 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton. Section 21. Chapter 7. The Ring and the Book. Part 2. I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement of the lyrics in Sir Francis Paul Graves' Golden Treasury. However, there may be two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution in the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's almost too well known. When lovely woman stoops to folly and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy, what art can wash her guilt away? Immediately afterwards comes with a sudden and thrilling change of note, the voice of burns. Ye banks and braves, O' Bonnie Dune, how can ye bloom so fair? How can ye chant ye little birds? And I say fool of care. Thou break my heart, though, Bonnie Bird, that sings upon the bow? Thou minds me of the happy days, when my false love was true. A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening to realize that they are two poems on exactly the same subject. The subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man, and the whole difference, the difference struck by the very first note of the voice of anyone who reads them, is this fundamental difference, that Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's words are spoken in that situation. In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet. A change of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination. Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, the Vates, was the supreme and absolute critic of human existence. The chorus in the human drama. He was to employ two words which when analyzed are the same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation such as the situation of a woman deserted by a man before mentioned, and gave as Goldsmith gives his own personal and definite decision upon it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the outside. Then, as in the case of the Golden Treasury, he has no sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things which would have been quite left out of the account by the poet of the general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of the inside of agony, would have introduced that touch of rage of the mourner against the chattering fevolity of nature. Thou break my heart, though, Bonnie Bird. We find and could find no such touch in Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion, therefore, that the Vates or the poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by this new method of what may be called the songs of experience. Now Browning, as he appears in the Ring and the Book, represents the attempt to discover not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional experiences such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith, seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by endeavoring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes them all. If Browning were endeavoring to do strict justice in a case like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Dune, he would not touch or modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it, but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its language that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama. Some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position. Let us say of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon developments which a misalliance would overthrow or in the position of some rival lover stricken to the ground with a tragedy in which he had not even the miserable comfort of a locust standee. All these characters in the story Browning would realize from their own emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave men halters and halos. Browning gives men neither halter nor halo. He gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the functions of the poet, that he gives men words for which men from the beginning of the world have starved more than for bread. Here then we have the second great respect in which the ring in the book is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without possessing a point of view. No one ever lived, who had not a little more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the application of this principle would revolutionize the old heroic epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and moral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer had written the Odyssey on the principle of the ring in the book. How disturbing! How weird an experience it would be to read the story from the point of view of Antinius. Without contradicting a single material fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so change the whole world around us that we should scarcely know we were dealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelope would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish woman, passing falsely as a widow and playing a double game between the attentions of foolish but honorable young men and the fitful appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor husband. A man prepared to act that most well-worn melodramatic role, the conjugial bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an instrument or the worst kind of wrongs. Or again, if we had the story of the fall of King Arthur, told from the standpoint of Mordred, it would only be a matter of a word or two in a turn, in the twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathizing with the efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacy of high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristum, and ultimately discovering with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there was no way to frustrate them except by overthrowing the cold and priggish and incapable egoist who ruled the country, and the whole artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. It might be that in spite of this new view of the case it would ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right, and Arthur was really right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompylia was really right. But anyone can see the enormous difference in scope and difficulty between the old epic, which told the whole story from one man's point of view, and the new epic, which cannot come to its conclusion until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical and disturbing as our imaginary defense of Antinias and Apologia of Mordred. One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and social, which is represented by the ring and the book. It is the step of deciding in the face of many serious dangers and disadvantages to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the poet who had learned to speak. Browning, in the new epic, is the poet who has learned to listen. This listening to the truth and error, to heretics, to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson that humanity has ever been set to learn. The ring and the book is the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the epic of free speech. Free speech is an ideal which has at present all the unpopularity of a truism, so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago, that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new truth. In gratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort, similar to that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in relation to social phenomena, we forget that the earth is a star and we forget that free speech is a paradox. It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or obvious to let a man dig up part of the public road or in fact half a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, the truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but which remains in very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time, but once admitted it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry. Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama in which the villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the truth had not been told until it had been seen in the villain, the pure and disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. Everything that was profound, everything indeed that was tolerable in the estates of 1880 and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate source in Browning's great conception that everyone's point of view is interesting, even if it be jaundiced, or a bloodshot point of view. He is at one with the decadence in holding that it is emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable to know something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. Since his time we have indeed been somewhat oversatisfied with the moods of the burglar and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen goods. But Browning, united with the decadence on this point, of the value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that justice was a mystery, but not like the decadence that justice was a delusion. He held in other words the true Browning doctrine that in a dispute everyone was to a certain extent right, not the decadent doctrine that in so mad a place as the world everyone must be by the nature of things wrong. Browning's conception of the universe can hardly be better expressed than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went to visit an elephant. One of them seized its trunk and asserted that an elephant was a kind of serpent. Another embraced its leg and was ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall. To the man who had hold of its tail a rope and to the man who ran upon its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs from the psychological decadence and impressionists in this important point, that he thinks that, although the blind men found out very little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant and was there all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an elephant is a thing with a very curious shape, and Browning firmly believed that the universe was a thing with a very curious shape. Indeed no blind poet could even imagine an elephant without experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of Browning and the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. We are maniacs isolated in separate cells and dreaming of trees and serpents without reason and without result. Part 1 The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie in what is called the message of Browning, or the teaching of Browning, or in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. Now Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress suit or a vote for Parliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun or open an umbrella if he had possessed those articles and realized their value. For example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the intellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very striking and very solid, as everything was, which came out of Browning's mind. His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of Old Pictures in Florence expresses very quaintly and beautifully the idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself. In other words, that insofar as a man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, there is something about his appearance which indicates that he should have another leg or another eye. The poem suggests admirably that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be greater than the whole, and from this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the large scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that, though this world is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, the fact does remain that we have named it a strange world. In other words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning, the hope that lies in the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines requires some audacity to express. He can only be properly stated as the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say that Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and obscure vallors, might, to use a yet more strange expression, have provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God has none, then man has in the universe a secret and blasphemous superiority. And this tremendous story of a divine jealousy Browning reads into the story of the crucifixion. If the Creator had not been crucified, he would not have been as great as thousands of wretched fanatics among his own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this point. Anyone who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be referred to Saul. But these are emphatically the two main doctrines or opinions of Browning, which I have ventured to characterize roughly as the hope of the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of faith, which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about them, in connection with Browning, there nevertheless remains something to be added. Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an optimist. His theory that man's sense of his own imperfection implies a design of perfection is a very good argument for optimism. This theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good argument for optimism. But anyone will make the deepest and blackest and most incurable mistake about Browning, who imagines that his optimism was found to have done any arguments for optimism. Because he had a strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the incompleteness of man and the sacrifice of an inipotence. But these doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism, since no one can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded on opinions which were the work of Browning, but on the life which was the work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers has said that something of Browning's theology must be put down to his possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like all remarks, touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching on the value of Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greater care, we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that faith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his digestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all about it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him. The thing which delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. I cannot in the least understand why a good digestion, that is, a good body, should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the first flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiarity, throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. We should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his boots if we meant that he really had no boots. But we do speak of a man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from lack of digestion. In the same way, we speak of a man suffering from nerves when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than anyone else's nerves. If anyone wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, he need only compare the old optimistic use of the word nervous, which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with a new pessimistic use of the word which we employ in speaking of a nervous manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence itself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw his inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning, or the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in life innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of things. Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat inadequate word, was a result of experience, experience which is, for some mysterious reason, generally understood in a sense of sad or disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for eating apples in a tree is in the common conception of the type of experience. If he really wished to be a type of experience, he would climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity of color. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at revivalist meetings. In the Salvation Army, a man's experiences mean his experience of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was much the same. But the revivalist's confessions deal mostly with the experiences of prayer and praise. Browning's dealt preeminently with what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love. This quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is also a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is that of the ultimate and unshakable order that is founded upon the absolute sight and sound and smell and handling of things. If a man had gone up to Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, do you think life is worth living? It is interesting to conjecture what his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian, he would have said, Existence is justified by its manifest design, its manifest adaptation of means to ends, or in other words, Existence is justified by its completeness. If on the other hand he had been influenced by his own serious intellectual theories, he would have said, Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness, or in other words, Existence is justified by its incompleteness. But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted opinions or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question, is life worth living, with the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul, he would have said as likely as not. Crimson Toadstools and Hampshire. Some plain glowing picture of this sort left on his mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. To his traditions hope was traced to order, to his speculations hope was traced to disorder, but to Browning himself hope was traced to something like red Toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle and wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life, it was rather that of a deep and eternal type, which believes that life, a mere abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete experiences which God made always come first. His own deductions and speculations about them always second, and in this point we find the real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems. One of the very few critics who seem to have gotten near to the actual secret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interesting book, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. He in contra-distinction to the vast mass of Browning's admirers had discovered what was the real root virtue of Browning's poetry, and the curious thing is that having discovered that root virtue he thinks it is a vice. He describes the poetry of Browning, most truly, as the poetry of barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the primeval and indivisible emotions. For the barbarian is the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause or by conceiving their ideal goal. Whether this be or be not a good definition of the barbarian, it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It might perhaps be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put a feather wrong in their headgear and who generally have very few feelings and think very little about those that they have. It is when we have grown to a greater and more civilized stature that we begin to realize and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that sleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our day has steadily advanced toward a passionate simplicity, and we become more primeval, as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge and chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy outfishing and Mater Link embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in the dark. Thus Mr. Santiana is perhaps the most valuable of all the Browning critics. He has gone out of his way to endeavor to realize what it is that repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault which none of Browning's opponents have discovered, and in this he has discovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers have discovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr. Santiana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does rest upon primitive feeling, and the only comment to be added is that so does the whole of everyone else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely with those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes, which are the ultimate despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. And here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is perpetually challenging all systems with a test of a terrible sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the actual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. Only poetry can realize motives, because motives are all pictures of happiness, and the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this. That in poetry as in music a notice struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind. Pros can only use a large and clumsy notation. It can only say that a man is miserable or that a man is happy. It is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with the first throb of its meter, can tell us whether the depression is the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of depression that drives him to the tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church. CHAPTER VIII THE PHILLOSPHY OF BROWNING PART II Now the supreme value of browning as an optimist lies in this that we have been examining, that beyond all his conclusions, and deeper than all his arguments, he was passionately interested in, and in love with, existence. If the heavens had fallen and all the waters of the earth run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence. If possible, a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy for precisely the reason of which Mr. Santiana complains, that his happiness is primal and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more religiously significant than an optimist. He is a happy man. This happiness he finds as every man must find happiness in his own way. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in which most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to considerable extent the poet of towns. Do you care for nature much, a friend asked him? Yes, a great deal, he said, but for human beings a great deal more. Nature, with its splendid and soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the essential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if they escaped from the rowdyest wagonette of trippers, could not be quieted again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The speciality of Browning is rather that he would have quieted and exalted by the wagonette. To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism, was to be found on the faces in the street. To him there were all the masks of a deity, the heads of a hundred headed Indian god of nature. Each of them looked toward some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by any other eyes. Each of them wore some expression, some blend of eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity, but men. His sense of the difference between one man and another would have made the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him lie playing four hundred beautiful heirs all at once. The mixture would not combine at all, it would lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever lived upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of God. Each one of us was engaged on a secret service. Each one of us had a peculiar message. Each one of us was the founder of a religion. Of that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices were more or less fragmentary and inadequate expressions. In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man, Sir Charles Gavin Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted very little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John Forester, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own adherents to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forester remarked half-gesting that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any the better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with some astonishment. He immediately asked why Forester should suppose him hostile to the Roman Church. Forester and Duffy replied almost simultaneously by referring to Bishop Blogram's Apology, which had just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the Sophistical and self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal Wiseman. Certainly, replied Browning cheerfully, I intended it for Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider to satire, there's nothing hostile about it. This is the real truth which lies at the heart of what may be called the great Sophistical monologues which Browning wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon their subjects. They are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. They are defenses. They say or are intended to say the best that can be said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people in this world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the day of judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world, then exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and the conventions of life is that we cannot properly justify a human being because that justification would involve the admission of things which may not conventionally be admitted. You might explain and make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old fighting politician who, for the good of his party and his country, acceded to measures of which he disapproved. But we cannot, because we are not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he disapproved. We might touch the life of many disillured public men with pathos and a kind of defeated courage by telling the truths about the history of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar if we hinted that they had any. Thus the decency of civilization do not merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to praise him. Browning in such poems as Bishop Blogram's Apology breaks his first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real goodness at last. He dethrones a saint in order to humanize a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of Browning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will become weak and sentimental and popular. The refuge of every idler, the excuse of every ne'er to will. There is little danger that men will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves before men as such snobs as Bishop Blogram, or such dastards as sludge the medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so stern as this optimism. It is as merciless as the mercy of God. It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with Browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by such generalization as the above. Browning's was a simple character, and therefore very difficult to understand. Since it was impulsive, unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. In the integrate many cases the original impulse which led Browning to plan a soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity. Possibly the first charcoal sketch of Blogram was the caricature of a priest. Browning, as we have said, had prejudices and had a capacity for anger, and two of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly clericalism and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, and he enjoyed every spirited and just defense the men could make of themselves, like triumph and blows in a battle, and toward the end would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is worthwhile to notice one very curious error that has arisen in connection with one of the most famous of these monologues. When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with the spiritualist home, it is generally and correctly stated that he gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied in Mr. Sludge the medium. The statement so often made particularly in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course merely an example of that breakfast reading from which no one has suffered more than Browning. Despite his students and societies, the man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hyrum H. Horsefall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and as it is more than once suggested something of a fool, nor is there the smallest reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any particular resemblance to home considered as an individual. But without doubt Mr. Sludge the medium is a general statement of the view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his acquaintance with home and home circle, and about that view of spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem, appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great deal of attention and aroused a great deal of controversy. The spiritualist called down thunder upon the head of the poet whom they depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of his own wife. The skeptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of magic. Which of these two parties was right about the question of attacking the reality of spiritualism is neither easy nor necessary to discuss. For the simple truth which neither of the two parties and none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed is that Mr. Sludge the medium is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be a great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it a justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning's method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning's method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that Mr. Sludge the medium is something like a defense of spiritualism will bear on the face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. But so, when we have comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be found to be. The general idea is that Browning must have intended Sludge for an attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made of vulgar and contemptible Mountabank, because his cheats are quite openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation detected, exposed, throttled, horse-whipped, and forgiven. To regard this deductionist sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very start of every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing the man loved more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a speciality of Browning than the utterance of large and noble truths by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praise and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Not what, as a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of Sludge. The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so fine that it is quite extraordinary that anyone should have missed the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludge, the medium, has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or paliation which will leave his moral character intact. He is therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank and to tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of the trickster's life by a survey of the borderland between truth and fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the eschemas of Panama, or fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the existence of North America. People of this kind quite consistently think Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may be remembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actually supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that causistry is the name of a crime. It does not appear to occur to people that causistry is a science and about as much a crime as botany. This tendency to causistry in Browning's monologues has done much towards establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which has done him so much harm. But causistry in this sense is not a cold and analytical thing but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know what combination of exuses might justify a man in manslaughter or bigamy is not to have a callous indifference to virtue. It is rather to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the remotest desert and the darkest in Cognito. This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and false who had raised in Sludge the medium. To say that it is sometimes difficult to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state a cynicism but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. To think that such a view involves the negation of honesty is like thinking that red is green because the two fade into each other in the colors of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when we come to the extreme edge of veracity when and when not it is permissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance, is the case of the fairy tales. We think a father, entirely pure and benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into heaven and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that he lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in walking home that evening he has seen a beanstalk grow halfway up the church or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few people would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted for a person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any exaggerated touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason of this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling of the fairy tale, almost a distinct artistic creation. To offer to tell a story is an ordinary society like offering to recite or play the violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be drawn up for these cases. But no one surely need to be ashamed to admit that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man like Sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny his right to be heard. CHAPTER VIII. THE PHYLOSOPHY OF BROWNING. PART III. We must occur, however, to the question of the main development of the Sludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a general excuse by the fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathizers and believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of how true were the tales told about conservatives in an exclusive circle of radicals, or the stories told about radicals in a circle of indignant conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes on to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud. This principal feeling toward his victims is, by his own confession, a certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of personal acquaintance, and how to remedy the slight and trivial slips of making Plato write Greek in knots and crosses. As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do, before I found the useful book that knows. It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints of conscience, but of any of the restraints, even of a wholesome personal conceit, than Sludge, the medium. He confesses not only to fraud, but to things which are, to the natural man, more difficult to confess, even than fraud, effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when there is nothing left either to gain or conceal, then he rises up into a perfect, bankrupt sublimity, and makes the great avowal, which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem. He says in effect, Now that my interest in deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted to my own final infamy, the frauds that I have practiced, now that I stand before you in a patent and open villainy which has something of the disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you, with full and impartial authority of a lost soul, that I believe there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousand conspiracies, by the labor of a thousand lies, I have discovered that there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other man understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much for that. This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the medium. It would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to his faith, as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith. But even more impressively they testified to their religion even after they had lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludge testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his honor. It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that anyone should have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is the pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force. Now for it, then, will you believe me, though? I have heard what I confess. I don't unsay a single word. I cheated when I could. Wrapped with my toe joints, set sham hands at work, wrote down names weak and sympathetic ink, rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor match, and all the rest. Believe that. Believe this. By the same token, though it may seem to set the crooked straight again, unsay the said. Stick up what I have knocked down. I can't help that. I somehow vomit truth today. This trait of mine, I don't know, can't be sure. But there was something in it, tricks and all. It is strange to call a poem as so clear and fine a climax, an attack on spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of Othello into the middle of the play. Either the whole poem of sludge to the medium means nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad of which the matter is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this, that some real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual. One curious theory, which is common to most Browning critics, is that sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious imposter, because after his confession and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsefall, he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman, and cynical boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely this is to have a very feeble notion, either of nature or art. A man driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a certain sensation, almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. Or let it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man. He is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight thrilling battles, and win herds-breasts victory for which he cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished imposter is the most wretched of geniuses. He is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man might surely therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, and gaining not indeed credit but at least a kind of glory. And in the course of this self-revelation he will come at last upon that part of himself which exists in every man, that part which does believe in and value and worship something. This he would fling to his hearer's face with even greater pride and take a delight in giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given before, the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. But surely all this sudden tempest of candor in a man would not mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary rate payer like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens, the moment the danger was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having betrayed the secret of his infamous freemason would add an indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in such a case would do exactly as Ludge does. He would declare his own shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realized what he had done, say something like this. Rrr, you brute beast, blackguard, cowardly scamp, I only wish I dared burn down the house and spoil your sniggering. And so on and so on. He would react like this. It is one of the most artistic strokes in Browning, but it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about spiritualism, or that he was speaking more truthfully in the second outburst than in the first. Wenz came this extraordinary theory that a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely. The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and coarse speaking will seldom do it. When we have grasped this point about Ludge the medium, we have grasped the key to the whole series of Browning's causistical monologues, Bishop Blogram's Apology, Prince Hohenstael's Schwangnau, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fafine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology, and several of the monologues in the ring in the book. They are all without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the greatest lies about a man and the greatest truths about him may be found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance. For Blogram he believed, say, half he spoke, or to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems is that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to tell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual motion, or has been swallowed by the sea serpent, there will yet be some point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that we require to know. If anyone wishes to test the truth, or see the best examples of this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a whole these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even brutal English. Browning's love of what is called the ugly is nowhere else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This like a great many other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed is perfectly appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered and untrustworthy egoist defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and weather-beaten philosophy is very likely to express himself best in a language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that every now and then in them there occurs bursts of pure poetry which are like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in the English language. Into the mouths of such slaves as Ludge and Guido Francesini take for the sake of example Bishop Blogram's Apology. The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's work. It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician grossness of a grand dinner party adieu. It has many touches of an almost wild bathos such as the young man who bears the impossible name of Gigadibs. The bishop in pursuing his worldly argument for conformity points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the religious theory of life neither can we be sure of the material theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty continually shaken by tormenting suggestion. We cannot establish ourselves on rationalism and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itself is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. Then comes the passage. Just when we are safest there is a sunset touch, a fancy from a flower bell, someone's death, a chorus ending from Europe rioties, and that's enough for fifty hopes and fears, as old and new at once as nature's self. To wrap and knock and enter in our soul take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, round the ancient title, on his base again. The grand, perhaps. Noble addiction and nobler meaning could not have been put into the mouth of Pompylia or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice over the comfortable wine and the cigars. Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves must be reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and vaguely. Of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law but of every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the indulgence of divine perfection. Thus Ludge is certain that his life of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by God. Thus Bishop Loughram is certain that his life of panic-stricken and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method that could unite him with God. Thus Prince Honestyle Schwagnow is certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has been the true means of realizing what he believes to be the will of God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the absolute. To many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine, indeed. But in truth it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less dangerous than its opposite. Everyone on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Everyone on the earth should believe that he has something to give the world which cannot otherwise be given. Everyone should, for the good of men and the saving of his own soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the human race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devil who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes of the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's names we have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and may at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevish and garellous sneak. We are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes and babbling lips, and suddenly the face begins to change and harden. The eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is the voice of God uttering his everlasting soliloquy. The end of Section 24, the end of Chapter 8, the end of Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton.