"Think as if man never thought before! Act as if all creation hung attent On the acting of such faculty as his."[A]

[Footnote A: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

His responsibility, his individuality, is not less, but greater, in that he can, in his thought and moral action, command the forces that the race has stored for him. The great man speaks the thought of his people, and his invocations as their priest are just the expression of their dumb yearnings. And even the mean and insignificant man is what he is, in virtue of the humanity which is blurred and distorted within him; and he can shed his insignificance and meanness, only by becoming a truer vehicle for that humanity.

Thus, when spirit is spiritually discerned, it is seen that man is bound to man in a union closer than any physical organism can show; while "the individual," in the old sense of a being opposed to society and opposed to the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought, not discoverable anywhere, because not real. And, on the other hand, society is no longer "collective," but so organic that the whole is potentially in every part—an organism of organisms.

The influence of this organic idea in every department of thought which concerns itself with man is not to be measured. It is already fast changing all the practical sciences of man—economics, politics, ethics and religion. The material, being newly interpreted, is wrought into a new purpose, and revelation is once more bringing about a reformation. But human action in its ethical aspect is, above all, charged with a new significance. The idea of duty has received an expansion almost illimitable, and man himself has thereby attained new worth and dignity—for what is duty except a dignity and opportunity, man's chance of being good? When we contrast this view of the life of man as the life of humanity in him, with the old individualism, we may say that morality also has at last, in Bacon's phrase, passed from the narrow seas into the open ocean. And after all, the greatest achievement of our age may be not that it has established the sciences of nature, but that it has made possible the science of man. We have, at length, reached a point of view from which we may hope to understand ourselves. Law, order, continuity, in human action—the essential pre-conditions of a moral science—were beyond the reach of an individualistic theory. It left to ethical writers no choice but that of either sacrificing man to law, or law to man; of denying either the particular or the universal element in his nature. Naturalism did the first. Intuitionism, the second. The former made human action the reaction of a natural agent on the incitement of natural forces. It made man a mere object, a thing capable of being affected by other things through his faculty of being pained or pleased; an object acting in obedience to motives that had an external origin, just like any other object. The latter theory cut man free from the world and his fellows, endowed him with a will that had no law, and a conscience that was dogmatic; and thereby succeeded in stultifying both law and morality.

But this new consciousness of the relation of man to mankind and the world takes him out of his isolation and still leaves him free. It relates men to one another in a humanity, which is incarnated anew in each of them. It elevates the individual above the distinctions of time; it treasures up the past in him as the active energy of his knowledge and morality in the present, and also as the potency of the ideal life of the future. On this view, the individual and the race are possible only through each other.

This fundamental change in our way of looking at the life of man is bound to abolish the ancient landmarks and bring confusion for a time. Out of the new conception, i.e., out of the idea of evolution, has sprung the tumult as well as the strength of our time. The present age is moved with thoughts beyond the reach of its powers: great aspirations for the well-being of the people and high ideals of social welfare flash across its mind, to be followed again by thicker darkness. There is hardly any limit to its despair or hope. It has a far larger faith in the destiny of man than any of its predecessors, and yet it is sure of hardly anything—except that the ancient rules of human life are false. Individualism is now detected as scepticism and moral chaos in disguise. We know that the old methods are no longer of use. We cannot now cut ourselves free of the fate of others. The confused cries for help that are heard on every hand are recognized as the voices of our brethren; and we now know that our fate is involved in theirs, and that the problem of their welfare is also ours. We grapple with social questions at last, and recognize that the issues of life and death lie in the solution of these enigmas. Legislators and economists, teachers of religion and socialists, are all alike social reformers. Philanthropy has taken a deeper meaning; and all sects bear its banner. But their forces are beaten back by the social wretchedness, for they have not found the sovereign remedy of a great idea; and the result is in many ways sad enough. Our social remedies often work mischief; for we degrade those whom we would elevate, and in our charity forget justice. We insist on the rights of the people and the duties of the privileged classes, and thereby tend to teach greed to those for whom we labour, and goodness to those whom we condemn. The task that lies before us is plain: we want the welfare of the people as a whole. But we fail to grasp the complex social elements together, and our very remedies tend to sunder them. We know that the public good will not be obtained by separating man from man, securing each unit in a charmed circle of personal rights, and protecting it from others by isolation. We must find a place for the individual within the social organism, and we know now that this organism has not, as our fathers seemed to think, the simple constitution of a wooden doll. Society is not put together mechanically, and the individual cannot be outwardly attached to it, if he is to be helped, He must rather share its life, be the heir of the wealth it has garnered for him in the past, and participate in its onward movement. Between this new social ideal and our attainment, between the magnitude of our social duties and the resources of intellect and will at our command, there lies a chasm which we despair of bridging over.

The characteristics of this epoch faithfully reflect themselves in the pages of Carlyle, with whose thoughts those of Browning are immediately connected. It was Carlyle who first effectively revealed to England the continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual action. Seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, and, amidst much smoke and din, showed his English readers something of the greatness of the moral world. He gave us a philosophy of clothes, penetrated through symbols to the immortal ideas, condemned all shibboleths, and revealed the soul of humanity behind the external modes of man's activity. He showed us, in a word, that the world is spiritual, that loyalty to duty is the foundation of all human good, and that national welfare rests on character. After reading him, it is impossible for any one who reflects on the nature of duty to ask, "Am I my brother's keeper?" He not only imagined, but knew, how "all things the minutest that man does, minutely influence all men, and the very look of his face blesses or curses whom-so it lights on, and so generates ever new blessing or new cursing. I say, there is not a Red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipeg, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe." Carlyle dealt the deathblow to the "laissez-faire" theory rampant in his day, and made each individual responsible for the race. He has demonstrated that the sphere of duty does not terminate with ourselves and our next-door neighbours. There will be no pure air for the correctest Levite to breathe, till the laws of sanitation have been applied to the moral slums. "Ye are my brethren," said he, and he adds, as if conscious of his too denunciatory way of dealing with them, "hence my rage and sorrow."

But his consciousness of brotherhood with all men brought only despair for him. He saw clearly the responsibility of man, but not the dignity which that implies; he felt the weight of the burden of humanity upon his own soul, and it crushed him, for he forgot that all the good of the world was there to help him bear it, and that "One with God is a majority." He taught only the half-truth, that all men are united on the side of duty, and that the spiritual life of each is conditional on striving to save all. But he neglected the complement of this truth, and forgot the greatness of the beings on whom so great a duty could be laid. He therefore dignifies humanity only to degrade it again. The "twenty millions" each must try to save "are mostly fools." But how fools, when they can have such a task? Is it not true, on the contrary, that no man ever saw a duty beyond his strength, and that "man can because he ought" and ought only because he can? The evils an individual cannot overcome are the moral opportunities of his fellows. The good are not lone workers of God's purposes, and there is no need of despair. Carlyle, like the ancient prophet, was too conscious of his own mission, and too forgetful of that of others. "I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts; because the children of Israel have forgotten Thy covenant, thrown down Thine alters, and slain Thy prophets, and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away." He needed, beside the consciousness of his prophetic function, a consciousness of brotherhood with humbler workers. "Yet I have left Me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him." It would have helped him had he remembered, that there were on all sides other workers engaged on the temple not made with hands, although he could not hear the sound of their hammers for the din he made himself. It would have changed his despair into joy, and his pity into a higher moral quality, had he been able to believe that, amidst all the millions against whom he hurled his anathemas, there is no one who, let him do what he will, is not constrained to illustrate either the folly and wretchedness of sin, or the glory of goodness. It is not given to any one, least of all to the wicked, to hold back the onward movement of the race, or to destroy the impulse for good which is planted within it.

But Carlyle saw only one side of the truth about man's moral nature and destiny. He knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. That morality is the essence of things, that wrong must prove its weakness, that right is the only might, is reiterated and illustrated on all his pages; they are now commonplaces of speculation on matters of history, if not conscious practical principles which guide its makers. But Carlyle never inquired into the character of this moral necessity, and he overlooked the beneficence which places death at the heart of sin. He never saw wrong except on its way to execution, or in the death throes; but he did not look in the face of the gentle power that led it on to death. He saw the necessity which rules history, but not the beneficent character of that necessity.

The same limitations marred his view of duty, which was his greatest revelation to his age. He felt its categorical authority and its binding force. But the power which imposed the duty was an alien power, awful in majesty, infinite in might, a "great task-master"; and the duty itself was an outer law, written in letters of flame across the high heavens, in comparison with which man's action at its best sank into failure. His only virtue is obedience, and his last rendering even of himself is "unprofitable servant." In this he has much of the combined strength and weakness of the old Scottish Calvinism. "He stands between the individual and the Infinite without hope or guide. He has a constant disposition to crush the human being by comparing him with God," said Mazzini, with marvellous penetration. "From his lips, at times so daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the Breton Mariner—'My God protect me! My bark is so small, and Thy ocean so vast.'" His reconciliation of God and man was incomplete: God seemed to him to have manifested Himself to man but not in man. He did not see that "the Eternity which is before and behind us is also within us."

But the moral law which commands is just the reflection of the aspirations of progressive man, who always creates his own horizon. The extension of duty is the objective counterpart of man's growth; a proof of victory and not of failure, a sign that man is mounting upwards. And, if so, it is irrational to infer the impossibility of success from the magnitude of the demands of a moral law, which is itself the promise of a better future. The hard problems set for us by our social environment are recognized as set by ourselves; for, in matters of morality, the eye sees only what the heart prompts. The very statement of the difficulty contains the potency of its solution; for evil, when understood, is on the way towards being overcome, and the good, when seen, contains the promise of its own fulfilment. It is ignorance which is ruinous, as when the cries of humanity beat against a deaf ear; and we can take a comfort, denied to Carlyle, from the fact that he has made us awake to our social duties. He has let loose the confusion upon us, and it is only natural that we should at first be overcome by a sense of bewildered helplessness. But this very sense contains the germ of hope, and England is struggling to its feet to wrestle with its wrongs. Carlyle has brought us within sight of our future, and we are now taking a step into it. He has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there, and was denied the view from Pisgah.

Now, this view was given to Robert Browning, and he broke out into a song of victory, whose strains will give strength and comfort to many in the coming time. That his solution of the evils of life is not final, may at once be admitted. There are elements in the problem of which he has taken no account, and which will force those who seek light on the deeper mysteries of man's moral nature, to go beyond anything that the poet has to say. Even the poet himself grows, at least in some directions, less confident of the completeness of his triumph as he grows older. His faith in the good does not fail, but it is the faith of one who confesses to ignorance, and links himself to his finitude. Still, so thorough is his conviction of the moral purpose of life, of the certainty of the good towards which man is moving, and of the beneficence of the power which is at work everywhere in the world, that many of his poems ring like the triumphant songs of Luther.



CHAPTER IV.

BROWNING'S OPTIMISM.

"Gladness be with thee, Helper of the World! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind, And recommence at sorrow."[A]

[Footnote A: Balaustion's Adventure.]

I have tried to show that one of the distinctive features of the present era is the stress it lays on the worth of the moral life of man, and the new significance it has given to that life by its view of the continuity of history. This view finds expression, on its social and ethical side, in the pages of Carlyle and Browning: both of whom are interested exclusively, one may almost say, in the evolution of human character; and both of whom, too, regard that evolution as the realization by man of the purposes, greater than man's, which rule in the world. And, although neither of them developed the organic view of humanity, which is implied in their doctrines, into an explicit philosophy, still the moral life of the individual is for each of them the infinite life in the finite. The meaning of the universe is moral, its last might is rightness; and the task of man is to catch up that meaning, convert it into his own motive, and thereby make it the source of his actions, the inmost principle of his life. This, fully grasped, will bring the finite and the infinite, morality and religion, together, and reconcile them.

But the reconciliation which Carlyle sought to effect was incomplete on every side—even within the sphere of duty, with which alone, as moralist, he specially concerned himself. The moral law was imposed upon man by a higher power, in the presence of whom man was awed and crushed; for that power had stinted man's endowment, and set him to fight a hopeless battle against endless evil. God was everywhere around man, and the universe was just the expression of His will—a will inexorably bent on the good, so that evil could not prevail; but God was not within man, except as a voice of conscience issuing imperatives and threats. An infinite duty was laid upon a finite being, and its weight made him break out into a cry of despair.

Browning, however, not only sought to bring about the reconciliation, but succeeded, in so far as that is possible in terms of mere feeling. His poetry contains suggestions that the moral will without is also a force within man; that the power which makes for righteousness in the world has penetrated into, or rather manifests itself as, man. Intelligence and will, the reason which apprehends the nature of things, and the original impulse of self-conscious life which issues in action, are God's power in man; so that God is realizing Himself in the deeds of man, and human history is just His return to Himself. Outer law and inner motive are, for the poet, manifestations of the same beneficent purpose; and instead of duty in the sense of an autocratic imperative, or beneficent tyranny, he finds, deep beneath man's foolishness and sin, a constant tendency towards the good which is bound up with the very nature of man's reason and will. If man could only understand himself he would find without him no limiting necessity, but the manifestation of a law which is one with his own essential being. A beneficent power has loaded the dice, according to the epigram, so that the chances of failure and victory are not even; for man's nature is itself a divine endowment, one with the power that rules his life, and man must finally reach through error to truth, and through sin to holiness. In the language of theology, it may be said that the moral process is the spiritual incarnation of God; it is God's goodness as love, effecting itself in human action. Hence Carlyle's cry of despair is turned by Browning into a song of victory. While the former regards the struggle between good and evil as a fixed battle, in which the forces are immovably interlocked, the latter has the consciousness of battling against a retreating foe; and the conviction of coming triumph gives joyous vigour to every stroke. Browning lifted morality into an optimism, and translated its battle into song. This was the distinctive mark and mission which give to him such power of moral inspiration.

In order, however, to estimate the value of this feature of the poet's work, it is necessary to look more closely into the character of his faith in the good. Merely to attribute to him an optimistic creed is to say very little; for the worth, or worthlessness, of such a creed depends upon its content—upon its fidelity to the facts of human life, the clearness of its consciousness of the evils it confronts, and the intensity of its realism.

There is a sense, and that a true one, in which it may be said that all men are optimists; for such a faith is implied in every conscious and deliberate action of man. There is no deed which is not an attempt to realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously he may misunderstand its nature. Final and absolute disbelief in an ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an impossibility in fact. The one stultifies action, and asserts an effect without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other stultifies intellectual activity: and both views imply that the critic has so escaped the conditions of human life, as to be able to pass a condemnatory judgment upon them. The belief that a harmonious relation between the self-conscious agent and the supreme good is possible, underlies the practical activity of man; just as the belief in the unity of thought and being underlies his intellectual activity. A moral order—that is, an order of rational ends—is postulated in all human actions, and we act at all only in virtue of it,—just as truly as we move and work only in virtue of the forces which make the spheres revolve, or think by help of the meaning which presses upon us from the thought-woven world, through all the pores of sense. A true ethics, like a true psychology, or a true science of nature, must lean upon metaphysics, and it cannot pretend to start ab initio. We live in the Copernican age, which puts the individual in a system, in obedience to whose laws he finds his welfare. And this is simply the assertion of an optimistic creed, for it implies a harmonious world.

But, though this is true, it must be remembered that this faith is a prophetic anticipation, rather than acquired knowledge. We are only on the way towards reconstructing in thought the fact which we are, or towards bringing into clear knowledge the elemental power which manifests itself within us as thought, desire, and deed. And, until this is achieved, we have no full right to an optimistic creed. The revelation of the unity which pervades all things, even in the natural world, will be the last attainment of science; and the reconciliation of nature and man and God is still further in the future, and will be the last triumph of philosophy. During all the interval the world will be a scene of warring elements; and poetry, religion, and philosophy can only hold forth a promise, and give to man a foretaste of ultimate victory. And in this state of things even their assurance often falters. Faith lapses into doubt, poetry becomes a wail for a lost god, and its votary exhibits, "through Europe to the AEtolian shore, the pageant of his bleeding heart." The optimistic faith is, as a rule, only a hope and a desire, a "Grand Perhaps," which knows no defence against the critical understanding, and sinks dumb when questioned. If, in the form of a religious conviction, its assurance is more confident, then, too often, it rests upon the treacherous foundations of authoritative ignorance, which crumble into dust beneath the blows of awakened and liberated reason. Nay, if by the aid of philosophy we turn our optimism into a faith held by reason, a fact before which the intellect, as well as the heart, worships and grows glad, it still is for most of us only a general hypothesis, a mere leap to God which spurns the intermediate steps, a universal without content, a bare form that lacks reality.

Such an optimism, such a plunge into the pure blue and away from facts, was Emerson's. Caroline Fox tells a story of him and Carlyle which reveals this very pointedly. It seems that Carlyle once led the serene philosopher through the abominations of the streets of London at midnight, asking him with grim humour at every few steps, "Do you believe in the devil now?" Emerson replied that the more he saw of the English people the greater and better he thought them. This little incident lays bare the limits of both these great men. Where the one saw, the other was blind. To the one there was the misery and the universal mirk; to the other, the pure white beam was scarcely broken. Carlyle believed in the good, beyond all doubt: he fought his great battle in its strength and won, but "he was sorely wounded." Emerson was Sir Galahad, blind to all but the Holy Grail, his armour spotless-white, his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and heat. But his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory. His victory was not won in the enemy's citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos, but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination. And, in consequence, Emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along which burthened humanity meanly toils.

But Browning's optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher, protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an invisible garment of contemplative holiness. It is a conviction which has sustained shocks of criticism and the test of facts; and it therefore, both for the poet and his readers, fulfils a mission beyond the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good. Its power will be felt and its value recognized by those who have themselves confronted the contradictions of human life and known their depths.

No lover of Browning's poetry can miss the vigorous manliness of the poet's own bearing, or fail to recognize the strength that flows from his joyous, fearless personality, and the might of his intellect and heart. "When British literature," said Carlyle of Scott and Cobbett, "lay all puking and sprawling in Wertherism, Byronism and other Sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us two healthy men." And he breaks out into a eulogy of mere health, of "the just balance of faculties that radiates a glad light outwards, enlightening and embellishing all things." But he finds it easy to account for the health of these men: they had never faced the mystery of existence. Such healthiness we find in Browning, although he wrote with Carlyle at his side, and within earshot of the infinite wail of this moral fatalist. And yet, the word health is inadequate to convey the depth of the joyous meaning which the poet found in the world. His optimism was not a constitutional and irreflective hopefulness, to be accounted for on the ground that "the great mystery of existence was not great to him: did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish." There are, indeed, certain rash and foolish persons who pretend to trace Browning's optimism to his mixed descent; but there is a "pause in the leading and the light" of those wiseacres, who pretend to trace moral and mental characteristics to physiological antecedents. They cannot quite catch a great man in the making, nor, even by the help of evolution, say anything wiser about genius than that "the wind bloweth where it listeth." No doubt the poet's optimism indicates a native sturdiness of head and heart. He had the invaluable endowment of a pre-disposition to see the sunny side of life, and a native tendency to revolt against that subjectivity, which is the root of our misery in all its forms. He had little respect for the Welt-schmerz, and can scarcely be civil to the hero of the bleeding heart.

"Sinning, sorrowing, despairing, Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked— Should I give my woes an airing,— Where's one plague that claims respect?

"Have you found your life distasteful? My life did, and does, smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I saved and hold complete. Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me I'll complain. Must in death your daylight finish? My sun sets to rise again.

* * * * *

"I find earth not grey but rosy, Heaven not grim but fair of hue. Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. Do I stand and stare? All's blue."[A]

[Footnote A: At the Mermaid.]

Browning was no doubt least of all men inclined to pout at his "plain bun"; on the contrary, he was awake to the grandeur of his inheritance, and valued most highly "his life-rent of God's universe with the tasks it offered and the tools to do them with." But his optimism sent its roots deeper than any "disposition"; it penetrated beyond mere health of body and mind, as it did beyond a mere sentiment of God's goodness. Optimisms resting on these bases are always weak; for the former leaves man naked and sensitive to the evils that crowd round him when the powers of body and mind decay, and the latter is, at best, useful only for the individual who possesses it, and it breaks down under the stress of criticism and doubt. Browning's optimism is a great element in English literature, because it opposes with such strength the shocks that come from both these quarters. His joyousness is the reflection in feeling of a conviction as to the nature of things, which he had verified in the darkest details of human life, and established for himself in the face of the gravest objections that his intellect was able to call forth. In fact, its value lies, above all, in this,—that it comes after criticism, after the condemnation which Byron and Carlyle had passed, each from his own point of view, on the world and on man.

The need of an optimism is one of the penalties which reflection brings. Natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world. The fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man; he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force Nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now first felt. Optimism is the expression of man's new reconciliation with his world; as the opposite doctrine of pessimism is the consciousness of an unresolved contradiction. Both are a judgment passed upon the world, from the point of view of its adequacy or inadequacy to meet demands, arising from needs which the individual has discovered in himself.

Now, as I have tried to show, one of the main characteristics of the opening years of the present era was its deeper intuition of the significance of human life, and, therefore, by implication, of its wants and claims. The spiritual nature of man, lost sight of during the preceding age, was re-discovered; and the first and immediate consequence was that man, as man, attained infinite worth. "Man was born free," cried Rousseau, with a conviction which swept all before it; "he has original, inalienable, and supreme rights against all things which can set themselves against him." And Rousseau's countrymen believed him. There was not a Sans-culotte amongst them all but held his head high, being creation's lord; and history can scarcely show a parallel to their great burst of joy and hope, as they ran riot in their new-found inheritance, from which they had so long been excluded. They flung themselves upon the world, as if they would "glut their sense" upon it.

"Expend Eternity upon its shows, Flung them as freely as one rose Out of a summer's opulence."[A]

[Footnote A:Easter Day.]

But the very discovery that man is spirit, which is the source of all his rights, is also an implicit discovery that he has outgrown the resources of the natural world. The infinite hunger of a soul cannot be satisfied with the things of sense. The natural world is too limited even for Carlyle's shoe-black; nor is it surprising that Byron should find it a waste, and dolefully proclaim his disappointment to much-admiring mankind. Now, both Carlyle and Browning apprehended the cause of the discontent, and both endured the Byronic utterance of it with considerable impatience. "Art thou nothing other than a vulture, then," asks the former, "that fliest through the universe seeking after somewhat to eat, and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe."

"Huntsman Common Sense Came to the rescue, bade prompt thwack of thong dispense Quiet i' the kennel: taught that ocean might be blue, And rolling and much more, and yet the soul have, too, Its touch of God's own flame, which He may so expand 'Who measured the waters i' the hollow of His hand' That ocean's self shall dry, turn dew-drop in respect Of all-triumphant fire, matter with intellect Once fairly matched."[A]

[Footnote A:Fifine at the Fair, lxvii.]

But Carlyle was always more able to detect the disease than to suggest the remedy. He had, indeed, "a glimpse of it." "There is in man a Higher than love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness." But the glimpse was misleading, for it penetrated no further than the first negative step. The "Everlasting Yea" was, after all, only a deeper "No!" only Entsagung, renunciation: "the fraction of life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your numerator as by lessening your denominator." Blessed alone is he that expecteth nothing. The holy of holies, where man hears whispered the mystery of life, is "the sanctuary of sorrow." "What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy? Nay, is not 'life itself a disease, knowledge the symptom of derangement'? Have not the poets sung 'Hymns to the Night' as if Night were nobler than Day; as if Day were but a small motley-coloured veil spread transiently over the infinite bosom of Night, and did but deform and hide from us its pure transparent eternal deeps." "We, the whole species of Mankind, and our whole existence and history, are but a floating speck in the illimitable ocean of the All ... borne this way and that way by its deep-swelling tides, and grand ocean currents, of which what faintest chance is there that we should ever exhaust the significance, ascertain the goings and comings? A region of Doubt, therefore, hovers for ever in the back-ground.... Only on a canvas of Darkness, such is man's way of being, could the many-coloured picture of our Life paint itself and shine."

In such passages as these, there is far deeper pessimism than in anything which Byron could experience or express. Scepticism is directed by Carlyle, not against the natural elements of life—the mere sensuous outworks, but against the citadel of thought itself. Self-consciousness, or the reflecting interpretation by man of himself and his world, the very activity that lifts him above animal existence and makes him man, instead of being a divine endowment, is declared to be a disease, a poisonous subjectivity destructive of all good. The discovery that man is spirit and no vulture, which was due to Carlyle himself more than to any other English writer of his age, seemed, after all, to be a great calamity; for it led to the renunciation of happiness, and filled man with yearnings after a better than happiness, but left him nothing wherewith they might be satisfied, except "the duty next to hand." And the duty next to hand, as interpreted by Carlyle, is a means of suppressing by action, not idle speech only, but thought itself. But, if this be true, the highest in man is set against itself. And what kind of action remains possible to a "speck on the illimitable ocean, borne this way and that way by its deep-swelling tides"? "Here on earth we are soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of the campaign, and have no need to understand it, seeing what is at our hand to be done." But there is one element of still deeper gloom in this blind fighting; it is fought for a foreign cause. It is God's cause and not ours, or ours only in so far as it has been despotically imposed upon us; and it is hard to discover from Carlyle what interest we can have in the victory. Duty is to him a menace—like the duty of a slave, were that possible. It lacks the element which alone can make it imperative to a free being, namely, that it be recognized as his good, and that the outer law become his inner motive. The moral law is rarely looked at by Carlyle as a beneficent revelation, and still more rarely as the condition which, if fulfilled, will reconcile man with nature and with God. And consequently, he can draw little strength from religion; for it is only love that can cast out fear.

To sum up all in a word, Carlyle regarded evil as having penetrated into the inmost recesses of man's being. Thought was disease; morality was blind obedience to a foreign authority; religion was awe of an Unknowable, with whom man can claim no kinship. Man's nature was discovered to be spiritual, only on the side of its Wants. It was an endowment of a hunger which nothing could satisfy—not the infinite, because it is too great, not the finite, because it is too little; not God, because He is too far above man, not nature, because it is too far beneath him. We are unable to satisfy ourselves with the things of sense, and are also "shut out of the heaven of spirit." What have been called, "the three great terms of thought"—the World, Self, and God—have fallen asunder in his teaching. It is the difficulty of reconciling these which brings despair, while optimism is evidently the consciousness of their harmony.

Now, these evils which reflection has revealed, and which are so much deeper than those of mere sensuous disappointment, can only be removed by deeper reflection. The harmony of the world of man's experience, which has been broken by "the comprehensive curse of sceptical despair," can, as Goethe teaches us, be restored only by thought—

"In thine own soul, build it up again."

The complete refutation of Carlyle's pessimistic view can only come, by reinterpreting each of the contradicting terms in the light of a higher conception. We must have a deeper grasp and a new view of the Self, the World, and God. And such a view can be given adequately only by philosophy. Reason alone can justify the faith that has been disturbed by reflection, and re-establish its authority.

How, then, it may be asked, can a poet be expected to turn back the forces of a scepticism, which have been thus armed with the weapons of dialectic? Can anything avail in this region except explicit demonstration? A poet never demonstrates, but perceives; art is not a process, but a result; truth for it is immediate, and it neither admits nor demands any logical connection of ideas. The standard-bearers and the trumpeters may be necessary to kindle the courage of the army and to lead it on to victory, but the fight must be won by the thrust of sword and pike. Man needs more than the intuitions of the great poets, if he is to maintain solid possession of the truth.

Now, I am prepared to admit the force of this objection, and I shall endeavour in the sequel to prove that, in order to establish optimism, more is needed than Browning can give, even when interpreted in the most sympathetic way. His doctrine is offered in terms of art, and it cannot have any demonstrative force without violating the limits of art. In some of his poems, however,—for instance, in La Saisiaz, Ferishtatis Fancies and the Parleyings, Browning sought to advance definite proofs of the theories which he held. He appears before us at times armed cap-a-pie, like a philosopher. Still, it is not when he argues that Browning proves: it is when he sees, as a poet sees. It is not by means of logical demonstrations that he helps us to meet the despair of Carlyle, or contributes to the establishment of a better faith. Browning's proofs are least convincing when he was most aware of his philosophical presuppositions; and a philosophical critic could well afford to agree with the critic of art, in relegating the demonstrating portions of his poems to the chaotic limbo lying between philosophy and poetry.

When, however, he forgets his philosophy, and speaks as poet and religious man, when he is dominated by that sovereign thought which gave unity to his life-work, and which, therefore, seemed to lie deeper in him than the necessities of his art and to determine his poetic function, his utterances have a far higher significance. For he so lifts the artistic object into the region of pure thought, and makes sense and reason so to interpenetrate, that the old metaphors of "the noble lie" and "the truth beneath the veil" seem no longer to help. He seems to show us the truth so vividly and simply, that we are less willing to make art and philosophy mutually exclusive, although their methods differ. Like some of the greatest philosophers, and notably Plato and Hegel, he constrains us to doubt, whether the distinction penetrates low beneath the surface; for philosophy, too, when at its best, is a thinking of things together. In their light we begin to ask, whether it is not possible that the interpretation of the world in terms of spirit, which is the common feature of both Hegel's philosophy and Browning's poetry, does not necessarily bring with it a settlement of the ancient feud between these two modes of thought.

But, in any case, Browning's utterances, especially those which he makes when he is most poet and least philosopher, have something of the convincing impressiveness of a reasoned system of optimism. And this comes, as already suggested, from his loyalty to a single idea, which gives unity to all his work. That idea we may, in the end, be obliged to treat not only as a hypothesis—for all principles of reconciliation, even those of the sciences, as long as knowledge is incomplete, must be regarded as hypotheses—but also as a hypothesis which he had no right to assume. It may be that in the end we shall be obliged to say of him, as of so many others—

"See the sage, with the hunger for the truth, And see his system that's all true, except The one weak place, that's stanchioned by a lie!"[A]

[Footnote A: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

It may be that the religious form, through which he generally reaches his convictions, is not freed from a dogmatic element, which so penetrates his thought as to vitiate it as a philosophy. Nevertheless, it answered for the poet all the uses of a philosophy, and it may do the same for many who are distrustful of the systems of the schools, and who are "neither able to find a faith nor to do without one." It contains far-reaching hints of a reconciliation of the elements of discord in our lives, and a suggestion of a way in which it may be demonstrated, that an optimistic theory is truer to facts than any scepticism or agnosticism, with the despair that they necessarily bring.

For Browning not only advanced a principle, whereby, as he conceived, man might again be reconciled to the world and God, and all things be viewed as the manifestation of a power that is benevolent; he also sought to apply his principle to the facts of life. He illustrates his fundamental hypothesis by means of these facts; and he tests its validity with the persistence and impressive candour of a scientific investigator. His optimism is not that of an eclectic, who can ignore inconvenient difficulties. It is not an attempt to justify the whole by neglecting details, or to make wrong seem right by reference to a far-off result, in which the steps of the process are forgotten. He stakes the value of his view of life on its power to meet all facts; one fact, ultimately irreconcilable with his hypothesis, will, he knows, destroy it.

"All the same, Of absolute and irretrievable black,—black's soul of black Beyond white's power to disintensify,— Of that I saw no sample: such may wreck My life and ruin my philosophy Tomorrow, doubtless."[A]

[Footnote A: A Bean Stripe—Ferishtah's Fancies.]

He knew that, to justify God, he had to justify all His ways to man; that if the good rules at all, it rules absolutely; and that a single exception would confute his optimism.

"So, gazing up, in my youth, at love As seen through power, ever above All modes which make it manifest, My soul brought all to a single test— That He, the Eternal First and Last, Who, in His power, had so surpassed All man conceives of what is might,— Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite, —Would prove as infinitely good; Would never, (my soul understood,) With power to work all love desires, Bestow e'en less than man requires."[B]

[Footnote B: Christmas Eve.]

"No: love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it, 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. And I shall behold Thee, face to face, O God, and in Thy light retrace How in all I loved here, still wast Thou!"[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid.]

We can scarcely miss the emphasis of the poet's own conviction in these passages, or in the assertion that,—

"The acknowledgment of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And has so far advanced thee to be wise."[A]

[Footnote A: A Death in the Desert.]

Consequently, there is a defiant and aggressive element in his attitude. Strengthened with an unfaltering faith in the supreme Good, this knight of the Holy Spirit goes forth over all the world seeking out wrongs. "He has," said Dr. Westcott, "dared to look on the darkest and meanest forms of action and passion, from which we commonly and rightly turn our eyes, and he has brought back for us from this universal survey a conviction of hope." I believe, further, that it was in order to justify this conviction that he set out on his quest. His interest in vice—in malice, cruelty, ignorance, brutishness, meanness, the irrational perversity of a corrupt disposition, and the subtleties of philosophic and aesthetic falsehood—was no morbid curiosity. Browning was no "painter of dirt"; no artist can portray filth for filth's sake, and remain an artist. He crowds his pages with criminals, because he sees deeper than their crimes. He describes evil without "palliation or reserve," and allows it to put forth all its might, in order that he may, in the end, show it to be subjected to God's purposes. He confronts evil in order to force it to give up the good, which is all the reality that is in it. He conceives it as his mission to prove that evil is "stuff for transmuting," and that there is nought in the world.

"But, touched aright, prompt yields each particle its tongue Of elemental flame—no matter whence flame sprung, From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness."

All we want is—

"The power to make them burn, express What lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind, Howe'er the chance."[A]

[Footnote A: Fifine at the Fair.]

He had Pompilia's faith.

"And still, as the day wore, the trouble grew, Whereby I guessed there would be born a star."

He goes forth in the might of his faith in the power of good, as if he wished once for all to try the resources of evil at their uttermost, and pass upon it a complete and final condemnation. With this view, he seeks evil in its own haunts. He creates Guido, the subtlest and most powerful compound of vice in our literature—except Iago, perhaps—merely in order that we may see evil at its worst; and he places him in an environment suited to his nature, as if he was carrying out an experimentum crucis. The

"Midmost blotch of black Discernible in the group of clustered crimes Huddling together in the cave they call Their palace."[B]

[Footnote B: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 869-872.]

Beside him are his brothers, each with his own "tint of hell"; his mistress, on whose face even Pompilia saw the glow of the nether pit "flash and fade"; and his mother—

"The gaunt grey nightmare in the furthest smoke, The hag that gave these three abortions birth, Unmotherly mother and unwomanly Woman, that near turns motherhood to shame, Womanliness to loathing"[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 911-915.]

Such "denizens o' the cave now cluster round Pompilia and heat the furnace sevenfold." While she

"Sent prayer like incense up To God the strong, God the beneficent, God ever mindful in all strife and strait, Who, for our own good, makes the need extreme, Till at the last He puts forth might and saves."[B]

[Footnote B: The Ring and the Book—Pompilia, 1384-1388.]

In these lines we feel the poet's purpose, constant throughout the whole poem. We know all the while that with him at our side we can travel safely through the depths of the Inferno—for the flames bend back from him; and it is only what we expect as the result of it all, that there should come

"A bolt from heaven to cleave roof and clear place, . . . . then flood And purify the scene with outside day— Which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark, Ne'er wants its witness, some stray beauty-beam To the despair of hell."[C]

[Footnote C: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 996-1003.]

The superabundant strength of Browning's conviction in the supremacy of the good, which led him in The Ring and the Book to depict criminals at their worst, forced him later on in his life to exhibit evil in another form. The real meaning and value of such poems as Fifine at the Fair, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, Ferishtah's Francies, and others, can only be determined by a careful and complete analysis of each of them. But they have one characteristic so prominent, and so new in poetry, that the most careless reader cannot fail to detect it. Action and dramatic treatment give place to a discussion which is metaphysical; instead of the conflict of motives within a character, the stress and strain of passion and will in collision with circumstances, there is reflection on action after it has passed, and the conflict of subtle arguments on the ethical value of motives and ways of conduct, which the ordinary moral consciousness condemns without hesitation. All agree that these poems represent a new departure in poetry, and some consider that in them the poet, in thus dealing with metaphysical abstractions, has overleapt the boundaries of the poetic art. To such critics, this later period seems the period of his decadence, in which the casuistical tendencies, which had already appeared in Bishop Blougram's Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, and other poems, have overwhelmed his art, and his intellect, in its pride of strength, has grown wanton. Fifine at the Fair is said to be "a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love." Its hero, who is "a modern gentleman, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophic person, of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will," produces arguments "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and "a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery," and with no further purpose on the poet's part than the dramatic delineation of character. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is spoken of in a similar manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of morality, of compromise, hypocrisy, lying, and a selfishness that betrays every cause to the individual's meanest welfare. The object of the poet is "by no means to prove black white, or white black, or to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less self-delusion reconcile itself to itself."

I am not able to accept this as a complete explanation of the intention of the poet, except with reference to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. The Prince is a psychological study, like Mr. Sludge the Medium, and Bishop Blougram. No doubt he had the interest of a dramatist in the hero of Fifine at the Fair and in the hero of Red Cotton Nightcap Country; but, in these poems, his dramatic interest is itself determined by an ethical purpose, which is equally profound. His meeting with the gipsy at Pornic, and the spectacle of her unscrupulous audacity in vice, not only "sent his fancy roaming," but opened out before him the fundamental problems of life. What I would find, therefore, in Fifine at the Fair is not the casuistic defence of an artistic and speculative libertine, but an earnest attempt on the part of the poet to prove,

"That, through the outward sign, the inward grace allures, And sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures,— All by demonstrating the value of Fifine."[A]

[Footnote A: Fifine at the Fair, xxviii.]

Within his scheme of the universal good he seeks to find a place even for this gipsy creature, who traffics "in just what we most pique us that we keep." Having, in the Ring and the Book, challenged evil at its worst as it manifests itself practically in concrete characters and external action, and having wrung from it the victory of the good, in Fifine and in his other later poems he meets it again in the region of dialectic. In this sphere of metaphysical ethics, evil has assumed a more dangerous form, especially for an artist. His optimistic faith has driven the poet into a realm into which poetry never ventured before. His battle is now, not with flesh and blood, but with the subtler powers of darkness grown vocal and argumentative, and threatening to turn the poet's faith in good into a defence of immorality, and to justify the worst evil by what is highest of all. Having indicated in outward fact "the need," as well as the "transiency of sin and death," he seeks here to prove that need, and seems, thereby, to degrade the highest truth of religion into a defence of the worst wickedness.

No doubt the result is sufficiently repulsive to the abstract moralist, who is apt to find in Fifine nothing but a casuistical and shameless justification of evil, which is blasphemy against goodness itself. We are made to "discover," for instance, that

"There was just Enough and not too much of hate, love, greed and lust, Could one discerningly but hold the balance, shift The weight from scale to scale, do justice to the drift Of nature, and explain the glories by the shames Mixed up in man, one stuff miscalled by different names."[A]

[Footnote A: Fifine at the Fair, cviii.]

We are told that—

"Force, guile were arms which earned My praise, not blame at all."

Confronted with such utterances as these, it is only natural that, rather than entangle the poet in them, we should regard them as the sophistries of a philosophical Don Juan, powerful enough, under the stress of self-defence, to confuse the distinctions of right and wrong. But, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, such an apparent justification of evil cannot be avoided by a reflective optimist; and it is implicitly contained even in those religious utterances of Rabbi Ben Ezra, Christmas Eve, and A Death in the Desert, with which we not only identify the poet but ourselves, in so far as we share his faith that

"God's in His heaven,— All's right with the world."

The poet had far too much speculative acumen to be ignorant of this, and too much boldness and strength of conviction in the might of the good, to refuse to confront the issues that sprang from it. In his later poems, as in his earlier ones, he is endeavouring to justify the ways of God to man; and the difficulties which surround him are not those of a casuist, but the stubborn questionings of a spirit, whose religious faith is thoroughly earnest and fearless. To a spirit so loyal to the truth, and so bold to follow its leading, the suppression of such problems is impossible; and, consequently, it was inevitable that he should use the whole strength of his dialectic to try those fundamental principles, on which the moral life of man is based. And it is this, I believe, which we find in Fifine, as in Ferishtah's Fancies and the Parleyings; not an exhibition of the argumentative subtlety of a mind whose strength has become lawless, and which spends itself in intellectual gymnastics, that have no place within the realm of either the beautiful or the true.



CHAPTER V.

OPTIMISM AND ETHICS: THEIR CONTRADICTION.

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.

* * * * *

"But most it is presumption in us, when The help of heaven we count the act of men."[A]

[Footnote A: All's Well that Ends Well.]

I have tried to show that one of the ruling conceptions of Browning's view of life is that the Good is absolute, and that it reveals itself in all the events of human life. By means of this conception, he endeavoured to bring together the elements which had fallen asunder in the sensational and moral pessimism of Byron and Carlyle. In other words, through the re-interpreting power which lies in this fundamental thought when it is soberly held and fearlessly applied, he sought to reconcile man with the world and with God, and thereby with himself. And the governing motive, whether the conscious motive or not, of Browning's poetry, the secret impulse which led him to dramatise the conflicts and antagonisms of human life, was the necessity of finding in them evidence of the presence of this absolute Good.

Browning's optimism was deep and comprehensive enough to reject all compromise. His faith in the good seemed to rise with the demands that were made upon it by the misery and wickedness of man, and the apparently purposeless waste of life and its resources. There was in it a deliberate earnestness which led him to grapple, not only with the concrete difficulties of individual life, but with those also that spring from reflection and theory.

The test of a philosophic optimism, as of any optimism which is more than a pious sentiment, must finally lie in its power to reveal the presence of the good in actual individual evils. But there are difficulties still nearer than those presented by concrete facts, difficulties arising out of the very suggestion that evil is a form of good. Such speculative difficulties must be met by a reflective mind, before it can follow out the application of an optimistic theory to particular facts. Now, Browning's creed, at least as he held it in his later years, was not merely the allowable exaggeration of an ecstatic religious sentiment, the impassioned conviction of a God-intoxicated man. It was deliberately presented as a solution of moral problems, and was intended to serve as a theory of the spiritual nature of things. It is, therefore, justly open to the same kind of criticism as that to which a philosophic doctrine is exposed. The poet deprived himself of the refuge, legitimate enough to the intuitive method of art, when, in his later works, he not only offered a dramatic solution of the problem of life, but definitely attempted to meet the difficulties of speculative ethics.

In this chapter I shall point out some of these difficulties, and then proceed to show how the poet proposed to solve them.

A thorough-going optimism, in that it subdues all things to the idea of the supreme Good, and denies to evil the right even to dispute the absoluteness of its sway, naturally seems to imply a pantheistic theory of the world. And Browning's insistence on the presence of the highest in all things may easily be regarded as a mere revival of the oldest and crudest attempts at finding their unity in God. For if all, as he says, is for the best, there seems to be no room left for the differences apparent in the world, and the variety which gives it beauty and worth. Particular existences would seem to be illusory and evanescent phenomena, the creations of human imagination, itself a delusive appearance. The infinite, on this view, stands over against the finite, and it overpowers and consumes it; and the optimism, implied in the phrase that "God is all," turns at once into a pessimism. For, as soon as we inquire into the meaning of this "all," we find that it is only a negation of everything we can know or be. Such a pantheism as this is self-contradictory; for, while seeming to level all things upwards to a manifestation of the divine, it really levels all downwards to the level of mere unqualified being, a stagnant and empty unknowable. It leaves only a choice between akosmism and atheism, and, at the same time, it makes each of the alternatives impossible. For, in explaining the world it abolishes it, and in abolishing the world it empties itself of all signification; so that the Godhood which it attempts to establish throughout the whole realm of being, is found to mean nothing. "It is the night, in which all cows are black."

The optimistic creed, which the poet strove to teach, must, therefore, not only establish the immanence of God, but show in some way how such immanence is consistent with the existence of particular things. His doctrine that there is no failure, or folly, or wickedness, or misery, but conceals within it, at its heart, a divine element; that there is no incident in human history which is not a pulsation of the life of the highest, and which has not its place in a scheme of universal good, must leave room for the moral life of man, and all the risks which morality brings with it. Otherwise, optimism is impossible. For a God who, in filling the universe with His presence, encroaches on the freedom and extinguishes the independence of man, precludes the possibility of all that is best for man—namely, moral achievement. Life, deprived of its moral purpose, is worthless to the poet, and so, in consequence, is all that exists in order to maintain that life. Optimism and ethics seem thus to come into immediate collision. The former, finding the presence of God in all things, seems to leave no room for man; and the latter seems to set man to work out his own destiny in solitude, and to give him supreme and absolute authority over his own life; so that any character which he forms, be it good or bad, is entirely the product of his own activity. So far as his life is culpable or praiseworthy, in other words, so far as we pass any moral judgment upon it, we necessarily think of it as the revelation of a self, that is, of an independent will, which cannot divide its responsibility. There may be, and indeed there always is for every individual, a hereditary predisposition and a soliciting environment, tendencies which are his inheritance from a remote past, and which rise to the surface in his own life; in other words, the life of the individual is always led within the larger sweep of the life of humanity. He is part of a whole, and has his place fixed, and his function predetermined, by a power which is greater than his own. But, if we are to call him good or evil, if he is to aspire and repent and strive, in a word, if he is to have any moral character, he cannot be merely a part of a system; there must be something within him which is superior to circumstances, and which makes him master of his own fate. His natural history may begin with the grey dawn of primal being, but his moral history begins with himself, from the time when he first reacted upon the world in which he is placed, and transformed his natural relations into will and character. For who can be responsible for what he did not will? What could a moral imperative mean, what could an "ought" signify, to a being who was only a temporary embodiment of forces, who are prior to, and independent of himself? It would seem, therefore, as if morality were irreconcilable with optimism. The moral life of man cannot be the manifestation of a divine benevolence whose purpose is necessary; it is a trust laid upon himself, which he may either violate or keep. It surpasses divine goodness, "tho' matched with equal power" to make man good, as it has made the flowers beautiful. From this point of view, spiritual attainment, whether intellectual or moral, is man's own, a spontaneous product. Just as God is conceived as all in all in the universe, so man is all in all within the sphere of duty; for the kingdom of heaven is within. In both cases alike, there is absolute exclusion of external interference.

For this reason, it has often seemed both to philosophers and theologians, as if the world were too confined to hold within it both God and man. In the East, the consciousness of the infinite seemed at times to leave no room for the finite; and in the West, where the consciousness of the finite and interest therein is strongest, and man strives and aspires, a Deism arose which set God at a distance, and allowed Him to interfere in the fate of man only by a benevolent miracle. Nor is this collision of pantheism and freedom, nay of religion and morality, confined to the theoretical region. This difficulty is not merely the punishment of an over-bold and over-ambitious philosophy, which pries too curiously into the mystery of being. It lies at the very threshold of all reflection on the facts of the moral life. Even children feel the mystery of God's permitting sin, and embarrass their helpless parents with the contradiction between absolute benevolence and the miseries and cruelties of life. "A vain interminable controversy," says Teufels-droeckh, "which arises in every soul since the beginning of the world: and in every soul, that would pass from idle suffering into actual endeavouring, must be put an end to. The most, in our own time, have to go content with a simple, incomplete enough Suppression of this controversy: to a few Solution of it is indispensable."

Solution, and not Suppression, is what Browning sought; he did, in fact, propound a solution, which, whether finally satisfactory or not, at least carries us beyond the easy compromises of ordinary religious and ethical teaching. He does not deny the universality of God's beneficence or power, and divide the realm of being between Him and the adversary: nor, on the other hand, does he limit man's freedom, and stultify ethics by extracting the sting of reality from sin. To limit God, he knew, was to deny Him; and, whatever the difficulties he felt in regarding the absolute Spirit as realising itself in man, he could not be content to reduce man into a temporary phantom, an evanescent embodiment of "spiritual" or natural forces, that take a fleeting form in him as they pursue their onward way.

Browning held with equal tenacity to the idea of a universal benevolent order, and to the idea of the moral freedom of man within it. He was driven in opposite directions by two beliefs, both of which he knew to be essential to the life of man as spirit, and both of which he illustrates throughout his poems with an endless variety of poetic expression. He endeavoured to find God in man and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. The vigour of his ethical doctrine is as pre-eminent, as the fulness of his conviction of the absolute sway of the Good. Side by side with his doctrine that there is no failure, no wretchedness of corruption that does not conceal within it a germ of goodness, is his sense of the evil of sin, of the infinite earnestness of man's moral warfare, and of the surpassing magnitude of the issues at stake for each individual soul. So powerful is his interest in man as a moral agent, that he sees nought else in the world of any deep concern. "My stress lay," he said in his preface to Sordello (1863), "on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so—you, with many known and unknown to me, think so—others may one day think so." And this development of a soul is not at any time regarded by the poet as a peaceful process, like the growth of a plant or animal. Although he thinks of the life of man as the gradual realization of a divine purpose within him, he does not suppose it to take place in obedience to a tranquil necessity. Man advances morally by fighting his way inch by inch, and he gains nothing except through conflict. He does not become good as the plant grows into maturity. "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force."

"No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head, Satan looks up between his feet,—both tug— He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul awakes And grows. Prolong that battle through this life! Never leave growing till the life to come."[A]

[Footnote A: Bishop Blougram.]

Man is no idle spectator of the conflict of the forces of right and wrong; Browning never loses the individual in the throng, or sinks him into his age or race. And although the poet ever bears within him the certainty of victory for the good, he calls his fellows to the fight as if the fate of all hung on the valour of each. The struggle is always personal, individual like the duels of the Homeric heroes.

It is under the guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power that is within him, and throw himself upon life with the whole energy of his being. It is better even to seek evil with one's whole mind, than to be lukewarm in goodness. Whether you seek good or evil, and play for the counter or the coin, stake it boldly!

"Let a man contend to the uttermost For his life's set prize, be it what it will!

"The counter our lovers staked was lost As surely as if it were lawful coin: And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost

"Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin Though the end in sight was a vice, I say. You, of the virtue (we issue join) How strive you?—'De te fabula!'"[A]

[Footnote A: The Statue and the Bust.]

Indifference and spiritual lassitude are, to the poet, the worst of sins. "Go!" says the Pope to Pompilia's pseudo-parents,

"Never again elude the choice of tints! White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life's business being just the terrible choice."[B]

[Footnote B: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1235-1238.]

In all the greater characters of The Ring and the Book, this intensity of vigour in good and evil flashes out upon us. Even Pompilia, the most gentle of all his creations, at the first prompting of the instinct of motherhood, rises to the law demanding resistance, and casts off the old passivity.

"Dutiful to the foolish parents first, Submissive next to the bad husband,—nay, Tolerant of those meaner miserable That did his hests, eked out the dole of pain ";[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid., 1052-1055.]

she is found

"Sublime in new impatience with the foe."

"I did for once see right, do right, give tongue The adequate protest: for a worm must turn If it would have its wrong observed by God. I did spring up, attempt to thrust aside That ice-block 'twixt the sun and me, lay low The neutralizer of all good and truth."[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—Pompilia, 1591-1596.]

"Yet, shame thus rank and patent, I struck, bare, At foe from head to foot in magic mail, And off it withered, cobweb armoury Against the lightning! 'Twas truth singed the lies And saved me."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid., 1637-1641.]

Beneath the mature wisdom of the Pope, amidst the ashes of old age, there sleeps the same fire. He is as truly a warrior priest as Caponsacchi himself, and his matured experience only muffles his vigour. Wearied with his life-long labour, we see him gather himself together "in God's name," to do His will on earth once more with concentrated might.

"I smite With my whole strength once more, ere end my part, Ending, so far as man may, this offence."[C]

[Footnote C: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1958-1960.]

Nor, spite of doubts, the promptings of mercy, the friends plucking his sleeve to stay his arm, does he fear "to handle a lie roughly"; or shrink from sending the criminal to his account, though it be but one day before he himself is called before the judgment seat. The same energy, the same spirit of bold conflict, animates Guido's adoption of evil for his good. At all but the last moment of his life of monstrous crime, just before he hears the echo of the feet of the priests, who descend the stair to lead him to his death, "he repeats his evil deed in will."

"Nor is it in me to unhate my hates,— I use up my last strength to strike once more Old Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face, To trample underfoot the whine and wile Of beast Violante,—and I grow one gorge To loathingly reject Pompilia's pale Poison my hasty hunger took for food."[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—Guido, 2400-2406.]

If there be any concrete form of evil with which the poet's optimism is not able to cope, any irretrievable black "beyond white's power to disintensify," it is the refusal to take a definite stand and resolute for either virtue or vice; the hesitancy and compromise of a life that is loyal to nothing, not even to its own selfishness. The cool self-love of the old English moralists, which "reduced the game of life to principles," and weighed good and evil in the scales of prudence, is to our poet the deepest damnation.

"Saint Eldobert—I much approve his mode; With sinner Vertgalant I sympathize; But histrionic Sganarelle, who prompts While pulling back, refuses yet concedes,—

* * * * *

"Surely, one should bid pack that mountebank!"

In him, even

"thickheads ought to recognize The Devil, that old stager, at his trick Of general utility, who leads Downward, perhaps, but fiddles all the way!"[A]

[Footnote A: Red Cotton Nightcap Country.]

For the bold sinner, who chooses and sustains his part to the end, the poet has hope. Indeed, the resolute choice is itself the beginning of hope; for, let a man only give himself to anything, wreak himself on the world in the intensity of his hate, set all sail before the gusts of passion and "range from Helen to Elvire, frenetic to be free," let him rise into a decisive self-assertion against the stable order of the moral world, and he cannot fail to discover the nature of the task he has undertaken, and the meaning of the power without, against which he has set himself. If there be sufficient strength in a man to vent himself in action, and "try conclusions with the world," he will then learn that it has another destiny than to be the instrument of evil. Self-assertion taken by itself is good; indeed, it is the very law of every life, human and other.

"Each lie Redounded to the praise of man, was victory Man's nature had both right to get and might to gain."[B]

[Footnote B: Fifine at the Fair, cxxviii.]

But it leads to the revelation of a higher law than that of selfishness. The very assertion of the self which leads into evil, ultimately leaves the self assertion futile. There is the disappointment of utter failure; the sinner is thrown back upon himself empty-handed. He finds himself subjected, even when sinning,

"To the reign Of other quite as real a nature, that saw fit To have its way with man, not man his way with it."[A]

[Footnote A: Fifine at the Fair, cxxviii.]

"Poor pabulum for pride when the first love is found Last also! and, so far from realizing gain, Each step aside just proves divergency in vain. The wanderer brings home no profit from his quest Beyond the sad surmise that keeping house were best Could life begin anew."[B]

[Footnote B:Ibid. cxxix.]

The impossibility of living a divided life, of enjoying at once the sweets of the flesh on the "Turf," and the security of the "Towers," is the text of Red Cotton Nightcap Country. The sordid hero of the poem is gradually driven to choose between the alternatives. The best of his luck, the poet thinks, was the

"Rough but wholesome shock, An accident which comes to kill or cure, A jerk which mends a dislocated joint!"[C]

[Footnote C: Red Cotton Nightcap Country.]

The continuance of disguise and subterfuge, and the retention of "the first falsehood," are ultimately made impossible to Leonce Miranda:

"Thus by a rude in seeming—rightlier judged Beneficent surprise, publicity Stopped further fear and trembling, and what tale Cowardice thinks a covert: one bold splash Into the mid-shame, and the shiver ends, Though cramp and drowning may begin perhaps."[D]

[Footnote D: Ibid.]

In the same spirit he finds Miranda's suicidal leap the best deed possible for him.

"'Mad!' 'No! sane, I say. Such being the conditions of his life, Such end of life was not irrational. Hold a belief, you only half-believe, With all-momentous issues either way,— And I advise you imitate this leap, Put faith to proof, be cured or killed at once!'"[A]

[Footnote A: Red Cotton Nightcap Country.]

Thus it is the decisive deed that gains the poet's approval. He finds the universe a great plot against a pied morality. Even Guido claims some kind of regard from him, since "hate," as Pompilia said, "was the truth of him." In that very hate we find, beneath his endless subterfuges, something real, at last. And since, through his hate, he is frankly measuring his powers against the good at work in the world, there cannot remain any doubt of the issue. To bring the rival forces face to face is just what is wanted.

"I felt quite sure that God had set Himself to Satan; who would spend A minute's mistrust on the end?"[B]

[Footnote B:Count Gismond.]

It is the same respect for strenuous action and dislike of compromise, that inspired the pathetic lines in which he condemns the Lost Leader, who broke "From the van and the free-men, and sunk to the rear and the slaves." For the good pursues its work without him.

"We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence; Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre; Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence, Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels, One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!"[A]

[Footnote A: The List Leader.]

Everywhere Browning's ethical teaching has this characteristic feature of vigorous decisiveness. As Dr. Westcott has said, "No room is left for indifference or neutrality. There is no surrender to an idle optimism. A part must be taken and maintained. The spirit in which Luther said 'Pecca fortiter' finds in him powerful expression." Browning is emphatically the poet-militant, and the prophet of struggling manhood. His words are like trumpet-calls sounded in the van of man's struggle, wafted back by the winds, and heard through all the din of conflict by his meaner brethren, who are obscurely fighting for the good in the throng and crush of life. We catch the tones of this heart-strengthening music in the earliest poems he sung: nor did his courage fail, or vigour wane, as the shades of night gathered round him. In the latest of all his poems, he still speaks of

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake."

"No, at noon-day in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer! Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 'Strive and thrive'! cry 'Speed!—fight on, fare ever There as here.'"[A]

[Footnote A: Epilogue to Asolande.]

These are fit words to close such a life. His last act is a kind of re-enlistment in the service of the good; the joyous venturing forth on a new war under new conditions and in lands unknown, by a heroic man who is sure of himself and sure of his cause.

But now comes the great difficulty. How can the poet combine such earnestness in the moral struggle with so deep a conviction of the ultimate nothingness of evil, and of the complete victory of the good? Again and again we have found him pronounce such victory to be absolutely necessary and inevitable. His belief in God, his trust in His love and might, will brook no limit anywhere. His conviction is that the power of the good subjects evil itself to its authority.

"My own hope is, a sun will pierce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; That, after Last, returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched; That what began best, can't end worst. Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."[B]

[Footnote B: Apparent Failure.]

It is the poet himself and not merely the sophistic aesthete of Fifine that speaks:—

"Partake my confidence! No creature's made so mean But that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate, Its supreme worth: fulfils, by ordinance of fate, Its momentary task, gets glory all its own, Tastes triumph in the world, pre-eminent, alone."

* * * * *

"As firm is my belief, quick sense perceives the same Self-vindicating flash illustrate every man And woman of our mass, and prove, throughout the plan, No detail but, in place allotted it, was prime And perfect."[A]

[Footnote A: Fifine at the Fair, xxix.]

But if so,—if Helen, Fifine, Guido, find themselves within the plan, fulfilling, after all, the task allotted to them in the universal scheme, how can we condemn them? Must we not plainly either modify our optimism and keep our faith in God within bounds, or, on the other hand, make every failure "apparent" only, sin a phantom, and the distinction between right and wrong a helpful illusion that stings man to effort—but an illusion all the same?

"What but the weakness in a Faith supplies The incentive to humanity, no strength Absolute, irresistible comforts. How can man love but what he yearns to help?"[B]

[Footnote B: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1649-1652.]

Where is the need, nay, the possibility, of self-sacrifice, except where there is misery? How can good, the good which is highest, find itself, and give utterance and actuality to the power that slumbers within it, except as resisting evil? Are not good and evil relative? Is not every criminal, when really known, working out in his own way the salvation of himself and the world? Why cannot he, then, take his stand on his right to move towards the good by any path that best pleases himself: since move he must. It is easy for the religious conscience to admit with Pippa that

"All service ranks the same with God— With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last or first."[A]

[Footnote A: Pippa Passes.]

But, if so, why do we admire her sweet pre-eminence in moral beauty, and in what is she really better than Ottima? The doctrine that

"God's in His heaven— All's right with the world!"[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

finds its echo in every devout spirit from the beginning of the world: it is of the very essence of religion. But what of its moral consequences? Religion, when thoroughly consistent, is the triumphant reconciliation of all contradictions. It is optimism, the justification of things as the process of evolving the good; and its peace and joy are just the outcome of the conviction, won by faith, that the ideal is actual, and that every detail of life is, in its own place, illumined with divine goodness. But morality is the condemnation of things as they are, by reference to a conception of a good which ought to be. The absolute identification of the actual and ideal extinguishes morality, either in something lower or something higher. But the moral ideal, when reached, turns at once into a stepping-stone, a dead self; and the good formulates itself anew as an ideal in the future. So that morality is the sphere of discrepancy, and the moral life a progressive realization of a good that can never be complete. It would thus seem to be irreconcilably different from religion, which must, in some way or other, find the good to be present, actual, absolute, without shadow of change, or hint of limit or imperfection.

How, then, does the poet deal with the apparently fundamental discrepancy between religion, which postulates the absolute and universal supremacy of God, and morality, which postulates the absolute supremacy of man within the sphere of his own action, in so far as it is called right or wrong?

This difficulty, in one or other of its forms, is, perhaps, the most pressing in modern philosophy. It is the problem of the possibility of rising above the "Either, Or" of discrepant conceptions, to a position which grasps the alternatives together in a higher idea. It is at bottom the question, whether we can have a philosophy at all; or whether we must fall back once more into compromise, and the scepticism and despair which it always brings with it.

It is just because Browning does not compromise between the contending truths that he is instructive. The value of his solution of the problem corresponds accurately to the degree in which he holds both the absoluteness of God's presence in history, and the complete independence of the moral consciousness. He refused to degrade either God or man. In the name of religion, he refuses to say that "a purpose of reason is visible in the social and legal structures of mankind"—only "on the whole "; and in the name of morality, he refuses to "assert the perfection of the actual world" as it is, and by implication to stultify all human endeavour. He knew the vice of compromising, and strove to hold both the truths in their fulness.

That he did not compromise God's love or power, and make it dominant merely "on the whole," leaving within His realm, which is universal, a limbo for the "lost," is evident to the most casual reader.

"This doctrine, which one healthy view of things, One sane sight of the general ordinance— Nature,—and its particular object,—man,— Which one mere eyecast at the character Of Who made these and gave man sense to boot, Had dissipated once and evermore,— This doctrine I have dosed our flock withal. Why? Because none believed it."[A]

[Footnote A: The Inn Album.]

"O'er-punished wrong grows right," Browning says. Hell is, for him, the consciousness of opportunities neglected, arrested growth; and even that, in turn, is the beginning of a better life.

"However near I stand in His regard, So much the nearer had I stood by steps Offered the feet which rashly spurned their help. That I call Hell; why further punishment?"[B]

[Footnote B: A Camel-Driver.]

Another ordinary view, according to which evil is self-destructive, and ends with the annihilation of its servant, he does not so decisively reject. At least, in a passage of wonderful poetic and philosophic power, which he puts into the mouth of Caponsacchi, he describes Guido as gradually lapsing towards the chaos, which is lower then created existence. He observes him

"Not to die so much as slide out of life, Pushed by the general horror and common hate Low, lower,—left o' the very ledge of things, I seem to see him catch convulsively, One by one at all honest forms of life, At reason, order, decency and use, To cramp him and get foothold by at least; And still they disengage them from his clutch.

* * * * *

"And thus I see him slowly and surely edged Off all the table-land whence life upsprings Aspiring to be immortality."

There he loses him in the loneliness, silence and dusk—

"At the horizontal line, creation's verge. From what just is to absolute nothingness."[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 1911-1931.]

But the matchless moral insight of the Pope leads to a different conclusion, and the poet again retrieves his faith. The Pope puts his first trust "in the suddenness of Guido's fate," and hopes that the truth may "be flashed out by the blow of death, and Guido see one instant and be saved." Nor is his trust vain. "The end comes," said Dr. Westcott. "The ministers of death claim him. In his agony he summons every helper whom he has known or heard of—

"'Abate,—Cardinal,—Christ,—Maria,—God—'

"and then the light breaks through the blackest gloom:

"'Pompilia! will you let them murder me?'

"In this supreme moment he has known what love is, and, knowing it, has begun to feel it. The cry, like the intercession of the rich man in Hades, is a promise of a far-off deliverance."

But even beyond this hope, which is the last for most men, the Pope had still another.

"Else I avert my face, nor follow him Into that sad obscure sequestered state Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain: which must not be."[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 2129-2132.]

This phrase, "which must not be," seems to me to carry in it the irrefragable conviction of the poet himself. The same faith in the future appears in the words in which Pompilia addresses her priest.

"O lover of my life, O soldier-saint, No work begun shall ever pause for death! Love will be helpful to me more and more I' the coming course, the new path I must tread, My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that!"[B]

[Footnote B: The Ring and the Seek—Pompilia, 1786-1790.]

For the poet, the death of man brings no change in the purpose of God; nor does it, or aught else, fix a limit to His power, or stultify by failure the end implied in all God's work, nature no less than man himself—to wit, that every soul shall learn the lesson of goodness, and reflect the devine life in desire, intelligence, and will.

Equally emphatic, on some sides at least, is Browning's rejection of those compromises, with which the one-sided religious consciousness threatens the existence of the moral life. At times, indeed, he seems to teach, as man's best and highest, a passive acquiescence in the divine benevolence; and he uses the dangerous metaphor of the clay and potter's wheel. Rabbi Ben Ezra bids us feel

"Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay";

and his prayer is,

"So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"[A]

[Footnote A: Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

But this attitude of quiescent trust, which is so characteristic of religion, is known by the poet to be only a phase of man's best life. It is a temporary resting-place for the pilgrim: "the country of Beulah, whose air is very sweet and pleasant, where he may solace himself for a season." But, "the way lies directly through it," and the pilgrim, "being a little strengthened and better able to bear his sickness," has to go forward on his journey. Browning's characteristic doctrine on this matter is not acquiescence and resignation. "Leave God the way" has, in his view, its counterpart and condition—"Have you the will!"

"For a worm must turn If it would have its wrong observed by God."[B]

[Footnote B: The Ring and the Book—Pompilia, 1592-1593.]

The root of Browning's joy is in the need of progress towards an infinitely high goal. He rejoices

"that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled."

The bliss of endeavour, the infinite worth of the consciousness of failure, with its evidence of coming triumph, "the spark which disturbs our clod," these are the essence of his optimistic interpretation of human life, and also of his robust ethical doctrine.

"Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"[A]

[Footnote A: Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

And he prolongs the battle beyond time, for the battle is the moral life and man's best, and therefore God's best in man. The struggle upward from the brute, may, indeed end with death. But this only means that man "has learned the uses of the flesh," and there are in him other potencies to evolve:

"Other heights in other lives, God willing."

Death is the summing up of this life's meaning, stored strength for new adventure.

"The future I may face now I have proved the past;" and, in view of it, Browning is

"Fearless and unperplexed When I wage battle next, What weapons to select, what armour to indue."

He is sure that it will be a battle, and a winning one. There is no limiting here of man's possibility, or confining of man's endeavour after goodness.

"Strive and Thrive! cry 'Speed,' fight on, fare ever There as here,"

are the last words which came from his pen.

Now, it may fairly be argued that these allusions to what death may mean, and what may lie beyond death, valuable as they may be as poetry, cannot help in philosophy. They do not solve the problem of the relation between morality and religion, but merely continue the antagonism between them into a life beyond, of which we have no experience. If the problem is to be solved, it must be solved as it is stated for us in the present world.

This objection is valid, so far as it goes. But Browning's treatment is valuable all the same, in so far as it indicates his unwillingness to limit or compromise the conflicting truths. He, by implication, rejects the view, ordinarily held without being examined, that the moral life is preliminary to the joy and rest of religion; a brief struggle, to be followed by a sudden lift out of it into some serene sphere, where man will lead an angel's life, which knows no imperfection and therefore no growth. He refuses to make morality an accident in man's history and "to put man in the place of God," by identifying the process with the ideal; he also refuses to make man's struggle, and God's achievement within man, mutually exclusive alternatives. As I shall show in the sequel, movement towards an ideal, actualizing but never actualized, is for the poet the very nature of man. And to speak about either God or man (or even the absolute philosopher) as "the last term of a development" has no meaning to him. We are not first moral and then religious, first struggling with evil and then conscious of overcoming it. God is with us in the battle, and the victory is in every blow.

But there lies a deeper difficulty than this in the way of reconciling morality and religion, or the presence of both God and man in human action. Morality, in so far as it is achievement, might conceivably be immediately identified with the process of an absolute good; but morality is always a consciousness of failure as well. Its very essence and verve is the conviction that the ideal is not actual. And the higher a man's spiritual attainment, the more impressive is his view of the evil of the world, and of the greatness of the work pressing to be done. "Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold I say unto you, 'Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.'" It looks like blasphemy against morality to say "that God lives in eternity and has, therefore, plenty of time." Morality destroys one's contentment with the world; and its language seems to be, "God is not here, but there; the kingdom is still to come."

Nor does it rest with condemning the world. It also finds flaws in its own highest achievement; so that we seem ever "To mock ourselves in all that's best of us." The beginning of the spiritual life seems just to consist in a consciousness of complete failure, and that consciousness ever grows deeper.

This is well illustrated in Browning's account of Caponsacchi; from the time when Pompilia's smile first "glowed" upon him, and set him—

"Thinking how my life Had shaken under me—broken short indeed And showed the gap 'twixt what is, what should be— And into what abysm the soul may slip"—[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 485-488.]

up to the time when his pure love for her revealed to him something of the grandeur of goodness, and led him to define his ideal and also to express his despair.

"To have to do with nothing but the true, The good, the eternal—and these, not alone In the main current of the general life, But small experiences of every day, Concerns of the particular hearth and home: To learn not only by a comet's rush But a rose's birth—not by the grandeur, God, But the comfort, Christ. All this how far away Mere delectation, meet for a minute's dream!"[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid. 2089-2097.]

So illimitably beyond his strength is such a life, that he finds himself like the drudging student who

"Trims his lamp, Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close, Dreams, 'Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!'— Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes To the old solitary nothingness."[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 2098-2103.]

The moral world with its illimitable horizon had Opened out around him, the voice of the new commandment bidding him "be perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect" had destroyed his peace, and made imperative a well nigh hopeless struggle; and, as he compares himself at his best with the new ideal, he breaks out into the cry,