The Browning Tonic

I.

THERE was once a time — not so long ago, either, as I would like to induce credulous people to believe — when the three editions of Robert Browning’s poems which now find home and welcome in my bookcases would, had I possessed them, have been sealed books to me.

In those days — already so inconceivable that they seem to recede into a prehistoric vista — it was commonly supposed by readers in my rank and station of enlightenment that a person who made any assured claim to a comprehension of Browning was either a rank pretender or the victim of a special revelation. It was during this period, I remember, that a teacher of English in the public schools said to me rather sadly, —

“I don’t like to tell people that I enjoy reading Browning — it makes me appear so conceited.”

Even in that dark era of my existence, however, I did not consider myself so ignorant of the work of the great poet as my present confession seems to imply. I was more or less familiar with The Pied Piper of Hamelin, I had heard the story of the good news that was brought from Ghent to Aix vigorously thundered forth on various declamatory occasions, and I had read with emotion that Incident of the French Camp which Owen Wister makes his Virginian hero criticise so cruelly. I should not say, if I were going to state my conception of the situation, that I had been growing up through gradations of Longfellow, Lowell, Tennyson, and the rest to the possibility of a comprehension of Browning. The library with which I was most familiar in my youth offered to a child naturally hungry for poetry a noble collection of English authors. Fed from this source I devoured Shakespeare with the avidity which one saves nowadays for the perusal of a popular novel, pored over Paradise Lost with the conviction that it was rather sensational reading, laid my head upon the lap of earth with Gray, and spouted Collins’s Odes to hill and sky in my lonely walks.

This was princely fare, and I ought to have benefited by it far more than I did, yet, in spite of my limitations, I assimilated something from it all, something that became a part of me, imperishable until I perish. From such a foundation, however ill profited by, one does not “grow up ” to other authors— one simply enlarges one’s Olympian temple to make room for new gods,

A man asked me once if I had not outgrown Dickens, and I questioned my inner consciousness to know if this were the case. Through long familiarity I had, indeed, ceased to read Dickens, but — outgrown ? Does one outgrow Mr. Micawber, Betsey Trotwood, Mr. Pickwick, and the rest ? Is it not rather that one enlarges the circle of one’s friends to find room for them all, every one, the old no less than the new ? Sometimes, too, the high gods prove too high, or the son of the carpenter is transformed before our eyes into the King of Men.

Lucian’s parable of the council of the gods and the struggle for precedence is applicable still. The dog-faced monster from Egypt with the great gold nose is, it is true, sooner or later relegated to the background when one learns to estimate comparative values, but he is not banished to outer darkness. All our gods come to stay — and a gold nose counts for something.

I can remember the exact moment when Robert Browning was first definitely revealed to me as a presiding deity.

I have always had a tendency to grasp at the pictorial aspect of things, and, as it chances, each of the group of poems which first revealed that poet to me as the friendliest friend of all is pigeon-holed in my mind with a spectacular tag attached to it.

Thus I entered the Browning country — the real land of faery where Browning is king — through the gate of Prospice, and the gate was opened to me by a young man. He stood, I remember, while he read the poem aloud, and a slant of sunlight fell full upon his broad brows and his rather nice gray eyes, and even lent a glamour to the exceedingly pointed toes of his patent leather shoes. He liked what he read, and was in earnest about it; he was not thinking of me and I very soon ceased thinking of him.

The peculiar movement of the poem appealed directly to an element always easily aroused in my nature,— the fighting spirit, which may be in my case more bravado than pluck, but which at any rate knows how to appreciate pluck in others.

struck a chord that went thrilling on until the quick transition at the end of the poem, when

dwindle and blend and change, to become

There is no touch to which the hearts of men and women so readily thrill with instant response as to this touch of human love, whether it be that of the fighter leaning across the black gulf of death to clasp the beloved one again, or the Blessed Damozel stooping from “ the gold bar of heaven ” to say,

Every one of us, even those who have deliberately taken husbands or wives in a series, cherishes in his or her inmost thought the conviction that under different and more favorable circumstances we, too, might have been capable of romantic love and perfect constancy. This unformulated belief in ourselves aids our self-respect immensely, and helps to put a garland — invisible perhaps, but to the eye of faith none the less decorative — around the least sentimental existence.

The motive of the whole poem, too, the courage, the constancy, the devotion, strikes with a bold hand — as Browning always does strike — that keynote of strength which is the dominant note in everything he writes. Weakness is the only thing he conceived it possible to fear. Be bold, act a man’s part and leave the rest, — above all, remember that fighting is the best fun in the world, and a man who won’t fight is not worth his salt.

My next discovery in the Browning country was Rabbi Ben Ezra, a mine of pure gold from which I have been digging nuggets ever since. The personal recollection to which my earlier knowledge of this poem is joined is that of a clergyman with whom I conned it over stanza by stanza, for the purpose, as I recall it, of convincing him that Browning had written some things which compared favorably with the work of his favorite Tennyson and were not materially harder to understand.

I told him, with that modest confidence in my literary judgments which has always distinguished me, that Tennyson never but once mustered sufficient courage really to “let himself go, ” and that Maud, which was the outcome of this first and last indulgence, has a hysteric note in it which would have been impossible to Browning.

“One feels all the time,” I criticised confidently, “that the

was a great deal more dreadful than it need have been if the hero of the poem could only have ‘ braced up ’ and fulfilled his own longings,

My clerical friend, however, did not believe in any man’s right to let himself go, and our sitting ended with a hopeless discrepancy between the lay and the ministerial judgment.

I have read this poem many times since then and never without finding in it something strong and stirring, something that gave me fresh courage to be gone

In many a night of weariness and racking pain I have repeated over and over to myself — that inner self that has power over the physical being — fragments from its battle call, — the bugle call to my retreating courage :—

It is true, I never did welcome each rebuff, and there was no moment, I suppose, when I would not joyfully have turned earth’s roughness smooth, but since I must endure the throe whether I grudged it or not, here was something to take hold of, to crystallize around, to serve as a sting to my spiritual weakness.

If, of all our authors, we are most indebted to him who helps us to hate cowardice, then Robert Browning must be hailed above all others as the prophet of courage, courage in victory, courage in defeat, the courage of the losing fight no less than the courage of success. One, he was,

I have never asked, it is true, whether in detail he lived up to what he preached. It does not matter. Most of us are in one way or another born cowards, and what we need more than anything else is to be made properly ashamed of ourselves. Hail, then, Robert Browning, disturber of the peace!

While I was still in the grasp of Rabbi Ben Ezra, I was invited to spend an afternoon with a “ Reading Circle, ” which was at that time struggling with the dark mysteries of Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

They told me sadly — the members of the Circle — that they had pored over a dozen interpretations of the poem and “didn’t understand it yet.”

“Of course I would like to understand what Browning meant by the thing,” one reader said candidly, — “that is, if he himself had any idea ‘where he was at,’— but I don’t see how anybody could like it.”

Having had my attention thus called to Childe Roland, I made a bold charge at his secrets, but very soon made up my mind that I was not under the slightest obligation to understand him. I have trodden that dark way with him many a time, have lost myself upon the barren plain, felt what he felt, looked with despairing eyes on what he saw, and when

I have always been sure that, after going through so much disagreeableness for the sake of arriving at the Dark Tower, only to find “all the lost adventurers, my peers, ” on dress parade watching to see what I was going to do about it, I should have blown the horn at all hazards. As I have previously hinted, Browning’s chief virtue is that he makes one feel willing to blow horns and wave banners and lead forlorn hopes.

It was at about this period of my Browning explorations that I began to meet the Greek professor in my morning walks. The springtime had come and the voice of the turtle was heard in the land, — a condition of affairs which made it more possible for the human voice to gain an audience. The Greek professor — who had retired from the active duties of his position — now and then joined company with me during our leisurely return from the morning errands which gave us an excuse for being abroad. He had a genuine passion for the classics, and enjoyed rolling out sonorous quotations from his favorite authors, although these gems of thought always required translation into English for the instruction of my ignorance.

One day he asked me rather mournfully if I liked Browning. I acknowledged with cheerful hope that I thought I was going to like him, though I had not yet penetrated very far into the labyrinth of his pages.

It appeared from the professor’s narrative that an enthusiastic young friend “who in the inexperience of youth doubtless flattered himself that he could comprehend all mysteries ” had requested him, the professor, to read Caliban upon Setebos — oh, the drawling scorn of accent with which this was spoken! and he was in process of offering this sacrifice to friendship.

“If you have n’t read the gibberish, ” he suggested, “ and have time to waste, as most women do have, I wish you would see whether you can make head or tail of it. I can’t.”

The next time we met I told the professor that I had ventured on Caliban and rather enjoyed the experiment. I spoke more diffidently than is my wont. I am generally most positive in regard to subjects I know least about.

“Enjoyed it!” the professor exclaimed. “Will you tell me what there is to enjoy about Caliban upon Setebos ? ” — the old scornful intonation.

“Well,” I replied, “the same element that appeals to me in all the Browning poems I know, — the daring of it, the boldness with which he puts his finger on the sore spots so many of us are conscious of and think it wicked to mention.”

“Pooh! ” my friend repeated, “Caliban upon Setebos! My dear woman, there ’s nothing in it — less than nothing! Now here ’s a little bit that I got from my Greek Calendar this morning— an epitaph by Leonidas. See what you think of this,” and the professor translated for me,

“ I like it, ” I answered, “ partly, I think, because it shows the same spirit that draws me toward Browning.”

“The only difference I recognize between the two, ” the professor remarked in his very softest drawl, “is the difference between words with meaning — much in little — and words without meaning — little in much.”

I no longer meet the professor in my morning walks. He heard one day “the great voice ” from those skies

and calling last Ave atque Vale! to those he left behind, he went his way. It may be that in that high Olympus he talks to-day with “Euripides the human ” and Catullus the beloved and Browning the brave, and there has learned to know as he is known.

From Caliban upon Setebos I passed by an easy transition to Paracelsus. This transformation scene was owing to the prophetic guidance of the Woman’s Literary Club. The “programme committee ” of this organization, knowing well where Genius had her home, had invited me to “ prepare a paper ” on the latter poem. I did not hesitate for a moment. I had once glanced hastily through the poem, and, being hampered by very little knowledge of its real import, in three days from the time of request I had delivered myself of an interpretation which solved satisfactorily — to my thinking — every vexed problem that the critics had ever raised in regard to its meaning.

I did not hesitate to assert in the most “flat-footed " manner, “Whatever charge of obscurity can be brought against other of Browning’s poems, there is nothing obscure in Paracelsus! ”

It was a great paper. I liked the exordium of it: —

“It is characteristic of the power and the outreach of Browning’s genius that it almost seemed as if he had nothing to learn from life. In Paracelsus, written by a stripling hardly past the age of boyhood, a young man standing at the threshold of his years, joyous with an Italian affluence of temperament, having never known the deep experiences, the struggles that are birth pangs of the soul, the disenchantments and failures of life, he paints the dream, the yearning, the bitter comedy, and the tragedy of the human drama as if his genius could foresee the end from the beginning, or as if he had already reached the vantage point of that

I am not much addicted to reading papers in public, — I think, in fact, that I made my début and my final exit in that capacity on the occasion in question, — and I remember well that the electric light above my head shone with unexampled violence, and the faces of the audience advanced and receded like the waves of the sea. There were tones in my voice, too, which were unrecognizable even to myself. When I had finished, a lady, who was then serving God and her native land by accepting the position of domestic in some needy household, took me kindly by the hand and told me that she liked my piece. Few of my audience seemed to realize that they were apathetically letting the opportunity of a lifetime slip by.

I have never been sorry for my audacity in writing that paper. I got from it for myself much that I did not know how to give to others, — the burden and message of Paracelsus, that strange, complex nature, trying at all the gates of life, striving to live a purely spiritual existence in a human world, forced to recognize one by one the physical and material barriers which made such a life impossible, hampered by the very strength of his own powers, and stooping at last to be bound by the restraints he despised, yet through strength and weakness alike,

It is the same dominant chord of courage. All the battle cries of all the ages are in it, and the confidence born of all the victories that have been.

A Browning notion of victory, however, does not with any necessity whatever imply the getting what one wants. It often means just keeping eternally at it, and realizing that surrender is the only defeat: —

II.

I am as well aware as any one can be that my Browning explorations are valuable to the world at large only as an indication of the ease with which one can grow rich.

As Captain Bunsby would say, “The bearings of this obserwation lies in the application on it.”

If I who am but a woman, neither scholar nor critic, a shallow adventuress going at the quest in mere haphazard fashion, have been able to discover for myself the true elixir, the tonic which the twentieth century most needs, what wealth may not lie in the search for that dominant sex which habitually calls itself “the stronger,” the sex of assured intellect and logical mind, and, to speak candidly, the sex that needs the tonic most.

I may be wrong, — and if so I am willing to acknowledge it to anybody who can convince me of my error, — but my observation goes to show that the average woman of to-day has more ideals than the average man and is therefore morally stronger. Moreover, no woman is ever allowed to suppose herself incapable of improvement. We belong to a sex that is continually being lessoned and lectured. One never takes up a newspaper without finding in it some admonition in regard to what women should or should not do. On the other hand, while our daily reading furnishes much inconsistent criticism of individual men, the evidence seems to point to the fact that men in the concrete are very well satisfied with themselves as they are. One cannot help feeling that if the entire sex could be lined up, and the question propounded to them, “What ’s the matter with man ? ” the answer would be one universal roar of “He ’s all right! ”

A woman, once convinced that she has a soul, can seldom be quite easy in ignoring it; a man feels sure that if he has one it is n’t his fault, and therefore he feels himself relieved from too great responsibility. The twentieth-century man, however, is not indolent in any sense but an ethical one. Never was there a time when more attention was paid to physical growth and culture, but a tonic whose efficacy must be assured by a more strenuous spiritual life does not especially commend itself to our athlete. He prefers ease of mind and malt extracts. He has “outworn” the old dogmas, seen the folly of ideals, and prefers to confine his attention to the things that really count. If there is another existence to follow this one, its philosophy is simple: —

therefore, why bother one’s self too much about a future which is, at best, problematic ?

The human race has not altogether deteriorated. The twentieth - century man has in him all the heroic possibilities that any man ever had, but he is suffering from that weakening of fibre which necessarily accompanies a dearth of convictions.

The acquisition of wealth, which is the ruling motive of the America of our century, does not constitute an ideal, since an ideal implies some sort of moral earnestness. Materialism, however, is perfectly consistent with great benevolences, generosity without sacrifice and sympathy without abnegation. Indeed, in proportion as we lower the standard of that absolute strength which constitutes perfect manhood and womanhood, the more “kind-hearted ” we grow, the more we deprecate anything which creates pain or demands endurance, the more we send flowers to criminals and sign petitions against the execution of murderers. We cry out against war and send delegates to Peace Congresses, not altogether because this course is “Christian, ” — though that is how we usually define our feeling, — but partly, too, because, like the child in Helen’s Babies, we object to the sight of anything “bluggy.”

I do not know anything which better illustrates the deterioration of fibre which is the result of an unstrenuous standard than the attitude of the American people — too large a proportion of them, at least — toward the Cuban War.

I was too young at the time of our civil conflict to pronounce with any accuracy upon the feeling of the public at large in regard to it, so perhaps I am wrong in imagining, as I always have done, that it was that of heroic acceptance and endurance, and that men and women alike felt that the best blood of a nation was not too great a price to pay to settle a moral issue forever and settle it aright.

Years after, when the bugles of war again sounded for a contest not our own, — a war of generosity to right the wrongs of another and alien people, — the response was just as ready, the deeds of heroism were no less conspicuous, and for a breathing space while the men of the country were shouting “ Remember the Maine! ” and the women were gathering in sewing circles for the manufacture of the flannel night clothing which no self-respecting soldier ever fails to assume before retiring to rest in the trenches, a thrill of the same unquestioning courage swept through the land.

Scarcely had the echo of the guns of Santiago died away, however, before the howl began, — the howl of the kindhearted, the sympathetic, the unstrenuous generation.

What justification, they asked, has any Christian nation for going to war at all, especially in a quarrel not its own ?

If, however, to suit his own purposes, President McKinley insisted upon war, why did he not select a country possessing a more temperate climate as the scene of battle ?

If time had been given the soldiers to provide themselves with suitable outfits, could not this delay have been utilized by the government for the manufacture of sandwiches in readiness for informal lunches to be served during charges and on the field of battle ? Has not a toiling and much enduring soldier a right to expect such common, every-day recognition of his services as a hot dinner, prepared promptly, would represent? Is the “poor soldier ” asking too much when he calls for clean linen and an opportunity to run up a laundry bill?

In short, the voice of the people suggested wisely, if we must have war, let us see that it is conducted regularly and in order, without bloodshed or confusion. Let physicians be provided to feel the military pulse daily and keep down all unnecessary fever in the veins.

Hence it happened that while we were taking all our newly acquired heroes down from their pedestals, and our army officers were quarreling over the division of glory, and mothers of volunteers were writing to the newspapers to complain that the tastes of their sons had never been consulted in regard to having oatmeal for breakfast, and committees of investigation were diligently smelling at all the army stores that remained unused, there were one or two more or less important facts that seemed to escape general cognizance.

It has, for instance, sometimes been apprehended that war is a grim game, not suited to holiday soldiers ; but if the thing at stake is worth the price to be paid, the only decency is to pay it joyfully without doubt or hesitation, and having paid, never to repent. Repentance, in such a case, is cowardice.

I remember a certain little boy who came home from school with a black eye and a bleeding nose and a question in his young mind whether he should weep or swagger. Just as his mother’s sympathy and first aid to the wounded were beginning to convulse his infant features his father appeared on the scene.

“Did you have any good reason for fighting ? ” he asked.

The budding warrior proclaimed a noble cause for battle.

“ Did you lick the other fellow ? ”

The other fellow had ignominiously bitten the dust.

“Then,” inquired the parent, “what are you whining over ? ”

Every grave on those Cuban hillsides marks a sacrifice for human progress, and when one remembers the failures, the futilities, the disgraces among living men, who can feel that he who in the moment of a supreme impulse offered all, and found his abnegation accepted, did not choose the better part ?

betwixt strength and weakness.

It is a part of the materialism of modern life and the cowardly theory that life is worth to a man only “what he gets out of it as he goes along, ” that so many men spend their days in offering continual sacrifices to their bodies.

When the hero of the popular short story is not eating or drinking, he is smoking. His chronicler flavors his pages with tobacco smoke and punctuates them with cocktails. In joy or sorrow, in the most romantic no less than the most commonplace moments the hero “lights another cigarette.” Emotion unaccompanied by nicotine is something of which he evidently has no conception.

It is the same, too, with the up to date young man in real life. He knows, if he has been properly trained, that while a toothpick should be indulged in only in that spot to which Scripture enjoins us to retire when we are about to pray, a meerschaum pipe is a perfectly well-bred article for public wear, and one which enables him to fulfill agreeably that law of his being which suggests that he should always be putting something in his mouth.

At a college ball game not long since where, as is usual on such occasions, clouds of incense were rising to the heavens from the male portion of the spectators, I amused myself by observing a young man who sat in a carriage near me, and who while the game was in progress smoked a pipe three times and filled in all the intervals with cigars and cigarettes. I knew something about him, and had frequently heard him referred to as “ a first-rate fellow, ” but if anybody had asked him if he believed himself capable of a single pure impulse of the soul entirely unmixed with bodily sensations he would have stared in amazement.

Rabbi Ben Ezra’s test,

would have struck this young man as a decidedly “fresh” inquiry. A certain pictorial advertisement which for a long time held a conspicuous place in the daily newspapers would, however, have appealed to him at once. It depicted a youth with a pipe in his mouth, holding his sweetheart on his knee, and rapturously exclaiming, as he diligently puffed the smoke into her face, “ With you and a pipeful of Every Day Smoke I am perfectly happy! ” Old Omar gives us a more poetic version of the same thing: —

I am not desirous in this essay of discussing the morality of any habit, as such; I simply wish to emphasize the fact that constant self-indulgence of any kind is incompatible with strength. The Browning tonic which I would like to substitute for the proprietary medicines of the age does not inspire any man to be an angel before his time, — it only stimulates him to be a man and master of himself;

The tonic in question is not an expensive remedy except in the amount of effort required on the part of the patient to render it efficacious, but it is perhaps a little too bracing to be taken in large doses until the spirit of it has begun to steal into one’s veins.

If, for instance, the young man of the ball game should begin before breakfast in the morning with

follow it up at about the time of his after-breakfast pipe with

manfully swallow an afternoon dose of

and substitute for his usual nightcap,

he might at first find such a sudden influx of red blood into his veins a little more than his system could bear, but, in due time, if the prescription were persevered in, he might learn to welcome the joy and the strength of the new elixir of life.

“Don’t you get a little weary of hearing life compared to a battlefield ? ” the athletic young man inquired when the rhetoric of these prescriptions was discussed in the family circle.

“Call it a football field, then, ” I retorted. “If you are going to play at all, one has a perfect right to expect you to get into the game.”

Martha Baker Dunn.