Two Contrasted Attitudes to Life

Browning and Arnold

BY B. N SHAMA RAO M.A.

(University of Mysore)

The Nineteenth Century in England was an age of perplexities. There were giants in intellect, like Carlyle, Newman and Ruskin, all passionately pleading for a revaluation of life as essentially spiritual. The worship of power and wealth was hateful to them all. They were great humanists preaching to their age in a hundred forms that the only blessedness to be sought in life is the ability to be morally or manually serviceable to others. These were the major prophets of the age. Men’s minds then were set thinking by the revelations of the new science with its promise of progress unlimited within measurable time. While the voice of those who welcomed progress was loudest, there were other sensitive spirits filled with doubt, undecided whether to welcome the new era of comfort and speed, or to warn the world against its is insidious effects. Particularly because the foundations of orthodox religion were shaken by the new science, some of these sensitive spirits were faced with honest doubt. Others, however, with an instinctive conviction about the immortality of the soul and the benevolence of God, welcomed doubt itself if it could set the mind thinking. While Tennyson and Arnold were the energetic doubters, Browning was the very embodiment of virile optimism. His was a reasoned faith. He gave emphatic expression to his optimistic creed in almost everyone of his dramatic lyrics, but nowhere so powerfully and consistently as in “Rabbi Ben Ezra.”

This dramatic monologue purports to be a pouring forth of the mature philosophy of life of a Jewish Divine of the mediaeval times. But it is actually an expression of the sustained philosophy of life of Browning himself. His robust optimism, his faith in God, his belief in immortality, his conviction that it is high aiming rather than paltry doing which measures the true success of mortal life–all these are expressed with wonderful vigour in the poem. The poem, here and there, betrays the crudity of expression for which Browning is noted. If we meet with lines like

“Irks care the cropful bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?” we have to allow them in Browning. But the vigorous thought of the poem is a stimulus to all, particularly the vague and the wandering, the timid and the disappointed.

The poem is a survey of life from the vantage ground of old age. The poet has no patience with whining pessimism which marks old age in general and fills it with thoughts of regret. Rather, he welcomes age as the period of understanding and judgment:

“Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made.”

This is his call to youth. The high aspirations, the eager questionings, the deep disappointments of youth he does not regret. What most he prizes in the years of youth is the energy to doubt, the spark that disturbs the clod. If feasting and feeding were to be the chief end of a life young or old, he would hardly consider such a life human. Doubt is what gives meaning to life, he emphatically asserts. He is convinced that we are near to that which provides, but does not partake, which gives rather than receives. So everything that sets obstacles in our way of life ought to be welcomed. Difficulty and danger only are the real tests of the energy of the soul. They ought not to baffle our search for the true goal of earthly existence, namely, to be able to live according to the designs of our Maker. Passionately he exhorts us to

“Welcome each rebuff

That turns earth’s smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!

Be our joys three parts pain!

Strive and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”

Reviewing what passes for failure in life in the eyes of men, he consoles himself and others who would think with him with the assurance that what misses the eye of the world in individual effort, if it happens to be sincere, is acceptable in the eyes of God:

“What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me;

A brute I might have been, but would not sink in the scale.”

Apparent failure in the life of the sincere fighter through life is, therefore, real success. It is not what the vulgar mass calls ‘accomplished work’ that is the true measure of the success of an individual life. The common judgment is sure to ignore much that is subtle and suppressed in the life of a genius, particularly when artistic creation is the aim of the soul. A coarse judgment of that sort is sure to miss much that is vital but unseen. But his faith is:

“All I could never be

All men ignored in me,

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.”

He looks upon God, the Creator, as a great Potter. The soul in man is the clay to be shaped into a divine cup worthy of being lifted to the lips of the Mighty Master. Time and circumstance together form the wheel of the Divine Potter. It matters not if, as the pitcher comes to have a finished form, grave marks of distress and trials are left on it. They are only the necessary sequel to the laughing figures of gaiety marked on the pot in the earlier revolutions of the wheel. In other words, youth resents gay experience. As age advances sorrow and disappointment meet us. But all these form only different phases of the education of the soul which has to be shaped into perfection through life.

Nor is this life the last. Here we ought to feel satisfied if the Good, the Right and the Infinite can be named without hesitation or doubt. It is such capacity to differentiate that distinguishes great minds from small. There will be time enough hereafter to pursue the education of the soul in other worlds of greater light and more varied opportunities:

“All that is, at all,

Lasts ever, past recall

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.

Time’s wheel runs fast or stops,

Potter and clay endure.”

Unbaffled by failure, therefore, he would welcome with warmth every stage of life. The energy of youth, the confidence of manhood and the understanding so serenity of old age–all alike appear to him of equal importance. He is no ascetic. He does not want that the soul should develop at the expense of the body. This does not mean he wants the flesh to be pampered at the expense of the spirit. It is a reasoned harmony between the two that he pleads for:

“………………………….All good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!”

Such is the vigorous plea of the poet for a balanced spiritual life of energetic faith in the triumph of the soul, based on a living belief in the existence of God:

“Our times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!”

Every way an opposite picture was the soul of Arnold. He wrote that he was ever wandering between two worlds, the one dead, and the other powerless to be born. His life was spent in beating where he must not pass, and seeking what he could not find. Life was to him nothing but sick hurry and a failure amidst divided aims. The eternal change and the repeated shocks of earthly life, he knew, exhausted the energy even of the strongest of souls. The languid doubt of the vague half-believers of casual creeds who never deeply felt or clearly willed, staggered him. Their life was one of new beginnings and disappointments new. They had no living insight into anything. Therefore, what they achieved was nothing. Very few indeed of the men of the modern age could be said to sit on the intellectual throne. A Goethe or a Carlyle might have had the good fortune to live on the dying spark of hope amidst the sad experiences of existence. Others, rather than prolong the dream of life, would wish for its speedy end. Sad Patience was their only friend, “near neighbour to Despair.” “The unconquerable hope”, “the free onward impulse”, was not for such as he. To him and his like, life in the modern world was a mad disease. He was tempted, therefore, to envy one like the Scholar Gipsy of legend who fled away from his fellows of Oxford to avoid corruption and sophistication and became elsewhere learned in the lore of the fresh and un-spoilt wanderers. In addition to the vivid painting of the natural scenery about Oxford which is furnished in the poem, it is the wistful melancholy of it that is of attraction to a type of the modern mind. Arnold himself was given to this intellectual self-analysis which bred in him an elegiac strain and a charming melancholy. But the manner in which the two types of mind–the cheerfully hopeful and the sensitively melancholy–differ fundamentally from each other cannot better be seen than by a comparative study of the philosophy of “Rabbi Ben Ezra” and “The Scholar Gipsy”.

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