Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/83

 replace. They do not want merely what Wordsworth called 'an extremely valuable chain of thoughts'.

In Browning it is possible to find a much more articulate theory of human nature and the universe than in Wordsworth; it submits more readily to be expressed in prose. It is found in Paracelsus and Sordello, in Old Pictures at [sic] Florence, and in the Grammarian's Funeral. It is a theory of progress; not of an endless advance merely, from point to point 'in unlimited series', but of the infinite Universe drawing the human adventurer to work out, in his own life, in knowledge and in power, everything that the universal world contains. There is a superficial likeness in Browning's theory to the 'Perfectibility' of some eighteenth-century philosophers; the difference is that Browning thinks of perfection as real, so that the imperfect human pilgrim is not a mere wanderer on from one stage to another, nor merely an instrument along with other finite things in building up the fabric of the Universe; he is thought of as one compelled by the Universe to put into his own small being all that the whole world means. This is the tragic absurdity of human life. Either it ventures the impossible, like Sordello, ' thrusting in time Eternity's concern,' or it cuts its ideals to fit the short human life allowed it, the ship's cabin of Bishop Blougram's allegory an inglorious compromise. This theory as Browning held it may (I believe) be stated in prose as a philosophical argument. If this be so, there is in Browning a strong element of purely intellectual as distinct from poetical or purely imaginative thought, and this which is intellectual may perhaps be extricated or 'disentwined', (to use a word of Browning's own) from his poetry, without disgrace either to his poetry or to the philosophical analyst. With Wordsworth this is impossible. Wordsworth's knowledge, in which he is eminent above all other thinkers in the world, is so essentially part of his own life, so close to reality, that it will not bear translation into any language but his