The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1897-11-14

49,
Quest in those glorious lines beginning:
MY good blade carves the casques Of men.
My tough lance shrilleth sure,
My strength is as the strength Of ten
Because my heart is pure
Mr.. Bates's splendid essay upon Child
Roland as being heroic attempt to realize
ones ideals is open to the same objection
While no one ever reaches his ideals, and
while the Dark Tower of Death stands at
the end, and while the hero defies it and
exultingly sets the slug horn to his lips.
still the fact remains that every such hero
accomplishes in some degree his ideals, and
the effort is its own exceeding great re-
ward.
Howard did not open all the prisons Of
Europe, and yet he started splendid
change. So with Wilberforce and Lincoln,
and all the great reformers No sane life
is ever failure, even though its ideals are
not realized. John Esten Cooke thinks the
Dark Tower to be the unfaith Of the nine
teenth century, and the terrors of the
previous century to be its doubt and skep-
ticism. Both Mr.. Bates and Mr.. Cooke see
in the traveller a man of dauntless courage,
who, even in the presence of death, set the
slug horn to his lips and blew defiance.
venture guess at this puzzle. Child Roland
seems to me to be brave man struggling
with pessimism. All the hideous objects
that obstruct his life's journey are the prod
ucts of this foul enemy of human happiness.
Pessimism poisons the stream of truth,
turns our sweets into bitters and sours, our
joys into shortcomings and disappointments.
Pessimism places at the end of life the dark
tower of failure. Its great prophets, Schop-
enhauer and Hartman, torture humanity
with satanic questions like, rs life worth
living?" rs marriage a failure?" Even so
saving a poet as Tennyson says:
Cry faint not-climb the SUBMITS slope
Beyond the farthest flights of hope,
Wrapt in dense clouds from base to COPE"
There is no sunshine and no riffs Of pleas
ure in pesslmism. 1t is sunless and hopeless,
and twin sister to materialism. This is my
guess as to the meaning of Child Roland
to the Dark Tower Came" But all these,
however, are simply guesses. 1t is more
than probable that Browning had no spe-
cial thought in view when he wrote those
terrible verses. 1t is likely that he penned
them because the mood was upon him and
he could not help il. To pertinacious inquir-
ers with some pet theories about their
meaning, he is said to have replied, eyes,
that's about it," but this proves nothing
except politeness.
Yelled Philosopher" that full justice had
been done to his lovely little poem, 1.-THE
Last Ride Together" one of the most
thoughtful that Browning ever wrote; yet,
I will venture a few words more. Passing
by his personal reflections, what could be
more exquisite than the general observa-
ton that the poet makes that the things
upon which we most pride ourselves are
vii,
and foibles and failures:
"And you, great sculptor-so, you gave
A score of years 60 Art, her slave,
And that's your Venus, whence we turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn.
What, man of music, you grown gray
With notes and nothing else to say,
Is this your sole praise from friend,
Greatly his operas strains intend
But in music we know how fashions end"
Abiding to the incompleteness of all
human completeness and addressing a
poet, Browning says:
(Your work.
otis something, nay tits much, but then
Have you yourself, what's best for men?
Are you-poor sick, old ere your time
Nearer a whit your own sublime
Than we who never turned a rhyme?'
And then comes that still profounder re-
Election that we are not permitted on this
earth to realize our dream of happiness lest
we should thus and thereby fail to set our
affections and ambitions on things above:
WHO knows what's fit for us? Had fate
Proposed bliss here should subimate
My being had signed the bond
Still one must have some life beyond
Have bliss to die with-dim-de
This foot once planted on the goal
This glory garland round my soul,
Could descry such? Try and test,
I sink back shuddering from the quest;
Earth being SO good, would heaven seem
The last verse is certainly a Browning
puzzle. 1t seems to me to be an inquiry
whether heaven is not, after ALL only
earth's ecstatic moments solidifed and
made perpetual It is an excellent illustra-
ton of Browning's obscurity.
"And yet-she has not spoke so longi
What If heaven be that, fair and strong
At HES best, best. with with our eyes upturned
We, fixed so. ever should so abide?
What If we still ride on, we two,
With life forever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree
The instant made eternity
And heaven just prove that | and she
Ride ride together, forever rider"
Oh! most lame and impotent conclusion!
In one of these verses Browning makes the
youth rejoice that he has got the sack, for
otherwise he would not as a married man
have aspired after heaven, and in the next
he wonders whether heaven is after all, in
his case, anything else than The Last Ride
Together indefinitely prolonged with the
bounds of space for q driveway and eterni-
ity for time table. In one verse our poet
doesn't want earth's aspirations realized,
for thus he would be unambitious after
heaven, and in the next he suggests that
heaven is only earth's joys multiplied by
eternity Is not this mixing up things badly?
1t is such passages as these that make
Browning clubs a necessity.
"Caliban Upon Setebos" is study in the
great problem OF godmaking Does man
make his own God, and if so, Of what kind?
It's Bible motto is, Thou thoughtest that
I was altogether such an one as myself"
1t is bitter satire upon the crude anthrop-
omorphic God concepts which are the bane
of all religions and with which Christianity
is heavily Handicapped. We must not fail
to draw the distinction between God as a
fact Of which no sane person has any doubt
and our frail human conceptions of that
fact We necessarily have to think of God
in terms Of our human experience. Aside
from revelation the process of godmaking
(Which Browning satirizes in this poem is
this. We take all that is best in our human
experience-love, joy, peace, pity-and null
tiply them by infinity and call the result