"O great, just, good God! Miserable Me!"

This humility and contrition, this discontent verging on hopelessness, constituted, as we have seen, the characteristic attitude of Carlyle; and it represents a true and, in fact, an indispensable element of man's moral life.

But this self-condemnation in the face of the moral law is nothing more than an element, and must not be taken either for the whole truth or for the most fundamental one. It is because it is taken as fundamental and final that the discrepancy between morality and religion is held to be absolute, and the consciousness of evil is turned against faith in the Good. It is an abstract way of thinking that makes us deduce, from the transcendent height of the moral ideal, the impossibility of attaining goodness, and the failure of God's purpose in man. And this is what Carlyle did. He stopped short at the consciousness of imperfection, and he made no attempt to account for it. He took it as a complete fact, and therefore drew a sharp line of distinction between the human and the divine. And, so far, he was right; for, if we look no further than this negative side, it is emphatically absurd to identify man, be he "philosopher" or not, with the Absolute. "Why callest thou Me good? there is none good save One, that is God." The "ought" must stand above all human attainment, and declare that "whatever is, is wrong." But whence comes the ought itself, the ideal which condemns us? Is it not also immanent in the fact it condemns?

"Who is not acute enough," asks Hegel, "to see a great deal in his surroundings which is really far from being what it ought to be?" And who also, we may add, has not enough of the generalizing faculty, often mistaken for a philosophical one, to extend this condemnation over the whole of "this best of all possible worlds"? But what is this "ought-to-be," which has such potency in it that all things confronted with it lose their worth?

The first answer is, that it is an idea which men, and particularly good men, carry with them. But a little consideration will show that it cannot be a mere idea. It must be something more valid than a capricious product of the individual imagination. For we cannot wisely condemn things because they do not happen to answer to any casual conception which we may choose to elevate into a criterion. A criterion must have objective validity. It must be an idea of something and not an empty notion; and that something must, at the worst, be possible. Nay, when we consider all that is involved in it, it becomes obvious that a true ideal—an ideal which is a valid criterion—must be not only possible but real, and, indeed, more real than that which is condemned by reference to it. Absolute pessimism has in it the same contradiction as absolute scepticism has,—in fact, it is only its practical counterpart; for both scepticism and pessimism involve the assumption that it is possible to reach a position outside the realm of being, from which it may be condemned as a whole. But the rift between actual and ideal must fall within the real or intelligible world, do what the pessimists will; and a condemnation of man which is not based on a principle realized by humanity, is a fiction of abstract thought, which lays stress on the actuality of the imperfect and treats the perfect as if it were as good as nothing, which it cannot be. In other words, this way of regarding human life isolates the passing phenomenon, and does not look to that which reveals itself in it and causes it to pass away. Confining ourselves, however, for the present, to the ideal in morality, we can easily see that, in that sphere at least, the actual and ideal change places; and that the latter contrasts with the former as the real with the phenomenal. For, in the first place, the moral ideal is something more than a mere idea not yet realized. It is more even than a true idea; for no mere knowledge, however true, has such intimate relation to the self-consciousness of man as his moral ideal. A mathematical axiom, and the statement of a physical law, express what is true; but they do not occupy the same place in our mind as a moral principle. Such a principle is an ideal, as well as an idea. It is an idea which has causative potency in it. It supplies motives, it is an incentive to action, and, though in one sense a thing of the future, it is also the actual spring and source of present activity. In so far as the agent acts, as Kant put it, not according to laws, but according to an idea of law (and a responsible agent always acts in this manner), the ideal is as truly actualized in him as the physical law is actualized in the physical fact, or the vegetable life in the plant. In fact, the ideal of a moral being is his life. All his actions are its manifestations. And, just as the physical fact is not seen as it really is, nor its reality proved, till science has penetrated through the husk of the sensuous phenomenon, and grasped it in thought as an instance of a law; so an individual's actions are not understood, and can have no moral meaning whatsoever, except in the light of the purpose which gave them being. We know the man only when we know his creed. His reality is what he believes in; that is, it is his ideal.

It is the consciousness that the ideal is the real which explains the fact of contrition. To become morally awakened is to become conscious of the vanity and nothingness of the past life, as confronted with the new ideal implied in it. The past life is something to be cast aside as false show, just because the self that experienced it was not realized in it. It is for this reason that the moral agent sets himself against it, and desires to annihilate all its claims upon him by undergoing its punishment, and drinking to the dregs its cup of bitterness. Thus his true life lies in the realization of his ideal, and his advance towards it is his coming to himself. Only in attaining to it does he attain reality, and the only realization possible for him in the present is just the consciousness of the potency of the ideal. To him to live is to realize his ideal. It is a power that irks, till it finds expression in moral habits that accord with its nature, i.e., till the spirit has, out of its environment, created a body adequate to itself.

The condemnation of self which characterizes all moral life and is the condition of moral progress, must not, therefore, be regarded as a complete truth. For the very condemnation implies the actual presence of something better. Both of the terms—both the criterion and the fact which is condemned by it—fall within the same individual life. Man cannot, therefore, without injustice, condemn himself in all that he is; for the condemnation is itself a witness to the activity of that good of which he despairs. Hence, the threatening majesty of the moral imperative is nothing but the shadow of man's own dignity; and moral contrition, and even the complete despair of the pessimistic theory, when rightly understood, are recognized as unwilling witnesses to the authority and the actuality of the highest good. And, on the other hand, the highest good cannot be regarded as a mere phantom, without nullifying all our condemnation of the self and the world.

The legitimate deduction from the height of man's moral ideal is thus found to be, not, as Carlyle thought, the weakness and worthlessness of human nature, but its promise and native dignity: and in a healthy moral consciousness it produces, not despair, but faith and joy. For, as has been already suggested in a previous chapter, the authority of the moral law over man is rooted in man's endowment. Its imperative is nothing but the voice of the future self, bidding the present self aspire, while its reproof is only the expression of a moral aspiration which has misunderstood itself. Contrition is not a bad moral state which should bring despair, but a good state, full of promise of one that is still better. It is, in fact, just the first step which the ideal takes in its process of self-realization: "the sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but go!"

The moral ideal thus, like every other ideal, even that which we regard as present in natural life, contains a certain guarantee of its own fulfilment. It is essentially an active thing, an energy, a movement upwards. It may, indeed, be urged that the guarantee is imperfect. Ideals tend to self-realization, but the tendency may remain unfulfilled. Men have some ideals which they never reach, and others which, at first sight at least, it were better for them not to reach. The goal may never be attained, or it may prove "a ruin like the rest." And, as long as man is moral, the ideal is not, and cannot be, fully reached, Morality necessarily implies a rift within human nature, a contradiction between what is and what ought to be; although neither the rift nor the contradiction is absolute. There might seem for this reason to be no way of bringing optimism and ethics together, of reconciling what is and what ought to be.

My answer to these difficulties must at this stage be very brief and incomplete. That the moral good, if attained, should itself prove vain is a plain self-contradiction. For moral good has no meaning except in so far as it is conceived as the highest good. The question. "Why should I be moral," has no answer, because it is self-contradictory. The moral ideal contains its justification in itself, and requires to lean on nothing else.

But it is not easy to prove that it is attainable. In one sense it is not attainable, at least under the conditions of human life which fall within our experience, from which alone we have a right to speak. For, as I shall strive to show in a succeeding chapter, the essence of man's life as spiritual, that is as intelligent and moral, is its self-realizing activity. Intellectual and moral life is progress, although it is the progress of an ideal which is real and complete, the return of the infinite to itself through the finite. The cessation of the progress of the ideal in man, whereby man interprets the world in terms of himself and makes it the instrument of his purposes, is intellectual and moral death. From one point of view, therefore, this spiritual life, or moral and intellectual activity, is inspired at every step by the consciousness of a "beyond" not possessed, of an unsolved contradiction between the self and the not-self, of a good that ought to be and is not. The last word, or rather the last word but one, regarding man is "failure."

But failure is the last word but one, as the poet well knew. "What's come to perfection perishes," he tells us. From this point of view the fact that perfection is not reached, merely means that the process is not ended. "It seethes with the morrow for us and more." The recognition of failure implies more effort and higher progress, and contains a suggestion of an absolute good, and even a proof of its active presence. "The beyond," for knowledge and morality, is the Land of Promise. And the promise is not a false one; for the "land" is possessed. The recognition of the fact to be known, the statement of the problem, is the first step in its solution; and the consciousness of the moral ideal not attained is the first step in its self-actualizing progress. Had man not come so far, he would not have known the further difficulty, or recognized the higher good. To say that the moral ideal is never attained, is thus only a half-truth. We must add to it the fact that it is always being attained; nay, that it is always present as an active reality, attaining itself, evolving its own content. Or, to return to the previous metaphor, the land of promise is possessed, although the possession always reveals a still better beyond, which is again a land of promise.

While, therefore, it must always remain true that knowledge does not reach absolute reality, nor morality absolute goodness, this cannot be used as an argument against optimism, except on the presupposition that mental and moral activity are a disease. And this is a contradiction in terms. If the ideal is in itself good, the process whereby it is attained is good; if the process in itself is evil, the ideal it seeks is evil, and therefore the condemnation of the actual by reference to it is absurd. And, on the other hand, to postulate as best the identity of ideal and actual, so that no process is necessary, is to assume a point of view where both optimism and pessimism are meaningless, for there is no criterion. As Aristotle teaches us, we have no right either to praise or to blame the highest. A process, such as morality is, which is not the self-manifestation of an actual idea, and an ideal which does not reveal its potencies in its passing forms, are both fictions of one-sided thought. The process is not the ideal, but its manifestation; and the ideal is not the process, but the principle which is its source and guide.

But if the process cannot be thus immediately identified with the ideal, or "man take the place of God," or "human self-consciousness be confused with the absolute self-consciousness," far less can they be separated. The infinitely high ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect goodness, implied in the Christian command, "Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," is an ideal, just because the unity of what is and what ought to be is deeper than their difference. The recognition of the limit of our knowledge, or the imperfection of our moral character, is a direct witness to the fact that there is more to be known and a better to be achieved. The negative implies the affirmative, and is its effect. Man's confession of the limitation of his knowledge is made on the supposition that the universe of facts, in all its infinitely rich complexity, is meant to be known; and his confession of moral imperfection is made by reference to a good which is absolute, and which yet may be and ought to be his. The good in morality is necessarily supreme and perfect. A good that is "merely human," "relative to man's nature," in the sense of not being true goodness, is a phantom of confused thinking. Morality demands "the good," and not a simulacrum or make-shift. The distinction between right and wrong, and with it all moral aspiration, contrition, and repentance, would otherwise become meaningless. What can a seeming good avail to a moral agent? There is no better or worse among merely apparent excellencies, and of phantoms it matters not which is chosen. And, in a similar way, the distinction between true and false in knowledge, and the common condemnation of human knowledge as merely of phenomena, implies the absolute unity of thought and being, and the knowledge of that unity as a fact. There is no true or false amongst merely apparent facts.

But, if the ideal of man as a spiritual being is conceived as perfect, then it follows not only that its attainment is possible, but that it is necessary. The guarantee of its own fulfilment which an ideal carries with it as an ideal, that is, as a potency in process of fulfilment, becomes complete when that ideal is absolute. "If God be for us, who can be against us?" The absolute good, in the language of Emerson, is "too good not to be true." If such an ideal be latent in the nature of man, it brings the order of the universe over to his side. For it implies a kinship between him, as a spiritual being, and the whole of existence. The stars in their courses fight for him. In other words, the moral ideal means nothing, if it does not imply a law which is universal. It is a law which exists already, whether man recognizes it or not; it is the might in things, a law of which "no jot or tittle can in any wise pass away." The individual does not institute the moral law; he finds it to be written both within and without him. His part is to recognize, not to create it; to make it valid in his own life and so to identify himself with it, that his service of it may be perfect freedom.

We thus conclude that morality, and even the self-condemnation, contrition, and consciousness of failure which it brings with it as phases of its growth, are witnesses of the presence, and the actual product of an absolute good in man. Morality, in other words, rests upon, and is the self-evolution of the religious principle in man.

A similar line of proof would show that religion implies morality. An absolute good is not conceivable, except in relation to the process whereby it manifests itself. In the language of theology, we may say that God must create and redeem the world in order to be God; or that creation and redemption,—the outflow of the universe from God as its source, and its return to Him through the salvation of mankind,—reveal to us the nature of God. Apart from this outgoing of the infinite to the finite and its return to itself through it, the name God would be an empty word, signifying a something unintelligible dwelling in the void beyond the realm of being. But religion, as we have seen, is the recognition not of an unknown but of the absolute good as real; the joyous consciousness of the presence of God in all things. And morality, in that it is the realization of an ideal which is perfect, is the process whereby the absolute good actualizes itself in man. It is true that the ideal cannot be identified with the process; for it is the principle of the process, and therefore more than it. Man does not reach "the last term of development," for there is no last term to a being whose essence is progressive activity. He does not therefore take the place of God, and his self-consciousness is never the absolute self-consciousness. But still, in so far as his life is a progress towards the true and good, it is the process of truth and goodness within him. It is the activity of the ideal. It is God lifting man up to Himself, or, in the language of philosophy, "returning to Himself in history." And yet it is at the same time man's effort after goodness. Man is not a mere "vessel of divine grace," or a passive recipient of the highest bounty. All man's goodness is necessarily man's achievement. And the realization by the ideal of itself is man's achievement of it. For it is his ideal. The law without is also the law within. It is the law within because it is recognized as the law without. Thus, the moral consciousness passes into the religious consciousness. The performance of duty is the willing service of the absolute good; and, as such, it involves also the recognition of a purpose that cannot fail. It is both activity and faith, both a struggle and a consciousness of victory, both morality and religion. We cannot, therefore, treat these as alternative phases of man's life. There is not first the pain of the moral struggle, and then the joy and rest of religion. The meat and drink is "to do the will of Him that sent Me, to finish His work." Heaven is the service of the good. "There is nothing in the world or out of it that can be called unconditionally good, except the good will." The process of willing—the moral activity—is its own reward; "the only jewel that shines in its own light."

It may seem to some to be presumptuous thus to identify the divine and the human; but to separate them makes both morality and religion impossible. It robs morality of its ideal, and makes God a mere name for the "unknown." Those who think that this identification degrades the divine, misapprehend the nature of spirit; and forget that it is of its essence to communicate itself. And goodness and truth do not become less when shared; they grow greater. Spiritual possessions imply community wherein there is no exclusion; and to the Christian the glory of God is His communication of Himself. Hence the so-called religious humility, which makes God different in nature from His work, really degrades the object of its worship. It puts mere power above the gifts of spirit, and it indicates that the worshipper has not been emancipated from the slavishness, which makes a fetish of its God. Such a religion is not free, and the development of man destroys it.

"I never realized God's birth before— How He grew likest God in being born."[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—Pompilia, 1690-1691.]

The intense love of the young mother drew the divine and the human together, and set at nought the contrast which prose ever draws between them. This thought of the unity of God and man is one which has frequent utterance from the poet when his religious spirit is most deeply moved; for it is the characteristic of religious feeling that it abolishes all sense of separation. It removes all the limitations of finitude and lifts man into rapturous unity with the God he adores; and it gives such completeness to his life that it seems to him to be a joyous pulse of the life that is absolute. The feeling of unity may be an illusion. This we cannot discuss here; but, in any case, it is a feeling essential to religion. And the philosophy which seeks to lift this feeling into clear consciousness and to account for its existence, cannot but recognize that it implies and presupposes the essential affinity of the divine nature with the nature of man.

Thus, both from the side of morality and from that of religion, we are brought to recognize the unity of God with man as a spiritual being. The moral ideal is man's idea of perfection, that is, his idea of God. While theology and philosophy are often occupied with the vain task of bridging a chasm between the finite and the infinite, which they assume to be separated, the supreme facts of the life of man as a spirit spring from their unity. In other words, morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. The good that man effects is, at the same time, the working of God within him. The activity that man is,

"tending up, Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man Upward in that dread point of intercourse Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him."[A]

[Footnote A: A Death in the Desert.]

"God, perchance, Grants each new man, by some as new a mode, Inter-communication with Himself Wreaking on finiteness infinitude."[B]

[Footnote B: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

And while man's moral endeavour is thus recognized as the activity of God within him, it is also implied that the divine being can be known only as revealed, and incarnated, if one may so say, in a perfect human character. It was a permanent conviction of Browning, that

"the acknowledgment of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it."

So far from regarding the Power in the world which makes for righteousness, as "not-ourselves," as Matthew Arnold did in his haste, that Power is known to be the man's true self and more, and morality is the gradual process whereby its content is evolved. And man's state of perfection, which is symbolized for the intelligent by the term Heaven, is, for Browning,

"The equalizing, ever and anon, In momentary rapture, great with small, Omniscience with intelligency, God With man—the thunder glow from pole to pole Abolishing, a blissful moment-space, Great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire— As sure to ebb as sure again to flow When the new receptivity deserves The new completion."[A]

[Footnote A: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

Thus, therefore, does the poet wed the divine strength with human weakness; and the principle of unity, thus conceived, gives him at once his moral strenuousness and that ever present foretaste of victory, which we may call his religious optimism.

Whether this principle receives adequate expression from the poet, we shall inquire in the next chapter. For on this depends its worth as a solution of the enigma of man's moral life.



CHAPTER VI.

BROWNING'S TREATMENT OF THE PRINCIPLE OF LOVE.

"God! Thou art Love! I build my faith on that!"[A]

[Footnote A: Paracelsus]

It may be well before going further to gather together the results so far reached.

Browning was aware of the conflict of the religious and moral consciousness, but he did not hesitate to give to each of them its most uncompromising utterance. And it is on this account that he is instructive; for, whatever may be the value of compromise in practical affairs, there is no doubt that it has never done anything to advance human thought. His religion is an optimistic faith, a peaceful consciousness of the presence of the highest in man, and therefore in all other things. Yet he does not hesitate to represent the moral life as a struggle with evil, and a movement through error towards a highest good which is never finally realized. He sees that the contradiction is not an absolute one, but that a good man is always both moral and religious, and, in every good act he does, transcends their difference. He knew that the ideal apart from the process is nothing, and that "a God beyond the stars" is simply the unknowable. But he knew, too, that the ideal is not merely the process, but also that which starts the process, guides it, and comes to itself through it. God, emptied of human elements, is a mere name; but, at the same time, the process of human evolution does not exhaust the idea of God. The process by itself, i.e., mere morality, is a conception of a fragment, a fiction of abstract thought; it is a movement which has no beginning or end; and in it neither the head nor the heart of man could find contentment. He is driven by ethics into philosophy, and by morality into religion.

It was in this way that Browning found himself compelled to trace back the moral process to its origin, and to identify the moral law with the nature of God. It is this that gives value to his view of moral progress, as reaching beyond death to a higher stage of being, for which man's attainments in this life are only preliminary.

"What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes, Man has Forever."[A]

[Footnote A: Grammarian's Funeral.]

There are other "adventures brave and new" for man, "more lives yet," other ways of warfare, other depths of goodness and heights of love. The poet lifts the moral ideal into infinitude, and removes all limits to the possibility and necessity of being good. Nay, the process itself is good. Moral activity is its own bountiful reward; for moral progress, which means struggle, is the best thing in the world or out of it. To end such a process, to stop that activity, were therefore evil. But it cannot end, for it is the self-manifestation of the divine life. There is plenty of way to make, for the ideal is absolute goodness. The process cannot exhaust the absolute, and it is impossible that man should be God. And yet this process is the process of the absolute, the working of the ideal, the presence of the highest in man as a living power realizing itself in his acts and in his thoughts. And the absolute cannot fail; not in man, for the process is the evolution of his essential nature; and not in the world, for that is but the necessary instrument of the evolution. By lifting the moral ideal of man to infinitude, the poet has identified it with the nature of God, and made it the absolute law of things.

Now, this idea of the identity of the human and the divine is a perfectly familiar Christian idea.

"Thence shall I, approved A man, for aye removed From the developed brute; a God though in the germ."[A]

[Footnote A: Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

This idea is involved in the ordinary expressions of religious thought. But, nevertheless, both theology and philosophy shrink from giving to it a clear and unembarrassed utterance. Instead of rising to the sublime boldness of the Nazarene Teacher, they set up prudential differences between God and man—differences not of degree only but of nature; and, in consequence, God is reduced into an unknowable absolute, and man is made incapable not only of moral, but also of intellectual life. The poet himself has proved craven-hearted in this, as we shall see. He, too, sets up insurmountable barriers between the divine and the human, and thereby weakens both his religious and his moral convictions. His moral inspiration is greatest just where his religious enthusiasm is most intense. In Rabbi Ben Ezra, The Death in the Desert, and The Ring and the Book, there prevails a constant sense of the community of God and man within the realm of goodness; and the world itself, "with its dread machinery of sin and sorrow," is made to join the great conspiracy, whose purpose is at once the evolution of man's character, and the realization of the will of God.

"So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too— So, through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here! Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine, But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love Me who have died for thee.'"[A]

[Footnote A: An Epistle from Karshish.]

But, if we follow Browning's thoughts in his later and more reflective poems, such as Ferishtah's Fancies for instance, it will not be possible to hold that the poet altogether realized the importance for both morality and religion alike, of the idea of the actual immanence of God in man. In these poems he seems to have abandoned it in favour of the hypotheses of a more timid philosophy. But, if his religious faith had not been embarrassed by certain dogmatic presuppositions of which he could not free himself, he might have met more successfully some of the difficulties which later reflection revealed to him, and might have been able to set a true value on that "philosophy," which betrayed his faith while appearing to support it.

But, before trying to criticize the principle by means of which Browning sought to reconcile the moral and religious elements of human life, it may be well to give it a more explicit and careful statement.

What, then, is that principle of unity between the divine and the human? How can we interpret the life of man as God's life in man, so that man, in attaining the moral ideal proper to his own nature, is at the same time fulfilling ends which may justly be called divine?

The poet, in early life and in late life alike, has one answer to this question—an answer given with the confidence of complete conviction. The meeting-point of God and man is love. Love, in other words, is, for the poet, the supreme principle both of morality and religion. Love, once for all, solves that contradiction between them which, both in theory and in practice, has embarrassed the world for so many ages. Love is the sublimest conception attainable by man; a life inspired by it is the most perfect form of goodness he can conceive; therefore, love is, at the same moment, man's moral ideal, and the very essence of Godhood. A life actuated by love is divine, whatever other limitations it may have. Such is the perfection and glory of this emotion, when it has been translated into a self-conscious motive, and become the energy of an intelligent will, that it lifts him who owns it to the sublimest height of being.

"For the loving worm within its clod, Were diviner than a loveless God Amid his worlds, I will dare to say."[A]

[Footnote A: Christmas Eve.]

So excellent is this emotion that, if man, who has this power to love, did not find the same power in God, then man would excel Him, and the creature and Creator change parts.

"Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, That I doubt His own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift? Here, the creature surpass the Creator,—the end what Began?"[B]

[Footnote B: Saul.]

Not so, says David, and with him no doubt the poet himself. God is Himself the source and fulness of love.

"Tis Thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who receive: In the first is the last, in Thy will is my power to believe. All's one gift."

* * * * *

"Would I suffer for him that I love? So would'st Thou,—so wilt Thou! So shall crown Thee, the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown— And Thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down One spot for the creature to stand in!"[A]

[Footnote A: Saul.]

And this same love not only constitutes the nature of God and the moral ideal of man, but it is also the purpose and essence of all created being, both animate and inanimate.

"This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely and means good."[B]

[Footnote B: Fra Lippo Lippi.]

"O world, as God has made it! All is beauty: And knowing this is love, and love is duty, What further may be sought for or declared?"

In this world then "all's love, yet all's law." God permits nothing to break through its universal sway, even the very wickedness and misery of life are brought into the scheme of good, and, when rightly understood, reveal themselves as its means.

"I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?— To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually Godlike."[C]

[Footnote C: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1375-1383.]

The poet thus brings the natural world, the history of man, and the nature of God, within the limits of the same conception. The idea of love solves for Browning all the enigmas of human life and thought.

"The thing that seems Mere misery, under human schemes, Becomes, regarded by the light Of love, as very near, or quite As good a gift as joy before."[A]

[Footnote A: Easter Day.]

Taking Browning's work as a whole, it is scarcely possible to deny that this is at once the supreme motive of his art, and the principle on which his moral and religious doctrine rests. He is always strong and convincing when he is dealing with this theme. It was evidently his own deepest conviction, and it gave him the courage to face the evils of the world, and the power as an artist to "contrive his music from its moans." It plays, in his philosophy of life, the part that Reason fills for Hegel, or the Blind Will for Schopenhauer; and he is as fearless as they are in reducing all phenomena into forms of the activity of his first principle. Love not only gave him firm footing amid the wash and welter of the present world, where time spins fast, life fleets, and all is change, but it made him look forward with joy to "the immortal course"; for, to him, all the universe is love-woven. All life is but treading the "love-way," and no wanderer can finally lose it. "The way-faring men, though fools, shall not err therein."

Since love has such an important place in Browning's theory of life, it is necessary to see what he means by it. For love has had for different individuals, ages and nations, a very different significance; and almost every great poet has given it a different interpretation. And this is not unnatural. For love is a passion which, beginning with youth and the hey-day of the blood, expands with the expanding life, and takes new forms of beauty and goodness at every stage. And this is equally true, whether we speak of the individual or of the human race.

Love is no accident in man's history, nor a passing emotion. It is rather a constitutive element of man's nature, fundamental and necessary as his intelligence. And, like everything native and constitutive, it is obedient to the law of evolution, which is the law of man's being; and it passes, therefore, through ever varying forms. To it—if we may for the moment make a distinction between the theoretical and practical life, or between ideas and their causative potency—must be attributed the constructive power which has built the world of morality, with its intangible but most real relations which bind man to man and age to age. It is the author of the organic institutions which, standing between the individual and the rudeness of nature, awaken in him the need, and give him the desire and the faculty, of attaining higher things than physical satisfaction. Man is meant to act as well as to think, to be virtuous as well as to have knowledge. It is possible that reverence for the intellect may have led men, at times, to attribute the evolution of the race too exclusively to the theoretic consciousness, forgetting that, along with reason, there co-operates a twin power in all that is wisest and best in us, and that a heart which can love, is as essential a pre-condition of all worthy attainment, as an intellect which can see. Love and reason[A] are equally primal powers in man, and they reflect might into each other: for love increases knowledge, and knowledge love. It is their combined power that gives interest and meaning to the facts of life, and transmutes them into a moral and intellectual order. They, together, are lifting man out of the isolation and chaos of subjectivity into membership in a spiritual kingdom, where collision and exclusion are impossible, and all are at once kings and subjects.

[Footnote A: It would be more correct to say the reason that is loving or the love that is rational; for, though there is distinction, there is no dualism.]

And, just as reason is present as a transmuting power in the sensational life of the infancy of the individual and race, so is love present amidst the confused and chaotic activity of the life that knows no law other than its own changing emotions. Both make for order, and both grow with it. Both love and reason have travelled a long way in the history of man. The patriot's passion for his country, the enthusiasm of pity and helpfulness towards all suffering which marks the man of God, are as far removed from the physical attraction of sex for sex, and the mere liking of the eye and ear, as is the intellectual power of the sage from the vulpine cunning of the savage. "For," as Emerson well said, "it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the world and all nature with its generous flames." Both love and reason alike pass through stage after stage, always away from the particularity of selfishness and ignorance, into larger and larger cycles of common truth and goodness, towards the full realization of knowledge and benevolence, which is the inheritance of emancipated man. In this transition, the sensuous play of feeling within man, and the sensitive responses to external stimuli, are made more and more organic to ends which are universal, that is, to spiritual ends. Love, which in its earliest form, seems to be the natural yearning of brute for brute, appearing and disappearing at the suggestion of physical needs, passes into an idealized sentiment, into an emotion of the soul, into a principle of moral activity which manifests itself in a permanent outflow of helpful deeds for man. It represents, when thus sublimated, one side at least of the expansion of the self, which culminates when the world beats in the pulse of the individual, and the joys and sorrows, the defeats and victories of mankind are felt by him as his own. It is no longer dependent merely on the incitement of youth, grace, beauty, whether of body or character; it transcends all limitations of sex and age, and finds objects on which it can spend itself in all that God has made, even in that which has violated its own law of life and become mean and pitiful. It becomes a love of fallen humanity, and an ardour to save it by becoming the conscious and permanent motive of all men. The history of this evolution of love has been written by the poets. Every phase through which this ever-deepening emotion has passed, every form which this primary power has taken in its growth, has received from them its own proper expression. They have made even the grosser instincts lyric with beauty; and, ascending with their theme, they have sung the pure passion of soul for soul, its charm and its strength, its idealism and heroism, up to the point at which, in Browning, it transcends the limits of finite existence, sheds all its earthly vesture, and becomes a spiritual principle of religious aspiration and self-surrender to God.

Browning nowhere shows his native strength more clearly than in his treatment of love. He has touched this world-old theme—which almost every poet has handled, and handled in his highest manner—with that freshness and insight, which is possible only to the inborn originality of genius. Other poets have, in some ways, given to love a more exquisite utterance, and rendered its sweetness, and tenderness, and charm with a lighter grace. It may even be admitted that there are poets whose verses have echoed more faithfully the fervour and intoxication of passion, and who have shown greater power of interpreting it in the light of a mystic idealism. But, in one thing, Browning stands alone. He has given to love a moral significance, a place and power amongst those substantial elements on which rest the dignity of man's being and the greatness of his destiny, in a way which is, I believe, without example in any other poet. And he has done this by means of that moral and religious earnestness, which pervades all his poetry. The one object of supreme interest to him is the development of the soul, and his penetrative insight revealed to him the power to love as the paramount fact in that development. To love, he repeatedly tells us, is the sole and supreme object of man's life; it is the one lesson which he has to learn on earth; and, love once learnt, in what way matters little, "it leaves completion in the soul." Love we dare not, and, indeed, cannot absolutely miss. No man can be absolutely selfish and be man.

"Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul Which, quickened by love's breath, may yet pervade the whole O' the grey, and, free again, be fire; of worth the same, Howe'er produced, for, great or little, flame is flame."[A]

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

Love, once evoked, once admitted into the soul,

"adds worth to worth, As wine enriches blood, and straightway sends it forth, Conquering and to conquer, through all eternity, That's battle without end."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid. liv.]

This view of the significance of love grew on Browning as his knowledge of man's nature and destiny became fuller and deeper, while, at the same time, his trust in the intellect became less. Even in Paracelsus he reveals love, not as a sentiment or intoxicating passion, as one might expect from a youthful poet, but as one of the great fundamental "faculties" of man. Love, "blind, oft-failing, half-enlightened, often-chequered trust," though it be, still makes man

"The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false."

In that poem, love is definitely lifted by the poet to the level of knowledge. Intellectual gain, apart from love, is folly and futility, worthless for the individual and worthless to the race. "Mind is nothing but disease," Paracelsus cries in the bitterness of his disappointment, "and natural health is ignorance"; and he asks of the mad poet who "loved too rashly,"

"Are we not halves of one dissevered world, Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part? Never! Till thou the lover, know; and I, the knower, Love—until both are saved."[A]

[Footnote A: Paracelsus.]

And, at the end of the poem, Paracelsus, coming to an understanding with himself as to the gain and loss of life, proclaims with his last strength the truth he had missed throughout his great career, namely, the supreme worth of love.

"I saw Aprile—my Aprile there! And as the poor melodious wretch disburthened His heart, and moaned his weakness in my ear, I learned my own deep error; love's undoing Taught me the worth of love in man's estate, And what proportion love should hold with power In his right constitution; love preceding Power, and with much power, always much more love; Love still too straitened in his present means, And earnest for new power to set love free."

As long as he hated men, or, in his passionate pursuit of truth, was indifferent to their concerns, it was not strange that he saw no good in men and failed to help them. Knowledge without love is not true knowledge, but folly and weakness.

But, great as is the place given to love in Paracelsus, it is far less than that given to it in the poet's later works. In Ferishtah's Fancies and La Saisiaz it is no longer rivalled by knowledge; nor even in Easter Day, where the voice beside the poet proclaiming that

"Life is done, Time ends, Eternity's begun,"

gives a final pronouncement upon the purposes of the life of man. The world of sense—of beauty and art, of knowledge and truth, are given to man, but none of them satisfy his spirit; they merely sting with hunger for something better. "Deficiency gapes every side," till love is known as the essence and worth of all things.

"Is this thy final choice? Love is the best? 'Tis somewhat late! And all thou dost enumerate Of power and beauty in the world, The righteousness of love was curled Inextricably round about. Love lay within it and without, To clasp thee,—but in vain! Thy soul Still shrunk from Him who made the whole, Still set deliberate aside His love!—Now take love! Well betide Thy tardy conscience!"[A]

[Footnote A: Easter Day.]

In his later reflective poems, in which he deals with the problems of life in the spirit of a metaphysician, seeking a definite answer to the questions of the intelligence, he declares the reason for his preference of love to knowledge. In La Saisiaz he states that man's love is God's too, a spark from His central fire; but man's knowledge is man's only. Knowledge is finite, limited and tinged with sense. The truth we reach at best is only truth for us, relative, distorted. We are for ever kept from the fact which is supposed to be given; our intellects play about it; sense and even intellect itself are interposing media, which we must use, and yet, in using them, we only fool ourselves with semblances. The poet has now grown so cautious that he will not declare his own knowledge to be valid for any other man. David Hume could scarcely be more suspicious of the human intellect; nor Berkeley more surely persuaded of the purely subjective nature of its attainments. In fact, the latter relied on human knowledge in a way impossible to Browning, for he regarded it as the language of spirit speaking to spirit. Out of his experience, Browning says,

"There crowds conjecture manifold. But, as knowledge, this comes only,—things may be as I behold Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are; I myself am what I know not—ignorance which proves no bar To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, can recognize What to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest—surmise."[A]

[Footnote A: La Saisiaz.]

Thought itself, for aught he knows, may be afflicted with a kind of colour-blindness; and he knows no appeal when one affirms "green as grass," and another contradicts him with "red as grass." Under such circumstances, it is not strange that Browning should decline to speak except for himself, and that he will

"Nowise dare to play the spokesman for my brothers strong or weak,"

or that he will far less presume to pronounce for God, and pretend that the truth finds utterance from lips of clay—

"Pass off human lisp as echo of the sphere-song out of reach."

"Have I knowledge? Confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare! Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care!

* * * * *

"And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew (With that stoop of the soul, which in bending upraises it too) The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete, As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to His feet."[B]

[Footnote B: Saul, III.]

But David finds in himself one faculty so supreme in worth that he keeps it in abeyance—

"Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst E'en the Giver in one gift.—Behold, I could love if I durst! But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's sake."[A]

[Footnote A: Saul, III.]

This faculty of love, so far from being tainted with finitude, like knowledge; so far from being mere man's, or a temporary and deceptive power given to man for temporary uses, by a Creator who has another ineffably higher way of loving, as He has of truth, is itself divine. In contrast with the activity of love, Omnipotence itself dwindles into insignificance, and creation sinks into a puny exercise of power. Love, in a word, is the highest good; and, as such, it has all its worth in itself, and gives to all other things what worth they have. God Himself gains the "ineffable crown" by showing love and saving the weak. It is the power divine, the central energy of God's being.

Browning never forgets this moral or religious quality of love. So pure is this emotion to the poet, "so perfect in whiteness, that it will not take pollution; but, ermine-like, is armed from dishonour by its own soft snow." In the corruptest hearts, amidst the worst sensuality, love is still a power divine, making for all goodness. Even when it is kindled into flame by an illicit touch, and wars against the life of the family, which is its own product, its worth is supreme. He who has learned to love in any way, has "caught God's secret." How he has caught it, whom he loves, whether or not he is loved in return, all these things matter little. The paramount question on which hangs man's fate is, has he learned to love another, any other, Fifine or Elvire. "She has lost me," said the unloved lover; "I have gained her. Her soul's mine."

The supreme worth of love, the mere emotion itself, however called into activity, secures it against all taint. No one who understands Browning in the least, can accuse him of touching with a rash hand the sanctity of the family; rather he places it on the basis of its own principle, and thereby makes for it the strongest defence. Such love as he speaks of, however irregular its manifestation or sensuous its setting, can never be confounded with lust—"hell's own blue tint." It is further removed from lust even than asceticism. It has not even a negative attitude towards the flesh; but finds the flesh to be "stuff for transmuting," and reduces it to the uses of the spirit. The love which is sung by Browning is more pure and free, and is set in a higher altitude than anything that can be reached by the way of negation. It is a consecration of the undivided self, so that "soul helps not flesh more, than flesh helps soul." It is not only a spiritual and divine emotion, but it also "shows a heart within blood-tinctured with a veined humanity."

"Be a God and hold me With a charm! Be a man and hold me With thine arm!

"Teach me, only teach, Love! As I ought I will speak thy speech, Love! Think thy thought—

"Meet, if thou require it, Both demands, Laying flesh and spirit In thy hands."[A]

[Footnote A: A Woman's Last Word.]

True love is always an infinite giving, which holds nothing back. It is a spendthrift, magnificent in its recklessness, squandering the very essence of the self upon its object, and by doing so, in the end enriching the self beyond all counting. For in loving, the individual becomes re-impersonated in another; the distinction of Me and Thee is swept away, and there pulses in two individuals one warm life.

"If two lives join, there is oft a scar They are one and one with a shadowy third; One near one is too far.

"A moment after, and hands unseen Were hanging the night around us fast; But we knew that a bar was broken between Life and life: we were mixed at last In spite of the mortal screen."[B]

[Footnote B: By the Fireside.]

The throwing down of the limits that wall a man within himself, the mingling of his own deepest interests with those of others, always marks love; be it love of man for maid, parent for child, or patriot for his country. It opens an outlet into the pure air of the world of objects, and enables man to escape from the stuffed and poisonous atmosphere of his narrow self. It is a streaming outwards of the inmost treasures of the spirit, a consecration of its best activities to the welfare of others. And when this is known to be the native quality and quintessence of love, no one can regard it anywhere, or at any time, as out of place. "Prize-lawful or prize-lawless" it is ever a flower, even though it grow, like the love of the hero of Turf and Towers, in slime. Lust, fleshly desire, which has been too often miscalled love, is its worst perversion. Love spends itself for another, and seeks satisfaction only in another's good. But last uses up others for its own worst purposes, wastes its object, and turns the current of life back inwards, into the slush and filth of selfish pleasure. The distinction between love and its perversion, which is impossible in the naive life of an animal, ought to be clear enough to all, and probably is. Nor should the sexual impulse in human beings be confused with fleshly desire, and treated as if it were merely natural, "the mere lust of life" common to all living things,—"that strive," as Spinoza put it, "to persevere in existing." For there is no purely natural impulse in man; all that he is, is transfused with spirit, whether he will or no. He cannot act as a mere animal, because he cannot leave his rational nature behind him.

He cannot desire as an innocent brute desires: his desire is always love or lust. We have as little right to say that the wisdom of the sage is nothing but the purblind savagery of a Terra del Fuegian, as we have to assert that love is nothing but a sexual impulse. That impulse rather, when its potency is set free, will show itself, at first confusedly, but with more and more clearness as it expands, to be the yearning of soul for soul. It puts us "in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality; but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom." The height to which this passion lifts man, is just what makes possible the fall into a sensuality and excess of brutishness, in comparison with which animal life is a paradise of innocence.

If this is clearly recognized, many of the idle questions of casuistry that are sometimes raised regarding sexual love and marriage will cease to trouble. For these questions generally presuppose the lowest possible view of this passion. Browning shows us how to follow with serene security the pure light of the emotion of love, amidst all the confused lawlessness of lustful passion, and through all the intricacies of human character. Love, he thinks, is never illicit, never unwise, except when it is disloyal to itself; it never ruins, but always strives to enrich its object. Bacon quotes with approval a saying "That it is impossible to love, and to be wise." Browning asserts that it is impossible to love and not be wise. It is a power that, according to the Christian idea which the poet adopts, has infinite goodness for its source, and that, even in its meanest expression, is always feeling its way back to its origin, flowing again into the ocean whence it came.

So sparklingly pure is this passion that it could exorcise the evil and turn old to new, even in the case of Leonce Miranda. At least Browning, in this poem, strives to show that, being true love, though the love of an unclean man for an unclean woman, it was a power at war with the sordid elements of that sordid life. Love has always the same potency, flame is always flame,

"no matter whence flame sprung, From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness."[A]

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

"Let her but love you, All else you disregard! what else can be? You know how love is incompatible With falsehood—purifies, assimilates All other passions to itself."[B]

[Footnote B: Colombe's Birthday.]

"Ne'er wrong yourself so far as quote the world And say, love can go unrequited here! You will have blessed him to his whole life's end— Low passions hindered, baser cares kept back, All goodness cherished where you dwelt—and dwell."[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid.]

But, while love is always a power lifting a man upwards to the level of its own origin from whatever depths of degradation, its greatest potency can reveal itself only in characters intrinsically pure, such as Pompilia and Caponsacchi. Like mercy and every other spiritual gift, it is mightiest in the mighty. In the good and great of the earth love is veritably seen to be God's own energy;

"Who never is dishonoured in the spark He gave us from His fire of fires, and bade Remember whence it sprang, nor be afraid While that burns on, though all the rest grow dark."[A]

[Footnote A: Any Wife to Any Husband, III.]

It were almost an endless task to recount the ways in which Browning exhibits the moralizing power of love: how it is for him the quintessence of all goodness; the motive, and inspiring cause, of every act in the world that is completely right; and how, on that account, it is the actual working in the man of the ideal of all perfection. This doctrine of love is, in my opinion, the richest vein of pure ore in Browning's poetry.

But it remains to follow briefly our poet's treatment of love in another direction—as a principle present, not only in God as creative and redeeming Power, and in man as the highest motive and energy of the moral life, but also in the outer world, in the "material" universe. In the view of the poet, the whole creation is nothing but love incarnate, a pulsation from the divine heart. Love is the source of all law and of all beauty. "Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night speaketh knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard." And our poet speaks as if he had caught the meaning of the language, and believes that all things speak of love—the love of God.

"I think," says the heroine of the Inn Album,

"Womanliness means only motherhood; All love begins and ends there,—roams enough, But, having run the circle, rests at home."[A]

[Footnote A: The Inn Album.]

And Browning detects something of this motherhood everywhere. He finds it as

"Some cause Such as is put into a tree, which turns Away from the north wind with what nest it holds."[B]

[Footnote B: The Ring and the Book—Canon Caponsacchi, 1374-1376.]

The Pope—who, if any one, speaks for Browning—declares that

"Brute and bird, reptile and the fly, Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant And flower o' the field, are all in a common pact To worthily defend the trust of trusts, Life from the Ever Living."[C]

[Footnote C: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1076-1081.]

"Because of motherhood," said the minor pope in Ivan Ivanovitch,

"each male Yields to his partner place, sinks proudly in the scale: His strength owned weakness, wit—folly, and courage—fear, Beside the female proved males's mistress—only here The fox-dam, hunger-pined, will slay the felon sire Who dares assault her whelp."

The betrayal of the mother's trust is the "unexampled sin," which scares the world and shames God.

"I hold that, failing human sense, The very earth had oped, sky fallen, to efface Humanity's new wrong, motherhood's first disgrace."[A]

[Footnote A: Ivan Ivanovitch.]

This instinct of love, which binds brute-parent to brute-offspring, is a kind of spiritual law in the natural world: it, like all law, guarantees the continuity and unity of the world, and it is scarcely akin to merely physical attraction. No doubt its basis is physical; it has an organism of flesh and blood for its vehicle and instrument: but mathematical physics cannot explain it, nor can it be detected by chemical tests. Rather, with the poet, we are to regard brute affection as a kind of rude outline of human love; as a law in nature, which, when understood by man and adopted as his rule of conduct, becomes the essence and potency of his moral life.

Thus Browning regards love as an omnipresent good. There is nothing, he tells us in Fifine, which cannot reflect it; even moral putridity becomes phosphorescent, "and sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures."

"There is no good of life but love—but love! What else looks good, is some shade flung from love, Love gilds it, gives it worth."[B]

[Footnote B: In a balcony.]

There is no fact which, if seen to the heart, will not prove itself to have love for its purpose, and, therefore, for its substance. And it is on this account that everything finds its place in a kosmos and that there is

"No detail but, in place allotted it, was prime And perfect."[A]

[Footnote A: Fifine at the Fair. xxxi.]

Every event in the history of the world and of man is explicable, as the bursting into new form of this elemental, all-pervading power. The permanence in change of nature, the unity in variety, the strength which clothes itself in beauty, are all manifestations of love. Nature is not merely natural; matter and life's minute beginnings, are more than they seem. Paracelsus said that he knew and felt

"What God is, what we are, What life is—how God tastes an infinite joy In finite ways—one everlasting bliss, From whom all being emanates, all power Proceeds: in whom is life for evermore, Yet whom existence in its lowest form Includes."[B]

[Footnote B: Paracelsus.]

The scheme of love does not begin with man, he is rather its consummation.

"Whose attributes had here and there Been scattered o'er the visible world before, Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant To be united in some wondrous whole, Imperfect qualities throughout creation, Suggesting some one creature yet to make, Some point where all those scattered rays should meet Convergent in the faculties of man.

* * * * *

"Hints and previsions of which faculties, Are strewn confusedly everywhere about The inferior natures, and all lead up higher, All shape out divinely the superior race, The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, And man appears at last."[A]

[Footnote A: Paracelsus.]

Power, knowledge, love, all these are found in the world, in which

"All tended to mankind, And, man produced, all has its end thus far: But, in completed man begins anew A tendency to God."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

For man, being intelligent, flings back his light on all that went before,

"Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains Each back step in the circle."[C]

[Footnote C: Ibid. 189.]

He gives voice to the mute significance of Nature, and lets in the light on its blind groping.

"Man, once descried, imprints for ever His presence on all lifeless things."

And how is this interpretation achieved? By penetrating behind force, power, mechanism, and even intelligence, thinks the poet, to a purpose which is benevolent, a reason which is all embracing and rooted in love. The magnificent failure of Paracelsus came from missing this last step. His transcendent hunger for knowledge was not satisfied, not because human knowledge is essentially an illusion or mind disease, but because his knowledge did not reach the final truth of things, which is love. For love alone makes the heart wise, to know the secret of all being. This is the ultimate hypothesis in the light of which alone man can catch a glimpse of the general direction and intent of the universal movement in the world and man. Dying, Paracelsus, taught by Aprile, caught a glimpse of this elemental "love-force," in which alone lies the clue to every problem, and the promise of the final satisfaction of the human spirit. Failing in this knowledge, man may know many things, but nothing truly; for all such knowledge stays with outward shows. It is love alone that puts man in the right relation to his fellows and to the world, and removes the distortion which fills life with sorrow, and makes it

"Only a scene Of degradation, ugliness and tears, The record of disgraces best forgotten, A sullen page in human chronicles Fit to erase."[A]

[Footnote A: Paracelsus.]

But in the light of love, man "sees a good in evil, and a hope in ill success," and recognizes that mankind are

"All with a touch of nobleness, despite Their error, upward tending all though weak; Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, But dream of him, and guess where he may be, And do their best to climb and get to him."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

"All this I knew not," adds Paracelsus, "and I failed. Let men take the lesson and press this lamp of love, 'God's lamp, close to their breasts'; its splendour, soon or late, will pierce the gloom," and show that the universe is a transparent manifestation of His beneficence.



CHAPTER VII.

BROWNING'S IDEALISM, AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL JUSTIFICATION.

"Master, explain this incongruity! When I dared question, 'It is beautiful, But is it true?' thy answer was, 'In truth Lives Beauty.'"[A]

[Footnote A: Shah Abbas.]

We have now seen how Browning sought to explain all things as manifestations of the principle of love; how he endeavoured to bring all the variety of finite existence, and even the deep discrepancies of good and evil, under the sway of one idea. I have already tried to show that all human thought is occupied with the same task: science, art, philosophy, and even the most ordinary common-sense, are all, in their different ways, seeking for constant laws amongst changing facts. Nay, we may even go so far as to say that all the activity of man, the practical as well as the theoretical, is an attempt to establish a modus vivendi between his environment and himself. And such an attempt rests on the assumption that there is some ground common to both of the struggling powers within and without, some principle that manifests itself both in man and in nature. So that all men are philosophers to the extent of postulating a unity, which is deeper than all differences; and all are alike trying to discover, in however limited or ignorant a way, what that unity is. If this fact were more constantly kept in view, the effort of philosophers to bring the ultimate colligating principles of thought into clear consciousness would not, at the outset at least, be regarded with so much suspicion. For the philosopher differs from the practical man of the world, not so much in the nature of the task which he is trying to accomplish, as in the distinct and conscious purpose with which he enters upon it.

Now, I think that those, who, like Browning, offer an explicitly optimistic idea of the relation between man and the world, have a special right to a respectful hearing; for it can scarcely be denied that their optimistic explanation is invaluable, if it is true—

"So might we safely mock at what unnerves Faith now, be spared the sapping fear's increase That haply evil's strife with good shall cease Never on earth."[A]

[Footnote A: Bernard de Mandeville.]

Despair is a great clog to good work for the world, and pessimists, as a rule, have shown much more readiness than optimists to let evil have its unimpeded way. Having found, like Schopenhauer, that "Life is an awkward business," they "determine to spend life in reflecting on it," or at least in moaning about it. The world's helpers have been men of another mould; and the contrast between Fichte and Schopenhauer is suggestive of a general truth:—"Fichte, in the bright triumphant flight of his idealism, supported by faith in a moral order of the world which works for righteousness, turning his back on the darker ethics of self-torture and mortification, and rushing into the political and social fray, proclaiming the duties of patriotism, idealizing the soldier, calling to and exercising an active philanthrophy, living with his nation, and continually urging it upwards to higher levels of self-realization—Schopenhauer recurring to the idea of asceticism, preaching the blessedness of the quiescence of all will, disparaging efforts to save the nation or elevate the masses, and holding that each has enough to do in raising his own self from its dull engrossment in lower things to an absorption in that pure, passionless being which lies far beyond all, even the so-called highest, pursuits of practical life."[A]

[Footnote A: Schopenhauer, by Prof. Wallace.]

A pessimism, which is nothing more than flippant fault-finding, frequently gains a cheap reputation for wisdom; and, on the other hand, an optimism, which is really the result of much reflection and experience, may be regarded as the product of a superficial spirit that has never known the deeper evils of life. But, if pessimism be true, it differs from other truths by its uselessness; for, even if it saves man from the bitterness of petty disappointments, it does so only by making the misery universal. There is no need to specify, when "All is vanity." The drowning man does not feel the discomfort of being wet. But yet, if we reflect on the problem of evil, we shall find that there is no neutral ground, and shall ultimately be driven to choose between pessimism and its opposite. Nor, on the other hand, is the suppression of the problem of evil possible, except at a great cost. It presents itself anew in the mind of every thinking man; and some kind of solution of it, or at least some definite way of meeting its difficulty, is involved in the attitude which every man assumes towards life and its tasks.

It is not impossible that there may be as much to be said for Browning's joy in life and his love of it, as there is for his predecessor's rage and sorrow. Browning certainly thought that there was; and he held his view consistently to the end. We cannot, therefore, do justice to the poet without dealing critically with the principle on which he has based his faith, and observing how far it is applicable to the facts of human life. As I have previously said, he strives hard to come into fair contact with the misery of man in all its sadness; and, after doing so, he claims, not as a matter of poetic sentiment, but as a matter of strict truth, that good is the heart and reality of it all. It is true that he cannot demonstrate the truth of his principle by reference to all the facts, any more than the scientific man can justify his hypothesis in every detail; but he holds it as a faith which reason can justify and experience establish, although not in every isolated phenomenon. The good may, he holds, be seen actually at work in the world, and its process will be more fully known, as human life advances towards its goal.

"Though Master keep aloof, Signs of His presence multiply from roof To basement of the building."[A]

[Footnote A: Francis Furini.]

Thus Browning bases his view upon experience, and finds firm footing for his faith in the present; although he acknowledges that the "profound of ignorance surges round his rockspit of self-knowledge."

"Enough that now, Here where I stand, this moment's me and mine, Shows me what is, permits me to divine What shall be."[B]

[Footnote B: Ibid.]

"Since we know love we know enough"; for in love, he confidently thinks we have the key to all the mystery of being.

Now, what is to be made of an optimism of this kind, which is based upon love and which professes to start from experience, or to be legitimately and rationally derived from it?

If such a view be taken seriously, as I propose doing, we must be prepared to meet at the outset with some very grave difficulties. The first of these is that it is an interpretation of facts by a human emotion. To say that love blushes in the rose, or breaks into beauty in the clouds, that it shows its strength in the storm, and sets the stars in the sky, and that it is in all things the source of order and law, may imply a principle of supreme worth both to poetry and religion; but when we are asked to take it as a metaphysical explanation of facts, we are prone, like the judges of Caponsacchi, not to "levity, or to anything indecorous"—

"Only—I think I apprehend the mood: There was the blameless shrug, permissible smirk, The pen's pretence at play with the pursed mouth, The titter stifled in the hollow palm Which rubbed the eye-brow and caressed the nose, When I first told my tale; they meant, you know— 'The sly one, all this we are bound believe! Well, he can say no other than what he says.'"[A]

[Footnote A: The Ring and the Book—Canon Caponsacchi, 14-20.]

We are sufficiently willing to let the doctrine be held as a pious opinion. The faith that "all's love yet all's law," like many another illusion, if not hugged too closely, may comfort man's nakedness. But if we are asked to substitute this view for that which the sciences suggest,—if we are asked to put "Love" in the place of physical energy, and, by assuming it as a principle, to regard as unreal all the infinite misery of humanity and the degradation of intellect and character from which it arises, common-sense seems at once to take the side of the doleful sage of Chelsea. When the optimist postulates that the state of the world, were it rightly understood, is completely satisfactory, reason seems to be brought to a stand; and if poetry and religion involve such a postulate, they are taken to be ministering to the emotions at the expense of the intellect.

Browning, however, was not a mere sentimentalist who could satisfy his heart without answering the questions of his intellect. Nor is his view without support—at least, as regards the substance of it. The presence of an idealistic element in things is recognized even by ordinary thought; and no man's world is so poor that it would not be poorer still for him, if it were reduced by the abstract sciences of nature into a mere manifestation of physical force. Such a world Richter compares to an empty eye-socket.

The great result of speculation since the time of Kant is to teach us to recognize that objects are essentially related to mind, and that the principles which rule our thought enter, so to speak, into the constitution of the things we know. A very slight acquaintance with the history even of psychology, especially in modern times, shows that facts are more and more retracted into thought. This science, which began with a sufficiently common-sense view, not only of the reality and solidity of the things of the outer world, but of their opposition to, or independence of thought, is now thinning that world down into a mere shadow—a something which excites sensation. It shows that external things as we know them, and we are not concerned in any others, are, to a very great extent, the product of our thinking activities. No one will now subscribe to the Lockian or Humean view, of images impressed by objects on mind: the object which "impresses" has first to be made by mind, out of the results of nervous excitation. In a word, modern psychology as well as modern metaphysics, is demonstrating more and more fully the dependence of the world, as it is known, on the nature and activity of man's mind. Every explanation of the world is found to be, in this sense, idealistic; and in this respect, there is no difference whatsoever between the interpretation given by science and that of poetry, or religion, or philosophy. If we say that a thing is a "substance," or has "a cause"; if, with the physicist, we assert the principle of the transmutation of energy, or make use of the idea of evolution with the biologist or geologist; nay, if we speak of time and space with the mathematician, we use principles of unity derived from self-consciousness, and interpret nature in terms of ourselves, just as truly as the poet or philosopher, who makes love, or reason, the constitutive element in things. If the practical man of the world charges the poet and philosopher with living amidst phantoms, he can be answered with a "Tu quoque." "How easy," said Emerson, "it is to show the materialist that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions to find his solid universe proving dim and impalpable before his sense."

"Sense," which seems to show directly that the world is a solid reality, not dependent in any way on thought, is found not to be reliable. All science is nothing but an appeal to thought from ordinary sensuous opinion. It is an attempt to find the reality of things by thinking about them; and this reality, when it is found, turns out to be a law. But laws are ideas; though, if they are true ideas, they represent not merely thoughts in the mind, but also real principles, which manifest themselves in the objects of the outer world, as well as in the thinker's mind.

It is not possible in such a work as this, to give a carefully reasoned proof of this view of the relation of thought and things, or to repeat the argument of Kant. I must be content with merely referring to it, as showing that the principles in virtue of which we think, are the principles in virtue of which objects as we know them exist; and we cannot be concerned with any other objects. The laws which scientific investigation discovers are not only ideas that can be written in books, but also principles which explain the nature of things. In other words, the hypotheses of the natural sciences, or their categories, are points of view in the light of which the external world can be regarded as governed by uniform laws. And these constructive principles, which lift the otherwise disconnected world into an intelligible system, are revelations of the nature of intelligence, and only on that account principles for explaining the world.

"To know, Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without."[A]

[Footnote A: Paracelsus.]

In this sense, it may be said that all knowledge is anthropomorphic; and in this respect there is no difference between the physics, which speaks of energy as the essence of things, and the poetry, which speaks of love as the ultimate principle of reality. Between such scientific and idealistic explanations there is not even the difference that the one begins without and the other within, or that the one is objective and the other subjective. The true distinction is that the principles upon which the latter proceed are less abstract than those of science. "Reason" and "love" are higher principles for the explanation of the nature of things than "substance" or "cause"; but both are forms of the unity of thought. And if the latter seem to have nothing to do with the self, it is only because they are inadequate to express its full character. On the other hand, the higher categories, or ideas of reason, seem to be merely anthropomorphic, and, therefore, ill-suited to explain nature, because the relation of nature to intelligence is habitually neglected by ordinary thought, which has not pressed its problems far enough to know that such higher categories can alone satisfy the demand for truth.

But natural science is gradually driven from the lower to the higher categories, or, in other words, it is learning to take a more and more idealistic view of nature. It is moving very slowly, because it is a long labour to exhaust the uses of an instrument of thought; and it is only at great intervals in the history of the human intellect, that we find the need of a change of categories. But, as already hinted, there is no doubt that science is becoming increasingly aware of the conditions, under which alone its results may be held as valid. At first, it drove "mind" out of the realm of nature, and offered to explain both it and man in physical and mathematical terms. But, in our day, the man of science has become too cautious to make such rash extensions of the principles he uses. He is more inclined to limit himself to his special field, and he refuses to make any declaration as to the ultimate nature of things. He holds himself apart from materialism, as he does from idealism. I think I may even go further, and say that the fatal flaw of materialism has been finally detected, and that the essential relativity of all objects to thought is all but universally acknowledged.

The common notion that science gives a complete view of truth, to which we may appeal as refuting idealism, is untenable. Science itself will not support the appeal, but will direct the appellant to another court. Perhaps, rather, it would be truer to say that its attitude is one of doubt whether or not any court, philosophical or other, can give any valid decision on the matter. Confining themselves to the region of material phenomena, scientific men generally leave to common ignorance, or to moral and theological tradition, all the interests and activities of man, other than those which are physical or physiological. And some of them are even aware, that if they could find the physical equation of man, or, through their knowledge of physiology, actually produce in man the sensations, thoughts, and notions now ascribed to the intelligent life within him, the question of the spiritual or material nature of man and the world, would remain precisely where it was. The explanation would still begin with mind and end there. The principles of the materialistic explanation of the world would still be derived from intelligence; mind would still underlie all it explained, and completed science would still be, in this sense, anthropomorphic. The charge of anthropomorphism thus falls to the ground, because it would prove too much. It is a weapon which cuts the hand that wields it. And, as directed against idealism, it only shows that he who uses it has inadequate notions both of the nature of the self and of the world, and is not aware that each gets meaning, only as an exponent of the other.

On the whole, we may say that it is not men of science who now assail philosophy, because it gives an idealistic explanation of the world, so much as unsystematic dabblers in matters of thought. The best men of science, rather, show a tendency to acquiesce in a kind of dualism of matter and spirit, and to leave morality and religion, art and philosophy to pursue their own ends undisturbed. Mr. Huxley, for instance, and some others, offer two philosophical solutions, one proceeding from the material world and the other from the sensations and other "facts of consciousness." They say that we may either explain man as a natural phenomenon, or the world as a mental one.

But it is a little difficult not to ask which of these explanations is true. Both of them cannot well be, seeing that they are different. And neither of them can be adopted without very serious consequences. It would require considerable hardihood to suggest that natural science should be swept away in favour of psychology, which would be done if the one view held by Mr. Huxley were true. And, in my opinion, it requires quite as much hardihood to suggest the adoption of a theory that makes morality and religion illusory, which would be done were the other view valid.

As a matter of fact, however, such an attitude can scarcely be held by any one who is interested both in the success of natural science and in the spiritual development of mankind. We are constrained rather to say that, if these rival lines of thought lead us to deny either the outer world of things, or the world of thought and morality, then they must both be wrong. They are not "explanations" but false theories, if they lead to such conclusions as these. And, instead of holding them up to the world as the final triumph of human thought, we should sweep them into the dust-bin, and seek for some better explanation from a new point of view.