
wpon Setebos, especially the opening lines: “Will sprawl, now that the
heat of day is best, flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, with
elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both

} xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 30}
| feet in the cool slush, and feels about his spine small eft-things course,
run in and out each arm, and make him laugh : and while above his
head a pompion-plant, coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, creeps
down to touch and tickle hair and beard, and now a flower drops with
a bee inside, and now a fruit to Snap at, catch and crunch,--he looks
out o'er yon sea which Sunbeams cross and recross till they weave a
spider-web (meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times), and talks
to his own self, howe'er he please, touching that other, whom his dam
called God.”
There's a grand passage in Balaustion's Adventure : including a
transcript from Euripides, descriptive of Herakles as he returns, after
his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis, which shows the poet's
sympathy with the physical. The passage is more valuable as revealing
that sympathy, from the fact that it's one of his additions to Euripides:
“ there stood the strength,
Happy, as always; something grave, perhaps ;
The great vein-cordage on the fret-worked brow,
Black-swollen, beaded yet with battle-drops
The yellow hair o' the hero !—his big frame
A-quiver with each muscle sinking back
Into the sleepy smooth it leaped from late.
Under the great guard of one arm, there leant
A shrouded something, live and woman-like,
Propped by the heart-beats 'neath the lion-coat.
When he had finished his survey, it seemed,
The heavings of the heart began subside,
The helping breath returned, and last the smile
Shone out, all Herakles was back again,
As the words followed the saluting hand.”
It is not so much the glory of flesh which Euripides represents in
Herakles, as the indulgence of appetite, at a time, too, when that
#indulgence is made to appear the more culpable and gross.
This idea of “the value and significanee of flesh,” it is important to
#note, alongs,with the predominant spiritual bearing of Browning's
ipoetry. It articulates everywhere the spiritual, so to speak—makes it
healthy and robust, and protects it against volatility and from running
into mysticism.
Shelley’s poetry is wanting in this articulation.
This much I wished to say introductory to my special subject.
After reading closely all B.'s poetry, much of it many times over, I
asked myself the question, What great idea or ideas do I feel to be the
ºfmost strongly enforced in his Poetry? and the spontaneous reply to
myself was, The idea of Personality as a quickening, regenerating power,
and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality. These two ideas
3 endeavour to set forth in this paper.
2
-*
:
§
.
Q
º
:












302 xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
*
I. The Idea of Personality as embodied in Browning’s Poetry.
A cardinal idea in Browning's poetry is the regeneration of men
through a personality who brings fresh stuff for them to mould,
interpret, and prove right, new feeling fresh from God—whose life
reteaches them what life should be, what faith is, loyalty and simple-
ness, all once revealed, but taught them so long since that they have
but mere tradition of the fact, truth copied falteringly from copies
faint, the early traits all dropped away. (Luria.) The intellect plays a
secondary part. Its place is behind the instinctive, spiritual antennae
which conduct along their trembling lines, fresh stuff for the intellect
to stamp and keep—fresh instinct for it to translate into law.
“A people is but the attempt of many to rise to the completer life
of one.” (A Soul's Tragedy.)
Only the man who supplies new feeling fresh from God, quickens
and regenerates the race, and sets it on the King's highway from which
it has wandered into byways—not the man of mere intellect, of
unkindled soul, that supplies only stark-naked thought. Through the
former, “God stooping shows sufficient of His light for those i' the dark
to rise by.” (R. and B., Pompilia.) In him men discern “the dawn
of the next nature, the new man whose will they venture in the place
of theirs, and whom they trust to find them out new ways to the new
heights which yet he only sees.” (Luria.) It is by reaching towards,
and doing fealty to, the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their
own, that, “trace by trace old memories reappear, old truth returns,
their slow thought does its work, and all's re-known.” (Luria.) £
“Some existence like a pact
And protest against Chaos” (Sordello, p. 168).
. “The fullest effluence of the finest mind,
All in degree, no way diverse in kind
From minds above it, minds which, more or less
Lofty or low, move seeking to impress
Themselves on somewhat ; but one mind has climbed
Step after step, by just ascent sublimed.
Thought is the soul of act, and, stage by stage,
Is soul from body still to disengage, #
As tending to a freedom which rejects
Such help, and incorporeally affects
The world, producing deeds but not by deeds,
Swaying, in others, frames itself exceeds,
Assigning them the simpler tasks it used
To patiently perform till Song produced
Acts, by thoughts only, for the mind : divest
Mind of e'en Thought, and, lo, God's unexpressed
Will dawns above us!” (Sordello, p. 168, 169).
A dangerous tendency of civilization is that towards crystallization—
towards hardened, inflexible conventionalisms which “refuse the sou
its way.”
xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 303
Such crystallization, such conventionalisms, yield only to the
dissolving power of the spiritual warmth of life-full personalities.
The quickening, regenerating power of personality is everywhere
exhibited in Browning's poetry. It is emphasized in Luria, and in the
* Monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi and Pompilia, in the Ring and
º the Book; it shines out, or glints forth, in Colombe's Birthday, in
| Saul, in Sordello, and in all the Love poems. I would say, en passant,
that Love is always treated by Browning as a spiritual claim; while
duty may be only a worldly one. See especially the poem entitled
|| Bifurcation. In Balaustion's Adventure : including a transcript from
º Euripides, the regenerating power of personality may be said to be the
#leavening idea, which the poet has introduced into the Greek play. It
lis entirely absent in the original. It baptizes, so to speak, the Greek
play, and converts it into a Christian poem. It is the “new truth’ of
he poet's Christmas Eve. º
| After the mourning friends have spoken their words of consolation
o the bereaved husband, the last word being, “Dead, thy wife—
iving, the love she left,” Admetos “turned on the comfort, with no
ears, this time. He was beginning to be like his wife. I told you of
hat pressure to the point, word slow pursuing word in monotone,
Alkestis spoke with ; so Admetos, now, solemnly bore the burden of
he truth. And as the voice of him grew, gathered strength, and
º on, and persisted to the end, we felt how deep had been
escent in grief, and with what change he came up now to light, and left
ehind such littleness as tears.”
| And when Alkestis was brought back by Herakles, “the hero twitched
| veil off: and there stood, with such fixed eyes and such slow smile,
lkestis' silent self! It was the crowning grace of that great heart to
eep back joy: procrastinate the truth until the wife, who had made
roof and found the husband wanting, might essay once more, hear, see,
nd feel him renovated now—able to do, now, all herself had done, risen
the height of her: so, hand in hand, the two might go together,
ve and die.” (Compare with this the restoration of Hermione to her
usband, in The Winter's Tale, Act V.)
| A good intellect has been characterized as the chorus of Divinity.
|bstitute for “good intelleet,” “an exalted magnetic personality,” and
le thought is deepened. An exalted magnetic personality is the
orus of Divinity, which in the great Drama of Humanity, guides and
erprets the feelings and sympathies of other souls and thus adjusts
ir attitudes toward the Divine. It is not the highest function of
h a personality to teach, but rather to inform, in the earlier and
per sense of the word. Whatever mere doctrine he may promulgate,

304 xv. PROF. CORSON on THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
is of inferior importance to the spontaneous action of his concrete life, in
which the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, breathe and live. What
is born in the brain dies there, it may be ; at best, it does not, and
cannot of itself, lead up to the full concrete life. It is only through
the spontaneous and unconscious fealty which an inferior does to a
superior soul (a fealty resulting from the responsiveness of spirit to
spirit), that the former is slowly and silently transformed into a more or
less approximate image of the latter. The stronger personality leads the
weaker on by paths which the weaker knows not, upward he leads him,
though his steps be slow and vacillating. Humility, in the Christian
sense, means this fealty to the higher. It doesn’t mean self-abasement,
self-depreciation, as it has been understood to mean, by both the Romish
and the Protestant Church. Pride, in the Christian sense, is the closing
of the doors of the soul to a great magnetic guest.
Browning beautifully expresses the transmission of personality in
his Saul. But according to Browning's idea, personality cannot strictly
be said to be transmitted. Personality rather evokes its like from other
souls, which are “all in degree, no way diverse in kind.”—Sordello,
p. 168.
David has reached an advanced stage, in his symbolic song to Saul.
He thinks, now, what next he shall urge “to sustain him where song
had restored him!—Song filled to the verge his cup with the wine of
this life, pressing all that it yields of mere fruitage, the strength and
the beauty: beyond, on what fields, glean a vintage more potent and
perfect to brighten the eye and bring blood to the lip, and commend
them the cup they put by ?” So once more the string of the harp
makes response to his spirit, and he sings:

“In our flesh-grows the branch of this life, in our SQulit bears fruit,
Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree.—how its stem trembled first
Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler; then safely outburst
The fan-branches all round ; and thou mindest when these, too, in turn
Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect; yet more was to learn,
E’en the good that comes in with the palm fruit. Our dates shall we slight,
When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight
Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them 7 Not so stem and
branch
Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall staunch
Every wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee such wine.
Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for I the spirit be thine !
By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy
More indeed, than at first when inconscious. the life of a boy.
Crush that life, and behold its wine running ! each deed thou hast done
Dies, revives, goes to work in the world ; until e'en as the sun
Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface,
Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace
The results of his past summer-prime, so, each ray of thy will,
xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 305
Every flash of thy passion and proness, long over, shall thrill
Thy nºhole people, the countless, with ardour, till they too give forth
A like cheer to their sons: mºho in turn, fill the South and the Worth
With the radiance thy deed nas the germ of.”
In the concluding lines is set forth what might be characterized as
the apostolic succession of a great personality—the succession of those
“who in turn fill the south and the north with the radiance his deed
was the germ of.”
What follows in David's song gives expression to the other mode
of transmitting a great personality—that is, through records that “give
unborn generations their due and their part in his being,” and also to
what those records owe their effectiveness, and are saved from becoming
a dead letter.
“Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb—bid arise
A grey mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies,
Let it mark where the great First King slumbers: whose fame would ye
know 2
Up above see the rock’s naked face, where the record shall go
In great characters cut by the scribe, Such was Saul, so he did;
With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid,
For not half, they'll affirm, is comprised there ! Which fault to amend,
In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend
(See, in tablets 'tis level above them) their praise, and record
With the gold of the graver, Saul’s story, the statesman's great word
Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The river's a-wave
With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave :
So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part
In thy being ! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou art l”
What is said in this passage is applicable to the record we have of
Christ's life upon earth. Christianity has only to a very limited extent
been perpetuated through the Jetter of the New Testament. It has
s been perpetuated chiefly through transmissions of personalities, through
apostolic succession, in a general sense, and through embodiments of his
spirit in art and literature—“the stateman's great word,” “the poet's
sweet comment.” Were it not for this transmission of the quickening
power of personality, the New Testament would be, to a great extent, a
dead letter. It owes its significance to the quickened spirit which is
brought to the reading of it. The personality of Christ could not be,
through a plastic sympathy, moulded out of the New Testament records
without the aid of intermediate personalities.
The Messianic idea was not peculiar to the Jewish race—the idea
of a Person, gathering up within himself, in an effective fullness and
harmony, the restorative elements of humanity, which have lost their
power through dispersion and consequent obscuration. There have
been Messiahs of various orders and ranks, in every age, great person-
306 XV. PROF. CORSON on THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BRowNING.
alities that have realized to a greater or less extent (though there has
been but one, the God-Man, who fully realized), the spiritual potential-
ities in man, that have stood upon the sharpest heights as beacons to
their fellows. In the individual, the species has, as it were, been
gathered up, epitomized, and intensified, and he has thus been a
prophecy, and, to some extent, a fulfilment of human destiny.
“A poet must be earth's essential king,” as Sordello asserts, and he
is that by virtue of his exerting or shedding the influence of, his
essential personality. “If caring not to exert the proper essence of his
royalty, he, the poet, trifle malapert with accidents instead—good things
assigned as heralds of a better thing behind”—he is “deposed from his
kingly throne, and his glory is taken from him.” Of himself Sordello
says: “The power he took most pride to test, whereby all forms of life
had been professed at pleasure, forms already on the earth, was but a
means of power beyond, whose birth should, in its novelty, be king-
ship's proof. Now, whether he came near or kept aloof the several
forms he longed to imitate, not there the kingship lay, he sees too
late. Those forms, unalterable first as last, proved him her copier,
not the protoplast of nature: what could come of being free by action
to exhibit tree for tree, bird, beast, for beast and bird, or prove earth
bore one veritable man or woman more? Means to an end such proofs
are : what the end ?” º
The answer given involves the great Browning idea of the quicken-
ing power of personality: “Let essence, whatsoe'er it be, extend—never
contract l”
By “essence” we must understand that which “constitutes man’s
self, is what Is,” as the dying John, in A Death in the Desert, expresses
it—that which backs the active powers and the conscious intellect,
“subsisting whether they assist or no.”
“Let essence, whatsoe'er it be, extend—never contract l” Sordello
says. “Already you include the multitude;” that is, you gather
up, in yourself, in an effective fullness and harmony, what lies scattered
and ineffective in the multitude; “then let the multitude include your-
self; ” that is, be substantiated, essenced with yourself; “and the result
were new : themselves before, the multitude turn you.” (become your-
self). “This were to live and move and have, in them, your being,
and secure a diadem you should transmit (because no cycle yearns
beyond itself, but on itself returns) when the full sphere in wane, the
world o'erlaid long since with you, shall have in turn obeyed some orb
still prouder, some displayer, still more potent than the last, of human
will, and some new king depose the old.”
This is a most important passage to get hold of in studying Browning.
XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING, 307
It may almost be said to gather up Browning's philosophy of life in a
nutshell.
There's a passage to the same effect in Balaustion's Adventure, in
regard to the transmission of the poet's essence. The enthusiastic
Rhodian girl, Balaustion, after she has told the play of Euripides, years
after her adventure, to her four friends, Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, and
Chrusion, says,
“I think I see how . . . you, I, or any one, might mould a new
Admetos, new Alkestis. Ah, that brave bounty of poets, the one
royal race that ever was, or will be, in this world ! They give no gift
that bounds itself, and ends i' the giving and the taking : theirs so
breeds i' the heart and soul of the taker, so transmutes the man who
only was a man before, that he grows god-like in his turn, can give—he
also : share the poet's privilege, bring forth new good, new beauty from
the old. As though the cup that gave the wine, gave too the god's
prolific giver of the grape, that vine, was wont to find out, fawn around
his footstep, springing still to bless the dearth, at bidding of a Mainad.”
II. Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality.
If Browning's idea of the quickening, the regeneration, the rectifica-
tion of personality, through a higher personality, be fully comprehended,
his idea of the great function of Art, as an intermediate agency of per-
sonality, will become plain. To emphasize the latter idea may be said
to be the ultimate purpose of his masterpiece, The Ring and the Book.
The complexity of the circumstances involved in the Roman murder
case, adapts it admirably to the poet's purpose—namely, to exhibit the
swervings of human judgment in spite of itself, and the conditions
upon which the rectification of that judgment depends.
This must be taken, however, as only the articulation, the frame-work,
of the great poem. It is richer in materials, of the most varied character,
than any other long poem in existence. To notice one feature of the
numberless features of the poem, which might be noticed, Browning's
deep and subtle insight into the genius of the Romish Church is shown
in it more fully than in any other of his poems, though special
phases of that genius are distinctly exhibited in numerous poems: a
remarkable one being The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Prazed's
Church. . It is questionable whether any work of any kind has ever
exhibited that genius more fully and distinctly than The Ring and the
Book exhibits it. The reader breathes throughout the ecclesiastical
atmosphere of the Eternal City.
To return from this digression, the several monologues of which the
poem consists, with the exception of those of the Canon Caponsacchi,
308 XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
Pompilia, and the Pope, are each curious and subtle and varied ex-
ponents of the workings, without the guidance of instinct at the heart
(Sordello, p. 179), of the prepossessed, prejudiced intellect, and of the
Sources of its swerving into error. What is said of the “feel after the
Vanished truth” in the monologue entitled Half Rome—the speaker
being a jealous husband—will serve to characterize, in a general way, “the
feel after truth” exhibited in the other monologues: “honest enough,
as the way is: all the same, harbouring in the centre of its sense a hidden
germ of failure, shy but sure, should neutralize that honesty and leave
that feel for truth at fault, as the way is too. Some prepossession such
as starts amiss, by but a hair's-breadth at the shoulder-blade, the arm o'
the feeler, dip he ne'er so brave; and so leads waveringly, lets fall wide
o' the mark his finger meant to find, and fix truth at the bottom, that
deceptive speck.”
The poet could hardly have employed a more effective metaphor in
which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues
all going over the same ground, are artistically justified in their
exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form of this swerving. For
the ultimate purpose of the poet, it needed to be strongly emphasized.
The student of the poem is amazed, long before he gets over all these
monologues, at the Protean capabilities of the poet's own intellect. It
takes all conceivable attitudes toward the case, and each seems to be a
perfectly easy one.
These monologues all lead up to the great moral of the poem, which
is explicitly set forth at the end, namely, “that our human speech is
naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation,
words and wind. Why take the artistic way to prove so much? Because,
it is the glory and good of Art, that Art remains the one way possible of
speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least.-How look a brother in
the face and say, Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind, thine
ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length: and, oh, the foolish-
ness thou countest faith ! Say this as silvery as tongue can troll—the
anger of the man may be endured, the shrug, the disappointed eyes of
him are not so bad to bear—but here's the plague, that all this trouble
comes of telling truth, which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,
seems to be just the thing it would supplant, nor recognizable by whom
it left: while falsehood would have done the work of truth. But Art,
—wherein man nowise speaks to men, only to mankind-Art may tell
a truth obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,” that is, bring
what is implicit within the soul, into the right attitude to become explicit
—bring about a silent adjustment through sympathy induced by the
concrete; in other words, prepare the way for the perception of the
xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 309
truth—“do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought
missing the mediate word;” meaning, that Art, so to speak, is the word
made flesh,_is the truth, and, as Art, has nothing directly to do with the
explicit. “So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, beyond
mere imagery on the wall,—so, note by note, bring music from your
mind, deeper than ever the Andante dived,—so write a book shall mean
beyond the facts, suffice the eye and save the soul beside.”
And what is the inference the poet would have us draw from this
passage . It is, that the life and efficacy of Art depends on the person-
ality of the artist, which “has informed, transpierced, thridded and so
thrown fast the facts else free, as light through ring and ring runs the
djereed and binds the loose, one bar without a break.”* And it is
really this fusion of the artist's soul, which kindles, quickens, informs
those who contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within
themselves the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own. The
work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist's own personality. It cannot be
impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is, must be, the temper
of his Art product.” Titus Andronicus could not have been written by
Shakspere. Even if he had written it as a burlesque of such a play
as Marlow's Jew of Malta, he could not have avoided some revelation of
that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent in his Plays. But
there's no Shakspere in Titus Andronicus. Are we not certain of
what manner of man Shakspere was from his Works (notwithstanding
that critics are ever asserting their impersonality)—far more certain
than if his biography had been written by one who knew him all his
life, and sustained to him the most intimate relations? We know
Shakspere, or, he can be known, if the requisite conditions are met,
better, perhaps, than any other great author that ever lived—know, in
the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which we
know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell's Biography. The moral propor-
tion which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been
imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was shed from his
spiritual constitution.
By “speaking truth” in Art's way, Browning means, inducing a
1
MP
right attitude toward, a full and free sympathy with, the True, which is
a far more important and effective way of speaking truth than deliver-
ing truth in re. A work of Art, worthy of the name, need not be true to
fact, but must be true in its spiritual attitude, and being thus true, it
will tend to induce a corresponding attitude in those who do fealty to
* The Ring and the Book.
* “And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he
who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things,
ought himself to be a true poem.”—Milton’s Apology for Smectymnuus.
310 XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
it. It will have the influence, though in an inferior degree, it may be,
of a magnetic personality. Personality is the ultimate source of spiritual
quickening and adjustment. Literature and all forms of Art are but the
intermédiate agencies of personalities. The artist cannot be separated
from his art. As is the artist so must be his art. The aura, so to
speak, of a great work of Art, must come from the artist's own person-
ality. The spiritual worth of Shakspere's Winter's Tale is not at all
impaired by the fact that Bohemia is made a maritime country, that
Whitsun pastorals and Christian burial, and numerous other features
of Shakspere's own age, are introduced into pagan times, that Queen
Hermione speaks of herself as a daughter of the Emperor of Russia, that
her statue is represented as executed by Julio Romano, an Italian painter
of the 16th century, that a puritan sings psalms to hornpipes, and, to
crown all, that messengers are sent to consult the Oracle of Apollo, at
Delphi, which is represented as an island I All this jumble, this galli-
maufry, I say, does not impair the spiritual worth of the play. As
an Art-product, it invites a rectified attitude toward the True and
the Sweet.
If we look at the letter of the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice,
it borders on the absurd ; but if we look at its spirit, we see the
Shaksperian attitude of soul which makes for righteousness, for the
righteousness which is inherent in the moral constitution of the universe.
The inmost, secretest life of Shakspere's Plays came from the
personality, the inmost, secretest life, of the man Shakspere. We
might, with the most alert Sagacity, note and tabulate and aggregate
his myriad phenomenal merits as a dramatic writer, but we might still
be very far from that something back of them all, or rather that
&mmanent something, that mystery of personality, that microcosmos,
that “inmost centre, where truth abides in fullness,” as Browning
makes Paracelsus characterize it, “ constituting man's self, is what Is,”
as he makes the dying John characterize it, in A Death in the Desert,
that “innermost of the inmost, most interior of the interne,” as Mrs.
Browning characterizes it, “the hidden Soul,” as Dallas characterizes it,
which is projected into, and constitutes the soul of, the Plays, and which
is reached through an unconscious and mystic sympathy on the part
of him who habitually communes with and does fealty to them. That
personality, that living force, coöperated spontaneously and uncon-
sciously with the conscious powers, in the creative process; and when
we enter into a sympathetic communion with the concrete result of
that creative process, our own mysterious personalities, being essentially
identical with, though less quickened than, Shakspere's, respond,
though it may be but feebly, to his. This response is the highest result
xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING, 311
of the study of Shakspere's works. The dramas are really means to
this end.
It is a significant fact that Shaksperian critics and editors, for
nearly two centuries, have been a genus irritabile, to which genus
Shakspere himself certainly did not belong. The explanation may
partly be, that they have been too much occupied with the letter,
and have fretted their nerves in angry dispute about readings and
interpretations; as theologians have done in their study of the sacred
records, instead of endeavouring to reach, through the letter, the person-
ality of which the letter is but a manifestation more or less imperfect.
To know a personality is, of course, a spiritual knowledge—the result
of sympathy, that is, spiritual responsiveness. Intellectually it is but
little more important to know one rather than another personality. The
highest worth of all great works of genius is due to the fact that they
are apocalyptic of great personalities.
Art says, as the Divine Person said, whose personality and the
personalities fashioned after it, have transformed and moulded the
ages, “ Follow me !” Deep was the meaning wrapt up in this com-
mand : it was, Do as I do, live as I live, not from an intellectual
perception of the principles involved in my life, but through a full
sympathy, through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of the
incarnate Word.
Art also says, as did the voice from the wilderness, inadequately
translated, “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
(Meravosºrs #yyuke yāp i Baauxeta rāv otpavāv.) Rather, be trans-
formed, or, as De Quincey puts it, “Wheel into a new centre your
spiritual system ; geocentric has that system been up to this hour—
that is, having earth and the earthly for its starting-point; henceforward
make it heliocentric (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for its
principle of motion).”
The poetry of Browning everywhere says this, and says it more
emphatically than that of any other poet in our literature. It says
everywhere, that not through knowledge, not through a sharpened
intellect, but through repentance, in the deeper sense to which I have
just alluded, through conversion, through wheeling into a new centre
its spiritual system, the soul attains to saving truth. Salvation with him.
means that revelation of the soul to itself, that awakening, quickening,
actuating, attitude-adjusting, of the Soul, which sets it gravitating toward
the Divine.
Browning's idea of Conversion is, perhaps, most distinctly expressed
in a passage in the Monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi, in The Ring
and the Book, wherein he sets forth the circumstances under which his
312 xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA of PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
soul was wheeled into a new centre, after a life of dalliance and elegant
folly, and made aware of “the marvellous dower of the life it was gifted
and filled with.” He has been telling the judges, before whom he has
been summoned, the story of the letters forged by Guido to entrap him
and Pompilia, and of his having seen “right through the thing that
tried to pass for truth and solid, not an empty lie.” The conclusion
and the resolve he comes to, are expressed in the soliloquy which he
repeats to the judges, as having uttered at the time: “So, he not only
forged the words for her but words for me, made letters he called mine:
what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress
messenger | As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the
crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs. Enough of this—
let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought
for her l’” What follows admits us to the very heart of Browning's
poetry—admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days,
strange to say, peculiarly his—which no other poet, certainly, of this
intellectual, analytic, scientific age, with its “patent, truth-extracting
processes,” has brought out with the same degree of distinctness—the
great Idea which may be variously characterized as that of soul-kindling,
soul-quickening, adjustment of soul-attitude, regeneration, conversion,
through personality—a kindling, quickening, adjustment, regeneration,
conversion, in which thought is not even a coefficient. As expressed in
Sordello, “Divest mind of e'en thought, and, lo, God’s unexpressed will
dawns above us!” (p. 169). “Thought 1" the Canon goes on to say,
“Thought 1 nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought : I have
thought sometimes, and thought long and hard. I have stood before,
gone round a serious thing, tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it
close, . . . God and man, and what duty I owe both,--I dare to say I
have confronted these in thought : but no such faculty helped here. I
put forth no thought, powerless, all that night I paced the city: it
was the first Spring. By the invasion I lay passive to, in rushed new
things, the old were rapt away; alike abolished—the imprisonment of
the outside air, the inside weight o' the world that pulled me down.
Death meant, to spurn the ground, soar to the sky,_die well and you
do that. The very immolation made the bliss; death was the heart of
life, and all the harm my folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil
hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp. . . . Into another state,
under new rule I knew myself was passing swift and sure; whereof the
initiatory pang approached, felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the
virgin band, the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop,
and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness: So I
lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy and out-
xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 313
throb pain. I’ the gray of the dawn it was I found myself facing the
pillared front o' the Pieve—mine, my church : it seemed to say for the
first time, “But am not I the Bride, the mystic love o' the Lamb, who
took thy plighted troth, my priest, to fold thy warm heart on my heart
of stone and freeze thee nor unfasten any more? This is a fleshly
woman,—let the free bestow their life blood, thou art pulseless
now !' . . . Now, when I found out first that life and death are means
to an end, that passion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man
whose form of worship is self-sacrifice—now, from the stone lungs
sighed the scrannel voice, ‘Leave that live passion, come be dead with
me !’ As if, i' the fabled garden, I had gone on great adventure,
plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit, and feasted to satiety, laughing at
such high fame for hips and haws, and scorned the achievement : then
come all at once o’ the prize o' the place, the thing of perfect gold, the
apple's self: and, scarce my eye on that, was 'ware as well of the seven-
fold dragon's watch. Sirs, I obeyed.” Obedience was too strange,_-
this new thing that had been struck into me by the look of the lady,
to dare disobey the first authoritative word. 'Twas God's. I had been
lifted to the level of her, could take such sounds into my sense. I said,
‘We two are cognizant o' the Master now ; it is she bids me bow the
head : how true, I am a priest I see the function here; I thought the
other way self-sacrifice : this is the true, seals up the perfect sum. I
pay it, sit down, silently obey.’”
Numerous and varied expressions of the idea of conversion set forth
in this passage, occur in Browning's poetry, evidencing his deep sense
of this great and indispensable condition of soul-life, of being born anew
(or from above, as it should be rendered in the Gospel, &va,0sv, that is,
through the agency of a higher personality), in order to see the kingdom
of God—evidencing his conviction that “the kingdom of God cometh
not with observation: for lo! the kingdom of God is within you.”
In the poem entitled Cristina, he says, or the speaker is made to say,
“Oh we’re sunk enough here, God knows but not quite so sunk that moments,
Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit’s true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing.
There are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames noondays kindle,
Whereby piled-up honours perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse, which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the sole work of a life-time that away the rest have trifled.”
And again, when the Pope in The Ring and the Book has come to
the decision to sign the death-warrant of Guido and his accomplices, he
* He means the entreaty of Pompilia, to rescue her from her husband, Count
Guido Franceschini, and take her to Rome, to the Comparini, her putative
parents.
31.4 xv. PROF, CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
}
*i
says: “For the main criminal I have no hope except in such a sudden-
ness of fate. I stood at Naples once, a night so dark I could have
scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
but the night's black was burst through by a blaze—thunder struck blow
on blow, earth groaned and bore, through her whole length of mountain
visible: there lay the city thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost
disshrouded, white the sea. So may the truth be flashed out by one
blow, and Guido See, one instant, and be saved. Else I avert my face,
nor follow him into that Sad obscure sequestered state where God
wnmakes but to remake the soul he else made first in vain; which must
not be. Enough, for I may die this very night : and how should I dare
die, this man let live? Carry this forthwith to the Governor l’”
Browning is the most essentially Christian of living poets. Religion
with him is, indeed, the all-in-all; but not any particular form of it as
a finality. This is not a world for finalities of any kind, as he constantly
teaches us: it is a world of broken arcs, not of perfect rounds. Formu-
lations of some kind he would, no doubt, admit there must be, as in
everything else ; but with him all formulations and tabulations of
beliefs, especially such as “make square to a finite eye the circle of
infinity,” + are, at the best, only provisional, and, at the worst, lead to
spiritual standstill, spiritual torpor, “a ghastly smooth life, dead at
heart.”” The essential nature of Christianity is contrary to special
prescription, do this or do that, believe this or believe that. Christ
gave no recipes. Christianity is with Browning, and this he sets forth
again and again, a life, quickened and motived and nourished by the
Personality of Christ. And all that he says of this Personality can
be accepted by every Christian, whatever theological view he may
entertain of Christ. Christ's teachings he regards but as incidents of that
Bersonality, and the records we have of his sayings and doings, but a
fragment, a somewhat distorted one, it may be, out of which we must,
by a mystic and plastic sympathy, aided by the Christ spirit which is
immanent in the Christian world, mould the Personality, and do fealty
to it. The Christian must endeavour to be able to say, with the dying
John, in Browning's Death in the Desert, “To me that story, ay, that
Life and Death of which I wrote “it was '—to me, it is.”
If there were any elements in Christ's nature not potentially in our
own, those elements would not be of any service to us. Our own
natures can be quickened only by what is identical with them.
The poem entitled Christmas Eve contains the fullest and most explicit
expression, in Browning, of his idea of the personality of Christ as
being the all-in-all of Christianity.
* Christmas Eve, * Easter Day, 17th v. from end.
XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 315
“the truth in God’s breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed:
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him :
And were no eye in us to tell,
Instructed by no inner sense,
The light of Heaven from the dark of Hell,
That light would want its evidence,—
Though Justice, Good, and Truth, were still
Divine, if, by some demon’s will,
Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed
Law through the worlds, and Right misnamed,
No mere exposition of morality
Made or in part or in totality,
Should win you to give it worship, therefore :
And if no better proof you will care for,
—Whom do you count the worst man upon earth ?
Be sure, he knows, in his conscience, more
Of what Right is, than arrives at birth
In the best man’s acts that we bow before :
And thence I conclude that the real God-function
Is to furnish a motive and injunction
For practising what we know already.
And such an injunction and such a motive
As the God in Christ, do you waive, and ‘heady,
High-minded,” hang your tablet votive
Outside the fane on a finger-post?
Morality to the uttermost,
Supreme in Christ as we all confess,
Why need we prove would avail no jot
To make Him God, if God he were not ?
Where is the point where Himself lays stress?
Does the precept run ‘Believe in Good,
In Justice, Truth, now understood
For the first time ’7—or ‘Believe in ME,
Who lived and died, yet essentially
Am Lord of Life " ?' Whoever can take
The same to his heart and for mere love's sake
Conceive of the love, that man obtains
A new truth; no conviction gains
Of an old one only, made intense *
By a fresh appeal to his faded sense.”
If all Christendom could take this remarkable poem of Christmas .
Eve to its heart, its tolerance, its Catholic spirit, and, more than all, the
fealty it exhibits to the Personality who essentially is Lord of Life,
what a revolution it would undergol and what a mass of dogmatic and
polemic theology would become utterly obsolete The most remarkable
thing, perhaps, about the vast body of Christian theology which has
* “Subsists uo law of life outside of life.”
>k * *k #: Ak
“The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless he had given the life, too, with the law.”
Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh.
316 xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
been developed during the eighteen centuries which have elapsed since
Christ was in the flesh, is, that it is occupied so largely, it might almost
be said, exclusively, with what Christ and his disciples taught, and
with fierce discussions about the manifold meanings which have been
ingeniously extorted from the imperfect record of what he taught.
British museum libraries of polemics have been written in defence of
what Christ himself would have been indifferent to, and written with
an animosity towards opponents which has been crystallized in a phrase
now applied in a general way to any intense hate—Odium. Theologicum.
If the significance of Christ's mission, or a large part of it, is to be
estimated by his teachings, from those teachings important deductions
must be made, as many of them had been delivered long before his
time. As a mere teacher or moralist, he could not have maintained any
important place in history.
Browning has something to say on this point, in this same poem
of Christmas Eve—
“Truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic
When Papist struggles with Dissenter,
Impregnating its pristine clarity,
—One, by his daily fare’s vulgarity,
Its gust of broken meat and garlic;
—One, by his soul's too-much presuming
To turn the frankincense's fuming
And vapors of the candle starlike
. Into the cloud her wings she buoys on.
Each that thus sets the pure air seething,
May poison it for healthy breathing—
But the Critic leaves no air to poison;
Pumps out by a ruthless ingenuity
Atom by atom, and leaves you—vacuity.
Thus much of Christ, does he reject?
And what retain 7 His intellect 7
What is it I must reverence duly 7
Poor intellect for worship, truly,
Which tells me simply what was told
(If mere morality, bereft
Of the God in Christ, be all that's left)
Elsewhere by voices manifold ;
With this advantage, that the stater
Made nowise the important stumble
Of adding, he, the sage and humble,
Was also one with the Creator.”
Browning's poetry is instinct with the essence of Christianity—the
life of Christ. There is no other poetry, there is no writing of any
form, in this age, which so emphasizes the fact (and it's the most
consoling of all facts connected with the Christian religion), that the
Personality, Jesus Christ, is the impregnable fortress of Christianity.
Whatever assaults and inroads may be made upon the original records
xv. PROF. coRSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 317
by Göttingen professors, upon the august fabric of the Church, with its
creeds and dogmas, and formularies, and paraphernalia, this fortress
will stand forever, and mankind will forever seek and find refuge in it.
The poem entitled Cleon bears the intimation (there's nothing directly
expressed thereupon), that Christianity is something distinct from, and
beyond, whatever the highest civilization of the world, the civilization
of Greece, attained to before Christ. Through him the world obtained
“a new truth—no conviction gained of an old one merely, made intense
by a fresh appeal to the faded sense.”
Cleon, the poet, writes to Protos in his Tyranny (that is, in the
Greek sense, Sovereignty). Cleon must be understood as representing
the ripe, composite result, as an individual, of what constituted the
glory of Greece—her poetry, Sculpture, architecture, painting, and music,
and also her philosophy. He acknowledges the gifts which the King
has lavished upon him. By these gifts we are to understand the
munificent national personage accorded to the arts. “The master of thy
galley still unlades gift after gift; they block my court at last and
pile themselves along its portico royal with sunset, like a thought
of thee.”
By the slave women that are among the gifts sent to Cleon, seems
to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by its subjection to
earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art. This is more par-
ticularly indicated by the one white she-slave, the lyric woman, whom
further on in his letter, Cleon promises the King he will make narrate
(in lyric song we must suppose) his fortunes, speak his great words,
and describe his royal face. §
‘He continues, that in such an act of love, the bestowal of princely
gifts upon him whose song gives life its joy, men shall remark the
Ring's recognition of the use of life—that his spirit is equal to more
than merely to help on life in straight ways, broad enough for vulgar
souls, by ruling and the rest. He ascribes to the King, in the building
of his tower (and by this must be understood the building up of his
own selfhood), a higher motive than work for mere work's sake, -that
higher motive being, the luring hope of some eventual rest atop of it
(the tower), whence, all the tumult of the building hushed, the first of
men may look out to the east.”
' Tennyson uses a similar figure in The Thwo Voices. The speaker, who is
meditating whether “to be or not to be,” says:
“Were this not well, to bide mine hour,
Though watching from a ruined tower
How grows the day of human power.”
The ruined tower is his own dilapidated self-hood, whence he takes his outlook
upon the world.
318 XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
By the eventual rest atop of the tower, is indicated the aim of the
Greek civilization, to reach a calm within the finite, while the soul is
constituted and destined to gravitate forever towards the infinite—to
“force our straitened sphere . . . display completely here the mastery
another life should learn" (Sordello, p. 23). The eventual rest in this
world is not the Christian ideal. Earth-life, whatever its reach, and
whatever its grasp, is to the Christian a broken arc, not a perfect round.
Cleon goes on to recount his accomplishments in the arts, and what
he has done in philosophy, in reply to the first requirement of Protos's
letter, Protos, as it appears, having heard of, and wonderingly enumer-
ated, the great things Cleon has effected; and he has written to know
the truth of the report. Cleon replies, that the epos on the King's
hundred plates of gold is his, and his the little chaunt so sure to rise
from every fishing-bark when, lights at prow, the seamen haul their
nets; that the image of the sun-god on the light-house men turn from
the sun's self to see, is his ; that the Poecile, o'er-storied its whole
length with painting, is his, too; that he knows the true proportions of
man and woman, not observed before ; that he has written three books
on the soul, proving absurd all written hitherto, and putting us to
ignorance again; that in music he has combined the moods, inventing
one ; that, in brief, all arts are his, and so known and recognized. At
this he writes the King to marvel not. We of these latter days, he
says, being more composite, appear not so great as our forerunners who,
in their simple way, were greater in a certain single direction, than we ;
but our composite way is greater. This life of men on earth, this
sequence of the soul’s achievements here, he finds reason to believe, was
intended to be viewed eventually as a great whole, the individual soul
being only a factor toward the realization of this great whole—toward
spelling out, so to speak, Zeus's idea in the race. Those divine men of
old, he goes on to say, reached each at one point, the outside verge that
rounds our faculty, and where they reached, who could do more than
reach! I have not chanted, he says, verse like Homer's, nor swept string
like Terpander, nor carved and painted men like Phidias and his friend;
I am not great as they are, point by point ; but I have entered into
sympathy with these four, running these into one soul, who, separate,
ignored each other's arts. The wild flower was the larger—I have
dashed rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup's honey with wine, and
driven its seed to fruit, and show a better flower, if not so large.
And now he comes to the important questions in the King's letter—
whether he, the poet, his soul thus in men's hearts, has not attained the
very crown and proper end of life—whether, now life closeth up, he
faces death with success in his right hand,-whether he fears death less
xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING, 319
than he, the King, does himself, the fortunate of men, who assigns the
reason for thinking that he does that he, the poet, leaves much behind,
his life stays in the poems men shall sing, the pictures men shall study ;
while the King's life, complete and whole now in its power and joy,
dies altogether with his brain and arm, as he leaves not behind, as the
poet does, works of art embodying the essence of his life which, through
those works, will pass into the lives of men of all succeeding times.
Cleon replies that if in the morning of philosophy, the King, with the
light now in him, could have looked on all earth’s tenantry, from worm
to bird, ere man appeared, and if Zeus had questioned him whether he
would improve on it, do more for visible creatures than was done, he
would have answered, “Ay, by making each grow conscious in him-
self: all's perfect else, life's mechanics can no further go, and all this
joy in natural life is put, like fire from off thy fingers into each, so
exquisitely perfect is the same. But 'tis pure fire—and they mere
matter are ; it has them, not they it : and so I choose, for man, that a
third thing shall stand apart from both, a quality arise within the
soul, which, intro-active, made to supervise and feel the force it has,
may view itself and so be happy. But it is this quality, Cleon con-
tinues, which makes man a failure. This sense of sense, this spirit
consciousness, grew the only life worth calling life, the pleasure-house,
watch-tower, and treasure-fortress of the soul, which whole surrounding
flats of natural life seemed only fit to yield subsistence to ; a tower that
crowns a country. But alas ! the soul now climbs it just to perish
there, for thence we have discovered that there's a world of capability
for joy, spread round about us, meant for us, inviting us; and still the
soul craves all, and still the flesh replies, “Take no jot more than ere
you climbed the tower to look abroad Nay, so much less, as that
fatigue has brought deduction to it.” After expatiating on this sad
state of man, he arrives at the same conclusion as the King in his
letter: “I agree in sum, O King, with thy profound discouragement,
who seest the wider but to sigh the more. Most progress is most
failure I thou sayest well.”
And now he takes up the last point of the King's letter, that
he, the King, holds joy not impossible to one with artist-gifts, who
leaves behind living works. Looking over the sea, as he writes,
he says, “Yon rower with the moulded muscles there, lowering
the sail, is nearer it than I.” He presents with clearness, and with
rigid logic, the dilemma of the growing soul; shows the vanity of
living in works left behind, and in the memory of posterity, while he,
the feeling, thinking, acting man, shall sleep in his urn. The horror
of the thought makes him dare imagine at times some future state
320 xv. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING.
unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in desire for joy. But no
Zeus has not yet revealed such a state; and alas ! he must have done so
were it possible !
He concludes, “Live long and happy, and in that thought die, glad
for what was l Farewell.” And then, as a matter of minor importance,
he informs the King, in a postScript, that he cannot tell his messenger
aright where to deliver what he bears to one called Paulus. Protos, it
must be understood, having heard of the fame of Paul, and being per-
plexed in the extreme, has written the great apostle to know of his
doctrine. But Cleon writes that it is vain to suppose that a Imere
barbarian Jew, one circumcised, hath access to a secret which is shut
from them, and that the King wrongs their philosophy in stooping to
inquire of such an one. “Oh, he finds adherents, who does not. Certain
slaves who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ, and, as
he gathered from a bystander, their doctrines could be held by no
Sane man.”
There is a quiet beauty about this poem which must insinuate itself
into the feelings of every reader. In tone it resembles the Epistle of
Farshish, the Arab physician. The verse of both poems is very beautiful.
No one can read these two poems, and Bishop Blougram's Apology, and
The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Prazed's Church, and not admit
that Browning is a master of blank verse in its most difficult form—a
form far more difficult than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or
the Idyllic blank verse of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with
thought, and, at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in
its course exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of
much of the verse of The Ring and the Book, especially that of the
monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and Count
Guido Franceschini. But this by the way.
Cleon belongs to a grand group of poems, in which Browning shows
himself to be, as I’ve said, the most essentially Christian of living poets
—the poet who, more emphatically than any of his contemporaries have
done, has enforced the importance, the indispensableness of a new birth,
the being born from above (à vu,0ev) as the condition not only of soul
vitality and progress, but also of intellectual rectitude. In this group of
poems are embodied the profoundest principles of education—principles
which it behoves the present generation of educators to look well to.
The acquisition of knowledge is a good thing, the sharpening of the
intellect is a good thing, the cultivation of philosophy is a good thing;
but there's something of infinitely more importance than all these—it
is, the rectification, the adjustment, through that mysterious operation
we call sympathy, of the unconscious personality, the hidden soul, which
XV. PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING, 321
co-operates with the active powers, with the conscious intellect, and,
as this unconscious personality is rectified or unrectified, determines
the active powers, the conscious intellect, for righteousness or un-
righteousness.
The attentive reader of Browning's poetry must soon discover how
remarkably homogeneous it is in spirit. There are many authors, and
great authors too, the reading of whose collected works gives the im-
pression of their having “tried their hand” at many things. No such
impression is derivable from the voluminous poetry of Browning. Wide as
is its range, one great and homogeneous spirit pervades and animates it
all, from the earliest to the latest. No other living poet gives so decided
an assurance of having a burden to deliver. An appropriate general
title to his works would be, “The Burden of Robert Browning to the
19th century.” His earliest poems are the least articulate, but there can
be no question about their attitude. We know in what direction the
poet has set his face—what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life
means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means in its
deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple. And if he
had left this world after writing no more than those poems of his youth,
Pauline and Paracelsus, a very fair ex-pede-Herculem estimate might
have been made of the possibilities which he has since so grandly
realized.
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