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-à-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-dröckh, "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.