Browning and Dogma Part 5

It is, indeed, the Greek, materialist here rather than artist, who points out to Protus that, in his estimate of the joy of leaving "living works behind," he confounds "the accurate view of what joy is with feeling joy."

Confounds

The knowing how And showing how to live (my faculty) With actually living. Otherwise Where is the artist's vantage o'er the king?

Because in my great epos I display How divers men young, strong, fair, wise, can act-- Is this as though I acted? If I paint, Carve the young Phoebus, am I therefore young?

Methinks I'm older that I bowed myself The many years of pain that taught me art!

I know the joy of kings.h.i.+p: well, thou art king! (ll. 281-300.)

All the Greek love of life, of physical beauty is here, intensified by the consciousness of the brief and transitory character of its existence. If death ends all things, then the poet and philosopher, whilst acquiring the knowledge "how to live," has sacrificed the power of living. Yet a sacrifice even greater than this is enthusiastically welcomed by the Grammarian of the Revival of Learning, greater since in this case the devotion of a lifetime leaves behind it no monument of fame. Yet, having counted the cost,

Oh! such a life as he resolved to live, When he had learned it.

_Sooner, he spurned it._[43]

We can almost detect the voice of Cleon in the urgency of the student's contemporaries. "Live now or never," since "time escapes." In the reply lies the clue to the immensity of difference between the two positions--

Leave Now for dogs and apes!

Man has Forever.[44]

In the one instance, life being lived in the light of the "Forever," it is possible to perceive with Pompilia that "No work begun shall ever pause for death":[45] and life, whatever its trials and limitations, becomes to the believer in immortality very well worth the living. Thus the Christian conception of human life transcends the pagan as the designs of the Italian painters surpa.s.s in their suggestive inspiration the perfection of the more purely technical achievements of Greek art. The whole discussion is so peculiarly characteristic of Browning's work that it seemed impossible to omit this comparison in the present connection, even though we shall be again obliged to revert to the Grammarian, and the theory exemplified in his history, in a.n.a.lyzing the defence of Bishop Blougram.

In pa.s.sing, then, to the concluding section of Cleon's reply to Protus, we are met by no exclusively Greek utterance; the voice is the voice of humanity unfettered by limitations of race or mental training.

"But," sayest thou ...

... "What Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: Sappho survives, because we sing her songs, And aeschylus, because we read his plays!"

Why, if they live still, let them come and take Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup, Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive? (ll. 301-308.)

It is self-abnegation, carried to an extent rendering impossible the preservation of the race, which can look to happiness, or even to satisfaction, in the prospect of annihilation so long as posterity shall enjoy the fruits of a life of labour--which may express all its yearnings towards immortality in the pet.i.tion:

O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: ...

_So to live is heaven_:

_This is life to come_ Which martyred men have made more glorious For us who strive to follow. May I reach That purest heaven ...

Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense.

Yet the mind which originated these n.o.bly philosophic lines found it impossible to continue literary work when severed from the human comrades.h.i.+p and sympathy, criticism and inspiration to which the heart, even more than the brain, had grown accustomed. After the death of Mr. G.

H. Lewes we are told--in the author's own words--that "The writing seems all trivial stuff," ... and that work is resorted to as "a means of saving the mind from imbecility."[46] We shall find Browning himself refusing, in the hour of bereavement, to admit the satisfaction to be derived from a contemplation of the progress of the race through individual sacrifice and loss of personal ident.i.ty; the satisfaction of the knowledge that

Somewhere new existence led by men and women new, Possibly attains perfection coveted by me and you;

[Whilst we] working ne'er shall know if work bear fruit.

Others reap and garner-- We, creative thought, must cease In created word, thought's echo, due to impulse long since sped!

Poor is the comfort

There's ever someone lives although ourselves be dead.[47]

Something more than this, more even than "the thought of what was" is demanded for the satisfaction of the soul, yet this is all the Greek has to offer to his correspondent.

Before leaving this section of the poem, one further comparison of striking interest claims at least a brief consideration--a comparison also of the life of the man of action with that of the man of thought: of Salinguerra, the Ghibelline leader and Sordello, the poet and dreamer, Ghibelline by antecedents, Guelph by conviction; the visionary and dreamer, but the dreamer whose dreams should remain a legacy to posterity, the visionary who held that "the poet must be earth's essential king." The comparison is especially interesting, since in this case also it is drawn (Bk. iv) by the poet himself. To Sordello, however, the recognition of a future existence has at times a very potent influence upon the present.

For him, moreover, in his moments of insight, _service_ not _happiness_, is the inspiration of life. Lofty as is the estimation in which he holds the office of poet, he yet deems Salinguerra

One of happier fate, and all I should have done, He does; the people's good being paramount With him.[48]

Here is

A nature made to serve, excel In serving, only feel by service well![49]

To the poet of the Middle Ages then, as to the Greek, though for different reasons, the man of action has the happier fate. But where the Greek shudders before the approach of death, the Italian issues triumphantly from the final struggle of life--the supreme temptation--through the realization

That death, I fly, revealed So oft a better life this life concealed, And which sage, champion, martyr, through each path Have hunted fearlessly.[50]

Only he would crave the consciousness which served as inspiration to sage, champion, martyr, and he, too, will hunt death fearlessly, will demand, "Let what masters life disclose itself!"

V. The concluding lines of the poem (336-353) contain a curiously suggestive contrast between the influences of an effete pagan culture, and of Christianity in its infancy. On the one hand, the Greek philosopher surrounded by evidences of marvellous physical and intellectual achievements, admitting the experience of an overwhelming horror, in face of the approach of "a deadly fate." On the other hand, "a mere barbarian Jew" and "certain slaves," pioneers of that faith which should offer solution to the problems before which Greek learning shrank confessedly powerless. A contrast between two stages of that development in the life of man, indicated by the theory of St. John's teaching, given in the interpolated note introductory to the main arguments of _A Death in the Desert_:

The doctrine he was wont to teach, How divers persons witness in each man, Three souls which make up one soul.

(1) The lower or animal life, distinguished as "What Does," (2) The intellect inspiring which "useth the first with its collected use," and is defined as "What Knows," that which _Cleon_ calls Soul. (3) Finally, the union of both for the service of the third and highest element, which is in itself capable of existence apart from either:

Subsisting whether they a.s.sist or no,

designated as "What Is," that which _Browning_ calls Soul in _Old Pictures in Florence_.

Life, in the person of Cleon, would appear to have reached the second of the stages thus distinguished--physical development, combined with intellectual pre-eminence, marking "an age of light, light without love."

With Paulus life has pa.s.sed beyond, and the spiritual energy has attained to its position of predominance over the lower elements const.i.tuting this Trinity of human nature. The barbarian Jew heralds a new phase in the world's history. The entire conclusion may well serve as commentary on the lines already quoted from _Old Pictures in Florence_:

The first of the new in our race's story Beats the last of the old.[51]

LECTURE III