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