Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher Part 11

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 pa.s.sion, as one might expect from a youthful poet, but as one of the great fundamental "faculties" of man. Love, "blind, oft-failing, half-enlightened, often-chequered trust," though it be, still makes man

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

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

"Are we not halves of one dissevered world, Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part? Never!

Till thou the lover, know; and I, the knower, Love--until both are saved."[A]

[Footnote A: _Paracelsus_.]

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

"I saw Aprile--my Aprile there!

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

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

But, great as is the place given to love in _Paracelsus_, it is far less than that given to it in the poet's later works. In _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and _La Saisiaz_ it is no longer rivalled by knowledge; nor even in _Easter Day_, where the voice beside the poet proclaiming that

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

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

"Is this thy final choice?

Love is the best? 'Tis somewhat late!

And all thou dost enumerate Of power and beauty in the world, The righteousness of love was curled Inextricably round about.

Love lay within it and without, To clasp thee,--but in vain! Thy soul Still shrunk from Him who made the whole, Still set deliberate aside His love!--Now take love! Well betide Thy tardy conscience!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Easter Day._]

In his later reflective poems, in which he deals with the problems of life in the spirit of a metaphysician, seeking a definite answer to the questions of the intelligence, he declares the reason for his preference of love to knowledge. In _La Saisiaz_ he states that man's love is G.o.d's too, a spark from His central fire; but man's knowledge is man's only.

Knowledge is finite, limited and tinged with sense. The truth we reach at best is only truth _for us_, relative, distorted. We are for ever kept from the fact which is supposed to be given; our intellects play about it; sense and even intellect itself are interposing media, which we must use, and yet, in using them, we only fool ourselves with semblances. The poet has now grown so cautious that he will not declare his own knowledge to be valid for any other man. David Hume could scarcely be more suspicious of the human intellect; nor Berkeley more surely persuaded of the purely subjective nature of its attainments. In fact, the latter relied on human knowledge in a way impossible to Browning, for he regarded it as the language of spirit speaking to spirit. Out of his experience, Browning says,

"There crowds conjecture manifold.

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

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

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

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

or that he will far less presume to p.r.o.nounce for G.o.d, and pretend that the truth finds utterance from lips of clay--

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

"Have I knowledge? Confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare!

Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care!

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

[Footnote B: _Saul_, III.]

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

"Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst E'en the Giver in one gift.--Behold, I could love if I durst!

But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake G.o.d's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's sake."[A]

[Footnote A: _Saul_, III.]

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

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

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

"Be a G.o.d and hold me With a charm!

Be a man and hold me With thine arm!

"Teach me, only teach, Love!

As I ought I will speak thy speech, Love!

Think thy thought--

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

[Footnote A: _A Woman's Last Word_.]

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

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

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

[Footnote B: _By the Fireside_.]

The throwing down of the limits that wall a man within himself, the mingling of his own deepest interests with those of others, always marks love; be it love of man for maid, parent for child, or patriot for his country. It opens an outlet into the pure air of the world of objects, and enables man to escape from the stuffed and poisonous atmosphere of his narrow self. It is a streaming outwards of the inmost treasures of the spirit, a consecration of its best activities to the welfare of others. And when this is known to be the native quality and quintessence of love, no one can regard it anywhere, or at any time, as out of place.

"Prize-lawful or prize-lawless" it is ever a flower, even though it grow, like the love of the hero of _Turf and Towers_, in slime. l.u.s.t, fleshly desire, which has been too often miscalled love, is its worst perversion. Love spends itself for another, and seeks satisfaction only in another's good. But last uses up others for its own worst purposes, wastes its object, and turns the current of life back inwards, into the slush and filth of selfish pleasure. The distinction between love and its perversion, which is impossible in the naive life of an animal, ought to be clear enough to all, and probably is. Nor should the s.e.xual impulse in human beings be confused with fleshly desire, and treated as if it were merely natural, "the mere l.u.s.t of life" common to all living things,--"that strive," as Spinoza put it, "to persevere in existing."

For there is no purely natural impulse in man; all that he is, is transfused with spirit, whether he will or no. He cannot act as a mere animal, because he cannot leave his rational nature behind him.

He cannot desire as an innocent brute desires: his desire is always love or l.u.s.t. We have as little right to say that the wisdom of the sage is _nothing but_ the purblind savagery of a Terra del Fuegian, as we have to a.s.sert that love is _nothing but_ a s.e.xual impulse. That impulse rather, when its potency is set free, will show itself, at first confusedly, but with more and more clearness as it expands, to be the yearning of soul for soul. It puts us "in training for a love which knows not s.e.x, nor person, nor partiality; but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom." The height to which this pa.s.sion lifts man, is just what makes possible the fall into a sensuality and excess of brutishness, in comparison with which animal life is a paradise of innocence.

If this is clearly recognized, many of the idle questions of casuistry that are sometimes raised regarding s.e.xual love and marriage will cease to trouble. For these questions generally presuppose the lowest possible view of this pa.s.sion. Browning shows us how to follow with serene security the pure light of the emotion of love, amidst all the confused lawlessness of l.u.s.tful pa.s.sion, and through all the intricacies of human character. Love, he thinks, is never illicit, never unwise, except when it is disloyal to itself; it never ruins, but always strives to enrich its object. Bacon quotes with approval a saying "That it is impossible to love, and to be wise." Browning a.s.serts that it is impossible to love and _not_ be wise. It is a power that, according to the Christian idea which the poet adopts, has infinite goodness for its source, and that, even in its meanest expression, is always feeling its way back to its origin, flowing again into the ocean whence it came.

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

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