Chapter 4 SOCIAL IDEALS

Browning's social ideals revolve about a trinity of values: the value of love, the value of truth, the value of evil. His ethics are the natural outgrowth of his mysticism and his idealism, with no touch of the utilitarianism which has been a distinctive mark of the fabric of English society during the nineteenth century, nor, on the other hand, of the hidebound conventionalism which has limited personal freedom in ways detrimental to just those aspects of social morality it was most anxious to preserve.

The fact of which Browning seemed more conscious than of any other fact of his existence, and which, as we have seen, was the very core of his mysticism, was feeling. Things about which an ordinary man would feel no emotion at all start in his mind a train of thoughts, ending only in the perception of divine love. The eating of a palatable fig fills his heart with such gratefulness to the giver of the fig that immediately he fares forth upon the way which brings him into the presence of the Prime Giver from whom all gifts are received. What ecstasy of feeling in the artist aspiring through his art to the higher regions of Absolute Beauty in "Abt Vogler" of the poet who loves, aspiring to the divine through his human love in the epilogue to "Ferishtah's Fancies!" The perception of feeling was so intense that it became in him exalted and concentrated, incapable of dissipating itself in ephemeral sentimentalities, and this it is which gives feeling to Browning its mystical quality, and puts personal love upon the plane of a veritable revelation.

Though reports have often floated about in regard to his attachments to other women after Mrs. Browning's death, the fact remains that he did not marry again, that he wrote the lyrics in "Ferishtah's Fancies," and the sonnet to Edward Fitzgerald just before his death, and thirty years after his wife's death. Moreover, in the epilogue to "The Two Poets of Croisic" he gives a hint of what might be his attitude toward any other women who may have come into his life, in the application of the tale of the cricket chirping "love" in the place of the broken string of a poet's lyre-

"For as victory was nighest,

While I sang and played,

With my lyre at lowest, highest,

Right alike-one string that made

Love sound soft was snapt in twain,

Never to be heard again,--

"Had not a kind cricket fluttered,

Perched upon the place

Vacant left, and duly uttered,

'Love, Love, Love,' when'er the bass

Asked the treble to atone

For its somewhat sombre drone."

These rare qualities of constancy, exaltation and aspiration, in love sublimating it into a spiritual emotion, which was evidently the distinctive mark of Browning's personality on the emotional side, furnishes the keynote by which his presentation or solution of the social problems involved in the relations of men and women is always to be gauged.

He had been writing ten years when he essayed his first serious presentation of what we might to-day call a problem play on an English subject in "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon." In all of his long poems and in many of his short ones personal love had been portrayed under various conditions-between friends or lovers, husband and wife, or father and son, and in every instance it is a dominating influence in the action, as we have already seen it to be in "Strafford." Again, in "King Victor and King Charles" the action centers upon Charles's love for his father, and is also moulded in many ways by Polyxena's love for her husband, Charles.

But a perception of the possible heights to be obtained by the passion of romantic love only fully emerges in "Pippa Passes," for example in Ottima's vision of the reality of her own love, despite her great sin as contrasted with that of Sebald's, and in Jules's rising above the conventionally low when he discovers he has been duped, and perceiving in Phene a purity of soul which no earthly conditions had been able to sully,

"Who, what is Lutwyche, what Natalia's friends,

What the whole world except our love-my own,

Own Phene?...

I do but break these paltry models up

To begin art afresh ...

Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!

Like a god going through the world there stands

One mountain for a moment in the dusk,

Whole brotherhoods of cedars on its brow:

And you are ever by me while I gaze

-Are in my arms as now-as now-as now!

Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!

Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"

Again, in "The Return of the Druses" there is a complicated clash between the ideal of religious reverence for the incarnation of divinity in Djabal and human love for him in the soul of Anael, resulting at the end in the destruction of the idea of Djabal's supernatural divinity, and his reinstatement perceived by Anael as divine through the complete exaltation of his human love for Anael.

These examples, however, while they illustrate Browning's attitude toward human love, are far enough removed from nineteenth-century conditions in England. In "Pippa," the social conditions of nineteenth-century Italy are reflected; in "The Druses," the religious conditions of the Druse nation in the fifteenth century.

In the "Blot in the 'Scutcheon" a situation is developed which comes home forcibly to the nineteenth-century Englishman despite the fact that the scene is supposed to be laid in the eighteenth century. The poet's treatment of the clash between the ideal, cherished by an old and honored aristocratic family of its own immaculate purity, and the spontaneous, complete and exalted love of the two young people who in their ecstasy transcend conventions, illustrates, as perhaps no other situation could, his reverential attitude upon the subject of love. Gwendolen, the older, intuitional woman, and Mertoun, the young lover, are the only people in the play to realize that purity may exist although the social enactments upon which it is supposed to depend have not been complied with. Tresham learns it only when he has wounded Mertoun unto death; Mildred never learns it. The grip of conventional teaching has sunk so deeply into her nature that she feels her sin unpardonable and only to be atoned for by death. Mertoun, as he dies, gives expression to the essential purity and truth of his nature in these words:

"Die along with me,

Dear Mildred! 'tis so easy, and you'll 'scape

So much unkindness! Can I lie at rest,

With rude speech spoken to you, ruder deeds

Done to you?-heartless men shall have my heart

And I tied down with grave-clothes and the worm,

Aware, perhaps, of every blow-O God!-

Upon those lips-yet of no power to bear

The felon stripe by stripe! Die Mildred! Leave

Their honorable world to them! For God

We're good enough, though the world casts us out."

This is only one of many instances which go to show that Browning's conception of love might include, on the one hand, a complete freedom from the trammels imposed upon it by conventional codes of morality, but on the other, was so real and permanent a sympathy between two souls, and so absolute a revelation of divine beauty, that its morality far transcended that of the conventional codes, which under the guise of lawful alliances permit and even encourage marriages based upon the most external of attractions, or those entered into for merely social or commercial reasons. A sin against love seems in Browning's eyes to come the nearest of all human failings to the unpardonable sin.

It must not be supposed from what has been said that he had any anarchistic desire to do away with the solemnization of marriage, but his eyes were wide open to the fact that there might be sin within the marriage bond, and just as surely that there might be love pure and true outside of it.

Another illustration of Browning's belief in the existence of a love such as Shakespeare describes, which looks on tempests and is never shaken, is given in the "Inn Album." Here, again, the characters are all English, and the story is based upon an actual occurrence. Such changes as Browning has made in the story are with the intention of pitting against the villainy of an aristocratic seducer of the lowest type a bourgeois young man, who has been in love with the betrayed woman, and who when he finds out that it was this man, his friend, who had stood between them, does not swerve from his loyalty and truth to her, and in the end avenges her by killing the aristocratic villain. The young man is betrothed to a girl he cares nothing for, the woman has married a man she cares nothing for. All is of no moment in the presence of a genuine loyal emotion which shows itself capable of a life of devotion with no thought of reward.

Browning has nowhere translated into more noble action the love of a man than in the passage where the hero of the story gives himself unselfishly to the woman who has been so deeply wronged:

"Take heart of hers,

And give her hand of mine with no more heart

Than now, you see upon this brow I strike!

What atom of a heart do I retain

Not all yours? Dear, you know it! Easily

May she accord me pardon when I place

My brow beneath her foot, if foot so deign,

Since uttermost indignity is spared-

Mere marriage and no love! And all this time

Not one word to the purpose! Are you free?

Only wait! only let me serve-deserve

Where you appoint and how you see the good!

I have the will-perhaps the power-at least

Means that have power against the world. Fortune-

Take my whole life for your experiment!

If you are bound-in marriage, say-why, still,

Still, sure, there's something for a friend to do,

Outside? A mere well-wisher, understand!

I'll sit, my life long, at your gate, you know,

Swing it wide open to let you and him

Pass freely,-and you need not look, much less

Fling me a 'Thank you!-are you there, old friend?'

Don't say that even: I should drop like shot!

So I feel now, at least: some day, who knows?

After no end of weeks and months and years

You might smile! 'I believe you did your best!'

And that shall make my heart leap-leap such leap

As lands the feet in Heaven to wait you there!

Ah, there's just one thing more! How pale you look!

Why? Are you angry? If there's after all,

Worst come to worst-if still there somehow be

The shame-I said was no shame,-none, I swear!-

In that case, if my hand and what it holds,-

My name,-might be your safeguard now,-at once-

Why, here's the hand-you have the heart."

The genuine lovers in Browning's gallery will occur to every reader of Browning: lovers who are not deterred by obstacles, like Norbert, lovers like Miranda, devoted to a woman with a "past"; like the lover in "One Way of Love," who still can say, "Those who win heaven, blest are they." Sometimes there is a problem to be solved, sometimes not. Whenever there is a problem, however, it is solved by Browning on the side of sincerity and truth, never on the side of convention.

Take, for example, "The Statue and the Bust," which many have considered to uphold an immoral standard and of which its defenders declare that the moral point of the story lies not in the fact that the lady and the Duke wished to elope with each other but that they never had strength enough of mind to do so. Considering what an entirely conventional and loveless marriage this of the lady and the Duke evidently was we cannot suppose, in the light of Browning's solution of similar situations, that he would have thought it any great crime if the Duke and the lady had eloped, since there was so genuine an attraction between them. But he does word his climax, it must be confessed, in a way to leave a loophole of doubt on the subject for those who do not like to be scandalized by their Browning: "Let a man contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize, be it what it will!"

There is a saving grace to be extracted from the last line.

"-The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost

Is-the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,

Though the end in sight was a vice, I say."

In "The Ring and the Book," the problem is similar to that in the "Inn Album," except that the villain in the case is the lawful husband. The lover, Caponsacchi, under different conditions demanding that he shall not give the slightest expression to his love, rises to a reverential height which even some of Browning's readers seem to doubt as possible. Caponsacchi is, however, too much under the spell of Catholic theology to see the mystical meaning of the love which he acknowledges in his own soul for Pompilia. In this poem it is Pompilia who is given the divine vision. If I may resay what I have said in another connection,[3] there is no moral struggle in Pompilia's short life such as that in Caponsacchi's. Both were alike in the fact that up to a certain point in their lives their full consciousness was unawakened: hers slept, through innocence and ignorance; his, in spite of knowledge, through lack of aspiration. She was rudely awakened by suffering; he by the sudden revelation of a possible ideal. Therefore, while for him, conscious of his past failures, a struggle begins: for her, conscious of no failure in her duty, which she had always followed according to her light, there simply continues duty according to the new light. Neither archbishop nor friendly "smiles and shakes of head" could weaken her conviction that, being estranged in soul from her husband, her attitude toward him was inevitable. No qualms of conscience troubled her as to her inalienable right to fly from him. That she submitted as long as she did was only because no one could be found to aid her. And how quick and certain her defence of Caponsacchi, threatened by Guido, when he overtakes them at the Inn! As she thinks over it calmly afterward, she makes no apology, but justifies her action as the voice of God.

"If I sinned so-never obey voice more.

O, the Just and Terrible, who bids us 'Bear.'

Not-'Stand by; bear to see my angels bear!'"

The gossip over her flight with Caponsacchi does not trouble her as it does him. He saved her in her great need; the supposition that their motives for flight had any taint of impurity in them is too puerile to be given a thought, yet with the same sublime certainty of the right, characteristic of her, she acknowledges, at the end, her love for Caponsacchi, and looks for its fulfilment in the future when marriage shall be an interpenetration of souls that know themselves into one. Having attained so great a good she can wish none of the evil she has suffered undone. She goes a step farther. Not only does she accept her own suffering for the sake of the final supreme good to herself, but she feels assured that good will fall at last to those who worked the evil.

In her absolute certainty of her realization of an unexpressed love in a future existence, she is only equaled in Browning's poetry by the speaker in "Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead."

That Browning's belief in the mystical quality of personal love never changed is shown by the fact that near the end of his life, in the "Parleying" with Daniel Bartoli, he treats a love romance based upon fact in a way to emphasize this same truth which so constantly appears in his earlier work. The lady in this case, who is of the people, having been offered a bribe by the King which will mean the dishonoring of herself and her husband, and which if she does not accept will mean her complete separation from her husband, instantly decides against the bribe. She prefers love in spirit in a convent to the accepting of the King's promise that she will be made much of in court if she will sign a paper agreeing that her husband shall at once cede his dukedoms to the King. She explains her attitude to the Duke, who hesitates in his decision, whereupon she leaves and saves his honor for him, but his inability to decide at once upon the higher ground of spiritual love reveals to her the inadequacy of his love as compared with her own and kills her love for him. She later, however, marries a man who was only a boy of ten at the time of this episode, and their life together was a dream of happiness. But she dies and the devoted husband becomes a man of the world again. The Duke, however, has a streak of genuineness in his nature after all. Although carried away by the charms of a bold, black-eyed, tall creature, a development in keeping with the nature of the Duke in the true story, Browning is equal to the occasion, and makes him declare that the real man in him is dead and is still faithful to the old love. All she has is his ghost. Some day his soul will again be called into life by his ideal love.

The poet frequently expresses a doubt of man's power to be faithful to the letter in case of a wife's death. "Any wife to any husband" reveals that feeling as it comes to a woman. The poet's answer to this doubt is invariably, that where the love was true other attraction is a makeshift by which a desolate life is made tolerable, or, as in "Fifine at the Fair," an ephemeral indulgence in pleasure which does not touch the reality of the spiritual love.

Browning was well aware that the ordinary woman had a stronger sense of the eternal in love than the ordinary man. In relation to the Duke in the poem previously mentioned he remarks:

"One leans to like the duke, too; up we'll patch

Some sort of saintship for him-not to match

Hers-but man's best and woman's worst amount

So nearly to the same thing, that we count

In man a miracle of faithfulness

If, while unfaithful somewhat, he lay stress

On the main fact that love, when love indeed,

Is wholly solely love from first to last-

Truth-all the rest a lie."

It may be said that all this is the romantic love about which the poets have always sung, and has as much existence in real life as the ideal of disinterested helpfulness to lovelorn damsels sung about in the days of chivalry. True, others have sung of the exaltation and the immortality of love, and few have been those who have found it, but nowhere has the distinctively human side been touched with such reverence as in Browning. It is not Beatrice translated into a divine personage to be adored by a worshipping devotee, but a wholly human woman who loves and is loved, who touches divinity in Browning's mind. Human love is then not an impossible ideal of which he writes in poetic language existing only in the realm of fancy; it is a living religion, bringing those who love nearer to God through the exaltation of their feeling than any other revelation of the human soul. Other states of consciousness reveal to humanity the existence of the absolute, but this gives a premonition of what divine love may have in store for the aspiring soul.

In holding to such an ideal of love as this Browning has ranged himself entirely apart from the main tendencies of thought of the century, on the relations of men and women, which have, on the one hand, been wholly conventional, marriage being a contract under the law binding for life except in cases of definite breaches of conduct, and under the Church of affection which is binding only for life; and have, on the other hand, gone extreme lengths in the advocacy of entire freedom in the relations of the sexes. The first degrades love by making it too much a matter of law, the second by making it an ephemeral passion from which almost everything truly beautiful in the relationship of two human beings is, of necessity, eliminated.

To either of these extreme factions Browning's attitude is equally incomprehensible. The first cries out against his liberalness, the second, declaring that human emotion should be untrammeled by either Church, law or God, would find him a pernicious influence against freedom; there are, however, many shades of opinion between the two extremes which would feel sympathy with his ideals in one or more directions.

The chief difficulty in the acceptance of the ideal for most people is that they have not yet developed to the plane where feeling comes to them with the intensity, the concentration, the depth or the constancy that brings with it the sense of revelation. For many people law or the Church is absolutely necessary to preserve such feeling as they are capable of from dissipating itself in shallow sentimentalism; while one or the other will always be necessary in some form because love has its social as well as its personal aspect.

Yet the law and the Church should both allow sufficient freedom for the breaking of relations from which all sincerity has departed, even though humanity as a whole has not yet and probably will not for many ages arrive at Browning's conception of human love.

Truth to one's own highest vision in love being a cardinal principle with Browning, it follows that truth to one's nature in any direction is desirable. He even carries this doctrine of truth to the individual nature so far as to base upon it an apology for the most unmitigated villain he has portrayed, Guido, and to put this apology into the mouth of the person he had most deeply wronged, Pompilia. With exquisite vision she, even, can say:

"But where will God be absent! In his face

Is light, but in his shadow healing too:

Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!

And as my presence was unfortunate,-

My earthly good, temptation and a snare,-

Nothing about me but drew somehow down

His hate upon me,-somewhat so excused

Therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,-

May my evanishment for evermore

Help further to relieve the heart that cast

Such object of its natural loathing forth!

So he was made; he nowise made himself:

I could not love him, but his mother did."

It is this notion that every nature must express its own truth which underlies a poem like "Fifine at the Fair." Through expressing the truth of itself, and so grasping at half truths, even at the false, it finally reaches a higher truth. A nature like Guido's was not born with a faculty for development. He simply had to live out his own hate. The man in "Fifine" had the power of perceiving an ideal, but not the power of living up to it without experimentation upon lower planes of living, probably the most common type of man to-day. There are others like Norbert or Mertoun, in whom the ideal truth is the real truth of their natures and for whom life means the constant expansion of this ideal truth within them. In many of the varying types of men and women portrayed by Browning there is the recognition of the possibility of psychic development either by means of experience or by sudden intuitions, and if, as in the case of Guido, there is no development in this life, there is hope in a future existence in a universe ruled by a God of love.

In his views upon human character and its possibilities of development Browning is, of course, in touch with the scientific views on the subject which filled the air in all later nineteenth-century thought, changing the orthodox ideal of a static humanity born in sin and only to be saved by belief in certain dogmas to that of a humanity born to develop; changing the notion that sin was a terrible and absolutely defined entity, against which every soul had ceaselessly to war, into the notion that sin is a relative evil, consequent upon lack of development, which, as the human soul advances on its path, led by its inborn consciousness of the divine to be attained, will gradually disappear.

But the evil which results from this lack of development in individuals to other individuals, and to society at large, brings a problem which as we have already seen in the first chapter is not so easy of solution. Yet Browning solves it, for is it not through the combat with this evil that the soul is given its real opportunity for development? Pain and suffering give rise to the thirst for happiness and joy, and through the arousing of sympathy and pity, the desire that others shall have happiness and joy, therefore to be despairing and pessimistic about evil or to wish for its immediate annihilation would really be suicidal to the best interests of the human race; nay, he even goes farther than this, as is hinted in one of his last poems, "Rephan," and imagines that any other state than one of flux between good and evil would be monotonous:

"Startle me up, by an Infinite

Discovered above and below me-height

And depth alike to attract my flight,

"Repel my descent: by hate taught love.

Oh, gain were indeed to see above

Supremacy ever-to move, remove,

"Not reach-aspire yet never attain

To the object aimed at! Scarce in vain,-

As each stage I left nor touched again.

"To suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss,

Wring knowledge from ignorance:-just for this-

To add one drop to a love-abyss!

"Enough: for you doubt, you hope, O men,

You fear, you agonize, die: what then?

Is an end to your life's work out of ken?

"Have you no assurance that, earth at end,

Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend

In the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?"

In his attitude toward the existence of evil Browning takes issue with Carlyle, as already noted in the second chapter. Carlyle, as Browning represents him, cannot reconcile the existence of evil with beneficent and omniscient power. He makes the opponent, who is an echo of Carlyle in the argument in "Bernard de Mandeville," exclaim:

"Where's

Knowledge, where power and will in evidence

'Tis Man's-play merely! Craft foils rectitude,

Malignity defeats beneficence,

And grant, at very last of all, the feud

'Twixt good and evil ends, strange thoughts intrude

Though good be garnered safely and good's foe

Bundled for burning. Thoughts steal even so-

Why grant tares leave to thus o'ertop, o'ertower

Their field-mate, boast the stalk and flaunt the flower,

Triumph one sunny minute?"

No attempt must be made to show God's reason for allowing evil. Any such attempt will fail. This passage comes as near as any in Browning to a plunge into the larger social questions which during the nineteenth century have come more and more to the front, and is an index of just where the poet stood in relation to the social movements of the century's end. His gaze was so centered upon the individual and the power of the individual to work out his own salvation and the need of evil in the process that his philosophical attitude toward evil quite overtops the militant interest in overcoming it.

Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the immense evil of the social conditions in England, and raged and stormed against them, but could see no light by which evil could be turned into good. He little realized that his own storming at the ineptitude, the imbecility, the fool-ness of society, and his own despair over the, to him, unaccountable evils of existence, were in themselves a positive good growing out of the evil. Though he was not to suggest practical means for leading the masses out of bondage, he was to call attention in trumpet tones to the fact that the bondage existed. By so doing he was taking a first step or rather drawing aside the curtain and revealing the dire necessity that steps should be taken and taken soon. While Carlyle was militantly shouting against evil to some purpose which would later mean militant action against it, Browning was settling in his own mind just what relation evil should hold to good in the scheme of the universe, and writing a poem to tell why he was a liberal. In fine, Carlyle was opening the way toward the socialism of the latter part of the century, while Browning was still found in the camp of what the socialist of to-day calls the middle-class individualist.

Liberalism, which had taken on social conditions to the point through legislation where every man was free to be a property holder if he could manage to become one, and to amass wealth, left out of consideration the fact that he never could be free as long as he had to compete with every other man in the state to get these things. Hence the movement of the working classes to gain freedom by substituting for a competitive form of society a co?perative form. Great names in literature and art have helped toward the on-coming of this movement. Carlyle had railed at the millions of the English nation, "mostly fools;" Ruskin had bemoaned the enthronement of ugliness as the result of the industrial conditions; Matthew Arnold had proposed a panacea for the ills of the social condition in the bringing about of social equality through culture, and, best of all, William Morris had not only talked but acted.

William Morris

To any student of social movements to-day, whether he has been drawn into the swirl of socialistic propaganda or whether he is still comfortably sitting in his parlor feeling an intellectual sympathy but no emotional call to leave his parlor and be up and doing, Morris appears as the most interesting figure of the century. The pioneers in the nineteenth-century movement toward socialism in England, unless we except the social enthusiasm of a Shelley or a Blake, were Owen and Maurice. Owen was that remarkable anomaly, a self-made man who had gained his wealth because of the new industrial order inaugurated by the invention of machinery, who yet could look at the circumstances so fortuitous for him in an impersonal manner, and realize that what had put a silver spoon into his own mouth was taking away even pewter spoons from other men's mouths. Although he was really in love with the new order of machine production, he realized what many to-day fail to see, that machine production organized for the benefit of private persons would most assuredly mean the poverty and the degradation of the workers. He did not stop here, however, but spent his vast fortune in trying to make the conditions of the workingmen better. In the estimation of socialists to-day his work was of a very high order, "not mere utopianism." It bore no similarity to the romantic dreams of poets who saw visions of a perfect society regardless of the fact that a perfect society cannot suddenly blossom from conditions of appalling misery and degradation. Owen was a practical business man. He knew all the ins and outs of the industrial régime, and consequently he had a practical program, not a dream, which he wished to see carried out. Accounts of the conditions of the workers at that time are heartrending. Everywhere the same tale of abject poverty, ignorance, and oppression in field and factory, long hours of labor and dear food. To bring help to these downtrodden people was the burning desire of Robert Owen and his followers. His efforts were not rewarded by that success which they deserved, his failure being a necessary concomitant of the fact that even a practical program for betterment cannot suddenly take effect owing to the inevitable inertia of any long-established conditions. In showing the causes which kept him from the full accomplishment of his ideals, in spite of his genuine practicalness, Brougham Villiers, the recent historian of the socialist movement in England, says he attempted too much "to influence the workers from without, trying, of course vainly, to induce the governing classes to interest themselves in the work of social reform. Yet it is difficult to see what else he could have done at the time. We have already shown how utterly disorganized the working classes were, how incapable, indeed, of any organization. They were also destitute of political power, and miserably underpaid. What could they do to help themselves? Help, if it was to come at all, must come from the only people who then had the power, if they only had the will, to accord it, and to them, at first, Robert Owen appealed. Later, he turned to the people, and for them indeed his work was not utterly wasted, though generations were to pass before the full effect of it could be seen."

However abortive his attempts to gain political sympathy for his socialist program, and in spite of the fact that socialist agitation came to a standstill in England with the defeat of the somewhat chaotic socialism of the Chartists, it cannot be doubted that his efforts influenced the political reformers who were to take up one injustice after another and fight for its melioration until the working classes were at least brought to a plane where they could begin to organize and develop toward the still higher plane where they could themselves take their own salvation in hand.

Another man who did much to bring the workingman's cause into prominence was Maurice, who emphasized the Christian aspect of the movement. He was an excellent supplement to Owen, whose liberal views on religion militated in some quarters against an acceptance of his humane views in regard to workingmen.

Notwithstanding the personal strength of these two men they failed not only in the practical attainment of their object, but their ideas on socialism did not even wedge itself into the thought consciousness of the Englishmen.

The men who did more than any one else to awaken the sleeping English consciousness were Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold and Morris. Of these Morris held a position midway between the old-fashioned dreamer of dreams and the new-fashioned hustling political socialist, who now sends his representatives to Parliament and has his "say" in the national affairs of the country.

Being a poet, he could, of course, dream dreams, and one of these, "The Dream of John Ball," puts the case of the toilers in a form at once so convincing and so full of divine pity that it does not seem possible it could be read even by the most hardened of trust magnates without making him see how unjust has been the distribution of this world's goods through the making of one man do the work of many: "In days to come one man shall do the work of a hundred men-yea, of a thousand or more: and this is the shift of mastership that shall make many masters and many rich men." This is a riddle which John Ball cannot grasp at once, and when it is explained to him he is still more mystified at the result.

"Thou hast seen the weaver at his loom: think how it should be if he sit no longer before the web and cast the shuttle and draw home the sley, but if the shed open of itself, speed through it as swift as the eye can follow, and the sley come home of itself, and the weaver standing by ... looking to half a dozen looms and bidding them what to do. And as with the weaver so with the potter, and the smith, and every worker in metals, and all other crafts, that it shall be for them looking on and tending, as with the man that sitteth in the cart while the horse draws. Yea, at last so shall it be even with those who are mere husbandmen; and no longer shall the reaper fare afield in the morning with his hook over his shoulder, and smite and bind and smite again till the sun is down and the moon is up; but he shall draw a thing made by men into the field with one or two horses, and shall say the word and the horses shall go up and down, and the thing shall reap and gather and bind, and do the work of many men. Imagine all this in thy mind if thou canst, at least as ye may imagine a tale of enchantment told by a minstrel, and then tell me what shouldst thou deem that the life of men would be amidst all this, men such as these of the township here, or the men of the Canterbury guilds."

And John Ball's conclusion is that things in that day to come will be not as they are but as they ought to be. With irresistible logic he declares:

"I say that if men still abide men as I have known them, and unless these folk of England change as the land changeth-and forsooth of the men, for good and for evil, I can think no other than I think now, or behold them other than I have known them and loved them-I say if the men be still men, what will happen except that there should be all plenty in the land, and not one poor man therein ... for there would then be such abundance of good things, that, as greedy as the lords might be, there would be enough to satisfy their greed and yet leave good living for all who labored with their hands; so that these should labor for less than now, and they would have time to learn knowledge," and he goes on, "take part in the making of laws."

But Morris was not the man to dream, merely. Though he did not trouble himself about the doctrinaire side of socialism, he preached it constantly from the human side and from the artistic side. While some socialist writers make us feel that socialism might possibly only be Gradgrind in another guise, he makes us feel that peace and plenty and loveliness would attend upon the sons and daughters of socialism. As one of his many admirers says of him: "He was an out-and-out Communist because of the essential sanity of a mind incapable of the desire to monopolize anything he could not use."

The authoritarianism of the Marxian socialists was distasteful to him, for, to quote from the same admirer, his "conception of socialism was that of a free society, based on the simple rights of all to use the earth and anything in it, and the consequent abolition of all competition for the means of life." His attitude of mind on these points led him to break away from the Social Democratic Federation, which, with its political program, was distasteful to Morris's more purely social feeling, and found the Socialist League. This emphasized more particularly the artistic side of socialism. Morris and his followers were bent upon making life a beautiful thing as well as a comfortable thing.

According to all accounts, the League was not as great a force in the development of socialist ideals as was Morris himself, who inspired such men as Burne-Jones and Walter Crane with a sympathy in the new ideals, as well as multitudes of lesser men in the crowds that gathered to listen to him in Waltham Green or in some other like open place of a Sunday.

Morris's chief contribution to the growth of the cause was perhaps his own business plant, into which he put as many of his ideals for the betterment of the workingmen's conditions as he was able to do under existing conditions. Who has not gloated over his exquisite editions of Chaucer and the like-books in which even the punctuation marks are a delight to the eye, and the illustrations as far beyond ordinary illustrations as the punctuation marks are beyond ordinary periods. If anything could add to the richness of the interior it is the contrasting simplicity of the white vellum bindings, and, again, if there is another possible touch of grace-a gilding of the lily-what could better fulfil that purpose than the outer boxing covered with a Morris cotton print! The critical may object that these Morris editions are so expensive that none but millionaire bibliophiles can have many of them. How many of us have even seen them except in such collections! And how many of his workmen are able to share in this product of their labor to any greater extent than the product of labor is usually shared in by its producers, may be asked.

Though we are obliged to answer that the workmen probably do not have the Morris books in their own libraries, they yet have the joy of making these beautiful books under conditions of happy workmanship-that is, they are skilled craftsmen, who have been trained in an apprenticeship, who are asked to work only eight hours a day, who receive higher wages than other workmen and, above all, who have the stimulation of the presence of Morris, himself, working among them.

Morris's enthusiasm for a more universally happy and beautiful society combined with the object lesson of his own methods in conducting a business upon genuinely artistic principles has done an incalculable amount in spreading the gospel of socialism. Still there was too much of the laissez faire atmosphere about his attitude for it to bring about any marked degree of progress.

The opinion of Mr. William Clarke who had many conversations with Morris on the subject reveals that, after all, there was too much of the poet about him for him to be a really practical force in the movement. He writes:

"It is not easy to understand how Morris proposes to bring about the condition of things he looks forward to. No parliamentary or municipal methods, no reliance upon lawmaking machinery, an abhorrence of everything that smacks of 'politics': it all seems very impracticable to the average man, and certainly suggests the poet rather than the man of affairs. What Morris thinks will really happen is, I should say, judging from numerous conversations I have had with him, something like this: Existing society is, he thinks, gradually, but with increasing momentum, disintegrating through its own rottenness. The capitalist system of production is breaking down fast and is compelled to exploit new regions in Africa and other parts, where he thinks its term will be short. Economically, socially, morally, politically, religiously, civilization is becoming bankrupt. Meanwhile it is for the socialist to take advantage of this disintegration by spreading discontent, by preaching economic truths, and by any kind of demonstration which may harass the authorities and develop among the people an esprit de corps. By these means the people will, in some way or other, be ready to take up the industry of the world when the capitalist class is no longer able to direct or control it. Morris believes less in a violent revolution than he did and thinks that workmen's associations and labor unions form a kind of means between brute force on the one hand and a parliamentary policy on the other. He does not, however, share the sanguine views of John Burns as to the wonders to be accomplished by the 'new' trades unionism."

The practical ineffectiveness of the Morris socialism in spite of its having taken some steps in the direction of vital activity was overcome by the next socialist body which came into prominence-the Fabian Society, in which Bernard Shaw has been so conspicuous a figure.

As already mentioned, the Fabians are not a fighting body, but a solidly educational body. To them is due the bringing of socialism into the realm of political economy, and in so doing they have striven to harmonize it with English practical political methods. Besides this, they have done a vast amount of work in educating public opinion, not with the view to immediately converting the English nation to a belief in the changing of the present order into one wholly socialistic, but with a view to introducing socialistic treatment of the individual problems which arise in contemporary politics.

John Burns

Their campaign of education was conducted so well that its effects were soon visible, not only in the modification of public opinion, but upon the workingmen themselves. The method was simple enough: "If any public, especially any social, question came to the front, the Fabian method was to make a careful independent study of the matter, and present to the public, in a penny pamphlet, a thoughtful statement of the case and some common sense, and incidentally socialistic, suggestions for a solution." Fabian ideas were thus introduced into the consciousness of the awakening trades unionists.

It has been objected that the gain was much more for the trades unionists than for the Fabians. Their one-time eager pupils have, it is said, progressed beyond their masters, as a review of recent socialistic tendencies would divulge had we the time to follow them in this place. However that may be, the great fact remains that the Fabians have done more than any other branch of socialists to bridge over the distance between what the English writers call the middle-class idealist and the proletarian, with the result that the proletarian has begun to think for himself and to translate middle-class idealism into proletarian realism.

Socialism, from being the watch word of the enthusiastic revolutionary, began to be discussed in every intelligent household and in every debating society. This enormous growth in public sentiment occurred during the session of the Unionist Parliament, 1886-92. When this Parliament opened there was hardly any socialist literature, and when it closed everybody was reading Bellamy and the "Fabian Essays," and Sir William Harcourt had made his memorable remark: "We are all socialists now."

The gesticulating and bemoaning idealists, the Carlyles and the Ruskins, the revolutionary but laissez faire prophets like Morris, who believed in a complete change but not in using any of the means at hand to bring about that change, had given place to men like Keir Hardie and John Burns, who had sprung into leadership from the ranks of the workingmen themselves, and who were to be later their representatives in Parliament when the Independent Labor Party came into existence. All this had been done by that group of progressive men, long-headed enough to see that the ideal of a better and more beautiful social life could not be gained except by a long and toilsome process of education and of action which would consciously follow the principles of growth discovered by scientists to obtain in all unconscious cosmic and physical development, the very principle which as we have seen, Browning declared should have guided his hero Sordello long before the Fabian socialists came into existence-namely, the principle of evolution. That their methods should have peacefully brought about the conditions where it was possible to form an Independent Labor Party, which would have the power to speak and act for itself instead of working as the Fabians themselves do through the parties already in power, shouts aloud for the wisdom of their policy. And is there not still plenty of work for them to do in the still further educating of all parties toward the flowering of genuine democracy, when the dreams of the dreamer shall have become actualities, because true and not spurious ways of making them actual shall have been worked out by experience?

This remarkable growth in social ideals was taking place during the ninth decade of the century and the last decade of Browning's life. Is there any indication in his later work that he was conscious of it? There is certainly no direct evidence in his work that he progressed any farther in the development of democratic ideals than we find in the liberalism of such a parliamentary leader as Mr. Gladstone, while in that poem in which he considers more especially than in any other the subject of better conditions for the people, "Sordello," he distinctly expresses a mood of doubt as to the advisability of making conditions too easy for the human being, who needs the hardships and ills of life to bring his soul to perfection, a far more important thing in Browning's eyes than to live comfortably and beautifully. All he wishes for the human being is the fine chance to make the most of himself spiritually. The socialist would say that he could not secure the chance to do this except in a society where the murderous principle of competition should give way to that of co?peration. With this Browning might agree. Indeed, may this not have been the very principle Sordello had in mind as something revealed to him which neither Guelf nor Ghibelline could see, or was this only the more obvious principle of republican as opposed to monarchical principle and still falling under an individualistic conception of society?

While his work is instinct with sympathy for all classes and conditions of men, Browning does not feel the ills of life with the intensity of a Carlyle, nor its ugliness with the grief of a Ruskin, nor yet its lack of culture with the priggishness of an Arnold, nor would he stand in open spaces and preach discontent to the masses like Morris. Why? Because he from the first was made wise to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success, to be proud of men's fallacies, their half reasons, their faint aspirings, upward tending all though weak, the lesson learned after weary experiences of life by Paracelsus. His thought was centered upon the worth of every human being to himself and for God. Earth is after all only a place to grow in and prepare one's self for lives to come, and failure here, so long as the fight has been bravely fought, is to be regarded with anything but regret, for it is through the failure that the vision of the future is made more sure.

What he finds true, as we saw, in the religious or philosophical world, he finds true in the moral world. Lack in human knowledge points the way to God; lack in human success points the way to immortality.

The meaning of this life in relation to a future life being so much more important than this life in itself, and man's individual development being so much more important than his social development, Browning naturally would not turn his attention upon those practical, social or governmental means by which even the chance for individual development must be secured. He is too much occupied with the larger questions. He is not even a middle-class idealist, dreaming dreams of future earthly bliss; he is the prophet of future existences.

Does his practical influence upon the social development of the century amount to nothing then? Not at all. He started out on his voyage through the century toward the democratic ideal in the good ship Individualism-the banner ship indeed. What he has emphasized upon this voyage is first the paramount worth of each and every human being, whether good or bad. Second, the possibility in every human being of conceiving an ideal, toward which by the exertion of his will power he should aspire, battling steadfastly against every obstruction that life throws in his course. Third, that even those who are incapable of formulating an ideal must be regarded as living out the truth of their natures and must therefore be treated with compassion. Fourth, that the highest function of the human soul is love, which expresses itself in many ways, but attains its full flowering only in the love of man and woman on a plane of spiritual exaltation, and that through this power of human love some glimpse of the divine is caught; therefore to this function of the soul it is of the utmost importance that human beings should be loyal and true, even if that loyalty and truth conflict with conventional ways of looking at life. Sailing in this good ship he also expresses his sympathy indirectly in his dramas and directly upon several occasions with the ideals of political freedom which during the century have been making progress toward democracy in the English Parliament through the legislation of the liberals, whose laws have brought a greater and greater measure of freedom to the middle classes and some measure of freedom to the working classes.

But it seems as if when nearing the end of the century Browning landed from his ship upon some high island and straining his eyes toward the horizon of the dawn of another life did not fully realize that there was another good ship, Socialism, struggling to reach the ideal of democracy, and now become the banner ship whose work is to sail out into the unknown, turbulent seas of the future, finding the path to another high island in order that the way may be made clear for the ship Individualism to continue her course to another stage in the voyage toward a perfect democracy. And as the new ship, Socialism, passes on its way it will do well to heed the vision of the poet seer, straining his eyes toward the dawn of other lives in other spheres, lest in the struggle and strain to bring about a more comfortable and beautiful life upon earth, the important truth be slighted that humanity has a higher destiny to fulfil than can be realized in the most Utopian dreams of an earthly democracy. This truth is in fact not only forgotten but is absolutely denied by many of the latter-day social reformers.

To sum up, I think one is justified in concluding that as a sympathizer with the liberal political tendencies of the nineteenth century Browning is of his age. In his quiescence upon the proletarian movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century he seems to have been left behind by his age. In his insistence upon the worth of the individual to himself and to God he is both of his age and beyond it. As has been said of philosophy, "It cannot give us bread but it can give us God, soul and immortality," so we may say of Browning, that though he did not raise up his voice in the cry of the proletarian for bread, he has insisted upon the truths of God, the soul and immortality.

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