A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) | Page 5

is a thinker whose thought is
metaphysical so far as principle goes. A metaphysical thinker is always
in some way or other thinking about _thought_; and this is precisely
what Mr. Browning has no occasion to do, because he takes its
assumptions upon trust. He is a constant analyst of secondary motives
and judgments. No modern freethinker could make a larger allowance
for what is incidental, personal, and even material in them: we shall see
that all his practical philosophy is bound up with this fact. But he has
never questioned the origin of our primary or innate ideas, for he has,
as I have said, never questioned their truth. It is essential to bear in
mind that Mr. Browning is a metaphysical poet, and not a metaphysical
thinker, to do justice to the depth and originality of his creative power;
for his imagination includes everything which at a given moment a
human being can think or feel, and often finds itself, therefore, at some
point to which other minds have _reasoned_ their way. The coincidence
occurs most often with German lines of thought, and it has therefore
been concluded that he has studied the works in which they are laid
down, or has otherwise moved in the same track; the fact being that he
has no bond of union with German philosophers, but the natural

tendencies of his own mind. It may be easily ascertained that he did not
read their language until late in life; and if what I have said of his
mental habits is true, it is equally certain that their methods have been
more foreign to him still. He resembles Hegel, Fichte, or Schelling, as
the case may be, by the purely creative impulse which has met their
thought, and which, if he had lived earlier, might have forestalled it. Mr.
Browning's position is that of a fixed centre of thought and feeling.
Fifty years ago he was in advance of his age. He stood firm and has
allowed the current to overtake him, or even leave him behind. If I may
be allowed a comparison: other mental existences suggest the idea of a
river, flowing onwards, amidst varying scenes, and in a widening bed,
to lose itself in the sea. Mr. Browning's genius appears the sea itself,
with its immensity and its limits, its restlessness and its repose, the
constant self-balancing of its ebb and flow.
As both dramatic and metaphysical poet, Mr. Browning is inspired by
one central doctrine: that while thought is absolute in itself, it is relative
or personal to the mind which thinks it; so that no one man can attain
the whole truth of any abstract subject, and no other can convict him of
having failed to do so. And he also believes that since intellectual truth
is so largely for each of us a matter of personal impression, no language
is special enough to convey it. The arguments which he carries on
through the mouths of his men and women often represent even moral
truth as something too subtle, too complex, and too changing, to be
definitely expressed; and if we did not see that he reverences what is
good as much as he excuses what is bad, we might imagine that even
on this ground he considered no fixed knowledge to be attainable.
These opinions are, however, closely bound up with his religious
beliefs, and in great measure explained by them. He is convinced that
uncertainty is essential to the spiritual life; and his works are saturated
by the idea that where uncertainty ceases, stagnation must begin; that
our light must be wavering, and our progress tentative, as well as our
hopes chequered, and our happiness even devoid of any sense of
finality, if the creative intention is not to frustrate itself; we may not see
the path of progress and salvation clearly marked out before us. On the
other hand, he believes that the circumstances of life are as much
adapted to the guidance of each separate soul as if each were the single

object of creative care; and that therefore while the individual knows
nothing of the Divine scheme, he _is_ everything in it.
This faith in personality is naturally abstruse on the metaphysical side,
but it is always picturesque on the dramatic; for it issues in that love of
the unusual which is so striking to every reader of Mr. Browning's
works; and we might characterize these in a few words, by saying that
they reflect at once the extent of his general sympathies, and his
antagonism to everything which is general. But the "unusual" which
attracts him is not the morbid or the monstrous, for these mean
defective life. It is every healthy escape from the conventional and the
commonplace, which are also defective life;