[Footnote: 1853.]
Goethe says:—
If one looks from the square into the church,
Dusk and dimness are his gains—
Sir Philistine is left in the lurch!
The sight, so seen, may well enrage him,
Nor anything henceforth assuage him.
Cross the holy threshold quite—
All at once ’tis rainbow-bright,
Device and story flash to light,
A gracious splendour truth reveals.
This to God’s children is full measure,
It edifies and gives you pleasure!”
This is true of every form in which truth is embodied—sight or sound, geometric diagram or scientific formula: unintelligible, it may be dismal from outside, but prismatic in revealing truth from within. So with the world itself, which the speculative eye sees as disorder, obscurity and sadness; only the child-like heart, to which the door into the divine idea is open, understands something of the Almighty’s secret. Of human things it is especially true of art, whose fundamental idea is the revelation of the true through the beautiful, and above all of poetry. The other arts have beauty outside—the marble’s form, the painting’s hues, the music’s sounds—that pleases the senses though the heart never perceives the meaning. But poetry, apart from its rhythmic melody and scattered gleams of imagery, which few care for who do not love it for itself, has nothing outside to entice the passer in.
If one has reached the heart of a poem, as in Goethe’s parable, or even found a loop-hole through which its stained windows can be seen from the other side, it is well to help others share his pleasure and profit. Some who would not find it themselves will be forever grateful. A man helps his fellows far more by exhibiting truth than by exposing error, and by unveiling beauty than by dissecting deformity. The evil and ugly are known only by the good and beautiful; it is the light that makes manifest.
Browning’s “Christmas Eve,” with its companion “Easter Day,” has attracted little notice from readers of poetry, though a few prize it highly. This is perhaps largely due to what many would call considerable obscurity. But obscurity is how profundity and carelessness of thought can both look at first glance, and some find it attractive in itself, hoping worth is its cause. Apply a test like Pascal’s for the Koran and the Scriptures: what is the character of the portions whose meaning is plain? If they are wise, the obscurity of the rest presumably comes from profundity, not opacity. Some will object that a writer who has a clear idea must be able to express it clearly. But communion of thought needs two minds, and the fault may lie in the one who receives, the one who gives, or neither. How can an idea that has taken shape for months in one man’s mind be received at once by a mind to which it comes a stranger and unexpected? The reader has no right to complain of obscurity so caused. Nor is the expression easiest to grasp at first sight necessarily the best: it will not go on moving, or gain force with closer acquaintance. Here Goethe’s parable applies. And if a writer is obscure after all, the man who has laboured most to enter his thoughts will complain least, and those who find him easiest are often those who understand him least.
For those to whom the religion of Christ has been the law of liberty—who have entered by that door into God’s universe and delight in all his manifestations—it is a great joy that, whatever position men of science or of predominant intellect take toward Christianity, men of genius, by virtue of what is child-like in them, are in our time plainly showing deep devotion to Christ. There are exceptions, but even they show feelings that seem to tend toward him and will one day flame into conscious worship. A mind that recognizes any of the multitudinous meanings of God’s revelation in sounds, forms and colours cannot be blind to his higher manifestation in common humanity, nor to him in whom is hid the key to the whole, the First-born of creation, in whose heart lies, as yet partially developed, the kingdom of heaven, which is the earth’s redemption. A mind that delights in the lofty and feels there is something higher than self will be drawn toward Christ; those who first saw him as a great prophet came at length to see him as the radiation of the Father’s glory, the likeness of his unseen being.
A description of the poem may encourage reading it and help in understanding it. On a stormy Christmas Eve the poet—or rather seer, for the whole is a poetic vision—takes refuge in the “lath and plaster entry” of a little chapel of Calvinistic Methodists gathering for worship. He describes with wonderful reality the flock passing him as they enter, from
Little old-faced, peaking sister-turned-mother
Of the sickly babe she tried to smother
Somehow up, with its spotted face,
From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place:”
to the “shoemaker’s lad,” whom he follows in, determined to bear their inquisitive looks no longer. The humour of the scene within is excellent: the stifling closeness of air and sermon, the audience’s contentment, the “old fat woman,” who
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devoured the pastor;”
A few rapid touches bring points of the reality almost unpleasantly near. At length, unable to bear it, he rushes out. It may be objected that the humorous, even the ridiculous, is mingled with the serious, especially in a work of art where they must be so close. But are they not as closely joined in the world as in any representation of it? Nothing human is inadmissible into art in some connexion; its widest idea comprehends all things. A work like this, like God’s world, in which he sends rain on the just and the unjust, must be taken as a whole and judged by its design, everything introduced relating suitably to adjacent parts and to the whole. Here the thing is real, true and human, a thing to be thought about; it has its place among other phenomena with which, however incongruous, it is vitally connected within.
Turning the page, we feel coolness and delight in the description of the sky, moon and clouds outside the chapel: a vision of the vision-bearing world itself, in a fine though not at first its rarest mood. A short digression, noting like feelings in different dress, will perhaps be pardoned. The moon is kept from shining out by “blocks” of cloud “built up in the west:”—
Seemed in its silence as if it knew
What, any moment, might look through
A chance-gap in that fortress massy.”
Old Henry Vaughan says of the “Dawning:”—
And for thy shadow looks the Light;
Stars now vanish without number,
Sleepie Planets set and slumber,
The pursie Clouds disband and scatter,
All expect some sudden matter.”
Calmness settles on his mind. He walks on, thinking of the scene he left and the sermon he heard. In the sermon good and bad are intimately mingled, and he is convinced its chief benefit is a reproducing of former impressions—a “convincing” of the “convinced,” as happens in many places and forms. He rejoices in the contrast his own church presents, since in the church of Nature his love to God, assurance of God’s love, and confidence in God’s design for him began. While exulting in God and the knowledge of Him to come, he is given a sight of a glorious moon-rainbow that lifts his worship to ecstasy. During which—
He was there.
He himself with His human air,
On the narrow pathway, just before:
I saw the back of Him, no more—
He had left the chapel, then, as I.
I forgot all about the sky.
No face: only the sight
Of a sweepy garment, vast and white,
With a hem that I could recognize.
I felt terror, no surprise:
My mind filled with the cataract,
At one bound, of the mighty fact.
I remembered, He did say
Doubtless, that, to this world’s end,
Where two or three should meet and pray,
He would be in the midst, their friend:
Certainly He was there with them.
And my pulses leaped for joy
Of the golden thought without alloy,
That I saw His very vesture’s hem.
Then rushed the blood back, cold and clear,
With a fresh enhancing shiver of fear.”
Praying for forgiveness where he has sinned, and prostrate in adoration before the form of Christ, he is “caught up in the whirl and drift” of his vesture and carried with him over the earth.
Stopping at length at the entrance of St. Peter’s in Rome, he stays outside while the form goes in, but sees all that goes on in the crowded, hushed interior: high mass. He has been carried from the little chapel to the opposite aesthetic pole. From the entry, where—
In the cracked square lanthorn I stood under
Shot its blue lip at me,”
“This miraculous dome of God—
This colonnade
With arms wide open to embrace
The entry of the human race
To the breast of.… what is it, yon building,
Ablaze in front, all paint and gilding,
With marble for brick, and stones of price
For garniture of the edifice?”
to “those fountains”—
Each to a musical water-tree,
Whose blossoms drop, a glittering boon,
Before my eyes, in the light of the moon,
To the granite lavers underneath;”
from the chapel’s singing to the organ self-restrained, that “holds his breath and grovels latent,” awaiting the elevation of the Host. Christ is within; he is left without. He thinks his Lord would not require him to go in, though he himself entered because there was a way to reach him there. By-and-by his heart awakes and declares that Love goes beyond error with them, and if Intellect is kept down, Love is the oppressor; so next time he resolves to enter and praise with them. The passage beginning “Oh, love of those first Christian days!”, on Love’s victory over Intellect, is very fine.
Again he is caught up and carried, this time to the door of a college in a German town, where a professor’s class-room is open for lecture this Christmas Eve—intellectually the opposite pole to both chapel and Basilica. The poet enters, fearful of losing the company of “any that call themselves his friends,” and describes the assembly and the entrance of “the hawk-nosed, high-cheek-boned professor,” whose discourse he summarizes in part. The professor takes it for granted that “plainly no such life was liveable,” and asks which explanation of the phenomena of Christ’s life to adopt—it matters little, “so the idea be left the same.” Taking the popular story and stripping off everything extraneous, he finds Christ simply a good man with an honest, true heart, whom his disciples thought divine, and whose doctrine, though quite mistaken by those who received and published it, “had yet a meaning quite as respectable.” At a pause the poet leaves, reflecting that though the sects may poison the air, here “the critic leaves no air to poison.” His meditations that follow are among the book’s most valuable passages. Though the professor has drained the idea of Christ of all that is peculiar to it, he still recommends him to his hearers’ veneration “rather than all who went before him, and all who ever followed after.” But why? says the poet. For his intellect,
(If mere morality, bereft
Of the God in Christ, be all that’s left)
Elsewhere by voices manifold?”
with which must be combined the fact that this intellect did not save him from the “important stumble” of saying that he and God were one. “His followers misunderstood him,” says the objector. Perhaps; but “the stumbling-block, his speech, who laid it?” Then is it for his goodness that he should rule his race?
Your fealty to such rule? What, all—
From Heavenly John and Attic Paul,
And that brave weather-battered Peter,
Whose stout faith only stood completer
For buffets, sinning to be pardoned,
As the more his hands hauled nets, they hardened—
All, down to you, the man of men,
Professing here at Göttingen,
Compose Christ’s flock! So, you and I
Are sheep of a good man! And why?”
Did Christ invent goodness? or did he only demonstrate that of which the common conscience was judge?
Worship for such mere demonstration
And simple work of nomenclature,
Only the day I praised, not Nature,
But Harvey, for the circulation.”
The worst man, says the poet, knows more than the best man does. God in Christ appeared to men to help them to do, to awaken the life within them.
Supreme in Christ as we all confess,
Why need we prove would avail no jot
To make Him God, if God he were not?
What is the point where Himself lays stress?
Does the precept run, ’Believe in good,
In justice, truth, now understood
For the first time?’—or, ’Believe in ME,
Who lived and died, yet essentially
Am Lord of life’? Whoever can take
The same to his heart, and for mere love’s sake
Conceive of the love,—that man obtains
A new truth; no conviction gains
Of an old one only, made intense
By a fresh appeal to his faded sense.”
In this lies the most direct practical argument about what is commonly called the Divinity of Christ. Here is a man whom even those who magnify him least confess to be good, the best of men. He says, “I and the Father are one.” Will not an earnest heart that knows this draw nearer to behold the great sight, feeling: “A good man like this would not have said so were it not so; the great truth of God probably lies behind this veil”? Christ’s nature cannot be proved by argument; he must be beheld, and his manifestation must “gravitate inwards” on the soul. As a mathematical theorem is proved only by the demonstration itself, not by talking about it, so Christ must prove himself to the soul by being beheld. The only proof of his divinity is his humanity. His divinity is doubted because his humanity is not comprehended, and while that is uncomprehended, assent to his divinity is of little avail. To theorize theologically without having so apprehended Christ, or to neglect gazing on him in order to establish some belief about him, is to fall in a divine matter into the errors of the old expounders of nature, who speculated on what a thing must be instead of observing what it was—a must be founded not on self-evident truth but on notions whose strength lay in being preconceived. There are thoughts and feelings that no will or imagination can summon; being spiritual, they arise in the soul at its highest spiritual condition, when the mind, like a smooth lake, reflects only heavenly images. Steadfastly regarding Him will produce this calm, and His will be the heavenly form reflected from the mental depth.
But to return to the poem. Christ’s remaining inside leads the poet to ask, in the spirit of Him who found all the good in men he could, whether anything in this lecture can be sympathized with; he finds the professor’s heart rescuing him somewhat from the error of his brain—even there “if Love’s dead there, it has left a ghost.” For when the natural deduction from his argument would be that our faith
He bids us, when we least expect it,
Take back our faith—if it be not just whole,
Yet a pearl indeed, as his tests affect it,
Which fact pays the damage done rewardingly,
So, prize we our dust and ashes accordingly!”
Since love as well as learning is needed to understand the New Testament, the poet regrets that “loveless learning” should leave its proper work and make such havoc in what is not its province. But as he sits “talking with his mind,” his mood slides from sympathy with the good into indifference to all forms: he feels inclined to rest in his own religious confidence and not trouble himself about his neighbours’ faith, for doubtless all share the central light, though variously refracted by the varied translucency of the mental prism.…
The black night caught me in his mesh,
Whirled me up, and flung me prone!
I was left on the college-step alone.
I looked, and far there, ever fleeting
Far, far away, the receding gesture,
And looming of the lessening vesture,
Swept forward from my stupid hand,
While I watched my foolish heart expand
In the lazy glow of benevolence
O’er the various modes of man’s belief.
I sprang up with fear’s vehemence.
—Needs must there be one way, our chief
Best way of worship: let me strive
To find it, and when found, contrive
My fellows also take their share.
This constitutes my earthly care:
God’s is above it and distinct!”
The symbolism in the first part of this extract is grand. As soon as he stops looking practically at the phenomena around him, he is enveloped in storm and darkness and sees only far off the vanishing skirt of his Lord’s garment. God’s care is over all, he goes on; I must do my part. Looked at speculatively, the world is dimness and mystery. If I look practically on it,
With witnessings of Providence.”
And whether the world I seek to help blames or praises me is nothing to me. My life—how is it with me?
By the hem of the vesture.…
And I caught
At the flying robe, and, unrepelled,
Was lapped again in its folds full-fraught
With warmth and wonder and delight,
God’s mercy being infinite.
And scarce had the words escaped my tongue,
When, at a passionate bound, I sprung
Out of the wandering world of rain,
Into the little chapel again.”
Had he dreamed? How then could he report the sermon and the preacher, of whom he goes on to give a very external account? But correcting himself—
Shall I take on me to change his tasks,
And dare, despatched to a river-head
For a simple draught of the element,
Neglect the thing for which He sent,
And return with another thing instead!
Saying .… ’Because the water found
Welling up from underground,
Is mingled with the taints of earth,
While Thou, I know, dost laugh at dearth,
And couldest, at a word, convulse
The world with the leap of its river-pulse,—
Therefore I turned from the oozings muddy,
And bring thee a chalice I found, instead.
See the brave veins in the breccia ruddy!
One would suppose that the marble bled.
What matters the water? A hope I have nursed,
That the waterless cup will quench my thirst.’
—Better have knelt at the poorest stream
That trickles in pain from the straitest rift!
For the less or the more is all God’s gift,
Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite seam.
And here, is there water or not, to drink?”
He concludes that the best for him is the mode of worship that partakes least of human forms and brings him nearest the spiritual; and, while wishing the Pope and the professor well—
Lest myself, at unawares, be found,
While attacking the choice of my neighbours round,
Without my own made—I choose here!”
He therefore joins heartily in the hymn sung by the little chapel’s congregation at the close of their worship. And this concludes the poem.
What is the central point from which this poem can be regarded? Novalis has said: “Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein.” (Philosophy is really home-sickness, an impulse to be at home everywhere.) A man’s life here, if it is life and not the vain image of one, is a continual attempt to find his place, his centre of receiving and acting. He wants to know where he is, and where he ought to be and can be; for rightly considered, the position a man ought to occupy is the only one he truly can occupy. It is a climbing and striving to reach the point of vision from which the crossings of fact, feeling and duty show as a regular, symmetrical design. A contradiction, or a thing unrelated, is as painful to him as a rocky particle to the oyster, and he can rid himself of it only by encasing it, as the oyster does, in the pearl of faith, believing that hidden in it lies the need of a higher theory of the universe than his soul has yet produced. The man of faith seeks this home-centre calmly and ceaselessly; the man of weak faith, stormily and by fits. Unhappy is the man whose perceptions are keener than his faith is strong. Nature puts strange questions to him, the human world is full of dismay, his conscience is bewildered by contradictory appearances—as may well befall one whose eye is not yet single and heart not yet pure. He is not at home; his soul is astray among people of strange speech and stammering tongue. But the faithful man is led onward; in the stillness his confidence brings arise the bright images of truth, and visions of God, seen only in solitary places, are granted to his soul.
And visited all night by troops of stars!”
What is true of the whole is true of its parts: in all the relations of life the true man seeks his home, and this poem shows such a quest. “Here I am among many of the same family. They differ in education, habits and forms of thought, but are called by the same name. What position am I to take toward them? I am a Christian; how am I to live in relation to Christians?” Such seems to be the poet’s thought. What central position can he gain that best answers his soul’s need toward God and also lets him sympathize with the whole Christian world, one of the whole and not alone? The position needed for both is one and the same, for he who is isolated from his brethren loses one of the greatest helps to draw near to God. In this peculiarly transitional time the question matters much to all who gladly forsake old—or rather modern—theories for a fuller development of Christianity and a return to its fountain-head, yet want to avoid losing sympathy with those content with what they must abandon. Seeing much in common modes of thought and belief that is inconsistent with, even opposed to, Christianity, they yet see in many of them a power of spiritual good, enveloped if not embodied in the mode though not dependent on it.
This flesh worn out to rags and tatters,
This soul at struggle with insanity,
Who thence take comfort, can I doubt,
Which an empire gained, were a loss without.”
The love of God is the soul of Christianity, and Christ is the body of that truth. It is the creating and redeeming, forming and satisfying power of the universe; it kills evil and glorifies goodness; it is the safety of the great whole and the home-atmosphere of all life. Well does the poet of “Christmas Eve” say:—
Were diviner than a loveless God
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.”
Surely then, since man is made in the image of God, nothing less than a love in the image of God’s love—all-embracing, quietly excusing, heartily commending, not insensible to what is foreign to it but overcoming it with good—can constitute man’s blessedness. Where man loves in his kind as God loves in his, man is saved and has reached the unseen and eternal. And if the man he ought to love has something in common with him, the law of love has increased force: if that point of sympathy lies at the centre of each being, and the centres are brought into contact, their circles will be, if not coincident, concentric. We must wait patiently for the completion of God’s great harmony, and meanwhile love everywhere, as we can.
But the great lesson of this poem, taught more directly in “Easter Day” (in the same volume), is that the business of a man’s life is to be a Christian. A man has to do with God first; only in Him can he find the unity and harmony he seeks, and to be one with Him is to be at the centre of things. If one acknowledges that God has revealed himself in Christ, recognizing man as his family by appearing in their form, that acknowledgment admits that man’s chief concern is with this revelation. What does God say and mean, teach and manifest in it? If the world is God’s making and he is present in all nature and history; if man’s soul is in his image; and if it is not enough for man to be rooted in God but he must lay hold on God—then no question can be truly answered except by one who stands at Christ’s side. God’s doings cannot be understood except by one with the mind of Christ, which is the mind of God. Where is he to begin, with what light to classify, and how bring order out of what seems confusion only because the order is greater than he can comprehend? Standing outside, he sees a tangled maze of forces where there is in truth an intertwining dance of harmony. No one has a solution to the world’s mystery, or any part of it, unless he can say with our poet:—
Straight up to Thee through all the world,
Which, like an idle scroll, lay furled
To nothingness on either side:
And since the time Thou wast descried,
Spite of the weak heart, so have I
Lived ever, and so fain would die,
Living and dying, Thee before!”
Christianity is not the ornament, or even complement, of life; it is its necessity; it is life itself glorified into God’s ideal.
Dr. Chalmers, considering the minuteness of the directions given to Moses for making the tabernacle, came to think he had attended too little to the “petite morale” of dress. Is this excuse enough for a few sentences on the rhyming of this poem? Rhymes form no small part of a poem’s artistic existence, and there is probably a deeper meaning in this part of the art than poets have yet made clear. Here the rhymes share in the poem’s humorous charm. The writer’s power with double and triple rhymes is remarkable, and the effect is often pleasing even in the more solemn parts. Take the lines:—
Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,
The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,
Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it.”
A poem is for the ear as well as the understanding and heart—or rather for the understanding and heart through the ear. The best poem is best set forth when best read. If some rhymes, read aloud, consist of words that keep the understanding from grasping the separate words while the ear grasps the rhymes, the art’s perfection is lost sight of, whatever completeness the rhyming shows on close examination. For instance, “equipt yours,” ”Scriptures;” ”Manchester,” ”haunches stir;” or “affirm any,” ”Germany;” where two words rhyme with one. But very few are objectionable for this difficulty of rapid analysis.
One of the most wonderful things in the poem is that so much argument is expressed in a verse one might at first think the least fitted for it. Yet the same argument in any other verse would probably have been intolerably dull as art. Here the verse is full of life and vigour, never flagging. Where the exact meaning is hard to reach, this results chiefly from the dramatic rapidity and condensation of the thoughts. The argumentative power is wonderful, the arguments powerful in their simplicity and embodied in admirably forceful words. The poem is full of pathos and humour, beauty and grandeur, earnestness and truth.