Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher | Page 3

of art that some nations have deposited the
profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts." Job and Isaiah,
Æschylus and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe, were first of all
poets. Mankind is indebted to them in the first place for revealing
beauty; but it also owes to them much insight into the facts and
principles of the moral world. It would be an unutterable loss to the
ethical thinker and the philosopher, if this region were closed against
them, so that they could no longer seek in the poets the inspiration and
light that lead to goodness and truth. In our own day, almost above all
others, we need the poets for these ethical and religious purposes. For

the utterances of the dogmatic teacher of religion have been divested of
much of their ancient authority; and the moral philosopher is often
regarded either as a vendor of commonplaces or as the votary of a
discredited science, whose primary principles are matter of doubt and
debate. There are not a few educated Englishmen who find in the poets,
and in the poets alone, the expression of their deepest convictions
concerning the profoundest interests of life. They read the poets for
fresh inspiration, partly, no doubt, because the passion and rapture of
poetry lull criticism and soothe the questioning spirit into acquiescence.
But there are further reasons; for the poets of England are greater than
its moral philosophers; and it is of the nature of the poetic art that,
while eschewing system, it presents the strife between right and wrong
in concrete character, and therefore with a fulness and truth impossible
to the abstract thought of science.
"A poet never dreams: We prose folk do: we miss the proper duct For
thoughts on things unseen."[A]
[Footnote A: Fifine at the Fair, lxxxviii.]
It is true that philosophy endeavours to correct this fragmentariness by
starting from the unity of the whole. But it can never quite get rid of an
element of abstraction and reach down to the concrete individual.
The making of character is so complex a process that the poetic
representation of it, with its subtle suggestiveness, is always more
complete and realistic than any possible philosophic analysis. Science
can deal only with aspects and abstractions, and its method becomes
more and more inadequate as its matter grows more concrete, unless it
proceeds from the unity in which all the aspects are held together. In
the case of life, and still more so in that of human conduct, the whole
must precede the part, and the moral science must, therefore, more than
any other, partake of the nature of poetry; for it must start from living
spirit, go from the heart outwards, in order to detect the meaning of the
actions of man.
On this account, poetry is peculiarly helpful to the ethical investigator,

because it always treats the particular thing as a microcosm. It is the
great corrective of the onesidedness of science with its harsh method of
analysis and distinction. It is a witness to the unity of man and the
world. Every object which art touches into beauty, becomes in the very
act a whole. The thing that is beautiful is always complete, the
embodiment of something absolutely valuable, the product and the
source of love; and the beloved object is all the world for the
lover--beyond all praise, because it is above all comparison.
"Then why not witness, calmly gazing, If earth holds aught--speak
truth--above her? Above this tress, and this, I touch But cannot praise, I
love so much!"[A]
[Footnote A: Song (Dramatic Lyrics).]
This characteristic of the work of art brings with it an important
practical consequence, because being complete, it appeals to the whole
man.
"Poetry," it has been well said, is "the idealized and monumental
utterance of the deepest feelings." And poetic feelings, it must not be
forgotten, are deepest; that is, they are the afterglow of the fullest
activity of a complete soul, and not shallow titillations, or surface
pleasures, such as the palate knows. Led by poetry, the intellect so sees
truth that it glows with it, and the will is stirred to deeds of heroism.
For there is hardly any fact so mean, but that when intensified by
emotion, it grows poetic; as there is hardly any man so unimaginative,
but that when struck with a great sorrow, or moved by a great passion,
he is endowed for a moment with the poet's speech. A poetic fact, one
may almost say, is just any fact at its best. Art, it is true, looks at its
object through a medium, but it always seems its inmost meaning. In
Lear, Othello, Hamlet, in Falstaff and Touchstone, there is a revelation
of the inner truth of human life beyond the power of moral science to
bestow.