Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher Part 10

"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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, and made it the absolute law of things.

Now, this idea of the ident.i.ty 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 G.o.d 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 unembarra.s.sed utterance. Instead of rising to the sublime boldness of the Nazarene Teacher, they set up prudential differences between G.o.d and man--differences not of degree only but of nature; and, in consequence, G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

"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 G.o.d 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 embarra.s.sed 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 embarra.s.sed 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 G.o.dhood.

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, then man would excel Him, and the creature and Creator change parts.

"Do I find love so full in my nature, G.o.d's ultimate gift, That I doubt His own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift?

Here, the creature surpa.s.s the Creator,--the end what Began?"[B]

[Footnote B: _Saul_.]

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

"Tis Thou, G.o.d, 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 const.i.tutes the nature of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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." G.o.d 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 G.o.dlike."[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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing emotion. It is rather a const.i.tutive element of man's nature, fundamental and necessary as his intelligence. And, like everything native and const.i.tutive, it is obedient to the law of evolution, which is the law of man's being; and it pa.s.ses, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 trans.m.u.tes 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 trans.m.u.ting 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 pa.s.sion for his country, the enthusiasm of pity and helpfulness towards all suffering which marks the man of G.o.d, are as far removed from the physical attraction of s.e.x for s.e.x, 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 mult.i.tudes 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 pa.s.s 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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, pa.s.ses 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 s.e.x and age, and finds objects on which it can spend itself in all that G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d.

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 pa.s.sion, 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.]