Page:Poet Lore, volume 1, 1889.djvu/20

4 In his forcible description of the evolution of man and man's soul from the lower forms and faculties of animal life, which he paints with such a masterful hand in "Paracelsus," he places love as the handmaid of power and knowledge in the processes of psychical and physical development,—

This it was that trained the inferior nature to shape out dimly the superior race. Translated into the language of modern science, we recognize in this that doctrine of sexual selection to which Darwin assigned so important a role in the evolution of organic forms.

Love displays its might in its struggles, in its revolts against laws and rules. Here we must bear in mind that Browning belongs to another generation than the present, to one which ripened in the sultry atmosphere that gendered the storms of '48, storms that swept away or greatly weakened an oppressive and artificial social as well as political fabric.

All the leading spirits of his age resented that oppression, and hated the narrow formalism which was its engine. "Respectability"—that was the god of the multitude, a miserable fetich in the eyes of brave men. Carlyle broke into Homeric laughter at the definition of this word by a certain witness. Asked what he meant by testifying that a man was "highly respectable," the witness replied that the man kept a gig; hereafter let us call it, cried Carlyle, not respectability, but gigmanity! Thackeray chafed under its restraints and unloaded his anathemas against it in "Vanity Fair;" and even the decorous Tennyson, a good deal of a born bourgeois, did at one time understand how a man, at least a young man, could "curse the social forms that sin against the strength of youth," and "the social lies that warp us from the living truth." But neither in Carlyle nor from the mouth of Becky Sharp do I recall any more bitter sneer at respectability than that covertly implied in the little poem so named by