Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher | Page 8

applies and tests its principles.
That Browning's ethical and religious ideas were for him something
different from, and perhaps more than, mere poetic sentiments, will, I
believe, be scarcely denied. That he held a deliberate theory, and held it

with greater and greater difficulty as he became older, and as his
dialectical tendencies grew and threatened to wreck his artistic freedom,
is evident to any one who regards his work as a whole. But it will not
be admitted so readily that anything other than harm can issue from an
attempt to deal with him as if he were a philosopher. Even if it be
allowed that he held and expressed a definite theory, will it retain any
value if we take it out of the region of poetry and impassioned religious
faith, into the frigid zone of philosophical inquiry? Could any one
maintain, apart from the intoxication of religious and poetic sentiment,
that the essence of existence is love? As long as we remain within the
realm of imagination, it may be argued, we may find in our poet's great
sayings both solacement and strength, both rest and an impulse towards
higher moral endeavour; but if we seek to treat them as theories of facts,
and turn upon them the light of the understanding, will they not
inevitably prove to be hallucinations? Poetry, we think, has its own
proper place and function. It is an invaluable anodyne to the cark and
care of reflective thought; an opiate which, by steeping the critical
intellect in slumber, sets the soul free to rise on the wings of religious
faith. But reason breaks the spell; and the world of poetry, and
religion--a world which to them is always beautiful and good with
God's presence--becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead,
mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly
changing forms of energy.
There is, at the present time, a widespread belief that we had better
keep poetry and religion beyond the reach of critical investigation, if
we set any store by them. Faith and reason are thought to be finally
divorced. It is an article of the common creed that every attempt which
the world has made to bring them together has resulted in denial, or at
the best in doubt, regarding all supersensuous facts. The one condition
of leading a full life, of maintaining a living relation between ourselves
and both the spiritual and material elements of our existence, is to make
our lives an alternating rhythm of the head and heart, to distinguish
with absolute clearness between the realm of reason and that of faith.
Now, such an assumption would be fatal to any attempt like the present,
to find truth in poetry; and I must, therefore, try to meet it before

entering upon a statement and criticism of Browning's view of life. I
cannot admit that the difficulties of placing the facts of man's spiritual
life on a rational basis are so great as to justify the assertion that there
is no such basis, or that it is not discoverable by man. Surely, it is
unreasonable to make intellectual death the condition of spiritual life. If
such a condition were imposed on man, it must inevitably defeat its
own purpose; for man cannot possibly continue to live a divided life,
and persist in believing that for which his reason knows no defence. We
must, in the long run, either rationalize our faith in morality and
religion, or abandon them as illusions. And we should at least hesitate
to deny that reason--in spite of its apparent failure in the past to justify
our faith in the principles of spiritual life--may yet, as it becomes aware
of its own nature and the might which dwells in it, find beauty and
goodness, nay, God himself, in the world. We should at least hesitate to
condemn man to choose between irreflective ignorance and irreligion,
or to lock the intellect and the highest emotions of our nature and
principles of our life, in a mortal struggle. Poetry and religion may,
after all, be truer then prose, and have something to tell the world that
science, which is often ignorant of its own limits, cannot teach.
The failure of philosophy in the past, even if it were as complete as is
believed by persons ignorant of its history, is no argument against its
success in the future. Such persons have never known that the world of
thought like that of action makes a stepping stone of its dead self. He
who presumes to decide what passes the power of man's thought, or to
prescribe absolute limits to human knowledge, is rash, to say the least;
and he has neither caught the most important of the lessons of modern
science, nor been lifted to the level