^B 
 
 B^^^^l 
 
 ■flH
 
 ^ h 
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN 
 
 a Stubs \\\ Democracy 
 
 to
 
 Uhe dilettante Xibrarp. 
 
 i. DANTE AND HIS IDEAL. By Herbert Bavnes, 
 
 M.R.A.S. With a Portrait. 
 
 2. BROWNINGS MESSAGE TO HIS TIMES. By 
 
 l>r. Edward Bekdoe. With a Portrait and Fac- 
 simile Letters. 
 
 3, 4 . THE DOCTOR. AND OTHER POEMS. By T. 
 
 K. Browne, M.A., of Clifton College, Author of 
 " Fo'c's'le Yarns." 2 vols. 
 
 5. GOETHE. By Oscak Bkowning, M.A., Tutor of 
 
 King's College, Cambridge. Willi a Portra t. 
 
 6. DANTE. By Oscar Browning, M.A. With a 
 
 Frontispiece. 
 
 Nos. 5 mid 6 are cula rgedfrow the A >iiclcs in the 
 " Encyclopeedia Britatinica." 
 
 7. BROWNING'S CRITICISM CF LIFE. By W. F. 
 
 Revell, Member of the London Browning Society. 
 With a Portrait. 
 
 S. HENRIK IBSEN. By tic Lev. Philip H. Wick- 
 steau, M.A. With a P01 nail. 
 
 9. THE ART OF ACTING. By Percy Fitzgerald. 
 With a Portrait. 
 
 10. WALT WHITMAN. By William Clarke, M.A.. 
 
 Cambridge. With a Portrait. 
 
 11. VICTOR HUGO. By J. Princle Nichol. With a 
 
 Portrait. 
 
 1?. BROWNING AND WHITMAN. By Oscar L. 
 Tkiggs.
 
 Browning and Whitman 
 
 H StufcE in S)emocrac£ 
 
 BY 
 
 OSCAR L. TRIGGS 
 
 (University of Chicago) 
 
 SWAN SONNE NSC HE IN & CO. 
 
 NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 
 
 1893
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNU 
 123^ SANTA BARBARA 
 
 T7 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 ->$<- 
 
 The volume now given to the public is an expansion of a 
 paper read before the London Browning Society at their 
 meeting of May 27th of the present year. The purpose 
 of the paper was to point out the essential democracy of 
 Robert Browning. The intent of the present work is to 
 suggest the need of an exegesis of modern prophetical 
 literature. And the endeavour is therefore made in the 
 case of Browning and Whitman to identify life and 
 literature. The result will be, for a few readers, not 
 incurious. It is found that some poems which prove 
 well in lecture-rooms and parlours prove not at all in the 
 open air, in the streets and workshops, in contact with 
 the varied life of man. 
 
 The thoughts which prompt the several essays may be 
 stated as follows : God is a living will, who is realised by 
 men and women in their practical activities and creations. 
 To realise the will of God, by whatever institutional means 
 of State or church or school, is the purport of democracy. 
 Democracy cares supremely for the soul ; this, before all 
 laws, forms, institutions, policies, economics, is the one 
 thing worthy of conserving. 
 
 For the purposes of world-profession, art can no longer 
 be separated from life. Art is the union of the real and 
 the ideal, it is matter receiving spirit, it is spirit taking- 
 form. Art is a witness of ideality ; at the same time it 
 shows the possibility of the realisation of highest thought.
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 Art points the way to life, and stimulates the personalities 
 to action. 
 
 Few are the poets upon whom the burden of prophecy 
 is laid. Many are called, it would seem, but few are 
 chosen. And what is more, the sacred few are often ob- 
 scured by the rubbish of words which an idle, listless 
 criticism has gathered about them. If we believe, with 
 Wordsworth, in the high calling of poets, their works, one 
 would think, are not to be considered as toys, fictions, 
 substitutes for a cigar or a game of dominoes, but seri- 
 ously, as in very league with life. The rhymers are many, 
 giving pleasure and entertainment ; they fill their day and 
 place. The answerers are few, and demand from readers 
 the whole of heart and brain and soul, for their words take 
 hold on things eternal. 
 
 It is not unfair, I think, to look to the New World for 
 exponents of democratic principles. I know not how 
 many eyes have seen as mine, but for me, while knowing- 
 well its shortcomings, America is yet not a State to 
 despair over, but to take hope in. America illustrates 
 ideality and practical constructiveness. It is a "land of 
 unprecedented faith, God's faith." Its people, it is true, 
 are engaged in material things, but, in a hopeful spirit 
 and with ideal promptings, they are turning them to 
 beautiful uses, building with stones which others have 
 rejected the institutions of freedom for the service of the 
 soul. For their future, democracy reserves its crowning 
 triumph, the completer evolution of individual character. 
 
 " O, America, because you build for mankind, I build for you." 
 At least I shall make this assumption in order to justify
 
 /* 
 
 PREFACE. Vll 
 
 the choice of American writers as exponents of democratic 
 sentiment. I have chosen four — Emerson and Thoreau 
 representative of the principle of individuality, Lowell 
 and Whitman representing the principle of union. The 
 fusion of these two principles completes the ideal of de- 
 mocracy. Whitman alone, when judged from the stand- 
 point of life, stands forth with a world-wide significance, 
 the supreme bard of the soul. 
 
 The argument which follows speaks for itself. I have 
 only to wonder at the criticism which looks with derision 
 upon the names in juxtaposition of Browning and Whit- 
 man. An American critic has already exclaimed, in the 
 words of Byron : " Powers eternal, such names mingled !" 
 The contempt in the remark is, of course — like one who, 
 standing in the light, is not aware he is in the light — 
 directed again^L Whitman. At the time of Whitman's 
 death it v. as written in the New York Independent that 
 " he wrote the noisest, noisomest stuff ever called poetry." 
 "The characteristic of his style is the big and the brag- 
 gart." " His poems are the long-winded replication of 
 Emerson's egoistic pantheism." Still, I venture to affirm 
 that the works of Whitman will take rank among the 
 great classics of the world, as truly classic and as truly 
 representative of American life and sentiment as are the 
 heroic tales of Greece and Rome. 
 
 In a comparative study of poets, the endeavour should 
 be to establish identities. A mechanical comparison of 
 externals is generally a useless effort. But from the point 
 of view of personality, which is the continuing element in 
 progress, all thoughts are considered as flowerings out of 
 the one principle. Thus viewed, all poetry has, as Whit- 
 man affirms, "more features of resemblance than differ-
 
 viii PREFACE. 
 
 ence, and becomes essentially like the planetary globe 
 itself, compact, and orbic, and whole." 
 
 The thought tendency, of which Whitman is a part, is 
 first clearly revealed in English literature, as a mystical 
 element, in the works of William Blake. The same 
 stream, grown larger by contributions of science and 
 philosophy and ethical truth, and informed by the spirit 
 of romanticism, emerges again in Browning. Richard 
 Wagner is, I think, more nearly related to the movement 
 (which is by no means national) than we are wont to sup- 
 pose. Not, however, dwelling upon this aspect of W T ag- 
 ner's works, one may discover in him the same principle 
 of revolt, springing from the same need of emotional 
 expression, which resulted, in the cases of Browning and 
 Whitman, and, indeed, of William Blake, in an extension 
 of the province of art. Wagner best illustrates the artistic 
 change, because he was conscious and scientific in all 
 that he undertook. 
 
 I wish, in closing, to acknowledge my indebtedness to 
 Dr. Frederick J. Furnivall, whose work in the service of 
 letters needs no praise of mine, who is better known by 
 me as one who is ever ready to extend the hand of wel- 
 come to the stranger within the gates. 
 
 OSCAR L. TRIGGS. 
 London, 1892.
 
 DEDICATED 
 TO 
 
 MARTHA DAVIS TRIGGS
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 
 ->*<- 
 
 
 Chap. 
 
 Page 
 
 
 PREFACE ..... 
 
 V 
 
 I. 
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE 
 
 1 
 
 II. 
 
 DEMOCRACY ..... 
 
 14 
 
 III. 
 
 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA . 
 
 24 
 
 IV. 
 
 DEMOCRATIC TYPES— 
 
 Emerson 
 Tlioreau 
 Lowell 
 
 
 
 Whitman .... 
 
 34 
 
 V. 
 
 WHITMAN : GENERAL RELATIONSHIP 
 
 40 
 
 VI. 
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN . 
 
 53 
 
 
 § I. The Personality 
 
 55 
 
 
 § 2. Mati and Nature . 
 
 80 
 
 
 § 3. Man in his Entirety 
 
 92 
 
 
 % 4. Life and Immortality 
 
 103 
 
 
 § 5. Love or the Social side oj Life 
 
 
 
 (artistic method) 
 
 119
 
 " Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distilled 
 
 from poems pass away, 
 The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass and leave ashes 
 Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil 
 
 of literature. 
 America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can 
 
 deceive it or conceal from it, it is impassive enough, 
 Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them. 
 If its poets appear, it will in due time advance to meet 
 
 them, there is no fear of mistake." 
 
 Whitman : By Blue Ontario's Shore. 
 
 " The words of true poems do not merely please, 
 The true poets are not followers of beauty but the 
 august masters of beauty." 
 
 Whitman : Song of the Answerer.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 I. -LITERATURE AND LIFE. 
 
 Towards Democracy is a volume of prose poems 
 written with peculiar passionate earnestness by a 
 student of human questions, Mr. Edward Carpenter. 
 It is an unique book, and but few, perhaps, can read 
 it with perfect sympathy and understanding. The 
 author, widely read in the literature of social reform, 
 seeks to interpret, in the light of a rare poetic insight, 
 the movement towards democracy ; a movement 
 which is altogether the most characteristic of our 
 time, witnessed alike in America, in England, and in 
 the older world. 
 
 " We are all Socialists now " — how came it about ? 
 The present stress laid upon the social question — 
 which is really a question of life upon the earth — is 
 indicative of the wider tendency to concern ourselves 
 with every concrete fact relating to man. By a series 
 of inquiries respecting the supreme truths and obliga- 
 tions of life, we have been quickened to strive for a 
 more reasonable social union. 
 
 Now in this discussion, it should be noted, the 
 
 A
 
 2 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 poets have taken the leading part. The higher litera- 
 ture of this century is, broadly speaking, socialistic, 
 in a way the eighteenth century would have thought 
 unworthy. Even in the poetry of Keats, though he was 
 one of the first to be touched by the modern spirit, 
 there is hardly a single allusion to contemporary life. 
 To use a phrase of Mrs. Browning, poets trundled back 
 their souls five hundred years to live in an ideal past. 
 Poetry was dissevered from life, and its pursuit was 
 for the few a kind of opium-eating. The influence of 
 Keats is seen in the earlier writings of Swinburne, 
 Rossetti, and William Morris. But there arose at the 
 beginning of the century, from various sources, an 
 earnest protest against the scorn of the present im- 
 plied by the dreamers. Mrs. Browning, in Aurora 
 Leigh, spoke strongly her convictions in the matter : 
 
 " Ay, but every age 
 Appears to souls who live in't, (ask Carlyle,) 
 Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours : 
 The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound 
 Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip : 
 A pewter age, — mixed metal, siiver-vvashed ; 
 An age of scum, spooned oft" the richer past, 
 An age of mere transition, meaning nought 
 Except that what succeeds must shame it quite 
 If God please. That's wrong thinking, to my mind, 
 And wrong thoughts make poor poems." 
 
 And mine, wrote Browning earlier in Paracelsus, — 
 
 '• Mine is no mad attempt to build a world 
 Apart from His, like those who set themselves
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE. 
 
 To find the nature of the spirit they bore, 
 
 And, taught betimes that all their gorgeous dreams 
 
 Were only born to vanish in this life, 
 
 Refused to fit them to this narrow sphere, 
 
 But chose to figure forth another world 
 
 And other frames meet for their vast desires, — 
 
 And all a dream ! Thus was life scorned; but life 
 
 Shall yet be crowned : twine amaranth ! I am priest !" 
 
 While there is in literature this return to reality 
 and life, there is on the other hand a wide and seem- 
 ingly impassable gulf between life and its actual 
 artistic expression. England, to take a case in my 
 immediate horizon, is to-day in the midst of a wide- 
 spread democratic advance. New world-forces are at 
 work, the effect of whose action no man can measure; 
 all things are in conflict and in revolution, the old 
 resisting the new, the new overcoming the old. We 
 look to art for guidance, for ideality, and for creative 
 faculty ; for it is not knowledge that is wanting, but 
 the power to clearly conceive and externalise that 
 which is known. But art, which was once the posses- 
 sion of the many, and with labour went hand in hand, 
 has become the profession of a coterie and a class. 
 And a vital generous sympathy, which might make the 
 loss of popular sentiment more endurable, is one of 
 the rarest traits of modern artistic production. Art, 
 in short, wants the sympathetic imagination. For 
 example, that which is most characteristic of England 
 at the present time is its industrialism. But one 
 would hardly gather from contemporary literature — 
 not even from the novel, which has the field at pre-
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 sent, save for a few light sketches— that there lies to 
 the north a huge, smoke-stained Black-country where 
 lives, with beauty crushed out of their life, but not 
 without hopes and fears and all human strivings, the 
 greater number of England's sturdy yeomanry. In 
 travelling throughout England I have marvelled to 
 find a nomadic tribe of workmen called " navvies," 
 numbering with women and children I know not 
 how many thousands, who form a community quite 
 apart from civilisation, having their own peculiar laws 
 and customs and beliefs, almost a new speech. In 
 the hopes and often passionate longings, the plead- 
 ings, the ideality of these working masses, dwells, if I 
 have seen and heard aright, the real world-spirit, 
 most vivid, vital, and enduring. Culture and wealth 
 seem inclined to pessimism and to obstruct and to 
 imprison thought and effort. From among the work- 
 men will come the builders of Utopia and prophets 
 of golden years. To them, with their free construc- 
 tive energy, we must look for a regenerated world, 
 and not to the conservatism of old privilege, which is 
 helpless and bewildered in the midst of an epoch of 
 ideas, of expansion, of essential democracy. England 
 has educated its aristocracy to its own harm if culture 
 remain but to neglect and obstruct. It is disastrous 
 that the conventional fashions of culture have sepa- 
 rated the mass of the people from the sympathies of a 
 manly recorder. Here is, for literature, a virgin field, 
 with inexhaustible resources of romantic and tragic 
 event, of pathos and humour, which rightly used 
 micht brins the hearts and minds of our toilinsr
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE. 5 
 
 millions into closer harmony with the soul of social 
 progress. (It would at least bring freshness to a 
 literature somewhat dulled by an abundance of writ- 
 ings of the quality of Lady Windermere's Fan.) One 
 understands why the ballads of Robin Hood and his 
 merry men (when was England " merrie " ?) lived on 
 among the people ; they stood for popular justice, for 
 the help of the people against the exactions of the 
 rich and noble-born. Under present conditions it 
 seems improbable that a William Langland, or, far 
 better still, a Robert Burns, may arise from the people 
 themselves ; such an one might be the solution of the 
 whole matter. With the exception of Whitman in 
 America, not a single modern English writer has made 
 a serious and comprehensive study of contemporary 
 life with the intent to voice the will of the people in 
 the manly spirit of Robert Burns, who still remains 
 the one representative British bard of democracy. 
 Rudyard Kipling in his Barrack Ballads has touched 
 once more the popular rhythm, depicting faithfully 
 the life of the soldier, its sentiment, pathos, and fun. 
 He has created practically a new figure in the litera- 
 ture of England, and these ballads of his will not be 
 counted among the least precious of our century's 
 poetry. 
 
 " We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no black- 
 guards too, 
 But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you." 
 
 Ballads : Tommy. 
 
 But the modern man, as he exists under these
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 British skies, toiling in mines and factories, tilling the 
 soil, and trading, trading, awaits a recorder. 
 
 "Good people," said the proud preacher of Kent, "things 
 will never be well in England so long as there be 
 villeins and gentlefolk'." 
 
 And there is another side to this matter. There is 
 almost a total lack in criticism, of a serious study of 
 literature from the standpoint of the people. There 
 are prophets among us, but forerunners and inter- 
 preters are lacking. While literature has not kept 
 pace with life, criticism has not kept pace with litera- 
 ture. To apply purely literary standards, suitable to 
 the art of the eighteenth century, to that which is 
 modern and essentially prophetical, is to discard much 
 as unworthy and unprofitable. We are pleased to 
 acknowledge the results of refined reslhetical criticism. 
 Take the writings of such a man as Walter Pater, 
 whose essays are models of artistic interpretation, and 
 are of value by reason of their line creative insight 
 and accurate beautiful speech, even apart from the 
 subject treated. The aesthetic critic, in his view, 
 (quoting bom the preface to the essays on the Re- 
 naissance,) "regards all the objects with which he has 
 to do, all works of art and the fairer forms of nature 
 and human life, as powers or forces producing pleas- 
 urable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar 
 and unique kind. This influence he feels and wishes 
 to explain, analysing it, and reducing it to its ele- 
 ments." This, from the point of view of beauty, is its 
 own justification, and all are willing to consent to its
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE. 
 
 application. But the canon of criticism which Mr. 
 Pater has chosen, following the leading of Goethe, 
 is " to see the object as in itself it really is." The 
 qualities, however, which serve to conceive and set 
 forth the elements of the beauty of the finer arts, 
 seem often unfitted to report the ruder beauty of 
 strenuous human prophecies of such as Whitman. 
 " No one," warns the prophet, " gets at my verses 
 who insists upon viewing them as a literary perform- 
 ance." Can not an equally sensitive mind be brought 
 to the consideration of men who have written for 
 other reasons than to produce pleasurable sensations, 
 who write instead " for the fibre of things, and for 
 inherent men and women." 
 
 " Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, 
 health, rudeness of body, withdrawness, 
 Gaiety, sun-tan, air-sweetness, such are some of the 
 words of poems." 
 
 Whitman : Song of the Open Road. 
 
 The higher literature is destined, under our demo- 
 cratic advance, to come to the judgment of the people. 
 And the people, I believe, will come to the masters 
 of song with serious minds, asking not for entertain- 
 ment, but for life, — 
 
 " What concerning life 
 
 Does this remembrancer set down." 
 
 Browning : Paracelsus. 
 
 Old formulas will have no power to claim and bind. 
 Their criticism will care supremely for the soul of 
 man.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " Art can no longer be separated from life ; 
 The old canons fail ; her tutelage completed she be- 
 comes equivalent to Nature, and hangs her curtains 
 continuous with the clouds and waterfalls ; 
 
 The form of man emerges in all objects, baffling the 
 old classification and definitions." 
 
 Carpenter : Towards Democracy. 
 
 The first result of democratic criticism will mani- 
 festly be an emphasis of the prophetical side of litera- 
 ture. William Morris has recorded his experience to 
 the effect that an audience of working-men thinks 
 more concretely than the rich. " I have been sur- 
 prised," he has said, " to find such a hearty feeling 
 towards John Ruskin among working-class audiences : 
 they can see the prophet in him rather than the 
 fantastic rhetorician as more superfine audiences do." 
 
 Myself have heard Walt Whitman quoted by work- 
 men in Victoria Park in London, passages respecting 
 the dignity of the common man, one a thought 
 
 " Of Equality — -as if it harm'd me, giving others the 
 same chances and rights as myself — as if it were 
 not indispensable to my own rights that others 
 possess the same." 
 
 Eloquent Tom Mann, at the recent University Ex- 
 tension Conference at Oxford, with a face aglow with 
 passion, spoke of the yearning of working-men, " not 
 for happiness," he said, but for higher life, the life 
 of culture, even of "sweetness and light," and among
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE. 
 
 the jewels of his speech he read as the inspiration of 
 his life, as the end for which himself and comrades 
 were striving in their Industrial Unions, as the creed, 
 indeed, of social progress, the words of Matthew Arnold 
 in Culture and Anarchy, words which sounded strangely 
 prophetical when read by one from the people : 
 
 " And because men are members of one great whole, 
 and the sympathy which is in human nature will 
 not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest, 
 or to have a perfect welfare independent of the rest, 
 the expansion of our humanity to suit the idea of 
 perfection which culture forms, must be a general 
 expansion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is 
 not possible while the individual remains isolated. 
 The individual is required, under pain of being 
 stunted and enfeebled in his own development if 
 he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his 
 march towards perfection, to be continually doing 
 all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of 
 the human stream sweeping thitherward." 
 
 It is easy to see what side the people will take in 
 this matter. 
 
 " I see brains and lips closed, tympans and temples un- 
 struck, 
 Until that comes which has the quality to strike and 
 to unclose." 
 
 Whitman : Autumn Bivulets. 
 
 To seek for prophecy in poetry is a protest against 
 the tendency to find in it mere beauty, rime, and 
 rhythm. "Poetry," said Poe, "has no dependence,
 
 10 DROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 unless incidentally, upon either duty or truth;" and 
 Poe's own poetry, such as Ulalume, is the absurd 
 reduction of this philosophy of beauty. Poetry, said 
 Mr. Arnold in protest, is essentially " a criticism of 
 life." And Ruskin, suiting the action to the word, 
 passed from his defence of the pre-Raphaelitcs to 
 vindicate all art; then to defend the truth of life itself 
 in all its various manifestations, arguing that "great 
 art is nothing else than the type of strong and noble 
 life." A poet, Shelley would say, unites with the 
 character of legislator that of the prophet ; " his 
 thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of 
 latest time." In the case of the greatest artist we are, 
 indeed, under a kind of necessity to ask what is their 
 criticism of life ; for the highest art is a more or less 
 definite expression of the ultimate personal criticism 
 of a great sympathising mind. 
 
 The judgment of philosophy is, of course, but 
 partial. Art, too, has its high claims, though " art 
 for art's sake" is a formula as vain as any other, if 
 uncompromisingly applied. But, certainly, among 
 those the key to whose interpretation is given by 
 a comprehensive survey of life itself, are numbered 
 the great artists of our century : Wagner, Ibsen, and 
 Tolstoi in Europe ; Browning, William Morris, Tenny- 
 son (In Memoriam), the pre-Raphaelite school of 
 painters in England ; in America, Walt Whitman. 
 
 In the case of William Morris, art and life, the poet 
 and socialist, meet in a remarkable relationship. Be- 
 tween the Earthly Paradise and New& from Novihere 
 there seems at first sight no intimate connection. The
 
 LITERATURE AND LTFE. I I 
 
 first is written, in exquisite melodious verse, for a 
 summer's day to be spent idly dreaming away from 
 the roar of the present. The latter work, a half-dream 
 likewise, but written in pure and simple prose, grasps 
 the concrete problems of the life of our day, and is 
 concerned with the future and an England re-created. 
 
 " Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in 
 the deeds of his hand." 
 
 Morris : Chants. 
 
 Really the later and the earlier works interpene- 
 trate. The poet's socialism grew out of his love of 
 art, which inflamed him with a desire to bring all men 
 within its domain, while the Earthly Paradise reveals 
 a man who chose to live before he wrote. He invites 
 us to 
 
 " Forget six centuries overhung with smoke, 
 Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, 
 Forget the spreading of the hideous town ; 
 Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, 
 And dream of London, small and white and clean, 
 The clear Thames bordered by its garden green." 
 
 And shows us Chaucer's London that he may recover 
 for us the conditions of life which made possible the 
 peculiar spring-tide quality of Chaucer's poems. And 
 before he wrote he repeated for himself the principles 
 of living, only from which pure art can spring. The 
 latter work announces the prophecy implied in the 
 former. 
 
 William Morris, especially in his combined claim 
 of art and labour, stands in the position of a prophet
 
 12 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 to his day and future days. For plainly the coming 
 struggle is to be waged for the freedom of industry. 
 Having practically achieved political and religious 
 liberty, the world is preparing for, yea, it is in the 
 midst of, its last and most momentous war — last, 
 because most difficult ; of greatest moment, because 
 it has to do with the emancipation of the very creative 
 genius of men. Industrial freedom — why are we loth 
 to agree ? — can never mean freedom from labour, but 
 in labour, just as political liberty means not freedom 
 from law, but under law, and religious liberty means 
 no: freedom from worship, but in worship. This then 
 is the prophecy : 
 
 " It is right and necessary that all men should have work 
 to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself 
 pleasant to do ; and which should be done under 
 such conditions as would make it neither over- 
 wearisome nor over-anxious." — Art and Socialism. 
 
 It is a canon of life as simple as plain, yet upon its 
 realisation depend the future of labour and the future 
 of art, and it is amazing that anyone, who has at 
 heart the welfare of literature, can be indifferent to it. 
 However, the aristoi of literary culture, now that 
 Morris has ceased to write rimes for their idle day, 
 pass him by without a word. A more generous 
 criticism in sympathy with the hopes, the passions, the 
 needs of our time may find room for A Dream of John 
 Ball and Art and Socialism. 
 
 Mr. Havelock Ellis, 1 in studying the new spirit as pre- 
 
 1 The New Spirit, by Havelock Ellis.
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE. 1 3 
 
 sented in modern literature, worked out for himself a 
 comparatively new method of literary criticism. He 
 brought to his task endowments of mind rare among 
 students of letters, for, in addition to critical abilities, he 
 has the scientific and social imagination. With his con- 
 clusions we may differ utterly. The volume in question 
 is interesting, for the purpose of this study, in the light 
 of its introduction. It is one of the first attempts to 
 review literature from the social point of view. The 
 results are noteworthy : a new light is thrown upon the 
 works of Heine ; the chapter on Whitman was the first 
 adequate criticism of the poet, especially in his 
 scientific aspect ; the treatment, of Ibsen and Tolstoi 
 is eminently just. 
 
 A volume following somewhat similar lines is the 
 one in the present series on Walt Whitman, by William 
 Clarke. A single chapter is given to the poet's art;, 
 the stress being laid upon his democracy and his 
 spiritual creed. 
 
 A very helpful work in the interpretation of Browning 
 is by Prof. Henry Jones, which has only reference to 
 the poet as a teacher of philosophy. Others have dis- 
 cussed the science of Browning and his theology. 
 
 That such studies are possible shows that we are to- 
 day confronted by new questions in art, questions 
 social, religious, philosophic, human. Verily 
 
 " Who is a poet [or critic] needs must apprehend 
 
 Alike both speech and thoughts which prompt to speak." 
 Browning : Bed Cotton Night-Carp Country.
 
 II. -DEMOCRACY. 
 
 Democracy is a word both of material and spiritual 
 significance. It is employed here in its wider inclusive 
 sense that there may attach to it the real meaning 
 which is contained in the somewhat conventional 
 phrase, We, the People. 
 
 Liberty, whether considered in the light of religious, 
 political, or industrial history, has final reference to the 
 soul of man. Through religions, politics, industries, 
 we advance in ways of practical self-realisation. The 
 law of expression is ever from the ideal to the real. 
 For the universe is one of thought and conscience, and 
 the problem for the soul is the projection of its own 
 spiritual inner freedom into the objective external 
 world. 
 
 "Yes! I see now — God is the Perfect Poet 
 Who in creation acts his own conceptions. 
 Shall man refuse to be aught less than God ?" 
 Aprille, in Paracelsus. 
 
 Institutions, laws, all visible forms, are therefore ever 
 shaped anew in response to the invisible creative 
 thought. " Freedom," Lowell says, '• is re-created 
 year by jear in hearts wide open on the Godward 
 side." 
 
 Democracy, considered as a form of government, is 
 M
 
 DEMOCRACY. 1 5 
 
 a result in the order of time of the evolution of the in- 
 telligence of men and of their power of associative 
 expression. In other words, it is the outcome, even 
 from an institutional point of view, of the development 
 of man's consciousness of himself. But government is 
 but a single phase of democracy. The soul is below 
 all. 
 
 "All religion, all solid things, arts, governments — all that 
 was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, 
 falls into niches and corners before the procession 
 of souls along the grand roads of the universe." 
 Whitman : Song of the Open Ruad. 
 
 " Underneath all now comes this word [Democracy] 
 
 turning the edges of the other words where they 
 
 meet it. 
 Politics, art, science, commerce, religion, customs and 
 
 methods of daily life, the very outer shows and 
 
 semblances, ordinary objects — 
 The rose in the garden, the axe hanging behind the 
 
 door in the outhouse — 
 Their meaning must now all be absorbed and recast in 
 
 this word, or else fall off like dry husks before its 
 
 disclosure." 
 
 Carpenter : Towards Democracy. 
 
 Properly, democracy is not a form of government at 
 all ; not a government by the one, or by the few, or 
 by the many. It is self-government or the absolute 
 and free control of one's self. Beneath institutions is 
 the one human personality. The social problem is 
 therefore twofold, the development and federation of
 
 1 6 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 sovereign individuals. Federation, as an institutional 
 government, is, however, but the working principle of 
 self-rule. In a democracy the State and society be- 
 come distinct, the State being but a mechanism, while 
 society is the living organic unity, whose bond of union 
 must be internal and spiritual and between individuals. 
 Federation, in other words, is a statement in political 
 terms of the idea of an organic society. Men are not 
 free because they have erected a republic; but a re- 
 public follows when men become first free. Who 
 honours the union, laws, officers he has helped to create, 
 really honours himself and the society of which he is a 
 part. 
 
 Democracy then, on the one hand, is the introduc- 
 tion in a fuller form than hitherto of personal responsi- 
 bility to one's own nature. It is opportunity for the 
 development of personality. Bonds of prejudice, con- 
 ventions, whatever tends to repress, are to be taken 
 away. It is emancipation. It is chance and room to 
 live. It is character and essential life. 
 
 Sometimes it is asserted by those whose insight can 
 be but superficial, that, in a democratic nation, men 
 are reduced to a commonplace level. But monarchies 
 do that; the German drill-sergeant does that. The 
 equality of democracy is one of human rights and of 
 opportunity to achieve inequality. Democracy is the 
 sphere of struggle ; it invites difference and demands 
 strife. Why am I a Liberal ? 
 
 " W T hy ? because all I haply can and do, 
 All that I am now, all I hope to be —
 
 DEMOCRACY. 1 7 
 
 Whence comes it, save from fortune setting free 
 Body and soul the purpose to pursue, 
 God traced for both." 
 
 The cardinal, political doctrine which writers like 
 Browning favour is the removal of every barrier which 
 might check the liberty of individual development. 
 
 On the other hand, the problem of federation is in 
 like manner solved by self-control. For when the 
 external bonds of society cease to have meaning, unity 
 must be won in its strongest citadel by spiritual means. 
 Were you looking to be held together by agreements, 
 a constitution ? A constitution by itself is a dead 
 thing. " Despotism/' says De Tocqueville, " may 
 govern without Faith, but liberty cannot." Spiritual 
 relationship, consciously existing between man and 
 man is the one and only thing which makes for unity. 
 
 "These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops 
 of iron, 
 I, ecstatic, O partners ! O lands ! with the love of lovers 
 tie you." 
 
 Whitman : Calamus. 
 
 The purpose of democracy is, as Whitman states, — 
 
 " To illustrate the doctrine that man, properly trained in 
 sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a 
 law and series of laws unto himself, surrounding 
 and providing for not only his own personal control, 
 but all his relations to other individuals and to the 
 State. 
 
 Democratic Vistas. 
 B
 
 1 8 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 The truest government begins and ends with the 
 individual. 
 
 Carlyle, we know, defined liberty in other terms : 
 
 "Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, 
 consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find 
 out, the right path, and to walk thereon. ... If 
 thou do know better than I what is good and right, 
 I conjure thee, in the name of God, force me to do 
 it ; were it by never such brass collars, whips, and 
 hand-cuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices ! " 
 
 Democracy, he said, meant despair of finding heroes 
 to govern us. But such is the liberty of the Saturni- 
 ans; the definition of democracy is insulting to a man. 
 Since, however, Carlyle's dictum is regarded by many 
 as the last word upon the subject, it will be well to 
 understand what is the basis for such reasoning. 
 
 We yield all due reverence to Carlyle. His influence 
 has been creative and inspiring. To be imbued with 
 his teaching is to have a nobler view of human life. 
 He has stood for the spiritual side of the universe : 
 
 "The Invisible world is near us, or rather it is here, in us 
 and about us ; were the fleshly coil removed from 
 our soul, the glories of the Unseen were even now 
 around us, as the ancients fabled of the spheral 
 music." 
 
 Carlyle believed in the spiritual world, in the unity of 
 nature, in the organic compact of society, the brother- 
 hood of man. To him as to no other we owe con- 
 ceptions of private and social duty. Thus far he is at 
 one with the foremost democrats, among whom I
 
 DEMOCRACY. 1 9 
 
 number Browning and Whitman, representing with 
 them the passage from an old creed to a new faith. 
 But, while believing in God, he was an infidel as to 
 man ; here he is at variance. 
 
 In former philosophies man and God had fallen 
 asunder. For the Puritan there was no place for man. 
 In the philosophy of the corrupt court of Charles the 
 Second, there was no room for God. The reconcilia- 
 tion came in the guise of an idealistic philosophy, 
 beginning with German Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, who 
 revealed the universal element in the life of man and 
 gave new dignity to the individual by reason of his 
 relations to the universal. 
 
 The movement was of immense significance both to 
 art and to life, and its effects will continue to be felt 
 for many generations. On the side of life the move- 
 ment was both individualistic and socialistic. The 
 individual was seen to be neither the master nor the 
 slave of the universe, but destined to live in perfect 
 freedom under social law. The individual derived his 
 life from the race, and the race in turn lived in the 
 individual. Each is possible only through the other ; 
 neither is complete without the other. Society was 
 thus seen to be an organism deriving its health from 
 that of each member in the system. Each member 
 again cannot live solely unto himself, but finds his 
 highest realisation in the life of the race. 
 
 Carlyle was among the first to bring into England 
 the poetic idealism of German philosophy and litera- 
 ture. He had worked his way through the despair 
 which followed upon the disruption of the old system,
 
 20 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 and stood for the organic unity of society. And he 
 saw, with his clear insight, the tremendous responsi- 
 bility thrown upon men. We are all bound together. 
 We rise or fall together. a It is a mathematical fact," 
 Carlyle said, " that the casting of this pebble from my 
 hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe." If 
 the spiritual life of one be lessened, the life of all is 
 affected. Either we elevate the race — it is a struggle 
 of life or death — or be degraded with the lowest. 
 The present social duty of each is to share with the 
 weakest the wealth, the culture, the opportunity, the 
 civilisation which we have inherited or acquired. We 
 are what we are by virtue of the humanity within us, 
 however poor, weak, perverted that may be. There 
 was no doubt in Carlyle's mind but that each was his 
 brothel's keeper. And his intense realisation of this 
 fact became the reason for his despair : " Ye are my 
 brethren, hence my rage and sorrow." For the duty 
 laid upon men was greater than they could bear. He 
 saw them as fools walking. The people were but 
 shooting the " Niagara " of social disaster. Seeing 
 clearly his own duty, he strove alone, like Elijah, un- 
 mindful of the seven thousand men who had not 
 bowed down to Baal. Like Julian, in Ibsen's drama, 
 he felt the godhead in himself, and, like him, was to 
 be vanquished by the Galilean who could see the god- 
 head in others. 
 
 Carlyle's special mission in England was to declare 
 the whole duty of man. But consider his conception 
 of duty. Duty was a necessity imposed on man by 
 an external infinite power. The law was given as on
 
 DEMOCRACY. 21 
 
 stone tablets, with an awful " Thou shalt," and " Thou 
 shalt not." Man was a soldier, alien to the field and 
 cause. Obedience was the only virtue. He who 
 gave the law and command was far removed in the 
 heavens, an eternal Judge. God was manifest to man ; 
 thus far the reconciliation had been wrought. Man, 
 therefore, was spirit. But within man there was no- 
 thing to correspond to the divinity without. He was 
 a wanderer, a blind giant, capable of spiritual yearn- 
 ings, but incapable of receiving satisfaction. An in- 
 finite burden was laid upon a finite being, andCarlyle, 
 having never gained the standpoint of Browning, that 
 
 " The truth in God's breast 
 
 Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed," 
 
 could only cry out, in the words of Caponsacchi, — 
 
 '•' O great, just, good God ! Miserable me !" 
 
 But whence, Carlyle, came the sorrow and the con- 
 demnation ? Pessimism itself is a witness of the 
 presence of ideality. The very cry is proof of the 
 power to rise, and a promise of man's worth and 
 dignity. The eye can see but what the heart prompts. 
 To know the need of reform, to have aspirations and 
 faiths, is far on the road to attainment. For man is 
 the 
 
 " Facet and reflection of God." 
 
 On the one hand, Carlyle never fully conceived the 
 idea of the solidarity of human life. His error is well 
 illustrated by his attitude towards the American Civil
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 War. He had not realised the power of social forces, 
 working for the correction of evil, by the action and 
 reaction of individuals in a social union : 
 
 " How society waits unform'd, and is for a while between 
 things ended and things begun." 
 
 Whitman: Songs of Parting. 
 
 And, on the other hand, he ignored the only solution 
 which can be had. Liberty is obedience, it is true, 
 but to that law which has its seat in the human con- 
 science. Liberty has value only as the threshold of a 
 willing service. Only by transference of the outer law 
 to the inner motive can duty become at all imperative. 
 
 " Into another state, under new rule 
 
 I knew myself was passing swift and sure. . . . 
 Sirs, I obeyed. Obedience was too strange, to dare 
 
 disobey 
 The first authoritative word. 'Twas God's." 
 
 CAPONSACCHI, in Ring and the Book. 
 
 Carlyle, failing in the complete synthesis, ended in 
 despair and pessimism. The complete reconciliation 
 has been made by Browning and Whitman, who 
 identify the inner and outer law, who find 
 
 " All's love, yet all's law." 
 
 "The whole universe," argues Whitman, "is ab- 
 solute Law. Freedom only opens entire activity and 
 license under the law. . . . We escape by a paradox
 
 DEMOCRACY. 23 
 
 into free will. We only attain to freedom by a know- 
 ledge of and implicit obedience to Law. Great is the 
 Will — the free Soul of man. Only obeying the laws 
 can attain freedom. The highest law is the Law of 
 Liberty — the fusion and combination of the conscious 
 will, with the universal eternal unconscious ones 
 which run through all Time, pervade history, prove 
 immortality, give moral purpose to the entire objective 
 world, and the last dignity to human life." 
 
 " For him I sing. 
 
 I raise the present on the past, 
 
 (As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on 
 
 the past,) 
 With time and space I him dilate and fuse the im- 
 mortal laws, 
 To make himself by them the law unto himself." 
 
 Whitman : Inscriptions. 
 
 Finally, the end and purpose of democracy is de- 
 clared by Paracelsus. 
 
 " Progress is 
 The law of life, man is not man as yet. 
 Nor shall I deem his object served, his end 
 Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth, 
 While only here and there a star dispels 
 The darkness, here and there a towering mind 
 O'erlooks its prostrate fellows : when the host 
 Is out at once to the despair of niyht, 
 When all mankind alike is perfected, 
 Equal in full-blown powers — then, not till then, 
 I say, begins man's general infancy." 
 
 Browning : Paracelsus.
 
 III.-DBMOCRACY IN AMERICA. 
 
 We must look, I think, to the United States of 
 America for the most consistent spiritual and struc- 
 tural expression of democratic ideas. That the United 
 States has a peculiar significance in history the whole 
 course of world-events goes to show. We believe the 
 American system of government to be a product of 
 historical evolution, that its structure was the purport 
 of all the past, that its completion is the aim of the 
 future. 
 
 " Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared, 
 I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and 
 
 ideal, 
 Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true 
 
 America, heir of the past so grand, 
 To build a grander future." 
 
 Whitman : Song of the open land. 
 
 " A newer garden of Creation, no primal solitude — 
 Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and 
 
 farms, 
 With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one, 
 By all the world contributed— Freedom's and Law's and 
 
 Thrift's society, 
 The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of Time's, 
 To justify the past." 
 
 Whitman : Autumn Rivulets. 
 24
 
 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. 25 
 
 Federal union is the last and highest attainment of 
 historical progress, last in the order of time, and 
 highest, since requiring in the sovereignties comprising 
 it the highest degree of political morality and of 
 social ideality. Previous to the United States there 
 existed but three examples of federated peoples, the 
 ancient Acheean League, the Swiss Republic, and the 
 United Netherlands, none of which served as a com- 
 plete guide to Hamilton and his coadjutors in their 
 task as architects of the Union. The problem before 
 them was the completer fusion of sovereignties. 1 
 They were to compromise two equally sacred rights, 
 that of the one and of the many. 
 
 The unit of the American society is the individual. 
 The right of self-government was the new principle en- 
 tering into the constitution of nations with the spread of 
 Christianity. The pre-Christian league had little or no- 
 thing analagous to the Christian State. Wherever the 
 Protestant and Puritan pilgrim has gone he has affirmed, 
 in political terms, the ideal truth of Christianity, the 
 self-sovereignty of man. The American State starts 
 with the individual as a political unit, acknowledges 
 his right to self-rule, groups him for purposes of 
 mutual helpfulness in ever wider constituencies, in the 
 ascending series of town, county, State, and nation, 
 each with delegated powers from the central source, 
 " We, the People." In spite of the corruptions which 
 have gathered round it, the practical basis of the 
 
 1 A problem not solved by Switzerland until the model 
 constitution of 1874. Previous to this, Swiss democracy 
 had been much allied with the spirit of feudal times.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 American nation is the individual conscience. That 
 which was external has become internal. And it is 
 at this point that European misjudgment arises. 
 " Burn your books," warned De Tocqueville, for de- 
 mocracy requires new standpoints. The American 
 compact is altogether with individuals. Did you 
 think that the States are bound together by a con- 
 stitution ? Did you think that the source of supreme 
 authority or law resided at Washington, or in the 
 legislatures of any one of the States? Did you think 
 that the noisy brood of orators and professional poli- 
 ticians and wire-pullers constituted the government of 
 the States ? But 
 
 " I see this day the People beginning their landmarks ; 
 Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more 
 like a God." 
 
 Whitman : Songs of Parting. 
 
 Beneath every external lies concealed, but alert and 
 ever secure, the great national will, the source of all 
 activity, the animus of all liberty. Mr. Bryce well 
 warns the readers of the American Commonwealth to 
 adjust their judgments in harmony with this hidden 
 fact : " What he [the European] probably fails to do is 
 to realise the existence in the American people of a 
 reserve force and patriotism more than sufficient to 
 sweep away all the evils which are now tolerated, and 
 to make the politics of the country worthy of its 
 material grandeur and of the private virtues of its in- 
 habitants. America excites an admiration which must 
 be felt upon the spot to be understood." " Greatness," 
 agrees Matthew Arnold, "is a spiritual condition
 
 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. 2"J 
 
 worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration." The 
 real point at issue is then the people themselves. 
 
 "A great city is that which has the greatest men and 
 women ; 
 If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in 
 the whole world." 
 
 Whitman : Song of the Open Road. 
 
 Among the people democratic justification is to be 
 found. Statistics of corn and cotton, iron and gold, 
 transactions in real estate, numbers of population, 
 tables of values and wages — these in no way indicate 
 the true wealth of a country. Formation of character 
 — I am repeating no child's homily, but truest 
 economic doctrine — is of real concern. Now 
 character is not reported in newspapers, it is not trans- 
 latable for foreign readers in books, it is hidden in 
 homes and daily affairs, is seen in the face and 
 manner, and must be gathered, as Mr. Bryce suggests, 
 upon the spot. That America has greatness of 
 character is not for me to affirm, but it will be well if 
 we understand that in its character its greatness is to 
 be found. That the tendency of democracy is to re- 
 duce men to levels and commonplaces I feel free to 
 deny. Monarchy builds a pyramid of rank, but levels 
 character; democracy levels rank, but builds a 
 pyramid of character. In the gallery of portraits of 
 great men at Versailles, the most striking face — 
 another bears witness — is that of Daniel Webster. In 
 any gallery of monarchs, statesmen, orators, the face of 
 Lincoln would attract attention for its strength, its faith, 
 its wisdom, its simplicity. A very common face, re-
 
 2S DROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 suiting no doubt from the fusion in America of the 
 races from the land of the vine and the land of snows, 
 is one marked by ideality and practical constructive 
 energy ; it is common, but not commonplace. 
 
 Matthew Arnold once said that America had solved 
 the political and social problems, but not the human pro- 
 blem. What is the human problem ? Does art or beauty 
 solve the human problem? Wagner, in answer, wrote to 
 his friend, "I cannot help thinking that if we had real 
 life we should need no art. Art begins just there where 
 real life ends, — when there is nothing more before us ; 
 then we cry out to art, ' I wish ! ' I cannot conceive 
 how a truly happy man can ever think of art." Who 
 can doubt that Wagner tells the secret of much of old 
 world culture ? For art is often the witness of the soul's 
 yearning to escape from its prison house. If the 
 western world has not highest art, it may yet have 
 highest life. 
 
 " Have you reckon'd that the landscape took substance 
 and form that it might be painted in a picture? " 
 Whitman : A Sony for Occupations. 
 
 " Mightier than Egypt's tombs, 
 
 Fairer than Grecia's, Roma's temples, 
 Prouder than Milan's statued, spired cathedral, 
 More picturesque than Rhenish castled^eep, 
 We plan even now to raise, beyond them all 
 Thy great cathedral sacred industry, no tomb, 
 A keep for life for practical invention.'' 
 
 WHITMAN : Song of the Exposition. 
 
 The problem for America is the development of a 
 grander, larger, more generous humanity combined
 
 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. 29 
 
 vital democratic forms. The elements of new-world 
 sentiment, as analysed for the students of Ann Arbor 
 by Ex-President Cleveland, are these : 
 
 *' A reverent belief in God, a sincere recognition of the 
 value and power of moral principle and those 
 qualities of heart which make a noble manhood, 
 devotion to unreserved patriotism, love for man's 
 equality, unquestionable truth in popular rule, the 
 exaction of civic virtue and honesty, faith in the 
 saving quality of universal education, protection of 
 a free and unperverted expression of the popular 
 will, and an insistence upon a strict accountability 
 of public officers as servants of the people." 
 
 The common charge brought against the western 
 civilisation is that it is materialistic. If it be largely 
 true, the days of democracy (which is the rule of 
 spirit) are numbered. But the charge is falsified by 
 the witness of the presence of an equal and surpassing 
 spirituality which moulds the material to its own 
 ends. 
 
 Since the discovery of the New World until now, 
 the people have been engaged in the struggle with 
 Nature for a home. But the necessities of a mater- 
 ialistic strife unceasing have developed in the human 
 participant an energy, a persistency, a practical in- 
 genuity, a power of moulding matter to finer ends, of 
 turning rudeness to beautiful uses — in short, of spiritu- 
 alising material things, to a degree unparalleled in the 
 history of the past. Does the clay mould the potter ? 
 Does the hand which fashions a thought in marble 
 partake of the nature of matter or of mind? The
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 astonishing uplift of the stone spire on the cathedral 
 at Salisbury, which seems to crown the victory of the 
 human spirit, is really not more indicative of the con- 
 quest of matter by the spirit of man than are the 
 engines and instruments of commerce and industry, 
 or even the presence of a human home and garden in 
 the midst of what was once a waste. 1 
 
 If I were called upon to search among poetic 
 creations for an illustration of this aspect of American 
 civilisation, I should enter not the dreamland of 
 Keats, not the freedom-land of Shelley, but the real- 
 ideal-land of Browning, and should name as the latter 
 poet's crowning work, The Ring and the Booh, whose 
 few crude facts are permeated by the poet-thought 
 and made to live again, showing forth the beauty of 
 life and the meaning of life in forms of completest 
 art. 
 
 It is such a materialism and such a spirituality that 
 is illustrated by the present day. 
 
 On the side of the past, American history is replete 
 with incidents of spiritual significance. The con- 
 tinent was discovered by faith and settled in hope. 
 Two wars have been waged, neither of them for 
 material gain ; one for independence and one for 
 union, ideas only yet furiously fought for. 
 
 The tendency of the present is to build better in 
 view of the future. Critics like Renan, who contrast 
 
 1 The beautiful winged electric car which passes my 
 door in Minneapolis like a thing bewitched, is a perpetual 
 protest against materialistic ideas and the crowning wit- 
 ness to a people's ideal thought.
 
 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. 3 1 
 
 the art and the historic past of an Italian city with 
 the apparent commercialism of a vvork-a-day modern 
 world, forget that America is taking form according to 
 an ideal future whose vistas open endlessly. Italy 
 has a glorious past ; its work is done. America has a 
 glorious future ; it seeks a perfection not yet realised, 
 a completeness which only the future can contain. 
 The unperformed advances — 
 
 " Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky." 
 
 Now materialism may take many forms : in art it 
 may be manifested in uncreative conventionality ; 
 in religion as a worship of idols and service of out- 
 ward forms ; in the State as a trust in the machinery 
 of government to accomplish what only a people's 
 active will can do ; in education as an emphasis of the 
 facts of knowledge as contrasted with the spirit of 
 wisdom. In society at large materialism may be 
 shown in a blind faith in creed or organisation, in 
 observance of ceremonies from which the spirit has 
 departed, in obstruction to reform, in actual inability 
 to change, in dullness to beauty or truth, in general 
 Philistinism, even in a worship of the past, even in an 
 idolatry of freedom — in any idolatry of means as ends. 
 In all these ways it may be that American society is 
 less materialised than that of Europe. America is 
 less conventional and more volatile. This charac- 
 teristic has often been commented upon, but it is 
 seldom noted that the ability to change springs from 
 a desire for improvement. Nothing is held to be so 
 complete that it cannot be made better. The past is
 
 32 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 great, but the future is great also ; the face is for- 
 ward, not backward. Institutions either of govern- 
 ment, or of religion, or of education, easily take new 
 forms. Experiments are readily set in operation 
 without the obstruction of conservative pessimism. 
 Method succeeds to method. .Execution is equal to 
 ideality. It is the spirit of man informing the material, 
 creating fluid structures in which it may remain for 
 the moment, emerging again when the form ceases to 
 give shelter. It takes soul to move mass. America 
 has, I believe, one great and abiding passion, — to make 
 the reason, the soul of man, and the will of God to 
 prevail. Such a statement is perhaps not subject to 
 proof, but is arrived at by a discerning spirit. 
 
 " Of these years I sing, 
 
 How they pass and have pass'd through convuls'd pains, 
 as through parturitions, 
 
 How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the pro- 
 mise, the sure fulfilment, the absolute success, 
 despite of people — illustrates evil as well as 
 good, 
 
 The vehement struggle so fierce for unity in one's self; 
 
 How many hold despairingly yet to the models de- 
 parted, caste, myths, obedience, compulsion, 
 and to infidelity ; 
 
 How few see the arrived models, the athletes, the 
 Western States, or see freedom or spirituality, 
 or hold any faith in results." 
 
 Whitman: Songs of Parting. 
 
 Have you marked the dominant, ever dominant note 
 of hope of American speakers and writers ? Have
 
 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. 33 
 
 you read the message of Whitman in its entirety ? 
 At this moment the people are confronted by as 
 momentous a question as has come to any nation, 
 a question which is resolving itself into one of indus- 
 trial war. But light-hearted, nothing daunted 
 
 " We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the 
 lesson, 
 
 Pioneers ! O pioneers ! "
 
 IV.-DEMOCRATIC TYPES. 
 
 There have been two great crises of democracy in 
 the New World, the war for independence and the 
 war for union. The first event was fought for separ- 
 ation and individual life. Of this principle Emerson 
 and Thoreau became the literary exponents. Emer- 
 son is, at once, the truest and sweetest voice of the 
 Puritanism which founded the nation and declared 
 for its independence. He was the first emancipator. 
 In his quiet, sober way he annulled the whole of 
 tradition. He was, in an especial manner, the guar- 
 dian of thought. In 1832, when the slavery agitation 
 was at its height, he wrote in his journal : " I have 
 quite other slaves to free than those negroes — to wit, 
 imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man — 
 far retired in the heaven of invention, and which, 
 important to the republic of man, have no watchman, 
 or lover, or defender, but I." And probably his 
 expansive influence has been chiefly felt by scholars. 
 His oration on The American Scholar, delivered in 1837, 
 was called by Holmes, The Intellectual Declaration of 
 Independence, and Lowell says to the same effect : 
 " The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically, 
 and the Revolution politically, independent, but we 
 were still socially and intellectually moored to 
 English thought till Emerson cut the cable and gave
 
 DEMOCRATIC TYPES. 35 
 
 us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue 
 water." While a mystic, and teaching the principle 
 of spiritual union, yet Emerson's chief stress lay upon 
 the individual. He was, primarily, a lover of ideas, 
 and was wanting in wide popular sympathies. 
 
 Thoreau was similarly an uncompromising indi- 
 vidualist. It was on July 4th, the American Day 
 of Independence, that he took up his residence in his 
 self-constituted Arcadia in Walden Woods. All his 
 social doctrines lead finally to this end, that the indi- 
 vidual must be given complete freedom for the 
 development of character along the lines of natural 
 qualities. Failure to follow the ideal was for him 
 unpardonable sin. 
 
 " Only so far as individual progress takes place will the 
 real progress of the race follow, and those persons 
 contribute most to this real progress who, stepping 
 aside from the ordinary routine, give us by their 
 lives and thoughts a new sense of the reality of 
 what is best of the ideal towards which all civil- 
 isation must aim. 3 ' 
 
 Journal, 
 
 The socialism of men seemed " their most contempt- 
 ible and discouraging aspect." " In this matter of 
 reforming the world we have little faith in corpora- 
 tions." With the social conditions then present, 
 Thoreau was unquestionably right. The time was not 
 ripe for the realisation of The People. Collective 
 action, such as the Brook Farm experiment, could 
 but end in failure. "As for these communities," said 
 Thoreau, "I think I had rather keep bachelor's hall
 
 $6 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 in hell than go to board in heaven." The first stress 
 of the transcendental philosophy was thus upon the 
 individual — What does the world mean to me? And 
 to the individual both Emerson and Thoreau preached 
 the worth of simplicity and sincerity. 
 
 The Civil War was a note of unity ; it was not 
 merely a war, it was a revolution. 
 
 " Thunder on ! Strike on, Democracy ! Strike with 
 vengeful stroke ; 
 And do you rise higher than ever yet, O days, O 
 cities ! " 
 
 Never have the results of a war so justified war. 
 The States, moving en masse of their own choice and 
 fighting for their own idea, understood for the first 
 time the meaning of the people. The war resulted in 
 national fusion and in the creation of a distinctively 
 American and democratic spirit, which shall last " for 
 thrice a thousand years," The people gained a 
 spiritual sense, gained character, solidarity, winning 
 also emotions, learning to call men brothers. Never 
 has reconciliation — " word over all, beautiful as the 
 sky" — followed so closely on strife. The last event 
 of the war, the forgiveness of the armies, was one of 
 the sublimest acts in history. Emerging from civil 
 strife, tried so as by fire, the United States entered 
 upon their full democratic career. 
 
 Lincoln, proved by that struggle, is revered as the 
 very embodiment of the democratic faith. 
 
 " The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.'' 
 WHITMAN : Burial Hymn.
 
 DEMOCRATIC TYPES. 37 
 
 " The kindly, earnest, brave foreseeing man, 
 Sagacious, patient, dreading praise not blame, 
 New birth of our new soil, the first American." 
 
 Lowell : Commemoration Ode. 
 
 Happily, Lincoln's name is enshrined in the two 
 noblest of songs, which are the chief thing the New 
 World has done thus far in poetical creation, Lowell's 
 Commemoration Ode, and Whitman's Burial Hymn. 
 Lowell and Whitman sound the new note of brother- 
 hood and love. 
 
 Lowell, especially the younger Lowell of the Vision 
 of Sir Launfal and author of the Biglow Pai^ers, is 
 pre-eminently the voice of the Christian democracy, 
 one like his own Prometheus — 
 
 " A great voice 
 Heard in the breathless pauses of the fight 
 By truth and freedom ever waged with wrong, 
 Clear as a silver trumpet, to awake 
 Far echoes that from age to age live on 
 In kindred spirits." 
 
 As deeply Puritan as Emerson, with as deep a faith in 
 the sacred nature of the individual, Lowell is more 
 democratic in the proclamation of the brotherhood of 
 man, more Christ-like in his sympathies for every 
 weak and outcast one. The Christ-nature has never 
 been interpreted by poetic insight in truer terms of 
 human life. One gains from Lowell the sense of that 
 essential Christianity which is the foundation of moral 
 America, which manifests itself in emphasis alike of 
 the sanctity of the individual as a being of action and
 
 38 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 thought, and of the social principle of sonship which 
 makes for social union. Lowell with his spiritual 
 visions is the national seer. It is from no lack of 
 appreciation that another is chosen in this study to 
 speak in his stead. Lowell is secure of a crown of 
 flowers perennially. 
 
 The world is slow in accepting the significance of 
 Whitman. Recognition has come more frankly — by 
 a strange irony — from England than from his own 
 well-loved land. Now that his message is finished, we 
 may make a more just estimate than hitherto. I will 
 state my own faith freely. When first I heard him 
 speak — " Camerado " was the word he used — 
 
 " Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken.' 5 
 
 I believe that his writings complete are the most not- 
 able utterance in the literature of America. 
 
 In his own person and poems Whitman is the com- 
 pletest embodiment of the democratic sentiment that 
 the Christian world has produced. 1 A greater, all- 
 
 1 But compare Sidney Lanier, The English Novel, page 
 45: "The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, 
 instead of being a true democrat, is simply the most in- 
 corrigible of aristocrats masquing in a peasant's costume." 
 Page 60 : "I complain of Whitman's democracy that it 
 has no provision for sick, or small, or puny, or plain- 
 featured, or hump-backed, or any deformed people, and 
 that his democracy is really the worst kind of aristo- 
 cracy, being an aristocracy of nature's favourites in the 
 matter of muscle." Yet says Whitman, " I bestow upon
 
 DEMOCRATIC TYPES. 39 
 
 comprehending, all-sympathising soul has not lived 
 upon the earth — you who like him not, have you 
 learned his lesson complete? Thoreau saw something 
 almost supernatural about the man. As a guide and 
 inspirer to men he has indeed been placed by the side 
 of Jesus of Nazareth. In the book in which the tribute 
 is paid, Towards Democracy, the comparison does not 
 seem irreverent. But it is sufficient to say that his 
 message is the expression of his deepest passion, and 
 that passion is, beyond cavil, the choicest fruit of the 
 Western World thus far. 1 
 
 " I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle 
 the New World, 
 And to define America, her athletic democracy, 
 Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in 
 them what you wanted." 
 
 Whitman : Inscriptions. 
 
 any man or woman the entrance to all the gifts of the 
 universe," and his invitation extends to every man and 
 woman, poor, or weak, or heavy-laden. The ideal, the 
 perfection of life, is a sound mind in a sound body. " I 
 show that size is only development." Would Mr. Lanier 
 present deformity as an end to be striven for? 
 
 1 Whittier is a sweet name truly, and together with 
 Bryant and Longfellow and Hawthorne, is as characteristic 
 of a phase of American life as are Lowell and Whitman. 
 Whittier is the soul of moral New England (whence 
 pilgrims came for conscience' sake). Lowell is of national, 
 Whitman of world-wide significance.
 
 V. -WHITMAN. 
 
 Whitman's significance is chiefly prophetical. He 
 has seen more clearly than others the necessity of 
 ideals to direct the building of America, and he has 
 gone far on before singing constructively the idea of 
 democracy ; in conclusion, he announces what comes 
 after him. But he is by no means unrelated to the 
 past. In his poems are embodied the distinctively 
 human and therefore primal experiences of the race. 
 There is in English one body of writings with whose 
 form and spirit Leaves of Grass quite directly coheres, 
 the works of William Blake, the passionate poet of 
 freedom. 
 
 " Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field, 
 Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the 
 
 bright air, 
 Let the enshrined soul shut up in darkness and in 
 
 sighing, 
 Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years, 
 Rise and look out ! his chains are loose ! his dungeon 
 doors are open." 
 
 Blake : Prophecy on America. 
 
 Mr. Swinburne, in his Essay on Blake, remarks that 
 there are so many points of contact between the two 
 40
 
 WHITMAN. 41 
 
 poets as to afford some ground of reason to those who 
 preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits. 
 
 " To each, all sides and shapes of life are alike acceptable 
 or endurable. From the fresh, free ground of 
 either workman nothing is excluded that is not 
 exclusive. The words of either strike deep, and 
 run wide and soar high. They are both full of 
 faith and passion. . . . Both are spiritual, and both 
 democratic ; both by their works recall . . . the 
 fragments vouchsafed to us of the Pantheistic 
 poetry of the East. Their casual audacities of 
 expression or speculation are in effect well nigh 
 identical. Their outlooks and theories are evidently 
 the same on all points of intellectual and social 
 life.' 5 
 
 Essay on Blake, p. 301. 
 
 These words were written in 1866, and have never 
 been fully gainsaid. They are chiefly true with refer- 
 ence to the poets' mystical creed. Blake was one of 
 the first disciples of that principle of mysticism, of the 
 essential unity of the universe, which became later the 
 inspiration of Emerson, Browning, and Whitman. 
 Blake sought in his best work to marry the reason, 
 the spirit, the soul, which he called heaven, and the 
 energy, the material, the body, which he called hell. 
 And Whitman announces a similar purpose in Song 
 of Myself : 
 
 " The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of 
 hell are with me, 
 The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I 
 translate into a new tongue."
 
 42 browning and whitman. 
 
 Blake, it is true, was not quite sane — how could he 
 be ? A spirit once more with faiths and vision, baffled, 
 shut up in the prison-house of an unsympathetic age. 
 Whitman is always sane, though there are not lacking 
 those who would class him also among the egotists of 
 insane genius ! * He touches life with a wider range 
 of thoughts and sympathies than was possible for 
 Blake. His poems, in short, are wrought in direct 
 response to his own century, a product of the world's 
 evolution, and follow, with Browning's, in literary order 
 as naturally as the Scriptural succession : " Abraham 
 begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob begat 
 Judas and his brethren." 
 
 The primary and determining quality of Whitman's 
 nature is emotional and religious. His thoughts tend 
 naturally to rapturous utterance. Everything is re- 
 garded with wonder, with reverence, and with love. 
 Creeds and schools are held in abeyance. In the dis- 
 pute about God he is silent. Still his prayer is that of 
 Columbus upon the sands : 
 
 " My hands, my limbs grow nerveless, 
 My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd, 
 Let the old timbers part ; I will not part, 
 I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves 
 
 buffet me, 
 Thee, Thee at least I know." 
 
 He is pantheistic in sentiment in that he beholds 
 
 1 See H. H. Ellis' translation of Prof. Lombroso's work 
 on The Man of Genhis.
 
 whitman. 43 
 
 God in every object, the Eternal Presence perfecting 
 the world ; but he holds such belief without reference 
 to the Eastern philosophy, for he still leaves room for 
 the moral life and freedom of the individual who has 
 his part also to perform. It is the pantheism of 
 Browning given statement in Christinas Eve : 
 
 " God's all, man's nought : 
 But also, God, whose pleasure brought 
 Man into being, stands away, 
 As it were, a hand-breadth off, to give 
 Room for the newly-made to live, 
 And look at Him from a place apart, 
 And use his gifts of brain and heart, 
 Given, indeed, but to keep forever." 
 
 That he is an apostle of Christ none will dispute. 
 Thoreau wrote in 1856 of Leaves of G?'ass that not all 
 the sermons that had been preached in the land were 
 equal to it for preaching. Nearest to Paul, the poet 
 enthrones love above every other form of truth or 
 virtue. 
 
 In philosophy Whitman is an idealist, having 
 frankly adopted Idealism for the uses of democracy 
 to justify it. He wonders how the system cculd have 
 arisen in Germany, when only America has room for 
 its application. 
 
 " And thou, America, 
 For the scheme's culmination, its thought and reality, 
 For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived." 
 
 Song of the Universal.
 
 44 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Idealism was a search for the universal man ; it 
 brought unity into a divided universe, identifying the 
 world of matter and spirit, the individual and society. 
 Democracy rests upon the answer to the question of 
 the relation of man to the universe. From the newly 
 gained point of view, Whitman, thinking of the ques- 
 tion, reconstructed the ideas of personality and love, 
 of the self and democracy. From his philosophy 
 springs his splendid optimism, his creed of an har- 
 monious world, his intent "to compact you ye parted, 
 diverse lives," his thought of man "justified, blended 
 with God " : 
 
 " For it [the soul] the mystic evolution, 
 Not the right only justified, what we call evil also 
 justified." Song of the Universal. 
 
 The conclusions of science, he averred in his pre- 
 face of 1876, interiorly tinged the chyle of all his 
 verse for purposes beyond. The scientific basis of 
 Leaves of Grass is one of great significance. Whit- 
 man, more than any other of the transcendentalists, 
 had thrown himself into the new current of scientific 
 and realistic thought, which, while without nationality, 
 may, at that time, under the influence of Darwin, be 
 called English. Science, by its laws of evolution, 
 conservation of energy, and other processes which 
 prove the unity of Nature, came to the help of his 
 philosophy 
 
 " To put rapport the mountains and rocks and streams, 
 And the winds of the north, and the forests of oak and 
 
 pine, 
 With you, O soul." Songs of Parting.
 
 WHITMAN. 45 
 
 Also to science is due his sense of the infinite ex- 
 panse of the universe. Whitman's imagination outruns 
 even Milton's in conception of vastness and splen- 
 dour, and in the midst of limitless space and limitless 
 time he dared to set man consonant, and greater than 
 Nature. Evolution, interpreted by a philosophic 
 mind, brought an escape from the sense of necessity 
 which had oppressed man from the beginning. 
 
 " This, then, is life, 
 Here is what has come to the surface after so many 
 throes and convulsions." 
 
 Starting from Paumanok. 
 
 " All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and 
 delight me, 
 Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul." 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 And there is still progression ; his soul cannot rest — 
 
 " Forever alive, forever forward." 
 
 Whitman's realistic method, his bold facing of the 
 facts of life — " I accept Reality, and dare not ques- 
 tion it " — is derived from that modern spirit which is 
 peculiarly scientific, consisting, as stated by Mr. Hux- 
 ley, in "veracity of thought and action, and the 
 resolute facing of the world as it is." As a representa- 
 tive of the new spirit, Mr. Havelock Ellis identifies 
 him with a contemporary in a far different land, 
 Henrik Ibsen.
 
 46 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Like the scientists, Whitman deals with types and 
 averages. Like them, he has a certain reverence for all 
 matter and their sense of the sweet purity of organic 
 life. There is often in his poems a happy touch of 
 scientific description, such as in the Leaf of Faces : 
 
 " The face of the singing of music— the grand faces of 
 natural lawyers and judges, broad at the back-top; 
 
 The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows — 
 the shav'd, blanch'd faces of orthodox citizens ; 
 
 The pure, extravagant, yearning", questioning artist's 
 face." 
 
 But Whitman is, in no proper sense, a scientist. 
 
 ' k Gentlemen, to you the first honours always ! 
 
 Your facts are useful and real— and yet they are not 
 
 my dwelling ; 
 I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling" 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 " When I heard the learn'd astronomer, 
 When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns 
 
 before me, 
 When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, 
 
 divide, and measure them, 
 When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured 
 
 with much applause in the lecture-room, 
 How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 
 Till, rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself, 
 In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time 
 Looked up in perfect silence at the stars." 
 
 By the Roadside.
 
 WHITMAN. 47 
 
 In truth, avoiding the dead — since merely intel- 
 lectual and temporal — statements of science, Whitman 
 repeats them significantly in terms of feeling, which 
 alone are eternal. In other words, with a poetic vision 
 equal to the range of science, he relates the laws of 
 Nature, by means of the emotional, to the common 
 life of man, assigning all their poetic place in the 
 united universe. 
 
 As an artist, Whitman is the legitimate successor in 
 America of the romanticism which has inspired, if not 
 directly fashioned, every great artistic creation in 
 Europe since the work of its inaugurator, Victor Hugo. 
 The purpose of the romantic movement, which is it- 
 self but a phase of the general progress of the race 
 towards liberty, was to free the personality from the 
 thrall of classical formalism. This was a real bondage, 
 and needed to be broken that the true Greek spirit 
 might be gained. Whitman is the last of the roman- 
 ticists, and one of the first fruits of the antique 
 spirit renewed. He has yearned to make somehow 
 vocal the aspirations, the promise, the affections of his 
 own people, to make somehow real the sense of 
 " sweet-air'd interminable plateaus " (beautiful as 
 dreams, which tally in land the grandeur of the skies 
 and the ocean), to convey in song something of the 
 movement of free-flowing rivers, and of the mystery of 
 the pine forests, and of the enthusiasm and hopefulness 
 of the perfect air and sunshine of his own land ; in 
 short, he has purposed to interpret the life of the 
 Modern Man in his own immediate days*
 
 48 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 "The conceits of the poets of other lands I'd bring thee 
 not, 
 Nor the compliments that have served their turn so long, 
 Nor rhyme, nor the classics, nor perfume of foreign 
 
 court or indoor library ; 
 But an odour I'd bring as from forests of pine in Maine, 
 or breath of an Illinois prairie." 
 
 Whispers of Heavenly Death. 
 
 And this is Hellenism. For it is not by invocations 
 to the Muses, or by allusions to Helicon's sacred spring 
 or Parnassus' holy heights ; it is not by the learning of 
 a Johnson or a Milton, or by the fine dream-lore of a 
 Keats, that we win the spirit of the Greek. The virtue 
 of Greek art is its acceptance of the environing nature. 
 The ideal which Phidias sculptured is that of a people 
 filled with the joyful sense of their own violet-tinted 
 hills. The Parthenon sprang out of the hill of the 
 Acropolis, pediment and column merging gradually 
 along the natural lines of the rocks, and issuing in the 
 finer human beauty of capital and frieze. Burns is 
 more Greek than Keats, Lowell than Pope, Millet than 
 Leighton, Whitman than either. The grey English 
 cathedrals which harmonise so well with the shadowy 
 skies of the north, and which rose into upper air out 
 of the " interior sphere " of a people's thought and 
 aspiration and love ; the pretty country churches which 
 have taken form from generation to generation under 
 the hands of the villagers themselves ; even the old 
 homesteads which fit so harmoniously into the nooks 
 of the hills, or by the edges of the woods, or along the 
 banks of the streams — these are more truly indicative
 
 WHITMAN. 49 
 
 of the classic spirit than the cumbrous, ornate churches 
 and mansions of the " Renaissance " style of the dull 
 eighteenth century — which was neither Greek nor 
 modern. 
 
 " Phoebus' chariot-course is run : 
 Look up poets to the sun ! 
 
 Pan, Pan is dead." 
 
 In this aspect of his art there is hardly another poet 
 with Whitman to compare. He is best understood by 
 reference to the old Dutch 1 painters of the seventeenth 
 century, who exhibited men in their natural environ- 
 ment, and more especially to Jean-Francois Millet, a 
 later exponent of similar principles in the plain of Bar- 
 bizon. Millet, removed from the direct influence of 
 romanticism, was one of the first to apply classical 
 principles to the delineation of the modern man. Of 
 about the same age as Whitman, he resembled him 
 even in appearance. An account was given of him by 
 James Parton in 1889 (in the JVeiv York Ledger) : 
 " Millet was tall and of a powerful build, his head large, 
 and his hair thick and bushy, flowing back from his 
 face in a manner a little wild. His face was handsome, 
 with excellent features, and large, gentle eyes. . . . His 
 studio nickname was ' The Man of the Woods.' . . . 
 His pictures were often bold and expressive, but the 
 method of treatment was unusual, and the execution 
 apt to be rough. Most of the students regarded him 
 as a queer fellow with talent, but too eccentric ever to 
 make effective use of it." 
 
 1 Whitman's Dutch relationship is always significant. 
 
 D
 
 50 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 The general character of Millet's work is truth to life 
 and nature. All things were beautiful for him which 
 were congruous. The hand of the peasant was beauti- 
 ful and true, and the labourers at work in the sun. 
 Everything in the neighbourhood of Barbizon was con- 
 veyed by him to canvas. He painted the trees, the 
 great Fontainebleau forest, the rocks, skies, land. He 
 painted the peasants about him at their work, plough- 
 ing, sowing, reaping and gleaning, shepherds and 
 goose-herders. All scenes which were really signifi- 
 cant, preferring men inaction, were welcome material. 
 Le Depart Pour le Travail [Starting for Work) is 
 especially in Whitman's style. It is of a young man 
 and girl going to the field in the fresh morning air, full 
 of light and motion; it has a cheerfulness rare in 
 Millet's work, which is touched generally by the sad- 
 ne s of the old world. There is Whitman's energy in 
 the strong Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners). 
 
 On the other hand there is Millet's action and 
 mystic meaning in the many picturesque bits in Whit- 
 man's poems. 
 
 " On a flat road runs the well-train'd runner, 
 He is lean and sinewy, with muscular legs, 
 He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs, 
 With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais'd." 
 
 By the Roadside. 
 
 " By the curb toward the edge of the flagging, 
 A knife-grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great 
 
 knife ; 
 Bending over, he carefully holds it to the stone ; by foot 
 and knee,
 
 WHITMAN. 5 1 
 
 With measur'd tread he turns rapidly ; as he presses with 
 
 light but firm hand, 
 Forth issue then in copious golden jets 
 Sparkles from the wheel." 
 
 Autumn Rivulets. 
 
 " The big doors of the country-barn stand open and ready, 
 The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow- 
 drawn waggon, 
 The clear light plays on the brown, gray, and green 
 
 intertinted, 
 The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow." 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 Every picture has a mystical significance. 
 
 "As I watch'd the ploughman ploughing, 
 
 Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester har- 
 vesting, 
 I saw there, too, O life and death, your analogies. 
 (Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest 
 according.) 
 
 Whispers of Heavenly Death. 
 
 The common occupations of men are sung, the 
 joys of the farmer, the woodman, the engineer, each 
 in his way — 
 
 " O, to work in mines, or forging iron, 
 Foundry casting, the foundry itself, the rude high roof, 
 
 the ample and shadow'd space, 
 The furnace, the hot liquid pour'd out and running.'' 
 
 Song of the Open Road.
 
 52 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Some pictures have the quiet contentment of old 
 Dutch paintings. 
 
 " Behold a woman ! 
 
 She looks out from her Quaker cap, her face is clearer 
 
 and more beautiful than the sky. 
 She sits in an arm-chair under the shaded porch of the 
 
 farm-house, 
 The sun just shines on her old, white head." 
 
 From Noon to Starry Night, 
 
 " Through the ample open door of the peaceful country 
 barn, 
 A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding, 
 And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away." 1 
 
 By the Roadside. 
 
 Thus related to the old, starting from Paumanok 
 where he was born, after roaming many lands, after 
 studying at the feet of the great masters, having studied 
 men and birds and stats Walt Whitman, solitary, 
 singing in the West, strikes up for a New World : 
 
 "Victory, union, faith, identity, time, 
 
 The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, 
 Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.'' 
 Start big from Paumanok. 
 
 1 A discussion of Whitman's artistic method, in its rela- 
 tion to that of Richard Wagner, is reserved for another 
 section.
 
 VI— BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " Do you see who have left all feudal processes and 
 poems behind them, and assumed the poems and 
 processes of Democracy ? " 
 
 Between Browning and Whitman there are points of 
 contact not a few. Browning was born in 1812, 
 Whitman in 18 19. The two poets started in life with 
 much the same thought and passion capital. A few 
 metaphysical conceptions underlie their writings from 
 first to last, the tendency to philosophic thinking 
 being accounted for, perhaps, by a similar strain of 
 Teutonic 1 ancestry. Whitman is as profound a 
 thinker as Browning. Philosophy is fundamental in 
 his nature. Even as a little boy he listened with 
 
 1 Whitman's mother was a Van Velsor of true Dutch 
 temper, an hereditary fact which answers for far more 
 than the poet's philosophic tendencies. As we now know 
 (cf. The Puritan in Holland, England and America, by 
 Douglas Campbell, New York), the characteristic 
 American sentiments and institutions are of Holland- 
 Puritan heritage. 
 
 Browning's mother was Scotch-German, her father 
 being William Wiedemann, a Hamburg German. From 
 her, Browning derived his thoughtful nature, as well, 
 probably, as his evangelical and liberal temper. 
 53
 
 54 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 amaze at the preacher who taught the duality of the 
 universe. No one is more repulsive than he, if read 
 superficially. He is not so " easy to be played on 
 as a pipe." There is not a body of writings in litera- 
 ture which demands a wider conversancy with the best 
 that has been thought or said in the world. For in 
 his works are shown only results, never processes. 
 The obscurity — and Leaves of Grass is as hard to read 
 as Sordello — is thus that connected with prophecy. 
 " You will pardon some obscurities," said Thoreau 
 in Walden, "for there are more secrets in my trade 
 than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but 
 inseparable from its very nature." Browning is 
 essentially a dramatist, and arrives at a similar result, 
 but by other and indirect means. When Leaves of 
 Grass first appeared in 1855 — that strange first volume, 
 so unlike a book, so very like a man — Emerson wrote 
 to the author : " I greet you at the beginning of a 
 great career, which yet must have had a long fore- 
 ground somewhere for such a start." 
 
 That foreground of thought may be found in 
 Browning's earlier works, Pauline, Paracelsus, and 
 Sordello, which are in so large a degree autobiographic 
 and the writer's own thought-basis. Therein stress 
 is laid upon the development of the soul, the 
 individual as self-centred and self-governed, and the 
 necessity of passage from selfish into sympathetic 
 existence. 
 
 The ethical problem of good and evil is solved by 
 either poet in the precisely similar terms of ethica 1 
 idealism which, postulating the universe as a unity,
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 55 
 
 requires the presence of what we call evil as a neces- 
 sary condition of man's spiritual energy and growth. 
 
 The scientific basis, such as belief in doctrines of 
 evolution, continuity of organic life, conservation of 
 energy, will be found to be likewise identical. 
 
 Oddly the criticism passed on Pauline in 1833, 
 " Somewhat mystical, somewhat poetical, somewhat 
 sensual, and not a little unintelligible," served with 
 varied phrase to welcome Leaves of Grass in 1855. 
 One thing, at least, in common — they were both 
 misunderstood. 
 
 § I. — THE PERSONALITY. 
 
 " I only knew one poet in my life, 
 And this, or something like it, was his way." 
 ITow it IStrikes a Contemporary. 
 
 Whitman's first great thought on life is of the Self. 
 Pride and love, or self and society, constitute " the 
 unseen impetus and moving power " of all his writ- 
 ings. But the self is prior, gives meaning and 
 vitality to all life, law, love, or beauty. 
 
 " And I will not make a poem, nor the least part of 
 a poem, but has reference to the soul, 
 Because having look'd at the objects of the universe, I 
 find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but 
 has reference to the soul." 
 
 Starting from Paumanok. 
 
 " The whole theory of the universe is directed unerr- 
 ingly to one single individual — namely, to You." 
 By Blue Ontario's Shore.
 
 56 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " One's-self must never give way — that is the final 
 substance — that out of all is sure, 
 Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last 
 
 finally remains ? 
 When shows break up what but One's-self is sure ? " 
 Whispers of Heavenly Death. 
 
 " The only government is that which makes minute of 
 individuals." 
 
 By Blue Ontario's Shore. 
 
 " We consider bibles and religions divine — I do not say 
 they are not divine. 
 I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow 
 
 out of you still ; 
 It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the 
 life." 
 
 A Song fur Occupations. 
 
 It is that the individual, while related to society 
 as a member, has a meaning in and for himself. On 
 the side of society he is but one of the human race, 
 and is a means ; on the side of his personality he is 
 related to the Absolute, has divine attributes and has 
 his end in himself. And to sing the divinity of man 
 Whitman has essayed. To exploit his own person- 
 ality, candidly and uncompromisingly, was the pur- 
 pose of Leaves of Grass ; nothing goes forth that is 
 not penetrated with himself. The personal element 
 comprises the unique quality of his book more pre- 
 cious than houses and gold. 
 
 " Camerado, this is no book, 
 Who touches this touches a man." 
 
 Songs of Parting.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. S7 
 
 Every line and thought of his poems have refer- 
 ence to the soul, but 
 
 " Thou, reader, throbbest life and pride and love the 
 same as I, 
 Therefore for thee the following chants." 
 
 Inscriptions. 
 
 Whitman takes as his starting-point an average man 
 in average circumstances who is still grand and heroic. 
 No one is excepted, for organic life must be inter- 
 dependent. 
 
 " Do you think matter has coher'd together from its 
 diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and 
 water runs and vegetation sprouts 
 For you only, and not for him and her ? " 
 
 Children of Adam, 
 
 Each is here as divinely as any is here. That per- 
 fect loveliness which writers like Goethe profess for 
 men of culture is shown to belong to the complete 
 ordinary character. 
 
 " Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the 
 centre-figure of all, 
 From the head of the centre-figure, spreading a nimbus 
 
 of gold-colour'd light, 
 But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without 
 its nimbus of gold-colour'd light." 
 
 Birds of P<issagc. 
 
 For the ordinary has meaning the same as the excep- 
 tional ; the need is that our eyes be opened. Each, 
 no matter what his birth, or occupation, or condition, 
 is out on the same open road of the Universe.
 
 53 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " Forever alive, forever forward, 
 
 Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, 
 
 feeble, dissatisfied, 
 Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected 
 by men." 
 
 Song of the Open Road. 
 
 The equality of a democracy, it should be observed, 
 is not one of possession or attainment — no one is 
 equal to another in that way — but with respect to 
 destiny. Human rights are not " natural " or derived 
 from the past, but are related to ideals of what ought 
 and is to be. The idea that " one man is as good as 
 another " is a foreign and false interpretation of the 
 American conception of equality before God. De- 
 mocracy recognises we are out on the road together 
 travelling to the same destination. 
 
 " I show that size is only development." 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 " I do not call one greater and one smaller, 
 That which fills its period and place is equal to any." 
 
 Song of Myself 
 
 " The universe is duly in order, everything is in its place, 
 What has arrived is in its place, and what waits shall 
 
 be in its place. . . . 
 The child of the glutton or venerealee waits long, and 
 the child of the drunkard waits long, and the 
 drunkard himself waits long." 
 
 Tlie Sleepers. 
 
 Whitman yields the utmost of homage to the woman.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 59 
 
 " I am the poet of the woman, the same as the man, 
 
 And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, 
 
 And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of 
 
 men." 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 In memory of his own mother, " to her, buried and 
 gone, yet buried not, gone not from me," "to her 
 the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, 
 life, love, to me the best," he graves a monumental 
 line. America is reserved by him as the "great 
 woman's land," and his only fear is that with all the 
 gifts of wealth and power vouchsafed his country — 
 
 "What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human 
 problem never solving,) 
 The gift of perfect women fit for thee — what if that gift 
 of gifts thou lackest ?" 
 
 By virtue of motherhood the woman is given the 
 superior place in the race-economy. But her claim is 
 finally for an equal selfhood. She, too, is out on the 
 open road. 
 
 He detects a similar equality in things and events. 
 A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the 
 stars. External objects furnish their part towards 
 eternity. 
 
 " And I will show that whatever happens to anybody 
 it may be turn'd to beautiful results." 
 
 Starting from Pmimanok. 
 
 It would seem that he lacked the sense of propor- 
 tion, but his position is logically consistent.
 
 60 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 '* The soul is of itself, 
 
 All verges to it, all has reference to what ensues, 
 All that a person does, says, thinks, is of consequence." 
 
 Autumn liividets. 
 
 All is finally truth. Truth compacts all, the false 
 and true. 
 
 " And henceforth I will go celebrate anything I see or am, 
 And sing and laugh and deny nothing." 
 
 From Noon to Staff y Night. 
 
 This is no doubt a form of pantheism — is that so 
 hateful a word ? Modern thought is rapidly becom- 
 ing pantheistic in the same sense. And the ethical 
 problem now presented is the reconciliation of the 
 idea of a universal benevolent law and that of a moral 
 being under that law, yet free to choose or to refuse. 
 This is the problem which Browning meets fairly, 
 without fear. He relinquishes no jot of his belief in 
 the all-pervading power of love and the essential 
 divinity of man. Like Whitman he is no hero-wor- 
 shipper or event-worshipper. In thought and method 
 the idea of personality is given supreme expression ; 
 this is alike the central principle of his philosophy 
 and the burden of his art. He has faith in spiritual 
 manhood, which proves for him an essential demo- 
 cracy. Tennyson plucked a flower from the crannied 
 wall, and said, — 
 
 " If I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is."
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 6l 
 
 Browning would glorify the meanest man as a like 
 manifestation of creative thought. With Shelley he 
 might say, " I am the friend of the unfriended poor." 
 In his parleying with Gerard he matches the worth of 
 the commonplace with Festus' robe and Fortunatus' 
 cap. The world gathers about each of us to draw 
 forth whatever of spiritual worth may be potential 
 there (cf. Epilogue). Nothing is in vain. The least 
 action of a man — failure it may be — is a step in his 
 conscious development. Each incident in the wider 
 arena of history is " a pulsation of the life of the 
 highest." Each person, however neglected by the 
 historians — the simple Briton pilot, Herve Riel, for 
 instance — has importance in the general, organic 
 scheme of life. 
 
 " Go to Paris : rank on rank 
 
 Search the heroes flung - pell-mell 
 
 On the Louvre, face and flank ! 
 
 You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve 
 
 Riel." 
 
 Herve Riel. 
 
 " There is no last nor first," sang Pippa. 
 Browning portrays no character without relations to 
 the Infinite. There is no creature, but that 
 
 " Some way it boasts, could we investigate, 
 Its supreme worth." 
 
 Fijine at the Fair. 
 
 Not Pippa, or Ottima, or Fifine, not Paracelsus, not 
 the Grammarian, not Halbert or Hob, not Dog Tray,
 
 62 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 not Guido — him even, are without their " nimbus 
 of gold-colour'd light." Even Caliban, who is so un- 
 couth that he cannot speak in terms of his own 
 personality, but " thinketh " and " saith," even the 
 undeveloped monster is not content to sprawl in 
 the mud complaining of the God. What is the 
 event and who the characters of his masterpiece, 
 The Ring and the Boole, that Browning should lavish 
 the resources of his mature genius upon them ? 
 — a case dug out of a yellow-leaved record of 
 crime, long thrown aside on old book-stalls, the in- 
 cidents of which had long since passed from human 
 memory ! Pompilia an obscure commonplace girl ! 
 Guido great only in crime ! Spenser would have 
 scorned to spend such pains: his song was of "knights 
 and ladies gentle deeds ; " he loved the stately hall of 
 nobles and the courts of kings. Shakespeare, too, is a 
 natural aristocrat, the poet of feudal forms and pro- 
 cesses. Kings and lords, citizens, fools, and hirelings 
 are. it is true, portrayed with equal care and fidelity ; 
 but what commonplace character is thought worthy of 
 a fate. Like the Greek drama, Shakespeare exhibits 
 the aristocracy of woe. We take Dogberry at his 
 word when he urges us to write him down an ass. 
 The great criminal is, however, given tragic meaning. 
 Iago is, perhaps, a greater compound of crime than 
 Guido. But observe the difference in the poets' treat- 
 ment, which amounts to a complete revolution of 
 dramatic thought and purpose. Browning is the 
 dramatist of the Whitman principle. 
 
 " He, at least, believed in Soul, was very sure of God."
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 63 
 
 He justifies the pride of man in himself by showing 
 in dramatic process men and women, various in being 
 and action, under every condition of evil or of error, but 
 never unguided by the light of an interior motive and 
 the hope of ultimate attainment. Whitman's announce- 
 ment is general ; he is thinking of average, typical men. 
 Browning animates his pages with specific and per- 
 sonal characters who may be " sunk enough, God 
 knows ! " but never so sunk but that this or that poor 
 impulse, which for once had play unstifled, indicates 
 the spirit's true endowments. 
 
 " Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts? O 
 Lear, 
 That a reason out of nature must turn them soft seems 
 clear." 
 
 Halbert and Hob. 
 
 It is the custom to complain of Browning's psycho- 
 logy. Few can repress a fling at his "marvellous 
 feats of psychological gymnastic." A truer insight 
 might have revealed the important nature of such 
 dramatic habit, which is — ye who like him not — one 
 of the very profound indications of the Christian and 
 democratic temper of modern life, namely, the inter- 
 pretation of concrete human existence. 
 
 The tendency of modern drama is towards psychic 
 presentment. Honouring to its worth the play-house, 
 its simulated stature, painted scenes and stage, it yet 
 takes 
 
 " For a worthier stage the soul itself, 
 Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,
 
 64 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 With all its grand orchestral silences 
 
 To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds." 
 
 Aurora Leigh. 
 
 Modern drama is, in short, internal, personal, demo- 
 cratic — " inward evermore to outward." Shakespeare 
 could not fully escape from the Greek tragic sense of 
 necessity. The passage from the old spirit to the 
 new is presented in the music-dramas of Richard 
 Wagner. The growth of Wagner's dramatic principle 
 is illustrative. His first works were projected after 
 the Greek model, with added mediaeval artifice and 
 mystical symbolism. He was at first impressed in his 
 study of life by the fact of man's helplessness. The 
 dark-visaged wandering mariner, whose life reflects the 
 pessimism of his world, is a very type of fate-driven 
 man. In the two more Christian romances help 
 comes still from without, in Tannhihiser by the inter- 
 vention of the Pope, in Lohengrin by a knight of the 
 Holy Grail. Tristan and Isolde has its fate-principle 
 in the love-drink. With the Kibelung tetralogy 
 Wagner's pessimistic views become most conspicuous. 
 The key to each drama is in externals. Wotan 
 is the embodiment of arbitrary will. Men and 
 gods together are impelled by blind, unintelligent 
 power. Wagner was then directly under the influence 
 of Schopenhauer; and the Eddie mythology, con- 
 structed during the long winters and nights and amid 
 the pitiless nature of the northern clime, probably in 
 terror of sea and weather, furnished him suitable 
 material. But the dawn of a new heaven and earth
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 6* 
 
 came soon after the twilight of the gods. Wotan sank 
 with his world. The empire of external will ends, so 
 far as Wagner is concerned, with the fall of Valhalla. 
 There is demand for restoration. The poet is 
 saved from pessimism, and carried far beyond it, by 
 the creation of Parsifal, who is to redeem the world 
 from curse by love and by his heart's mastery over 
 fate. Still in Siegfried we recognise the precursor of 
 Parsifal, and Brunhilde's victory over the lower prin- 
 ciples of nature typifies the final triumph of the soul. 
 Siegfried is redeemed from the gods of the elder 
 world ; but his destiny is fixed even before his birth ; 
 as a youth he wields a magic sword against which not 
 even the spear of Wotan has might ; voices of wood- 
 birds lead him on ; and against fate he cannot prevail. 
 The only satisfaction to the character-motive is that 
 his activities spring from his love of life, that he is 
 endowed with the magic sword by his own efforts, 
 and that he remains without fear. 
 
 Parsifal comes before us first as a youth, full of 
 abounding life, like Siegfried. But he is more than a 
 hero; he is a Saviour. Redemption by love and by 
 man is the theme of Wagner's last and in every way 
 greatest work. He reconciles the forces hitherto in 
 tragic collision. Love and will operate within the 
 human spirit. The area of their working is the one 
 human person who passes from stage to stage in pro- 
 cesses of spiritual and psychical education. Man 
 conquers fate. The dramatic solution has passed for- 
 ever from gods to men. The whole play of Parsifal 
 is radiant with light and hope. And Parsifal redeems 
 
 E
 
 66 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 not because of any external compact, but because he 
 is what he is, because he has attained by struggle with- 
 in his own soul the conquest over sin and death. 
 Kundry, as a type of a struggling and finally redeemed 
 soul, is Wagner's most striking character, and, at the 
 same time, one of the most impressive and original 
 creations in literature. Wagner's last word on life is, 
 in this respect, modern, psychical, democratic. 
 
 Between Wagner and Browning, Ibsen stands mid- 
 way. Wagner has, perhaps, dealt with weightier 
 matters than Ibsen, but both singularly illustrate in 
 their own life-struggle the psychical method of their 
 art. Ibsen has the same northern imagination, the 
 same Teutonic melancholy. He is the poet of the 
 Norway winter, its ice and night ; one would think 
 that all the land is bleak, barren, and storm-beaten ; 
 there is hardly a suggestion of sunshine and flowers. 
 As a child, Ibsen loved darkness rather than light. 
 Nor are his works uninfluenced by the pessimism of 
 fatalism. The Emperor Julian is conquered at length 
 by the world-will which favours the Galilean, and he 
 falls with the cry, "Thou hast conquered Galilean." 
 Of the writer's earlier works, the idea of a call is the 
 key of interpretation, a call which seems at times, as 
 in Brand, to be one of necessity. After his dream of 
 social regeneration had been shattered by the failure 
 of the Paris Commune, he seems to have taken especial 
 delight in picturing social chaos. The Wild Buck is 
 pessimistic in the extreme. 
 
 Up to a certain point, Ibsen is the dramatist of the 
 philosophy of Carlyle. He believes in aristocracy —
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 67 
 
 " I mean," he explains, "the aristocracy of character, 
 of will, of mind." He has Carlyle's distrust of popular 
 movements and of majorities. Carlyle's dictum con- 
 cerning the people of England — •" mostly fools," is 
 paralleled by a similar remark of Ibsen of the Nor- 
 wegians — -" cats and dogs." They both would build 
 society upon pillars of truth and sincerity — the world 
 has not seen more intense haters cf falsehood and 
 sham. But observe how they differ, and in the differ- 
 ence lies the peculiar dramatic quality of Ibsen's 
 works. Ibsen believes in the utmost of personal liberty. 
 In a letter written to Georg Brandes in 1871, he 
 says : — " The State is the curse of the individual. 
 What has been the price of Prussia's strength as a 
 State ? The absorption of the individual in the polit- 
 ical and geographical entity. The waiter is the best 
 soldier. Away with the State ! When that revolution 
 is accomplished I will be there : undermine the notion 
 of the State, let free will and spiritual affinity be the 
 only recognised basis of union, and you will have the 
 beginnings of a liberty worthy of the name." 1 His 
 task becomes then that of Whitman, " to make every 
 man in the land a nobleman." He dreams for man- 
 kind a redemption through love into a state of free 
 and purified will. He insists, by consequence, upon 
 individual development. All vital development must 
 be from within, and natural. This principle is em- 
 bodied in his dramas. The " action, action, action/' 
 of the Greeks is set aside. In his first dramatic effort 
 
 1 Life, by Jaeger, trans, by Bell, p. 205.
 
 68 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 — written at twenty — Cataline, there is hardly a plot, 
 and no proper counterplot. The whole play is enacted 
 within Cataline's own soul. Ibsen does not portray 
 deeds so much as the results of deeds as exhibited in a 
 life. All is inner, psychological. The interest of such a 
 play as The Doll's House, which is without impressive 
 accessories or heroic action of any kind, is centred 
 in the psychical development of the characters them- 
 selves. The interest is intense, because the solution 
 is human and uncertain. To take an opposite case : 
 when we see personalised Good and Evil in Goethe's 
 drama striving for Faust's soul, there can be little 
 doubt as to the result, and we are not at all surprised 
 when Faust is borne aloft by the angels with trium- 
 phant song. When the strife is within the self, a man 
 or woman's worth something. 
 
 The first hint in English literature of redemption 
 by spiritual struggle is perhaps contained in Milton's 
 Paradise Regained (and it is interesting to note the 
 accord of Milton and Wagner in this matter, however 
 at variance their conceptions of the Christ may be). 
 Milton first suggested the way to recover the paradise 
 that was lost, the heaven within the soul, and the 
 redemptive idea set forth in Paradise Regained sur- 
 passes as a justification of the ways of God to men all 
 the stupendous machinery of Paradise Lost. Milton 
 himself preferred, it is said, the former to the latter ; 
 it has better philosophy if not higher art. 
 
 " I, who erewhile the happy Garden sung 
 By one man's disobedience lost, now sing 
 Recovered Paradise to all mankind,
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 69 
 
 By one man's firm obedience fully tried 
 Through all temptation, and the Tempter foiled 
 In all his wiles, defeated and repulsed, 
 And Eden raised in the waste wilderness." 
 
 Paradise Regained. 
 
 A commentator remarks about this passage, stating 
 the popular opinion, no doubt, even of to-day : " It may 
 seem a little odd that Milton should impute the re- 
 covery of Paradise to the short scene of our Saviour's 
 life upon earth, and not rather extend it to His agony, 
 crucifixion," etc. But Milton clearly saw that the 
 crucifixion was but the culmination of a spiritual 
 struggle which had gone on for long within Christ's 
 own soul. The Cross, he would say, is not the 
 central fact in the life of Christ, but the life itself. 
 His redemption was not wrought by magic, not by 
 contract. Christ was never a mere actor ill that 
 world-drama ; He, most of all, took life seriously, and 
 it is recorded of Him that He never laughed. May it 
 not be that for Him as for others the incidents of the 
 earth-life were 
 
 " Just a stuff 
 To try the soul's strength on, educe the man." 
 
 In a Balcony. 
 
 So Milton rightly chose a typical incident at the 
 beginning of Christ's Messianic mission. 
 
 " On thy glorious work 
 Now enter, and begin to save mankind." 
 
 Paradise Pcjained.
 
 yo BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 We are prepared now to understand the nature of 
 many of the psychological problems Browning has set 
 for us. Browning is first and foremost a dramatist of 
 the inner life. As to the disputed point of his sub- 
 jectivity, I think he must be taken at his word that his 
 poetry is "so many utterances of so many imaginary 
 persons, not mine " (Preface to Pauline). He is 
 subjective in that he gives expression to the sub- 
 jectivity of others, and as such he is Christian and 
 democratic. There is no hint of a fate save as "God's 
 in the heaven," save the "Hand always above my 
 shoulder." We may quote Whitman's line : 
 
 " I only am he who places over you no master, owner, 
 better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in 
 yourself.'' Birds of Passage. 
 
 There is no suggestion of pessimism ; for at least 
 " each one may love, and loving ranks with God." 
 Holding firmly to the belief that the world is ruled by 
 love, actuating all created being, he held with equal 
 tenacity to the idea of the possibility of the will of 
 man acting freely within that law — free to reach the 
 goal in various ways, even by error and failure. Will- 
 freedom, soul-struggle (inward evermore to outward), 
 and soul-progress — which imply opposition, failure, 
 hate, sin — are the three phrases which indicate Brown- 
 ing's dramatic significance. Paracelsus fails, corrects 
 the error, and attains. If attainment be not won in 
 the earth life, there is the leaf in the hand of dead 
 Evelyn Hope to suggest that there are " other heights 
 in other lives, God willing."
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 7 1 
 
 The crux of a democratic philosophy is plainly the 
 outcast, the abandoned, the soul-hardened criminal — 
 K oh, a crime will do to serve for a test." How can 
 they be included in the moral and social scheme of 
 life ! Whitman, with a cheery optimism, includes 
 them all : " Not till the sun excludes you will I exclude 
 you." To the universal banquet 
 
 " The kept-woman, sponger, thief are hereby invited, 
 The heavy-lipped slave is invited, the venerealee is 
 
 invited ; 
 There shall be no difference between them and the 
 rest." 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 " I will make the songs of passion to give them their 
 way, 
 And your songs outlaw'd offenders, for I scan you with 
 kindred eyes, and carry you with me the same as 
 
 any. : ' 
 
 Starting from Paumanoh. 
 
 Browning, in like manner, crowds his pages with 
 specific criminals, not, like the school of Zola, to 
 describe them, but to justify them. He would show 
 the truth beneath the falsehood. He would show 
 that each of the many "■ helps to recruit the life of the 
 race by a general plan," be his soul's fruit hate or 
 love. In some way the existence of Fifine must be 
 justified, else is she created in vain, " which must 
 not be." 
 
 His trial of strength was his defence of Guido 
 Franceschini, whose life-story is found in an old
 
 /2 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 record of crime, a "blotch of black." It was no light 
 task. If the facts of life were against his philosophy, 
 the only alternative was despair or the quiet acquies- 
 cence of the lotus-eater. Guido was one of the vilest 
 compounds of criminality which literature or life have 
 recorded. Browning set the case in order — there is 
 the book to show for it. The " main monster " is 
 painted with unsparing literalism : 
 
 " Count Guido Franceschini, the Aretine, 
 Descended of an ancient house, though poor, 
 A beak-nosed, bushy-bearded, black-haired lord, 
 Lean, pallid, low of stature, yet robust, 
 Fifty years old." 
 
 liing and the Book, i., 780-84. 
 
 He is set in a suitable environment, in the midst of a 
 dark, subsidiary brotherhood, " denizens o' the cave : " 
 Paolo, the "fox-faced, horrible priest;" "the boy of 
 the brood, the young Girolamo ; " " then comes the 
 gaunt, grey nightmare in the furthest smoke, the hag 
 that gave these three abortions birth;" "last, these 
 God-abandoned, wretched lumps of life," the murderers. 
 And ranged against them are old Pietro and Violante, 
 not over scrupulous^ "sadly mixed natures." Only 
 the one pure white woman-lily, the newly awakened 
 priest, the serene aged Pope to serve as contrast to 
 the shade. Guido is permitted to wreak his worst 
 and is brought to judgment at last. One half of 
 Rome condemns — " Out with you from the common 
 light, and air, and life of man." The other half finds 
 for Guido much excuse. " He is noble and may be 
 innocent," suggests the upper class. Judgment which
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 'J I 
 
 is "honest enough as the way is, all the same har- 
 bouring in the centre of its sense a hidden germ of 
 failure." Guido mutters, " Hardly misfortune, and no 
 fault at all." But Caponsacchi, in the heat of his 
 passion, urges upon the judges, — 
 
 " Leave Guido all alone 
 Back on the world again that knows him now ! 
 I think he will be found (indulge so far !) 
 Not to die so much as slide out of life, 
 Pushed by the general horror and common hate 
 Low, lower, — left o' the very ledge of things, 
 I seem to see him catch convulsively 
 One by one at all honest forms of life, . . . 
 And thus I see him slowly and surely edged 
 Off all the table-land whence life upsprings 
 Aspiring to be immortality. . . . 
 So I leave Guido in the loneliness, 
 Silence, and dusk, till at the doleful end, 
 At the horizontal line, creation's verge, 
 From what just is to absolute nothingness — 
 Whom is it, straining onward still, he meets ? . . . 
 Judas, made monstrous by much solitude ! 
 The two are at one now ! . . . 
 There let them grapple, denizens o' the dark, 
 Foes or friends, but indissolubly bound, 
 In their one spot out of the ken of God 
 Or care of man, forever and evermore !" 
 
 Ring and the Book, vi., 1908-54. 
 
 There is awful earnestness there, and the words 
 commend themselves to many, perhaps to most. But 
 Pompilia has all along " sent prayer like incense up 
 for that most woeful man my husband once."
 
 74 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " So far as lies in me, 
 I give him for his good the life he takes, . . . 
 Let him make God amends, — none, none to me. . . . 
 We shall not meet in this world nor the next, 
 But where will God be absent? In His face 
 Is light, but in His shadow healing too ; 
 Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed !" 
 
 Ring and the Bool; vii., 1707-21. 
 
 The wise Pope, who has light nor fears the dark at 
 all, sums up the case in the quiet of his soul. Of 
 previous judgments he comments that truth, while not 
 in any one, is evolvible from the whole. The matter 
 is reviewed : Guido began life well, " fortified by pro- 
 pitious circumstance, great birth, good breeding, with 
 the Church for guide." But tills black mark impinges 
 the man that he believes in just the vile of life. " Not 
 one permissible impulse moves the man." What then ! 
 Is he to be excluded ? In the creation there is 
 strength enough, intelligence enough. Christ proved 
 that love also is limitless. The universe is thus shown 
 complete. The Tope has, therefore, faith in the 
 world, faith that sin and sorrow have their purpose to 
 evolve the moral qualities of man. The foremost fact 
 is that 
 
 " Life is but the starting-point of man : compel him strive, 
 Which means, in man, as good as reach the goal, — 
 Why institute that race, his life, at all ?" 
 
 Ring and the Bool; x., 1436-39. 
 
 The Pope will not stay the execution of the criminals. 
 But he has for Guido the hope of a suddenness of fate.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 75 
 
 " 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 gioaned 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." 
 
 Ming and the Book, x., 21 17-28. 
 
 The end is not yet. There is other hope. There 
 is a " sad, obscure, sequestered state where God un- 
 makes but to remake the soul He else made first in 
 vain ; which must not be." 
 
 The sentence of death, carried forthwith to the 
 Governor, finds at the prison-house one who had 
 exerted his strength against all good in vain ! Love is 
 an essential element in human nature, and will find 
 out its way. 
 
 "Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God, — Pom- 
 pilia, will you let them murder me." It is the spiritual 
 flash struck out from the soul's midnight ; it is as the 
 cry of the thief upon the cross ; it is an impulse from 
 the soul, realising at the last what love is. 
 
 This single moment may seem insufficient evidence 
 for the conclusion drawn, but I can only answer, aside 
 from the witness of insight which requires such conclu- 
 sion (and compare Mr. Westcott's paper on Brownings, 
 View of Life, p. 15), that it is Browning's way to state 
 a fact obliquely. In Prince Hohensteil-Schvangau
 
 76 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 there is a story told of an artist who covered up the 
 Laocoon group, save the central figure, with neither 
 sons nor serpents to denote the purpose of the gesture. 
 Then a crowd was called to explain the reason of 
 such energy of legs and arms, and eyeballs starting 
 from their sockets. One said : " I think the gesture 
 strives against some obstacle we cannot see." All 
 the rest said : " Tis a yawn of sheer fatigue subsiding 
 to repose ; the statue is 'Somnolency' clear enough." 
 The problem here is to know the mind of the maker. 
 Now Browning, unlike Shakespeare, seldom dramatises 
 for the sake of dramatic action alone. He is rather 
 the dramatist of a principle (cf. Gold Hair : The 
 Statue and the Bust; The Grammaziaris Funeral; 
 The Last Ride Together ; Halbert and Hob, etc.), hold- 
 ing further that 
 
 " Art's fittest triumph is to show that good 
 Lurks in the heart of evil evermore." 
 
 In the present instance, the whole interest of the book 
 is centred in Guido's conversion and the comments 
 of every character, and especially the last words of 
 the Pope, as well as Browning's own philosophy of 
 love, and his stated intention to "twice show truth 
 beyond mere imagery on the wall," as well as his 
 suggestion that the record lives, "if precious be the 
 soul of man to man," lead directly to the cry of 
 combined remorse and hope, " Pompilia." 
 
 One said, in his haste, that it was still a sign of 
 meanness in Guido to seek safety from a woman. 
 But it is that Guido realised in himself at the last the
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. J? 
 
 power of divine love, which can only operate in the 
 heart of man, and which is revealed in its most pure 
 and perfect form through woman. For a somewhat 
 similar use of the principle of saving love, compare 
 Wagner's Der Fliegende Hollander Tannhauser and 
 Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Goethe's Faust. In 
 the first, Senta, leaping into the sea at the moment of 
 shipwreck, achieves for the Jew surcease of sorrow. 
 Tannhauser sinks lifeless by the body of Elisabeth 
 with the cry on his lips, " Heilige Elisabeth bitte fur 
 mich ! " while the pilgrims sing in chorus, — - 
 
 " Heil ! Heil ! Der Gnade Wunderheil ! " and 
 " Hoch iiber alle Welt ist Gott 
 
 Und sein Erbannen ist kein Spott ! 
 
 Halleluja ! Helleluja ! " 
 
 In the postlude to Die G otter ddmmerung, amid the 
 basses which review the fall of the ancient rule of 
 gold and greed, the violins, with ever finer harmonies, 
 take up the melody heard before in the song of 
 Sieglinde prophetical of the redeeming love of 
 Brunhilde, and now actually symbolical, proclaim 
 that " the woman-soul leadeth us upward and on." 
 In Faust the Chorus Mysticus, in the same manner, 
 sings at the close, — 
 
 " Alles Vergangliche 
 Ist nurein Gleichniss ; 
 Das Unzuliingliche, 
 Hier wird's Greigniss ; 
 Das Unbeschreibliche, 
 Hier ist es Gethan ;
 
 yS BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Das Ewig-Weibliche 
 Zieht uns hinan." 
 
 " All things transitory 
 But as symbols are sent : 
 Earth's insufficiency 
 Here grows to Event 
 The Indescribable, 
 Here it is done ; 
 The Woman-Soul leadeth us 
 Upward and on ! " 
 
 Bayard Taylor, Translator. 
 
 And compare Lowell's Das Ewig-Weibliche. 
 
 " Still must the body starve our souls with shade ; 
 But when Death makes us what we were before, 
 Then shall her sunshine all our depths invade, 
 And not a shadow stain heaven's crystal floor." 
 
 Hate, as Pompilia suggests, was the truth of Guido. 
 His choice of evil was the beginning of hope. 
 Energy characterised his adoption of evil. He 
 sought it with his whole strength. Indifference would 
 have been reason for despair. 
 
 " If you choose to play !— is my principle, 
 Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 For his life's set prize, be it what it will." 
 
 The Statue and the Bust. 
 
 In much the same spirit Luther was wont to urge, 
 " Pecca fortiter." And the Pope finds much amiss 
 m the half-hearted ways of the parents s
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 79 
 
 Never again elude the choice of tints ! 
 White shall not neutralise the black, nor good 
 Compensate bad in man, absolve him so : 
 Life's business being just the terrible choice." 
 
 Ring and the Bool;, x. 1234-38. 
 
 Guido lived out the life which was true for him. 
 And this life was his way — "you of the virtue we 
 issue join " — to the goal of his higher nature. Asser- 
 tion of self showed the futility of a loveless life. "If 
 the fool would persist in his folly he would become 
 wise," is Blake's way of stating the fact of progression. 
 For the soul cannot rest in sin. The will must be 
 reserved at all hazards, or there is no human world. 
 
 And this, it is worthy of note, is the conclusion of 
 Faust. The angels sing, concluding, — 
 
 " Who ever 
 Strives forward with unswerving will — 
 Him can we aye deliver." 
 
 There is demanded, however, by Browning, a 
 severer moral strife. Faust was saved by no great 
 merit of his own, rather by grace. But the law of the 
 soul is really progressive. And Browning's record 
 lives " if precious be the soul of man to man." How- 
 ever, — 
 
 " It's wiser being good than bad ; 
 It's safer being meek than fierce : 
 It's fitter being sane than mad."
 
 SO BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 In any case, — 
 
 " My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
 The thickest cloud earth ever stretched, 
 That after Last returns the First, 
 Though a wide compass round be fetched, 
 That what began best can't end worst, 
 Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst." 
 Apparent Failure. 
 
 § 2. — MAN AND NATURE. 
 
 Whitman's subject is the soul of man. Thought is 
 the ultimate reality. The soul, (love, and reason, and 
 will,) constitutes the universe ; Nature alone is but a 
 universe becoming. Thought gives to Nature all its 
 meaning. Only man is sacred. 
 
 " How dare you place anything before a man." 
 
 By Blue Ontario's Shore. 
 
 It is not the earth that is great. It is man who is 
 great. 
 
 " I have lived to behold man burst forth and warlike 
 America rise, 
 Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern 
 
 solitary wilds, 
 No more the mountains roam or sail the stormy sea." 
 
 Drum- Taps.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Once only Whitman turns to greet the sun. 
 
 " Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full 
 dazzling-. . . . 
 Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again, O 
 Nature, your primal sanities ! " 
 
 Drum-Taps. 
 
 But his soul tramples clown at once what it asked 
 for. 
 
 " Keep your splendid silent sun, 
 
 Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by 
 the woods, 
 
 Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn- 
 fields and orchards, 
 
 Keep the blossoming buck-wheat fields where the ninth- 
 month bees hum ; 
 
 Give me faces and streets . . . 
 
 People endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, 
 pageants, * * * 
 
 Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical 
 chorus ! " 
 
 Drum-Taps. 
 
 While thus asserting the superiority of man and his 
 works, he yet identifies himself with the whole objec- 
 tive world. 
 
 " When the full-grown poet came, 
 
 Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, 
 with all its shows of day and night), saying, He 
 is mine ; 
 
 P
 
 82 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous, and 
 unreconciled, Nay, he is mine, alone ; 
 
 — Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and 
 took each by the hand ; 
 
 And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, 
 tightly holding hands, 
 
 Which he will never release until he reconciles the two, 
 
 And wholly and joyously blends them." 
 
 Good-bye, my Fancy. 
 
 This sense of the blending of all life spheres, one has 
 often to remark, is the chief characteristic of Whit- 
 man's philosophy. Once alone with a great oak tree 
 he questions " Am I alone ? " feeling that the qualities 
 which exist consciously in man exist — shall it be said 
 unconsciously — in Nature. He found the law of his 
 poems in the wide rolling western prairies, and among 
 the tumbled rock-piles and turbulent gorges of the 
 mountains. In the Canons of Colorado he ponders : 
 
 " Mine, too, such arrays, for reasons of their own ; 
 Was't charged against my chants they had forgotten 
 
 art? . . . 
 But thou that revelest here— spirit that formed this 
 
 scene, 
 They have remember'd thee." 
 
 From Noon to Starry Night. 
 
 Nature is never described for itself. On the other 
 hand Whitman excells all other American writers as a 
 word painter of Nature in its human aspect. A near 
 approach to description is The Man-of-War Bird and 
 Warble for Lilac-Time. But in the first case, he 
 wishes the bird his soul, then t: what joys were thine ! "
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 83 
 
 In the second case, the summer's sparkling restless- 
 ness betokens the need of the soul to be up and away, 
 the blue sky, the grass, the lilac, the morning drops of 
 dew, serving as preludes to the soul's flight. Rather 
 immersed in Nature he translates its hidden meaning 
 into his poet-speech ; he is the voice of the Red- 
 wood tree and of the hermit thrush ; and the sea (the 
 old crone) creeping to his feet whispers her secret. 
 This quality of his thought, primarily a religious 
 quality, is one secret of his power. His poems thrill 
 and dilate the spirit similar to the words of Christ, 
 " I and my Father are one." 
 
 '* I too inaugurate a religion, each is not for its own 
 sake, 
 I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are 
 for religion's sake." 
 
 Starting from Paumanok. 
 
 It is well to attend to this view of man's place in 
 Nature as indicating the tendency of democracy to con- 
 cern itself with personality. Nature, in America, is 
 characterised by vastness and sublimity. The tra- 
 veller's first impressions, in sailing the fresh rivers and 
 lakes, traversing the plains or passing the mountains, 
 in entering the forests of pine and cedar of the North 
 and South, are ever of size and infinite distances. It 
 seems as if plain and mountain, river and forest, had 
 conspired to oppress man. At this moment a sister 
 writes to me from central Iowa : " Nothing but endless 
 plain ! Men seem so small here beneath the far skies ! 
 And the winds areneverstill !" Thosewho dwell habitu- 
 ally in the midst of the quiet, mellow, English gardens,
 
 84 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 where Nature has been tamed and domesticated by cen- 
 turies of human occupation, can never know the tension 
 of mind, which often must succumb from very weariness, 
 required of those who make their homes amid the vast- 
 nesses of the New World. Perhaps a less transcendent 
 mind than the early pilgrim, one less concerned about 
 God and the soul, would have been subdued amid the 
 " forests primeval." But they went thither to find a 
 refuge-home, and they conquered the forests for con- 
 science' sake. Nature was viewed in its religious 
 aspect, or in reference to the human personality. It is 
 ideality that gives to Bryant's nature-songs and Lowell's 
 wood-notes their peculiar artistic quality. " To insure 
 health," wrote Thoreau in his Journal, "a man's rela- 
 tion to Nature must come very near to a personal one." 
 And in Walden it is written that " Nature must be 
 viewed humanly to be viewed at all ; that is, her scenes 
 must be associated with human affections, such as are 
 associated with one's native place, for instance. She is 
 most significant to a lover." 
 
 To give this latter thought illustration, compare 
 Browning's poem, By the Fireside. The lovers are 
 alone in the Alpine valley, but the twilight and the 
 evening star have grown aware. The lights and shades 
 of evening weave the marriage-spell about them. 
 
 " The forests had done it ; there they stood ; 
 We caught for a moment the powers at play : 
 They had mingled us so, for once and good, 
 Their work was done — we might go or stay, 
 They relapsed to their ancient mood." 
 
 xlviii.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 85 
 
 It is such moments of passionate significance that 
 Browning chose in Nature to portray ; the night of 
 the lightning storm at Naples, suggesting the flash of 
 Guido's conversion ; the moment of the tempest in 
 Pippa Passes, a scene which Mr. Lowell has observed 
 is an untrue description of Nature, but truefor theguilty 
 lovers ; the hour when David walked home under the 
 stars, all Nature pulsing in harmony with his thought. 
 
 For Browning consciousness is ultimate. Nature 
 finds itself in man, prefiguring or echoing his existence. 
 
 " For many a thrill 
 Of kinship, I confess to, with the powers 
 Called Nature : animate, inanimate, 
 In parts, or in the whole, there's something there 
 Manlike that somehow meets the man in me." 
 
 Prince H-Schwangau. 
 
 Love is the law at once of Nature and of man. 
 
 " Brute and bird, reptile and the fly, 
 Ay, and I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant 
 And flower o' the field, are all in a common pact 
 To worthily defend the trust of trusts, 
 Life from the Ever Living." 
 
 Ring and the Book, x., 1076-81. 
 
 Nature is never described in and for itself. 
 
 " The wise thrush, he sings each song twice""over 
 Lest you should think he never could recapture 
 The first fine, careless rapture ! " 
 
 Home Thoughts from Abroad.
 
 86 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 This is one of the most beautiful touches in the 
 literature of nature-poetry. It is manifestly something 
 more than a description of the bird's song. " I think," 
 says Thoreau, " the most important requisite in de- 
 scribing an animal is to be sure that you give its 
 character and spirit." Browning's birds and beasts are 
 human, with a heart and soul. The grand lines in 
 Paracelsus, beginning, — 
 
 "The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, 
 And the earth changes like a human face " — 
 
 are really the projection of a thought, and so else- 
 where. 
 
 That entire absorption of Nature by the personality 
 is rarely indicated, because Browning is dealing with 
 men in action ; but that this is the point of view 
 from which he writes is often shown. As Paracelsus 
 states : 
 
 " Man, once descried, imprints forever 
 His presence on all lifeless things : the winds 
 Are henceforth voices, wailing, or a shout, [cf. James Lee's 
 
 Wife, vi.,] 
 A querulous mutter, or a quick, gay laugh, 
 Never a senseless gust now man is bom. 
 The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts, 
 A secret they assemble to discuss, 
 When the sun drops behind their trunks, which glare 
 Like grates of hell : the peerless cup afloat 
 Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph 
 Swims bearing high above her head : no bird 
 WhisUes unseen, but through the gaps above
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 87 
 
 That let light in upon the gloomy woods, 
 A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top, 
 Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye. 
 The moon has enterprise, deep quiet droops 
 With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour, 
 Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn 
 Beneath a warm moon like a happy face : 
 — And this to fill us with regard for man." 
 
 Paracelsus. 
 
 The idea of Nature is like all other thoughts in pro- 
 cess of evolution. It may be unfair, except for the 
 sake of contrast, to refer to the pretty descriptiveness 
 of Thomson, Dyer, or Cowper, though fresh and 
 delightful their sentiments are as one emerges from 
 the elegant, correct artificiality of the preceding 
 "Augustan Age." 
 
 " At length the finished garden to the view 
 Its vistas opens, and its alleys green. 
 Snatched through the verdant maze the hurried eye 
 Distracted wanders; now the bowery walk 
 Of covert close, where scarce a speck of day 
 Falls on the lengthened gloom, protracted sweeps ; 
 Now meets the bending sky; the river now, 
 Dimpling along, the breezy-ruffled lake, 
 The forest darkening round, the glittering spire, 
 The ethereal mountain and the distant main." 
 
 Thomson : The Seasons — Spring. 
 
 There is a vast difference 1 between this pretty high- 
 
 1 A truer rendering of Nature was brought in by the 
 early English landscape painters as Constable, Crome, 
 and Gainsborough. They painted Nature as it appeared,
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 soundingncss and Whitman's Song of the Redwood 
 Tree, or Browning's presentment of the evolution of 
 the world. 
 
 The whole gain is on the side of personality. The 
 struggle is directly at this point. Byron and Words- 
 worth turned away from man. The highest aspiration 
 which Childe Harold attains to is to lose himself in 
 the solitudes of Nature. 
 
 " There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
 There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 
 There is society, where none intrudes, 
 By the deep Sea, and music in its roar : 
 I love not Man the less, but Nature more.'' 
 
 Cliilde Harold, clxxviii. 
 
 What school-boy has not declaimed approvingly the 
 stanza which follows, which is emblematic of the 
 pitiless conquest of Nature over man. 
 
 " Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll ! 
 Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain ; 
 Man marks the earth with ruin — his control 
 Stops with the shore ; upon the watery plain 
 The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain 
 A shadow of man's ravage, save hib own, 
 
 but added a human element. "John, my boy," said old 
 Crome, "if your subject is only a pig-sty, dignify it." 
 Turner finally asserts the superiority of man, and paints 
 the external world in its relationship to the human per- 
 sonality. (Cf. "Modem Painters: their superiority in the 
 art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters ; by 
 a graduate of Oxford.")
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 89 
 
 When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, 
 
 He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, 
 
 Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown." 
 
 For the sake of contrast place beside this Whitman's 
 lines : 
 
 " These shows of the East and West are tame compared 
 
 to you ; 
 These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, 
 
 you are immense and interminable as they; 
 These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, 
 
 throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she 
 
 who is master or mistress over them : 
 Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, 
 
 elements, pain, passion, dissolution." 
 
 Birds of Passage. 
 
 Wordsworth with a " sense sublime " of the divine 
 element in the world, — - 
 
 " A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things,'' — 
 
 was yet unable to rise to Browning's assurance of the 
 presence of God amid the apparent chaos of the life 
 of man. Man gave him only sadness. 
 
 " The world is too much with us." 
 
 On the other hand, — 
 
 " My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky."
 
 90 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 The active principle of Wordsworth's poetry is the 
 sense of life in Nature, and of man's life as a part 
 thereof. He would live beneath Nature's " more 
 habitual sway." The meanest flower that blows 
 awakens thoughts too deep for personality to ex- 
 press. In Nature man would find himself. 
 
 A protest against such as Wordsworth's view is 
 entered by Coleridge in his ode Dejection. 
 
 " Though I should gaze forever 
 On that green light that lingers in the west : 
 I may not hope from outward forms to win 
 The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. 
 
 O Lady ! we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone does Nature live : 
 Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud ! 
 
 And would we aught behold, of higher worth, 
 Than that inanimate cold world allowed 
 To the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd, 
 
 Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth, 
 A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud 
 
 Enveloping the Earth — 
 And from the soul itself must there be sent 
 
 A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, 
 Of all sweet sounds the life and element !" 
 
 Of all men in England Richard Jefferies is perhaps most 
 nearly akin to the Americans. One recognises in him 
 and Thoreau the same mystic religious temperament, 
 and something of the same attitude towards Nature. 
 The Story of my Heart contains a beautiful record of 
 the boy Jefferies, in the morning of life, climbing the
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 9 1 
 
 hill in the sweet air, searching for soul-life : " I felt 
 myself myself." He strove to take from Nature all 
 its beauty, grandeur, and energy. Thoreau similarly, 
 recording his desire in the quaint parable at the 
 beginning of Walden of the hound, the bay-horse and 
 the turtle-dove, sought in Nature its ideal presence. 
 But their habitual attitude towards man as related to 
 Nature is quite dissimilar. Jefferies, while " observing 
 with a poet's eye," x views Nature more as an end in 
 itself, and as a faithful delineator of external life 
 follows rather the older school of naturalists, such as 
 Gilbert White of Selborne. His genius was dedicated 
 to the sun and the fields with entire detachment 
 from the activities of men. " From my home near 
 London," so runs the story of his life, " I made a 
 pilgrimage almost daily to an aspen by a brook. . . . 
 The idea of the pilgrimage was to get away from the 
 endless and nameless circumstances of everyday 
 existence. ... By my daily pilgrimage I escaped 
 from it back to the sun." He hopes that succeeding 
 generations will be able to be idle : " I hope that 
 nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time, that they 
 may enjoy their days, and the earth, and the beauty 
 of this beautiful world." Thoreau was not a naturalist 
 at all. He had little interest in Nature for itself. As 
 Mr. Salt once said in conversation, he was a super- 
 naturalist. He was a critic of society, and went into 
 
 1<l Who observing the works of Almighty God with a poet's 
 eye has enriched the literature of his country and made him- 
 self a place among those who have made men happier and 
 wiser." On Jefferies' tomb in Salisbury Cathedral.
 
 92 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Walden woods that he might find out whether life was 
 worth living, and to gain advantage-ground from which 
 to lecture his neighbours on " clothes " and " shelter" 
 and " economy," and to shame them into a life of 
 simplicity. " As I have said," referring to his life at 
 Walden, " I do not propose to write an ode to dejec- 
 tion, but to brag lustily, as chanticleer in the morn- 
 ing, standing on his roost, if only to wake, my neigh- 
 hours up." His real interest is with men. His en- 
 thusiasm is for the individual. 
 
 It is so with Browning. The "return to Nature" 
 meant for him a return to man, who is the end and 
 interpreter of Nature. He is neither indignant at man 
 like Shelley, nor sorrowful like Wordsworth, nor de- 
 spairful like Carlyle. With Whitman he lights for 
 freedom and the souls of men. In the streets of the 
 city, among every-day affairs, the fight is fought and 
 won — not in solitude or in idleness. 
 
 Wordsworth is the poet of Nature : 
 
 " Me didst thou constitute a priest of thine." 
 
 Browning and Whitman are poets of man and de- 
 mocracy — are they not also poets of Nature ? 
 
 -MAN IN HIS ENTIRETY, 
 
 Unity, to repeat, is the dominant factor in Whit- 
 man's philosophy. He asserts the whole man, the 
 body no less than the soul.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 93 
 
 " Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for 
 the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far." 
 
 Inscriptions. 
 
 Lo ! a ship starting over the unbounded sea, " spread- 
 ing all sails, carrying even her moon sails ; " it is his 
 book, himself, complete. 
 
 The premise is that which William Blake stated so 
 strenuously long ago — then written down " indecent " 
 — the unity of matter and spirit. Before reform can 
 come in the world, Blake asserted in the Marriage of 
 Heaven and Hell, " first the notion that man has a 
 body distinct from the soul is to be expunged." 
 " Man has no Body distinct from the Soul, for that 
 which is called Body is a portion of the Soul discerned 
 by the five senses." 
 
 Throughout the Middle Ages the elements, soul and 
 body, were separated in thought and treatment. On 
 the one hand were ascetic monk and theologian 
 assuming the soul, in its nature, to be noble, and the 
 body, in its nature, to be base. Advised St. Simeon 
 Stylites in Tennyson's poem, — 
 
 " Mortify 
 Your flesh, like me, with scourges and with thorns ; 
 Smite, shrink not, spare not. If it may be, fast 
 Whole Lents and pray." 
 
 In art, also, a prohibition was laid upon the human 
 nature. Poets chose as ideals some unsubstantial 
 vision, some "Undine" evanescent as the mist — 
 surely we can go no farther that way. On the other
 
 94 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 hand were Minnesinger and trouvere, impulsive 
 romancers, heirs of the pre-Christian traditions, rare 
 protesting spirits against the dogmatism of the Church 
 and the infidelity of art. They have taken calm, 
 wholesome joy in life and the world, asserting, like 
 Lippo, the value of fleshly beauty : 
 
 " Now is this sense, I ask? 
 A fine way to paint soul by painting body 
 So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further 
 And can't fare worse ! " 
 
 There were many, it is true, sunk, beast-like, in the 
 sensual throng of Bacchus — this way too is seen to be 
 error. 
 
 It seems that Blake was among the first to seek to 
 reconcile the antagonism. He was never done pro- 
 testing against the division of the being, one activity 
 labelled right and another wrong. The chorus to his 
 Song of Libert?/ chants : " Let the Priest of the Raven 
 of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note, 
 curse the sons of joy. . . . For everything that 
 lives is Holy." Again he says, " Some will say, Is not 
 God alone the prolific ? I answer, God only acts and 
 is in existing beings or men." 
 
 The same spirit of bodily reverence emerges again 
 in Jefferies. He was never tired of contemplating the 
 Greek sculptures in the British Museum. " I believe 
 in the human being, mind and flesh, form and soul." 
 " I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest 
 blasphemy." 
 
 On the whole, the tendency of the present centu 7
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 95 
 
 has been to build the very social structure upon 
 those bodily stones which mediaeval speculation 
 rejected. 
 
 With Browning the "value and significance of 
 flesh " is a characteristic phrase. He regards the 
 " flesh " as being, in a sense, antagonistic rather, 
 a barrier to the spirit — the "carnal mesh" hems all 
 and " makes all error ; " " other heights in other lives, 
 God willing " — but it is in no ascetic temper that he 
 writes. Life is a mode of the soul's revelation. 
 
 " Body and soul are one thing with two names 
 For more or less elaborate stuff." 
 
 Bed Cotton Night-Cap Country. 
 
 The only dualism implied in his writings is a separa- 
 tion within man's spiritual nature, between knowledge 
 and love, and never between the body and the soul. 
 For by the body the soul attains identity. Only by 
 the false can we know the true ; only through the 
 flesh can we reach the soul ; only through man can 
 we find God. All Browning's practical philosophy is 
 held in this truth. " Eternity is in love with the 
 production of time," is Blake's proverb. Browning 
 always rebukes those who would degrade life. 
 
 " I say, o'er step no least one of the rows 
 That lead men from the bottom where he plants 
 Foot first of all, to life's last ladder top." 
 
 Pari, with Christ. Smart. 
 
 The strong life-pulse is a peculiarity of his verse.
 
 96 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 It may be but a fancy, but I seem to understand 
 Browning better, knowing London. Though "Italy" 
 — Queen Mary's saying serves — be engraven on his 
 heart, his thought is English and Londonesque. To 
 the passionate nature of Italy is joined the active 
 thought of England. London was for Browning (as 
 tor Spenser) " life's first native source." It is the 
 place for a dramatic poet to be born in. The domi- 
 nant sense of the city is powerful, active human will. 
 The keynote of nearly every scene is struggle of 
 some sort. London is rapid ; it might say with 
 Pauline, " I am made up of an intensest life," yet 
 it lacks persistency ; it is mysterious, complex, 
 obscure, capricious, paradoxical, a tangle of myriad 
 threads. All these go to make up the structural 
 warp and woof of many of Browning's poems. It is 
 needless to say that Browning is an uncompromising 
 realist. 
 
 " He walked and tapped the pavement with his cane, 
 Scenting the world, looking it full in face." 
 
 Follow Browning across the square in Florence to the 
 booth at the palace-step, where he found his Book, 
 through the ways of the city, across the bridge, till he 
 stood at home again at Casa Guidi : or retrace the walk 
 of Pippa from the Silkmills to Orcana, to the tur- 
 ret on the hill above Asola, to the Bishop's Brother's 
 House near the Duomo — every fact is accurate, 
 even to the old clothes sweetening in the sun, 
 fountain railing, the " doorway where the black 
 begins," the steps where poor girls sit, and even, as
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 97 
 
 Mr. Hall Griffin informs me, to the echo on the ridge 
 at Asolo which Luigi calls forth. Even Childe Roland 
 has its facts ; the frame-work a folk-tale, its castle in 
 Carrara, one scene from a tapestry ; once walking in a 
 blotchy waste at the edge of an English manufacturing 
 city, there was called to mind by some internal 
 sympathy, the very imagery of the plain, its waste 
 soil, abandoned tools, the little spiteful river, the old 
 horse, the gnarled scrubby tree — could this be said of 
 Coleridge's Kubla Khan ? The poet takes and tosses 
 in the air a square, old, yellow book, " pure crude 
 fact secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard 
 and brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since." 
 Has it been pointed out how the story is revealed to 
 the reader in the manner of real life ? Take a case : 
 A tragic event has happened, the details of which are 
 unknown to us. We make inquiry from one half of 
 London, and from the other half, and from tertium 
 quid ; probably attend the trial, hear the witness of 
 the actors themselves, the lawyers pleading, the 
 judge's decision. And in about the time required 
 to read through The Ring and the Book the whole 
 case becomes plain. 
 
 It is no wonder at all that Browning was welcomed 
 from the first in the great Western world, which is so 
 large, abounding, vital, wilful, " marching to fortune 
 not surprised by her." "In America," wrote Mrs. 
 Browning in 1859, " he is a power, a writer, a poet, — 
 he is read — he lives in the hearts of the people." The 
 people of America, themselves living in an atmosphere 
 of " character and situation/' have yet lacked literary
 
 98 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 dramatic expression. Browning for the first time fur- 
 nished an activity of will and a dramatic energy akin to 
 its own. It seems peculiarly appropriate that the first 
 complete edition of his works in the States should ap- 
 pear in a Railway Time-Table. x Is there another poet 
 whose tunes were born out of the " thump, thump and 
 shriek, shriek of the train " ? (that time he came down 
 from Manchester cf. Christmas Eve). Well — all this 
 is to fill us with regard for man and for the world in 
 which the man must live. Thus are life and the body 
 crowned — " Twine amaranth ! I am priest." 
 
 It is interesting to note, by the way, how Capon- 
 sacchi, the priest of the Church, plighted to the 
 " Bride o' the Lamb," realised the falseness of his 
 position when he found first that life and death are 
 means to an end, and passion uses both. 
 
 Life is indeed more than art. Art is an agency in 
 personality. "If we had real life we should need no 
 art," wrote Wagner. There is a curious scorn of art 
 and the artist, otherwise inexplicable, in In a Balcony, 
 One Word More, The Last Hide Together, Cleon, and 
 elsewhere Browning says, — 
 
 " Little girl with the poor coarse hand 
 I turned from to a cold clay cast — 
 
 1 Reprint of Smith, Eider & Co.'s Edition, 1868, in 
 the Official Guide of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, in 
 monthly issues from 1872 to 1874. It is one of the curios- 
 ities of literature. Mr. Browning procured a set for the 
 British Museum.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 99 
 
 I have my lesson, understand 
 The worth of flesh and blood at last. . . . 
 
 Flesh and bone and nerve that make 
 
 The poorest coarsest human hand 
 
 An object worthy to be scanned 
 A whole life long for their sole sake." 
 
 James Lee's Wife, viii. 
 
 He is no scorner of the body who wrote the glad 
 chant of life in Saul. 
 
 " How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to 
 employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in 
 joy." 
 
 Whitman breaks, perhaps, more completely with old 
 conventions. Probably, as Mr. Ellis suggests, he 
 examples for the first time, since the Greek ideal, the 
 reintegration of the natural instincts of the entire man. 
 The Greek and the Christian meet in him. His 
 poems are as true to life as the Greek statue, and 
 there is added the Christian element of the inner 
 governing life. But he has not the refinement of the 
 later Greek; he is Gothic, almost barbaric in his 
 health and brawn. For the future of democracy he 
 announces a larger, saner brood of men and women, a 
 future of a free life, a simple diet, clear sweet blood, 
 " of litheness, majestic faces, and perfect physique." 
 Would you have the broadest culture? The secret of 
 the making of the best poems and persons is to grow 
 in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.
 
 lOO BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Health is unity, wholeness, haleness ; disease is sepa- 
 ration, disintegration. All comes by the body. 
 
 But this naturalism is no longer opposed to Chris- 
 tianity, but in harmony with its highest truths. 
 " Jesus," said Blake, " was all virtue, and acted from 
 impulse, not from rules." While Whitman trusts the 
 impulses of nature, it is a nature which is, as it were, 
 ethical. God is not a workman who made the world 
 as a watch is made — does not Paley argue vainly ? — or 
 who formed the man as a potter shapes his pitcher — 
 that metaphor of the "Potter's Wheel!" God, who 
 is Love and Power, is rather the inherent principle of 
 work, the evolving force, the life of the man. Whit- 
 man's naturalism is upon the higher level of our 
 modern social truth, and is as far removed from lust 
 on the one hand and asceticism on the other as the 
 heavens from the earth. He consecrates the un- 
 divided being. Lust is destroyed by the natural 
 activity of love. The flesh says not, " Let us eat and 
 drink for to-morrow we die," but " All good things are 
 ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps 
 soul." 
 
 The theology of Carlyle asserted a perpetual sepa- 
 ration between the human and divine natures. In the 
 new theology of democracy man's nature is held to be 
 essentially akin to the Divine. The body is the temple 
 of the Holy Ghost. " If any man defile the Temple 
 of God, him shall God destroy," say the Scriptures. 
 Love is the natural activity of the soul. Sin is an 
 interloper, abnormal, arising from abuse, disease, in- 
 sanity. Life is homogeneous with duty.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. IOI 
 
 " I give nothing as duties, 
 What others give as duties I give as living impulses, 
 Shall I give the heart's action as a duty ? " x 
 
 Birds of Passage. 
 
 Observe now the meaning exhibited in Browning's 
 monologues, that life is a progress whose law is love. 
 Success in living is obedience, not to duty, which may 
 only bring happiness (cf. Bifurcation), but to the 
 natural impulses of one's own nature, which lead to 
 God. 
 
 " How the world is made for each of us ! 
 How all we perceive and know in it 
 Tends to some moment's product thus, 
 
 When a soul declares itself — to wit, 
 By its fruit, the thing it does ! . . . 
 
 " I am named and known by that moment's feat ; 
 
 There took my station and degree ; 
 So grew my own small life complete, 
 
 As Nature obtained her best of me — 
 One born to love you, sweet ! . . . 
 
 1 Sidney Lanier, in the name of art and artists (evi- 
 dently impelled by his " taste " and not by his philosophy), 
 utters a fervent protest " against a poetry which has 
 painted a great scrawling picture of the human body, and 
 has written under it, ' This is the soul' ; which shouts a 
 profession of religion in every line, but of a religion that, 
 when examined, reveals no tenet, no rubric, save that a 
 man must be natural, must abandon himself to every 
 passion ; and which constantly roars its belief in God, but 
 with a camerado air as if it were patting the Deity on the 
 back, and bidding Him, Cheer up, and hope for further 
 encouragement." — English Novel, p. 62.
 
 102 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " So earth has gained by one man the more, 
 And the gain of earth must be heaven's gain too." 
 
 By the Fireside. 
 
 The tendency which makes for righteousness is our- 
 selves. In other words, love is the claim of the soul, 
 duty may be only the requirement of the world. 
 
 " God never is dishonoured in the spark 
 He gave us from His fire of fires, and bade 
 Remember whence it sprang, nor be afraid 
 While that burns on, though all the rest grow dark." 
 Any Wife to any Husband. 
 
 Browning does not deny the flesh because the love 
 which he sings includes and exalts the flesh. 
 
 " Where is the use of the lips' red charm, 
 The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow, 
 And the blood that blues the inside arm — 
 
 " Unless we turn, as the soul knows how, 
 The earthly gift to an end divine ? " 
 
 The Statue and the Bust. 
 
 Browning speaks quite in his own name in Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra. 
 
 " Let us not always say, 
 ' Spite of this flesh to-day 
 I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! ' 
 As the bird wings and sings, 
 Let us cry ' All good things 
 Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh 
 helps soul ! ' ''
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 103 
 
 By reason of The Statue and the Bust and Fifine at 
 the Fair, Browning's name has been joined with 
 Shelley and Byron as confusing distinctions of moral 
 right and wrong. It may be so, and it may be that it 
 is well that conventional morality is sometimes dis- 
 turbed. But in the former poem the sin, for Brown- 
 ing, consisted in the absence of valour, in the failure to 
 put forth will. " He who desires and acts not breeds 
 pestilence," is Blake's way of putting it. The latter 
 poem is an attempt to find room in an optimistic 
 philosophy for the lowest of God's creatures. " Not 
 till the sun excludes you do I exclude you." 
 
 § 4. — LIFE AND IMMORTALITY. 
 
 Browning and Whitman are in substantial agree- 
 ment as to the meaning of life. The thought of the 
 one may be given in the words of the other. 
 
 " This world's no blot for us, 
 
 Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good." 
 
 " Law must be active in earth or nowhere." 
 
 They have not been vanquished, like Carlyle and 
 Byron, by the problems of man's destiny. Life is for 
 the individual an episode in the history of an immortal 
 being. It is the period of probation or opportunity 
 for identity, character building, and self-realisation 
 with reference to eternity. The present and the future 
 are, for them, thoughts inseparably blended.
 
 104 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " I know the past was great, and the future will be great, 
 And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present 
 
 time, 
 And that where I am or you are this present day is the 
 
 centre of all days, all races, 
 And there is the meaning to us of all that has ever come 
 of races and days, or ever will come." 
 
 Birds of Passage. 
 
 The present proves the soul worthy, and all things 
 are at work moulding the soul into finer form for pur- 
 poses beyond. 
 
 " It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother 
 and father, it is to identify you." 
 
 Proud Music of the Storm. 
 
 " And I have dream'd that the purport and essence of the 
 known life, the transient, 
 Is to form and decide identity for the unknown life, the 
 
 permanent." 
 
 Proud, Music of the Storm. 
 
 " I count life just a stuff 
 To try the soul's strength on, educe the man." 
 
 In a Balcony. 
 
 " Machinery just meant 
 To give the soul its bent, 
 
 Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed." 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 
 " What good, O life ? 
 
 That you are here — that life exists and identity, 
 That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute 
 a verse." 
 
 By the Roadside.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 105 
 
 As a condition of probatory education, stress is laid 
 upon the presence of what we call evil in the world. 
 
 " I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part 
 also." 
 
 Evil blends with good in a manner proportioned to the 
 education of a free, rational, and religious being, who 
 is kin to God, and intended to yield Him praise. Pro- 
 gress requires failure. " Without contraries is no pro- 
 gression," said Blake. We are beginning to believe 
 that the "Fall," by which "Death came into the 
 world and all our woe," was a necessary step in the 
 evolution of the moral nature of the race ; that the 
 advance out of evil consists in the elimination of the 
 lower elements of nature, that evil can be but transient, 
 a chastisement of the Father, a stepping-stone, as it 
 were, to our higher selves, a means to an end ; only the 
 good continues and is eternal. Why, " amelioration is 
 one of the earth's words." 
 
 This philosophic insight is the secret of the poets' 
 optimism. There is an optimism which is mere sunni- 
 ness of temper ; there is a pessimism which is mere 
 fault-finding. There is an optimism which refuses to 
 see the ills of life, as there is a pessimism which refuses 
 to see the good. Carlyle took Emerson through the 
 streets of London, propounding at every step if this or 
 that were evil, but Emerson's eyes were blind, refusing 
 to acknowledge what the other saw. Carlyle's pessi- 
 mism was far deeper than Emerson's optimism ; it 
 recognised the good and the evil of the world, though 
 failing to correlate. Of this same deeper nature is the
 
 106 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 optimism of Browning and Whitman. After coming in 
 direct contact with the misery and mistakes of life, 
 never blind to the actual results of evil, they yet hold 
 that good is the heart of all ; for God is love, eternal 
 and universal. 
 
 It is a restatement of the Scriptural hope, that all 
 things are working together for good. It arises more 
 directly from the optimistic philosophy set forth by 
 the German idealists. The thought was recognised in 
 literature by Blake, and, in this century, has been re- 
 asserted by many of our most profound thinkers, by 
 Browning and Whitman, by Kingsley, by Roden Noel 
 in A Modem Faust, 1 by none so pertinently as by 
 George Macdonald. 
 
 It will not do, by the way, to ignore the contribution 
 of the poets and secular writers to current theologic 
 thought. We often fail of seeing how the higher 
 literature of this century is pervaded by religious 
 ideas in a way the eighteenth century would have 
 deemed impossible, and from which its fine wits would 
 have turned with much disdain. That the poets have 
 had a message to deliver is no failure of their art. 
 Browning's message — he too is a prophet — is of all 
 the most significant. He set himself at the problem 
 which lies at the basis of religious philosophy. His 
 solution that 
 
 " We fall to rise, are baffled to fight better," 
 
 is a justification of the ways of God to men, in com- 
 
 1 "It may be the All draweth breath 
 From good and evil, life and death. ;;
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 107 
 
 parison with which such a solution as that of Milton 
 in Paradise Lost seems superficial. 
 
 For us a new gladness has been given, a gladness 
 deeper than Emerson's, not shared by Byron or 
 Carlyle, not by Matthew Arnold, and but hardly 
 attained by the Poet Laureate. "There's a great 
 difference between him and me," said Carlyle of 
 Browning. " He seems very content with life, and 
 takes much satisfaction in the world. It's a very 
 strange and curious spectacle to behold a man in 
 these days so confidently cheerful." It is a confidently 
 cheerful voice that these days most need, an afifirmer, 
 without doubt, without despair, without suggestion of 
 cynicism. 
 
 Democracy is a hope, a promise that evil is not 
 necessary, that social conditions may be remedied, 
 that poverty, disease, crime, cannot and shall not 
 endure. For " God's in His heaven," and t: all's right 
 with the world." 
 
 In the Song of the Open Road, Passage to India, 
 Pioneers, and often elsewhere, Whitman shows the two 
 essential conditions of the earth-life, battle and progress. 
 
 Man is a war. He is no idle, necessary spectator 
 in the strife of good and evil. Morality is energy of 
 life. One side of the square Deific, in Whitman's 
 mystical song, is doubt, defiance, revolt. Spiritual 
 attainment is for man's own winning. Wars are 
 fought for liberty and the souls of men. Out of every 
 struggle we gather a spiritual fruit. 
 
 " My book and the war are one."
 
 IOS BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 "I, too, haughty Shade, also sing war, and a longer and 
 
 greater one than any, 
 Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, 
 
 advance and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering, 
 (Yet methinks, certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) 
 
 the field, the world, 
 For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul, 
 Lo ! I, too, am come, chanting the chant of battles — 
 I, above all, promote brave soldiers." 
 
 Inscriptions. 
 
 " Through untried roads with ambushed opponents lined, 
 Through many a sharp defeat and many a crisis often 
 
 baffled ; 
 Here marching", ever marching on, a war fight out — 
 
 aye, here, 
 To fiercer, weightier battles give expression." 
 
 Drum-Tapis. 
 
 " I am he who tauntingly compels men and women, 
 nations- 
 Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your 
 lives." 
 
 Song of the Open Road. 
 
 '•' Swift to the head of the Army ! Swift ! Spring to your 
 places, Pioneers ! O Pioneers." 
 
 Pioneers. 
 
 Man is a progress. 
 
 " Sail forth, steer for the deeo waters only, 
 
 Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou 
 with me,
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. IOQ 
 
 For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared 
 
 to go, 
 And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all." 
 
 Passage to India. 
 
 He must out on the open road. The universe is 
 a road for travelling souls. The road opens in never- 
 ending vista, " stretches and waits for you," and 
 passes on. There is no tarrying. There is no rest. 
 To be idle is to cease to live. 
 
 " Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and 
 never stopping." 
 
 Pioneers. 
 
 Apparent failure may be in truth success. 
 
 " Have you heard that it was good to gain the day ?j 
 I also say it is good to fall." 
 
 Sony of Myself. 
 
 The road is endless, brings "none to his or her 
 terminus, or to be content or full." "On earth the 
 broken arcs," said Browning. What have we to do 
 with creeds or formula? There is nothing so fixed 
 that it is final. Thought is ever constructive and 
 ever takes vista. 
 
 "What has succeeded? Yourself? Your nation? 
 Nature ? 
 Now understand me well — it is provided in the essence 
 of things that from any fruition of success no 
 matter what shall come forth something to make 
 a greater struggle necessary." 
 
 Sony of the Open Road.
 
 110 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 There is no stoppage this side of the Infinite. 
 Whitman dedicates his songs, his thoughts, himself 
 for completion to the Invisible World. " In heaven 
 the perfect round," agrees Browning. 
 
 " Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achieved 
 The seas all cross'd, weather'd the capes, the voyage 
 
 done, 
 Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim 
 
 attain'd, 
 All fill'd with friendship, love complete, the Elder 
 
 Brother found, 
 The Younger melts in fondness in his arms." , 
 
 Passage to India. 
 
 It will be unnecessary to consider at length Brown- 
 ing's statement of the thought. It is part and parcel 
 of all his works. Towards the last, Browning sought 
 to establish a dualism within the spiritual nature of 
 man, separation between knowledge and love, the one 
 unknowable, the other knowable ; but in Rabbi Ben 
 Ezra and The Ring and the Book the human spirit is 
 regarded as undivided in its progressive activity. His 
 last words ring clear : 
 
 " No at noon clay in the bustle of man's work-time 
 Greet the unseen with a cheer ! 
 Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
 ' Strive and thrive !' cry 'Speed !' — fight on, fare ever 
 There as here." 
 
 Asolando. 
 
 Both scientific and religious doctrines, as well as 
 poetic, underlie this conception of life.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. I T T 
 
 " In this broad earth of ours, 
 Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, 
 Enclosed and safe within its central heart, 
 Nestles the seed perfection." 
 
 Song of the Universal. 
 
 Nature outside of man is complete ; with man begins 
 a tendency to God, progress being man's distinctive 
 mark alone, — 
 
 " Not God's and not the beasts, — God is, they are, 
 Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." 
 
 Death in the Desert. 
 
 With imperfect though growing knowledge, and with 
 freedom of choice and consciousness of final ach : eve- 
 ment, men strive for self-realisation. The law of the 
 battle is effort, and the tendency of its working is to 
 set man forward in the strife ; effort raises, depend- 
 ence lowers. Each must achieve for himself. 
 
 " Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you, 
 You must travel it for yourself." 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 The struggle is personal and alone. " When the 
 fight begins within himself a man's worth something." 
 " Thus we half men struggle." 
 
 Browning and Whitman are men of will, men of 
 action, such as Blake would class among the demons 
 of his " Hell," radiating infinite energy and joy. The 
 contrast is again with Wordsworth (a "lost leader" in 
 very truth). When the time comes for the strife of 
 democracy, it is the conception of the former that we 
 need ; for rest and recovery from the strong diastole
 
 112 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 of life we may, perhaps, wish to turn to Wordsworth 
 to lose ourselves, for the moment, in the quiet of 
 Nature. 
 
 The meaning of life is constructed, as has been 
 already indicated, with reference to immortality. To 
 this thought finally both poets ascend ; here they cul- 
 minate. 
 
 "Thus I believe, thus I affirm, that I am certain it is, 
 and that from this life I shall pass to another 
 better where that lady lives of whom my soul was 
 enamoured." 1 
 
 And this, by the way, is the supreme thought in 
 democracy ; for the soul is seen at length to prevail 
 and to govern absolutely. 
 
 Browning, resting in the fundamental facts of God 
 and consciousness (cf. La Saisiaz), is more intellectual 
 in the statement of his plea than Whitman. Life is 
 intelligible — why evil ? why aspiration ? failure ? 
 growth ? motive ? character ? why love ? — only when 
 considered as a probation. Spiritual force persists. 
 Only by a future life can the universe become a 
 harmony. 
 
 " Truly there needs another life to come ! 
 If this be all (I must tell Festus that) 
 And other life awaits us not — for me 
 I say 'tis a poor cheat, a stupid bungle, 
 A wretched failure ; I for one protest 
 Against it — and I hurl it back with scorn." 
 
 Paracelsus. 
 
 1 A note from Dante written by Browning in his wife's 
 Testament.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 113 
 
 Browning believes in immortality because of the 
 demands of reason. On the other hand, we may agree 
 with Mrs. Orr, that "his challenge to Faith and 
 Hope imposes itself far less through any intellectual 
 plea which he may advance in his support than 
 through the unconscious testimony of all creative 
 genius to the marvel of conscious life." 
 
 Whitman, confident in his inspiration and truer to 
 his art (which is a result and not a process) simply 
 affirms, without argument, though the same intellectual 
 appeal is present. 
 
 " I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and 
 Space, but I believe heavenly death provides for 
 
 all." 
 
 Songs of Parting. 
 
 " Is it a dream ? 
 Nay, but the lack of it the dream, 
 And failing it, life's lore and wealth a dream, 
 And all the world a dream ! " 
 
 Birds of Passage. 
 
 " The untold want by life and land ne'er granted, 
 Now, voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find." 
 
 Songs of Parting. 
 
 " It is not chaos or death — it is form, union, plan — it is 
 eternal life — it is Happiness.'' 
 
 So)ig of Myself. 
 
 However, for Whitman, the final assurance is given 
 by Nature.
 
 114 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " Ah, the dead to me mar not, they fit well in Nature, 
 They fit very well in the landscape under the trees and 
 
 grass, 
 And along the edge of the sky in the horizon's far 
 margin." 
 
 Autumn Rivulets. 
 
 " The smallest sprout shows there is really no death." 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 It is the sea, that, creeping to his feet, whispers the 
 word, " final, superior to all " ; the grey brown thrush 
 in the cedar swamp carols a welcome to the " dark 
 mother." In the moose, the cat, the chickadee, the 
 prairie dog — all animals, he sees the same old law of 
 life and death. The pulsations of all matter and 
 spirit throbbing forever prove that 
 
 " Death is but the beginning, and that nothing is or can 
 be lost, nor ever die, nor soul nor matter." 
 
 Specimen Days. 
 
 For if one life be continuous, all life must be con. 
 tinuous. 
 
 " I swear I think now that everything without exception 
 has an eternal soul ! 
 The trees have, rooted in the ground ! the weeds of 
 the sea have ! the animals ! " 
 
 Proud Music of the Storm. 
 
 " And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields, 
 And brown ants in the little wells beneath them." 
 
 Song of Myself.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 1 5 
 
 To both poets old age is but the estuary that en- 
 larges itself and opens broadly into the great sea. 
 
 " Old age, calm, expanded, broad, with the haughty 
 
 breadth of the universe, 
 
 Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom 
 
 of death." 
 
 Song of the Open Road. 
 
 " Grow old along with me ! 
 The best is yet to be, 
 The last of life, for which the first was made : 
 Our times are in His hand 
 Who saith ' A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half ; trust God : see all, nor be 
 afraid ! ' " 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 
 Whitman will sing the very loveliness of death : 
 death was never sung so tenderly and joyously as in his 
 two finest lyrics, Out of the Cradle and Lincoln's Burial 
 Hymn, and in his last sweet farewell song : 
 
 " Thee, holiest minister of Heaven — thee, envoy, usherer, 
 guide at last of all, 
 Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call'd life, 
 Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death." 
 
 Death's Valley. 
 
 Hitherto death has been for the most part a sombre 
 figure in literature, charactered throughout the Middle 
 Ages as a grim musician, leading all men upon his 
 dance, the dance Macaber. Prince Henry, in Long- 
 fellow's Golden Legend, shudders at the paintings in the 
 gallery.
 
 Il6 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Prince Henry : — " Let us go forward, and no longer stay 
 In this great picture-gallery of Death ! 
 I hate it ! ay, the very thought of it ! " 
 
 Elsie :— " Why is it hateful to you ?" 
 
 Prince Henry : — " For the reason 
 
 That life, and all that speaks of life, is 
 
 lovely 
 And Death, and all that speaks of 
 
 Death, is hateful.' 5 
 
 So might have answered the poets of many former 
 generations. For the men of the age of Elizabeth, the 
 grave was a vast charnel-house which could not be 
 contemplated without a shudder and a fear. In our 
 own century, William Morris, like the mariners of his 
 Earthly Paradise, has done all in his power to escape 
 its thought, which chills all he enjoys. Tennyson 
 rises only to the hope that good may fall at last far 
 off to all. For Whitman there is no death, there is 
 no "other" life. In the midst of the valley he sees 
 God's beautiful, eternal, right hand. " Joy ! " he calls 
 to his shipmate, " Joy ! " 
 
 There are the same joyful tones in Browning's 
 thoughts on death. 
 
 " Easter Day breaks, Christ rises, Mercy every way is 
 infinite.'' 
 
 Very characteristic is the song at the end of parley- 
 ing with Gerard de Lairesse. The old poet could 
 join hands with a young lover, singing, —
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 17 
 
 " Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows 
 On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows ; 
 Dance you, reds, and whites, and yellows !" 
 
 "Love is all," he concludes, "and death is nought." 
 
 The character of the future life they cannot know 
 — they are satisfied that it is something good. 
 
 " I know it not, O soul, 
 
 Nor dost thou, all is a blank before u 
 All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible 
 land." 
 
 Whispers of Heavenly Death. 
 
 " They go ! they go ! I know that they go, but I know not 
 where they go, 
 But I know that they go toward the best — toward some- 
 thing great." 
 
 So)ig of the Open Road. 
 
 In This Compost, and in one passage in Song of 
 Myself, Whitman suggests an immortality of the dust ; 
 he bequeaths himself to grow from the grass he loves, 
 and, if you were to protest that the earth is a poor im- 
 mortality, he would question with the child, "What is 
 grass ? " 
 
 " How could I answer the child ? I do not know what it is 
 any more than he." 
 
 Song of Myself 
 
 But in the end he asserts for the spirit a separate 
 existence. 
 
 It is pathetic to see, once or twice, how the poets'
 
 Il8 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 faith falters. Amid the sorrows of the world, oppres- 
 sions, and shame, "the meanness and agony without 
 end," it is not to be wondered at that there comes to 
 Whitman the terrible doubt of appearances, that 
 
 "The may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after 
 all, 
 That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful 
 fable only." 
 
 Calamus. 
 
 Even in the strong, beautiful Prayer of Columbus 
 there is a pathetic questioning. Doubt comes to 
 Browning also in the midst of triumph. 
 
 " Sudden turns the blood to ice : a chill wind disencharms 
 All the late enchantment ! What if all be error." 
 
 Epilogue : Ferishtdhs Fancies. 
 
 But both return from the doubt with a surer faith in 
 the present. In the dialogue between Fancy and 
 Reason, Browning pleads that uncertainty as to the 
 soul's future is needful lest the soul, abandoning its 
 struggles upon earth, fail of its probation. After all, — 
 
 "You must mix some uncertainty 
 
 With faith if you would have faith be." 
 
 Faster Bay. 
 
 God, whom I praise ; how could I praise, 
 If such as I might understand, 
 Make out and reckon on his ways, 
 And bargain for his love, and stand, 
 Paying a price, at his right hand ? " 
 
 Agricola in Meditation.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. I T9 
 
 Whitman's doubts are solved at once by the grasp of 
 his lovers' hands, by companionship with dear friends. 
 
 " I cannot answer the question of appearances, or that of 
 identity beyond the grave, 
 But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, 
 He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me." 
 
 Calamus. 
 
 § 5. — LOVE OR THE SOCIAL SIDE OF LIFE. 
 (ARTISTIC METHOD.) 
 
 The last line quoted leads directly to the considera- 
 tion of Whitman's second great thought on Life. 
 While singing One's-self he utters the word demo- 
 cratic, ministering at once to the individual and to 
 society, to the self and to the love which annihilates 
 mere selfishness. In a complete world society is as 
 necessary as the individual. By himself the one is but 
 a potentiality. In community, in action and inter- 
 action, the individual becomes real and progressive. 
 But given a number of self-governing people, how 
 can a nationality be compacted ? 
 
 " Were you looking to be held together by lawyers ? 
 Or by an agreement on a paper ? Or by arms ? 
 Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.' 
 
 Drum-Taps. 
 
 How but by a spiritual principle which will draw 
 men together in proportion as external bonds are 
 relaxed. The recognition of love, as such a unifying 
 principle, is comparatively modern, and the complete
 
 120 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 history of its working has yet to be written. Pro- 
 fessor Henry Jones, treating of the theme of love, 
 has finely said : " Love, which in its earliest form, 
 seems to be the natural yearning of brute for brute, 
 appearing and disappearing at the suggestion of 
 physical needs, passes into an idealised sentiment, 
 into an emotion of the soul, into a principle of moral 
 activity, which manifests itself in a permanent over- 
 flow of helpful deeds for man. It represents, when 
 thus sublimated, one side, at least, of the expansion 
 of the self luhich culminates when the ivorld beats in 
 the pulse of the individual, and the joys and sorrows, 
 the defeats and victories of mankind are felt by him 
 as his own. It is no longer dependent merely on the 
 incitement of youth, grace, beauty, whether of body 
 or character ; it transcends all limitations of sex and 
 age, and finds objects on which it can spend itself 
 in all that God has made, even in that which has 
 violated its own law of life and become mean and 
 pitiful. It becomes a love of fallen humanity, and 
 an ardour to save it by becoming the conscious and 
 permanent motive of all men. The history of this 
 evolution of love has been written by the poets. 
 Every phase through which this ever-deepening 
 emotion has passed, every form which this primary 
 power has taken in its growth, has received from 
 them its own proper expression. They have made 
 even the grosser instincts lyric with beauty ; and, 
 ascending with their theme, they have sung the pure 
 passion of soul for soul, its charm and its strength, 
 its idealism and heroism, up to the point at which,
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 121 
 
 in Browning, it transcends the limits of finite exist- 
 ence, sheds all its earthly vesture, and becomes a 
 spiritual principle of religious aspiration and self- 
 surrender to God." 1 
 
 As a spiritual principle love has never been sung with 
 such poetic insight as by Browning. With Whitman 
 love is less a principle than a practice — if the dis- 
 tinction he allowable— and his confidence springs 
 not so much from his philosophy as from his obser- 
 vation that love has lain latent in all men, therefore 
 beneath metaphysics, beneath Socrates as beneath 
 Christ. His songs are of personal love between com- 
 rades, with the intent, however, of national compact- 
 ment. He calls to human brotherhood with clear 
 and penetrating voice, saying with Christ in Palestine, 
 " All ye are brethren." Like Christ he is a direct, 
 personal, emotional force, probably the strongest in 
 this century. 
 
 " Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of 
 the tenderest lover, 
 Who was not proud of his songs but of the measureless 
 ocean of love within him, and freely pour"d it 
 forth." 
 
 Calamus. 
 
 The critical period of Whitman's life was the Ci\il 
 War, during which he served in the hospitals. The 
 war purified his nature, rendered him sympathetic as 
 a mother and filled his mind with emotive thought. 
 From the war emerging, he sings of comradeship and 
 
 1 Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher, 
 p. 15S-9.
 
 122 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 democracy. He has no doubt now as to the mean- 
 ing of popular government. Democracy, as he 
 understands it, is not wholly a question of in- 
 stitutions. He would agree with Carlyle that men 
 are not free because possessed of a vote and one 
 ten-thousandth part in a " House of Palaver." 
 Liberty is not derived from a State legislature. 
 Institutions are extraneous, the mere clothing of the 
 body, and clothing, as Mr. Clemens suggests in his 
 study of King Arthur's Court, may wear out and 
 become ragged. " To be loyal to rags, to shout for 
 rags, to worship rags, to die for rags — that is a loyalty 
 of unreason, it is pure animal ; it belongs to mon- 
 archy, was invented by monarchy ; let monarchy keep 
 it." 
 
 " But really I am neither for nor against institutions. 
 Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city 
 
 of these States, inland and sea-boaid, 
 And in the fields and woods, and above every keel, 
 
 little or large, that dents the water, 
 Without edifices, or rules, or any argument, 
 The institution of the dear love of comrades." 
 
 Calamus. 
 
 Upon no other basis than love can democracy be 
 reared. Selfishness is separation, death, and decay. 
 
 "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks 
 to his own funeral drest in his shroud." 
 
 Song of Myself. 
 
 In the evolution of nations, as of individuals, only 
 the fittest, the most helpful survives. May we not
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 23 
 
 say that the English race occupies the forefront of 
 civilisation because taking most heed of the law of 
 brotherhood. Brotherhood becomes leally a question 
 of national survival. 
 
 " Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problems 
 of freedom yet." 
 
 Drum-Taps. 
 
 " I will make inseparable cities with their arms about 
 each other's necks, 
 
 By the love of comrades, 
 
 By the manly love of comrades." 
 
 Calamus. 
 
 " I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the 
 attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth, 
 I dream'd that was the new city of Friends." 
 
 Calamus. 
 
 A beautiful vision, as true as beautiful, and one which 
 the world will not willingly let die. 
 
 The emotional is the key to Whitman's artistic 
 method. If he err, it is on the side of love. Caring 
 for the wounded soldiers in war time, he bore deep in 
 his breast "a burning flame." Afterwards he could 
 write, — 
 
 " Beauty, knowledge inure not to me — yet there are two 
 or three things inure to me : 
 I have nourished the wounded and soothed many a 
 
 dying soldier, 
 And at intervals, waiting in the midst of camp, com- 
 posed these songs." 
 
 Drum- Taps. 
 
 Whitman's method, let me repeat, is not derived
 
 124 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 from formal art, but from life itself. It may be a 
 novel thing in literary criticism to scrutinise a civil 
 war for the genesis of poetic forms, but Whitman 
 demands novelty of view or he will not be understood. 
 
 " Arm'd year [1861], year of the struggle, 
 No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, 
 
 terrible year, 
 Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping 
 
 cadenzas piano, 
 But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, 
 advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder." 
 
 Drum-Taps. 
 
 To a certain civilian he answered, — 
 
 " I have been born of the same as the war was born. . . . 
 And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and 
 
 with piano tunes, 
 For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me." 
 
 Drum-Taps. 
 
 Till the war, he was seeking the law of his poems. 
 His best work, more pure, refined, was subsequent to it. 
 
 With respect to literature, Whitman is related in 
 method not so directly to Browning as to Richard 
 Wagner, with whom, however, both poets have often 
 the closest affinity. Let it not be thought strange 
 that such relationship is possible. The habitual 
 attitude of the northern Teutonic mind is much the 
 same under whatever skies or whatever conditions. 
 Wagner and Browning are more conscious products 
 of an old culture and civilisation. Whitman is a more 
 unconscious artist of not altogether dissimilar thought-
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 25 
 
 tendencies in a freer world. It will be well to indicate 
 what we understand to be Wagner's place in the 
 republic of art. While a legitimate successor of 
 Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann, in that he has 
 extended the province of music, Wagner is yet 
 primarily a poet, only secondarily a musician. He is 
 related rather — taking into account difference of time 
 and conditions — to the Greek tragedy-writers who 
 were not only writers of plays, but also composers of 
 the music and lyric rhythms which were an essential 
 accompaniment. And, as with the plays of ^Eschylus, 
 who of all the Greeks best observed the function of 
 poet-composer, the final appeal is to the student of 
 literature. Wagner has himself indicated that this is 
 the point of view from which he wished his works to 
 be contemplated. " I write no more operas," he said 
 in 1851, ''and as I can invent no arbitrary name for 
 my works, I call them dramas, because by my doing 
 so, I at least most clearly define the standpoint whence 
 what I offer must be accepted." It seems a little 
 strange that to this day the majority of his critics 
 persist in judging him as a musical performer. Even 
 the Royal Opera House at Govent Garden announced 
 the Niblung cycle among its "German Opera," and 
 literary journals have discussed their performance in 
 the columns devoted to music. But Wagner is so 
 much more than a musician, his numerous prose 
 writings and published letters are so replete with 
 wisdom, gathered by the truest insight, up'on many 
 subjects — art, philosophy, religion, politics — all human 
 subjects of world-wide significance — that it is folly to
 
 126 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 neglect the more comprehensive view. " Now if you 
 wish to start a paper," Wagner wrote to Uhlig, "I beg 
 you to get rid of all that smells of ' musical paper ' : 
 always conceive the undertaking from a general stand- 
 point, art and life ; and truly, according to their core 
 and essence, not according to their husk." Now 
 Wagner is first and foremost a dramatist, and deals 
 in his artistic works with thought, and character, and 
 situation. It will be remembered that his first ambi- 
 tion was to be a poet. As a school-boy he worked 
 for years upon a tragedy, more terrible than Hamlet 
 and Lear, in which his forty-two characters perished. 
 And to supply a musical setting to his drama, he 
 began the study of music, borrowing Lozier's Thorough- 
 bass Method for his purpose. In all his dramas the 
 poetry was written first. And it will be found that 
 the thought conveyed by his music is poetic, not 
 strictly musical. 
 
 The thought-soul of a sonata is musical ; it has its 
 own laws, and own manner and medium of expression. 
 When Mendelssohn was asked what was the meaning 
 of his Songs without Words, he replied that they meant 
 what they said. Musical thought is untranslatable : it 
 appeals directly to the emotional nature and to the 
 imagination. 
 
 Wagner's compositions are not so. In his art are 
 embedded a philosophy of life, an interpretation of 
 history, almost a theology. Every drama has its pur- 
 pose, and contains, even in the structure of the musical 
 phrases, a criticism of life. And it is the triumph of 
 his art that, starting from ideal truth, he has succeeded
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 27 
 
 in giving such truth concrete expression in the action 
 of characters who are as clearly and skilfully drawn as 
 are those of Shakespeare. To his philosophy, though 
 it is never obtrusive, and to the characters who are its 
 mouthpieces, the song and orchestral accompaniments 
 are subsidiary and explanatory. The instrumentation 
 becomes very near articulation. Wagner has simply 
 constructed a language of musical sounds which, with 
 the word-sounds, body forth the emotional and rational 
 element which is below all language whatsoever. His 
 music is speech, not merely song. In a few instances 
 the orchestra assumes the function of an actor, as in 
 Siegfried's Death-March, where the orchestral har- 
 monies make an independent proclamation of heroic 
 grief (with all the joyful notes, by the way, of Whit- 
 man's songs of Death) in a manner impossible to any 
 other instrument in the drama. The orchestra again 
 has a prophetical function, as when, in Das Rheingold, 
 Wotan tarries a moment in thought upon the rainbow- 
 bridge, there is heard the prophecy of the sword which, 
 long after, is destined, in the hand of Siegfried, to 
 shatter the spear of power and restore a divided world. 
 In no case, however, is the music absolute, but always 
 subsidiary to dramatic harmony. Someone at my 
 elbow suggests that Schumann is more akin to Brown- 
 ing than Wagner. But the suggestion contains the 
 confusion of identifying music and poetry, which I 
 have tried to avoid. It is idle to seek to make Wagner's 
 dramas conform to the laws of a music to which they 
 were never intended to conform. The whole force of 
 the comparison with Whitman relies upon the distinc-
 
 128 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 tion. You may think Wagner's system to be in error 
 — that is another matter. 
 
 With the thought-content of Wagner's dramas, we 
 have not here to do. But as a justification of the 
 juxtaposition of the names of Wagner, Browning, and 
 Whitman, I cannot forbear quoting a single passage 
 from a letter of Wagner to Uhlig, which illustrates the 
 Teutonic principle of liberty held in common by the 
 three : 
 
 " I will be happy, and a man can only be that if he is 
 free ; but that man is free who is what he can, 
 and, therefore, must be. Whoever, therefore, 
 satisfies the inner necessity of his being, is free ; 
 because he feels himself one with himself, because 
 everything which he does answers to his nature, to 
 his true needs. Whoever follows a necessity, not 
 from within, but from without, is subject to com- 
 pulsion; he is not free, but an unfortunate slave. 
 The free man laughs at oppression from without, 
 if only inner necessity be not sacrificed to it ; it 
 can only cause fly stings, not heart wounds. I 
 don't care what happens to me, if only I become 
 what, according to my nature, I ought to become. 
 So shall I be right even if no idler take notice of 
 me." Letters. 1 
 
 In the manner of expression we are confronted by 
 a new problem, and the three artists are alike in this, 
 also a peculiarly Teutonic trait, in departure from 
 accepted conventions of form — " sow song sedition." 
 
 In Die Meister •singer von Nilrnberg there is a sug- 
 
 1 Translated by Hueffler.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 29 
 
 gestive symbolism of the antagonism between the 
 formalism of art and its freedom, the reconciliation of 
 which Wagner, Whitman, and Browning may be 
 said to have striven for. The creative principle is 
 associated in the play with the enthusiasm of love, 
 with the poet-knight Walter, who unmindful of the 
 pedantic code which governed the composition of 
 master-songs, gives free expression, joyful, birdlike, to 
 the native poetic impulses of his heart ; but he fails 
 thereby of the prize. The regulative principle is 
 associated with age and moderation, with the guild 
 who thinks songs can be made as shoes on a last, with 
 Beckmesser who " marks " and sings by rule, who is 
 also " outdone and outsung." Finally, Hans Sachs, 
 cobbler and poet — Richard Wagner himself, Brown- 
 ing, Whitman, any good craftsman — sides both with 
 Walter and the guild, recognising the power of the 
 one and the need of the other, adapts form to spirit, 
 sacrificing something of each to make the union 
 possible, and by Sachs' help Walter wins his bride 
 and medal. And Hans warns his fellow-workers, — 
 
 " One way you measure solely 
 A work your rules do not fit ; 
 Resign your own views wholly, 
 Some other rules apply to it." 
 
 Wagner's music dramas have two supreme char- 
 acteristics. The first is their deep emotional element. 
 His subjects were chosen that he might appeal to the 
 feelings ; their intellectual qualities but strengthen 
 the emotional. It is for this reason that he chose the 
 
 1
 
 ISO BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 medium of music, in addition to language, to convey 
 the burden of emotional thought. 
 
 " Such led to thee, O soul, 
 All senses, shows and objects lead to thee, 
 But now, it seems to me, sound leads o'er all the rest." 
 Whitman : Music of the Storm. 
 
 " Consider it well; each tone of our scale in itself is 
 nought ; 
 It is everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and all is 
 said : 
 Give it to me to use ! I mix it with two in my thought : 
 And there ! ye have heard and seen : consider and 
 bow the head ! " 
 
 Browning : Abt Vogler. 
 
 Complete examples of emotional art are the love- 
 dramas of Tristan and Isolde, the heroic Ring des 
 Nibelungen, and Parsifal, the last of which is, per- 
 haps, the highest expression of art in its supreme 
 religious form we have yet attained to. Through the 
 senses Wagner reaches the soul. 
 
 The second characteristic, with reference to form, 
 is harmony of content and expression. The tendency 
 of Wagner's method is to seek artistic effect in under- 
 lying harmonies of thought and tonality. The music 
 springs from the words, and the words from the music 
 — " the verse being as the mood it paints " (cf. Pauline). 
 " Unless the subject absorbs me completely," Wagner 
 wrote to his friend Uhlig, " I cannot produce twenty 
 bars worth listening to." And again he writes : " The
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 131 
 
 musical phrases fit themselves on to the verses and 
 periods without any trouble on my part ; everything 
 grows as if wild from the ground." The orchestra is, 
 therefore, no mere accompaniment, but an essential 
 expression of the thought and action. " Every bar of 
 the music," the author explained to Liszt, "■ is justified 
 only by the fact that it explains something in the 
 action or in the character of the actor." In a letter to 
 Uhlig, he says : 
 
 "Just at the beginning of the second scene of this act — 
 when Elsa steps on to the balcony — it struck me 
 how in the prelude for wind instruments, the 7th, 
 8th, and 9th bars where Elsa appears by night, a 
 theme is heard for the first time, which, later on, 
 when Elsa advances towards the church, in bright 
 daylight and full splendour, is presented in com- 
 plete development broad and bright. Thereupon 
 it became evident to me that my themes always 
 originate coherently and with the character of 
 plastic phenomena." 
 
 Letters. 
 
 In other words, renouncing the artificial symmetry of 
 beat and measure he endeavours to correlate physical 
 and psychical phenomena. The word which best de- 
 scribes the beauty of the Wagnerian drama, as indeed 
 the beauty of Nature and of highest art, is characteristic, 
 that which belongs to the idea, and is of it, a beauty 
 which may include even discord and harshness as 
 essential elements. 
 
 Beauty, can we agree? has no objective existence.
 
 132 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 The great art of the world is beautiful because it first 
 has power. 
 
 " The rhyme and uniformity of perfect pcems show the 
 free growth of material laws, and bud from them 
 as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a 
 bush . . . and the fluency and ornaments of the 
 finest poems are not independent but dependent." 
 
 This is Whitman's dictum ; and it is interesting 
 to compare the words of Blake in his preface to the 
 Jerusalem, where its form is characterised as follows : 
 
 " Every word and every letter is studied and put into its 
 place. The terrific numbers are reserved for the 
 terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and 
 gentle parts, and the prosaic for the inferior parts ; 
 all are necessary to each other." 
 
 In literature, the lyrical forms proper for song have 
 been found inadequate for our century's burden of 
 emotive thought. And as in music, the tendency has 
 been to advance from Italian song and melody to 
 those complete orchestral harmonies which Wagner 
 describes as the invention of the Christian spirit, so 
 in literature the poets have passed from the lyric to a 
 grander, more harmonious epic structure, midway be- 
 tween speech and song, wherein both thought and 
 passion find their common home. 
 
 Whitman's method is seen at its best — it is fair to 
 take a man at his best, to measure him, not bv his
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 33 
 
 shortcomings, but as Browning would estimate him, by 
 his highest faculty and attainment — in the threnody on 
 the burial of Lincoln, a song which is, as Swinburne 
 notes, " the most sonorous nocturne ever chanted in 
 the church of the world." It is a master-song in 
 thought, in phrase, and in movement, and needs no 
 defence to any real tone-artist. The chief character- 
 istic is its emotional quality. Love, uniting with 
 Nature's lyrical mourners, chants of death in strains 
 of passionate music, death's outlet song of life, and the 
 whole emotional and rational being can but respond to 
 its glowing human appeal. The second characteristic 
 is harmony of line and rhythm to the thought and 
 motive. Motive, metre, and tone-quality are pre- 
 sented in a predestined unity. The chant form lends 
 itself to emotional utterance, and has always been so 
 employed by Hebrew psalmists and Celtic bards. The 
 chant removes to the farthest the limits of time, must 
 be read as a whole in pulses and tones, appeals to the 
 synthetic rather than analytic perception. The verse 
 form of the hymn interprets the emotion with rare 
 felicity of phrase and tonality. The prelude is as per- 
 fect, in its own way, as that to Lohengrin ; it announces 
 the subject, and strikes the recurring chords of the 
 lilac and the star, and "thought of him I love." By 
 a cluster of powerful spondaic lines the dominant 
 passion is stirred to the depths. Then follow pictures 
 of life and Nature, the lines branching with the 
 thought ; till the poet, rapt by the charm of the bird's 
 carol, the voice of his spirit tallying the song of the 
 bird, rises to a height of lyrical ecstasy.
 
 134 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " Over the tree-tops I float thee a song, 
 Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad 
 
 fields and the prairies wide, 
 Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves 
 
 and ways, 
 I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death." 
 
 The chord of feeling is completed by a correspond- 
 ence of the last thoughts with the first. The effect 
 of the whole is that produced by solemn mu<-ic. 
 One is left staring at the page, quite oblivious 
 to time or space, like one listening to far off 
 anthems. The intellectual plays hardly no part 
 in perception. Imagination and passion, the 
 complete synthetic being, are permitted un- 
 hindered movement, so completely has harmony, 
 flowing and volatile, taken the place of metrical melody. 
 Not less characteristic are the war lyrics, though Whit- 
 man never attained an equal perfection of poetic ex- 
 pression. However, as a whole, Whitman's writings 
 are not to be viewed as a mere artistic performance. 
 
 Browning is apparently less emotional than Whit- 
 man. Prof. Sharp, in his biography, speaks of Brown- 
 ing's " fatal excess of cold over emotive thought." 
 But to this opinion I venture to demur. It would be 
 true if said of Wordsworth, but it is seldom true of 
 Browning ; the former is meditative, the latter is the 
 reverse. "Cold," rational processes are indeed often 
 present, but that they are "fatal" is not certain, for 
 we have to deal to-day with an art which is all inclusive. 
 Our creed declares Browning — in the words of 
 The Book of the Poets said of Shakespeare — " most
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 35 
 
 passionate and most rational — of an emotion 
 which casts us into thought, of a reason which 
 leaves us open to emotion." Both emotional 
 nature and emotional expression have altered some- 
 what since the days of Minnesingers. Agreeing as to 
 the emotional quality of Wagner's and Whitman's art, 
 it is within reason to say that they are as profound 
 thinkers as Browning. 
 
 It is a matter difficult to argue, for the appeal is to 
 the personality ; and from this standpoint, for myself, 
 the emotive element in Browning's poems is their most 
 characteristic quality. 
 
 Impulse predominated in the poet's nature (cf. Mrs. 
 Orr's Biog. p. 3S8). He was a lover of music, the 
 most emotional of the arts, and for the mystic an echo 
 of the eternal life — " music which leads us," said Car- 
 lyle, " to the verge of the infinite." 
 
 The processes of his thought are more often pas- 
 sionate and intuitive than strictly logical. Intensity 
 and concentration or fusion are the way of the passions, 
 not of the intellect. Premising love as the supreme 
 living principle, Browning reasons in the manner of a 
 mystic from the whole to the parts. If he fail artisti- 
 cally it is in attempting to justify his emotional, 
 spiritual experiences to his conscious philosophy. To 
 do this he must descend from the heaven of his art, as 
 he does even in One Word More, to analyse and define. 
 But, on the other hand, his very analyses are those of 
 a man full of emotion, and a vital imagination rescues 
 at the last even his later philosophic poems from mere 
 temporality.
 
 136 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " Love proceeding Power, and with much Power always 
 
 much more Love." 
 
 Paracelsus. 
 
 Professor Jones says upon this point, quoting from 
 his preface : 
 
 " In some of these poems we might even seem to be re- 
 ceiving a philosophical lesson, in place of a poetical 
 inspiration, if it were not for those powerful im- 
 aginative utterances, those winged words, which 
 Browning has always in reserve, to close the ranks 
 of his argument. If the question be stated in a 
 prosaic form, the final answer, as in the ancient 
 oracle, is in the poetic language of the gods." 
 
 The obscurity of his poems, when not obscurity as to 
 facts, is more often emotional than intellectual, for 
 emotions, far more often than thoughts, lie too deep 
 for words. Such, for instance, is the "obscurity" of 
 Lyric Love, which demands an inner spiritual 
 adjustment of phrase to phrase rather than gram- 
 matical — a synthetic not analytic vision ; the poem 
 is plain to a lover. The dashes scattered abundantly 
 in his pages (cf. Lxion, etc.) often indicate the spiritual 
 atmosphere in which the thoughts float free, like 
 sea-weed in the waves. 
 
 His method, again, is like that of Wagner, inner, 
 emotional, having to do not with logical, but with 
 psychical consistency. The monologue, his own 
 characteristic creation, adapts itself to the expression 
 of moods and impulses. Mr. Fox, reviewing Pauline 
 in 1S33, accepted its peculiar confessional quality as 
 indicative of the highest emotional life in the writer.
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 37 
 
 Only a highly passionate nature, with its power of 
 fusion, can be successful with the psychical method. 
 
 At the worst, poetry and philosophy are near akin, 
 and it becomes a question of moment whether 
 Browning, in appealing to philosophy, has really 
 stepped upon alien ground. For the mystic, poetry 
 and philosophy alike are "a reasoning of things 
 together." They seek the same truth and the same 
 kind of truth, philosophy proving what poetry 
 assumes, the unity of the universe. Both to use 
 Shelley's phrase, " participate in the eternal, the 
 infinite, and the one/' and Browning is surely not the 
 only thinker among artists. Perhaps never before 
 in the world's history have serious thoughts taken 
 such possession of first-rate art. The real antithesis 
 of art is not to philosophy but to science. 
 
 The whole effect of any given poem is, moreover, 
 to arouse never the thought alone, but the whole 
 personality. This is the real point at issue. And 
 Browning is almost unique in the manner in which 
 he adjusts the entire nature of the reader to see and 
 know the truth. He makes vital the imagination, 
 quickens the emotions, and sets flowing within us 
 mingled streams of thought and will-impulse. "The 
 words of true poems give you more than poems." 
 "Only the poet begets." Like Luria to the Floren- 
 tines, Browning brings 
 
 " Fresh stuff 
 For us to mould, interpret and prove right, 
 New feeling fresh from God."
 
 I38 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 Thought? "Nay sirs," said Caponsacchi, "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, 
 As I stretch forth my arm to touch this bar. 
 God and man, and what duty I owe both, — 
 I dare 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." 
 
 Ring and the Book, vi., 937-48. 
 
 There can be, at least, but one opinion as to his 
 teaching. His highest theme is love, his song a 
 burden of love. Browning, if ever poet did, called 
 the harp back to the heart. It was in his old age, 
 when, so some critics assert, the cold philosophic 
 habit of thinking had quenched the fire of his poetic 
 passion ! that he penned one of the sweetest love 
 songs in literature, Summum Bonum. No one 
 has more strongly asserted the superiority of love 
 over knowledge. " For we know in part and we pro- 
 phesy in part." His theory of life and society is 
 passionate, not scientific. 
 
 " Love, hope, fear, faith — these make humanity." 
 
 His interest is with the salvation of men, his sympa- 
 thies with the failures and unheroic. Love for him
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 1 39 
 
 is the greatest thing in the world; and Professor 
 Drummond, in treating of the great theme of St. 
 Paul, quotes centrally, after the 13th chapter of 
 Corinthians, a few lines from Browning's Death in the 
 Desert. 
 
 " For life with all it yields of joy, and woe, 
 And hope, and fear, 
 
 Is j) 1st onr chance of the prize of learning love, — 
 Hoio love might be, hath been indeed and is." 
 
 Browning is a more skilful artist than Whitman. 
 The adjustment between the new and the old (the 
 creative and the regulative principles), on which the 
 success of poetry as a minister of life depends, is far 
 more perfect. The English heroic is capable of indef- 
 inite expansion. Thought, in Pope's couplet, is a 
 spirit imprisoned in its own expression. But Brown- 
 ing, retaining something of the form, liberates the 
 genius, permitting it to escape from line to line with 
 a glad sense of freedom. His verses will not 
 always scan ; the form of Bed Cotton Might-Cap 
 Country and of other poems approaches the freedom 
 of prose. Applying the canon of correlation of form 
 and spirit, Browning is seen to be an artist of the 
 rarest technic — how perfect we have hardly yet 
 begun to appreciate, so taken up have we been 
 hitherto by discussions of his philosophy of life. 
 Already in Pauline his active will was shaping the 
 form to his purpose. 
 
 " So I will sing on fast as fancies come, 
 Rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints."
 
 f40 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 And in the first preface to Paracelsus he insisted that 
 his work should be judged by the laws of its own pro- 
 duction — aiming at effect, power, careless of mere 
 beauty as the stars about numbers. He would trust 
 the spirit, as sovran nature does, to make the form 
 " inward evermore to outward." The whole question 
 of Browning's artistic forms awaits an investigator ; it 
 will depend upon what we mean by form, and whether 
 form be an end or means of power. That grotesque- 
 ness which Mr. Bagehot finds so repulsive in Cali- 
 ban upon Setebos may be found to be its characteristic 
 beauty. What more perfect example of adaptation of 
 rime, metre, word, and tone to the informing thought 
 than The Flight of the Duchess or Fra Lippo Lippi ; 
 or the twilight passage in Andrea del Sarto where the 
 youth, hope, and art of the painter are toned down to 
 sober Fiesole, line and tone and movement contri- 
 buting their effect. 
 
 Or under what possible formal canon of art can 
 this conversation of Ottima be placed, where the scene 
 alone informs the words : 
 
 " Night ? Such may be your Rhine-land nights perhaps ; 
 But this blood-red beam through the shutter's chink 
 We call such light the morning ; let us see ! 
 Mind how you grope your way, though ! How these tall 
 Naked geraniums straggle ! Push the lattice 
 Behind that frame ! — Nay, do I bid you ? — Sebald, 
 It shakes the dust down on me ! Why, of course, 
 The slide-bolt catches. Well, are you content, 
 Or must I find you something else to spoil ? 
 Kiss and be friends, my Sebald ! Is't full morning? 
 Oh, don't speak then ! "
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 141 
 
 Will not some psychologist, skilled not in the 
 " Science of Rhyme," but in the art of soul-expression, 1 
 interpret Browning for us ? 
 
 One quality common to Browning, Wagner, and 
 Whitman, which I may be permitted to make mention 
 of in passing, is the consonantal rather than vocalic 
 tonality of their song. Wagner sought to create a 
 harmony of consonantal sounds. He chose, there- 
 fore, alliteration or consonantal rime for his verse, 
 quite indifferent to the vowels. The body of the tone 
 is thus heavier and seemingly harsh. The lighter, 
 more tuneful Tannhmiser and Lohengrin are capable 
 of translation into Italian song, but the heroic Ring 
 would lose in every way if sung in any other language 
 than its native German. In the same way Browning 
 gains strength by the use of consonants, which are as 
 marked a characteristic of the English as the German 
 speech. Alliteration is never mechanical with him, 
 but psychic. In the following lines the consonants 
 form the body of sound : 
 " Thunders on thunders, doubling and redoubling 
 
 Doom o'er the mountain, while a sharp white fire 
 
 Now shone, now sheared its rusty herbage, troubling 
 
 Hardly the fir-boles, now discharging its ire 
 
 Full where some pine-trees solitary spire 
 
 Crashed down, defiant to the last." 
 
 Gerard de Lairesse. 
 
 As an illustration again of psychic sound-harmonies, 
 I think one may study to advantage the liquid flow of 
 the bird's song in Whitman's Out of the Cradle. 
 
 1 Cf. History of JEsthetic, Bosanquet, 1892: chap. XV. 
 and App. II.
 
 142 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 " Shake out carols ! 
 
 Solitary here the night's carols ! 
 
 Carols of lonesome love ! death's carols ! 
 
 Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon ! 
 
 O under that moon where she droops almost down into 
 
 the sea ! 
 O reckless, despairing carols." 
 
 A comparison with Poe's poems, which are 
 so often purely mechanical in their construction, 
 would serve as a contrast. The preference for 
 consonantal tonality arises no doubt from the 
 peculiar Teutonic and northern temperament, which 
 despises the mere elegancies of singers and rimers of 
 the southern races, which, devoid of truth, can but be 
 conceived by a less imaginative race as mere "lascivi- 
 ous pleasings," heaviness and strength of harmonies 
 being preferred to lightness and sweetness of melodies. 
 The modern study of phonology may help us to 
 appreciate the emotional beauty of consonantal effects 
 which now seem harsh to our vocalic ears. Perhaps 
 the day of lautlehre is coming. 
 
 Browning, Wagner, and Whitman have been intro- 
 duced in this study as indicating the new spirit in art, 
 whose operation has resulted in what some schools of 
 critics lament as destruction of form. But form has 
 not been destroyed. That is an impossibility in any 
 art whatsoever. The whole secret is that new wine 
 has been poured into new bottles. The distinction 
 between the old and the new is not between the 
 formal and the formless, but between different forms. 
 Art has changed in recognition of the needs of
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 143 
 
 emotional thought. A more plastic, extensive medium, 
 half-song, half-speech, has been employed which 
 responds more readily to the passionate beat of the 
 heart. 
 
 Love has of late greatly increased among men. It 
 is indicated everywhere by a growing sense of com- 
 radeship, and interdependence, and organic union. 
 In a democracy the emotional must ever be the 
 solvent, the unifying force ; for the intellectual too 
 often divides men. Despotism may govern without 
 love, but liberty cannot. 
 
 The work of fusion is assigned by Whitman to 
 the poet, arguing that poetry, in its entirety, is the 
 dominant moral factor of progress. 
 
 " I listened to the Phantom by Ontario's shore, 
 I heard the voice arising demanding bards : 
 By them all native and grand, by them alone can these 
 States be fused into the compact organism of a 
 nation." 
 
 By Bine Ontario's Shore. 
 
 Looking to England, Whitman questions: "Is there 
 one that is consistent with these United States or 
 essentially applicable to them as they are and are to 
 be? Is there one whose underlying basis is not a 
 denial and insult to democracy ? " 
 
 I cannot follow Whitman here in the spirit of 
 unreasoning discipleship. Browning's message to 
 democracy, though with a wide difference in manner 
 of statement, is yet singularly like that of Whitman 
 in its essential purpose. To strike the sum of the
 
 144 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 
 
 foregoing estimate, Browning and Whitman are alike 
 in the stress laid upon the value and dignity of per- 
 sonality, man or woman, each of whom is created 
 different for a purpose, given his own centre and own 
 government, equal with respect to destiny. They are 
 alike in regarding the soul as the end of the evolution 
 of Nature, which is higher, therefore, than animals 
 and trees, and appointed to progress beyond them to 
 the goal of Infinite Spirit. They are alike in recog- 
 nising, not scorning, the uses of the body and the 
 world in which the body must exist, and alike in their 
 faith in the present and their hope in the future. So 
 far their message is for the sake of individuality. 
 They are alike, to continue, in their word, high over 
 all, of love, which is the greatest good and the supreme 
 principle in the world ; both are willing, therefore, to 
 give emotions, not the intellect alone, way in shaping 
 their verse — this word they have given for the sake of 
 unity. Thus the poets join hands in linking literature 
 with life, for this, I submit, is the very creed of 
 emancipation and democracy. 
 
 Nor can democracy be unmindful of the earlier 
 poets, who never ceased to hold up the light and song 
 of English freedom. Was not Chaucer out on the 
 " open road," journeying in bond of fellowship with 
 other pilgrims to Becket's shrine ! — the shrine is 
 passed, but the road goes on. Thinking, too, of 
 Milton and Burns, and especially of Shelley, whom 
 we celebrate, whose love of freedom and " passion for 
 reforming the world " no man has exceeded, and now 
 of William Morris, our later prophet, whose hope for
 
 BROWNING AND WHITMAN. 145 
 
 art and labour contains the prophecy of the golden 
 day that is to be, I am inclined to quote for them all 
 the lines of Whittier on the Child's Memorial Window 
 to Milton in St. Margaret's Church at Westminster : 
 
 " The New World honours him ivhose lofty plea 
 For England's freedom made her own more sure, 
 Whose song immortal as the theme shall be 
 Their common freehold while both worlds endure." 
 
 The New World? — " How little the New after all," 
 Whitman said, " how much the Old, Old World." 
 
 THE END. 
 
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