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

and this is why we find in
his men and women those vivid, various, and subtly compounded
motives and feelings, which make our contact with them a slight, but
continuous electric shock.
And since the belief in personality is the belief in human life in its
fullest and truest form, it includes the belief in love and self-sacrifice. It
may, indeed, be said that while Mr. Browning's judgments are leavened
by the one idea, they are steadily coloured by the other; this again being
so evident to his serious renders that I need only indicate it here. But
the love of love does more than colour his views of life; it is an
essential element in his theology; and it converts what would otherwise
be a pure Theism into a mystical Christianity which again is limited by
his rejection of all dogmatic religious truth. I have already alluded to
his belief that, though the Deity is not to be invested with human
emotions, He can only be reached through them. Love, according to
him, is the necessary channel; since a colourless Omnipotence is
outside the conception as outside the sympathies of man. Christ is a
message of Divine love, indispensable and therefore true; but He is, as
such, a spiritual mystery far more than a definable or dogmatic fact. A
definite revelation uttered for all men and for all time is denied by the
first principles of Mr. Browning's religious belief. What Christianity
means for him, and what it does not, we shall also see in his works.
It is almost superfluous to add that Mr. Browning's dramatic
sympathies and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an

optimist. He believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is
good in its way. We also see that his optimism takes the individual and
not the race for its test and starting point; and that he places the
tendency to good in a _conscious_ creative power which is outside both,
and which deals directly with each separate human soul. But neither
must we forget that the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself
equally through good and evil; so that he does not shrink from the
contemplation of evil or by any means always seek to extenuate it. He
thinks of it philosophically as a condition of good, or again, as an
excess or a distortion of what is good; but he can also think of it, in the
natural sense, as a distinct mode of being which a bad man may prefer
for its own sake, as a good man prefers its opposite, and may defend
accordingly. He would gladly admit that the coarser forms of evil are
passing away; and that it is the creative intention that they should do so.
Evil remains for him nevertheless essential to the variety, and invested
with the dignity of human life; and on no point does he detach himself
so clearly from the humanitarian optimist who regards evil and its
attendant sufferings as a mere disturbance to life. Even where suffering
is not caused by evil doing, he is helped over it by his individual point
of view; because this prevents his ever regarding it as distinct from the
personal compensations which it so often brings into play. He cannot
think of it in the mass; and here again his theism asserts itself, though
in a less obvious manner.
So much of Mr. Browning's moral influence lies in the hopeful
religious spirit which his works reveal, that it is important to
understand how elastic this is, and what seeming contradictions it is
competent to unite. The testimony of one poem might otherwise be set
against that of another with confusing results.
Mr. Browning's paternal grandfather was an Englishman of a west
country stock;[1] his paternal grandmother a Creole. The maternal
grandfather was a German from Hamburg named Wiedemann, an
accomplished draughtsman and musician.[2] The maternal grandmother
was completely Scotch.
This pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of Mr.

Browning's genius; for it shows that on the ground of heredity they are,
in great measure, accounted for. It contains almost the only facts of a
biographical nature which can be fitly introduced into the present work.
HIS CHOICE AND TREATMENT OF SUBJECT.
VERSIFICATION.
Mr. Browning's choice of subject is determined by his belief that
individual feeling and motive are the only true life: hence the only true
material of dramatic art. He rejects no incident which admits of
development on the side of feeling and motive. He accepts none which
cannot be so developed. His range of subject covers, therefore, a great
deal that is painful, but nothing that is simply repulsive: because the
poetry of human life, that is of individual experience, is absent from
nothing which he