"Solid standing-place amid The wash and welter, whence all doubts are bid Back to the ledge they break against in foam."[A]
[Footnote A: _Francis Furini_.]
His practical maxim was
"Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust As wholly love allied to ignorance!
There lies thy truth and safety."[B]
[Footnote B: _A Pillar of Sebzevar_.]
All phenomena must, in some way or other, be reconciled by the poet with the fundamental and indubitable fact of the progressive moral life of man. For the fundamental presupposition which a man makes, is necessarily his criterion of knowledge, and it determines the truth or illusoriness of all other opinions whatsoever.
Now, Browning held, not only that no certain knowledge is attainable by man, but also that such certainty is incompatible with moral life.
Absolute knowledge would, he contends, lift man above the need and the possibility of making the moral choice, which is our supreme business on earth. Man can be good or evil, only on condition of being in absolute uncertainty regarding the true meaning of the facts of nature and the phenomena of life.
This somewhat strange doctrine finds the most explicit and full expression in _La Saisiaz_. "Fancy," amongst the concessions it demands from "Reason," claims that man should know--not merely surmise or fear--that every action done in this life awaits its proper and necessary meed in the next.
"I also will that man become aware Life has worth incalculable, every moment that he spends So much gain or loss for that next life which on this life depends."[A]
[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]
But Reason refuses the concession, upon the ground that such sure knowledge would be destructive of the very distinction between right and wrong, which the demand implies. The "promulgation of this decree," by Fancy, "makes both good and evil to cease." Prior to it "earth was man's probation-place"; but under this decree man is no longer free; for certain knowledge makes action necessary.
"Once lay down the law, with Nature's simple 'Such effects succeed Causes such, and heaven or hell depends upon man's earthly deed Just as surely as depends the straight or else the crooked line On his making point meet point or with or else without incline,'
Thenceforth neither good nor evil does man, doing what he must."[A]
[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_, 195.]
If we presuppose that "man, addressed this mode, be sound and sane" (and we must stipulate sanity, if his actions are to be morally judged at all)--then a law which binds punishment and reward to action in a necessary manner, and is known so to bind them, would "obtain prompt and absolute obedience." There are some "edicts, now styled God's own nature's," "which to hear means to obey." All the laws relating to the preservation of life are of this character. And, if the law--"Would'st thou live again, be just"--were in all ways as stringent as the other law--
"Would'st thou live now, regularly draw thy breath!
For, suspend the operation, straight law's breach results in death"--[B]
[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]
then no one would disobey it, nor could. "It is the liberty of doing evil that gives the doing good a grace." And that liberty would be taken away by complete assurance, that effects follow actions in the moral world with the necessity seen in the natural sphere. Since, therefore, man is made to grow, and earth is the place wherein he is to pass probation and prove his powers, there must remain a certain doubt as to the issues of his actions; conviction must not be so strong as to carry with it man's whole nature. "The best I both see and praise, the worst I follow," is the adage rife in man's mouth regarding his moral conduct.
But, spite of his seeing and praising,
"he disbelieves In the heart of him that edict which for truth his head receives."[A]
[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]
He has a dim consciousness of ways whereby he may elude the consequences of his wickedness, and of the possibility of making amends to law.
"And now, auld Cloots, I ken ye're thinkin', A certain Bardie's rantin', drinkin', Some luckless hour will send him linkin'
To your black pit; But, faith, he'll turn a corner jinkin', And cheat you yet."
The more orthodox and less generous individual is prone to agree, as regards himself, with Burns; but, he sees, most probably, that such an escape is impossible to others. He has secret solacement in a latent belief that he himself is an exception. There will be a special method of dealing with him. He is a "chosen sample"; and "God will think twice before He damns a man of his quality." It is just because there is such doubt as to the universality and necessity of the law which connects actions and consequences in the moral sphere, that man's deeds have an ethical character; while, to disperse doubt and ignorance by the assurance of complete knowledge, would take the good from goodness and the ill from evil.
In this ingenious manner, the poet turns the imperfect intellect and delusive knowledge of man to a moral use. Ordinarily, the intellectual impotence of man is regarded as carrying with it moral incapacity as well, and the delusiveness of knowledge is one of the strongest arguments for pessimism. To persons pledged to the support of no theory, and to those who have the _navete_, so hard to maintain side by side with strong doctrinal convictions, it seems amongst the worst of evils that man should be endowed with fallacious faculties, and cursed with a futile desire for true knowledge which is so strong, that it cannot be quenched even in those who believe that truth can never be attained. It is the very best men of the world who cry
"Oh, this false for real, This emptiness which feigns solidity,-- Ever some grey that's white, and dun that's black,-- When shall we rest upon the thing itself, Not on its semblance? Soul--too weak, forsooth, To cope with fact--wants fiction everywhere!
Mine tires of falsehood: truth at any cost!"[A]
[Footnote A: _A Bean-Stripe_.]
The poet himself was burdened in no small degree with this vain desire for knowing the truth; and he recognized, too, that he was placed in a world which seems both real and beautiful, and so well worth knowing.
Yet, it is this very failure of knowledge--a failure which, be it remembered, is complete and absolute, because, as he thinks, all facts must turn into phantoms by mere contact with our "relative intelligences,"--which he constitutes into the basis of his optimistic faith.
So high is the dignity and worth of the moral life to Browning, that no sacrifice is too great to secure it. And, indeed, if it were once clearly recognized that there is no good thing but goodness, nothing of supreme worth, except the realization of a loving will, then doubt, ignorance, and every other form of apparent evil would be fully justified--provided they were conditions whereby this highest good is attained. And, to Browning, ignorance was one of the conditions. And consequently, the dread pause in the music which agnosticism brings, is only "silence implying sound"; and the vain cry for truth, arising from the heart of the earth's best men, is only a discord moving towards resolution into a more rapturous harmony.
I do not stay here to inquire whether sure knowledge would really have this disastrous effect of destroying morality, or whether its failure does not rather imply the impossibility of a moral life. I return to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter, and which it is now possible to answer. That question was: How does Browning reconcile his hypothesis of universal love with the natural and moral evils existing in the world?
His answer is quite explicit. The poet solves the problem by casting doubt upon the facts which threaten his hypothesis. He reduces them into phenomena, in the sense of phantoms begotten by the human intellect upon unknown and unknowable realities.
"Thus much at least is clearly understood-- Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge--just so much as shows that still It ends in ignorance on every side."[A]
[Footnote A: _Francis Furini_.]
He is aware of the phenomena of his own consciousness,
"My soul, and my soul's home, This body ";
but he knows not whether "things outside are fact or feigning." And he heeds little, for in either case they
"Teach What good is and what evil,--just the same, Be feigning or be fact the teacher."[B]
[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]
It is the mixture, or rather the apparent mixture, of shade and light in life, the conflict of seeming good with seeming evil in the world, that constitutes the world a probation-place. It is a kind of moral gymnasium, crowded with phantoms, wherein by exercise man makes moral muscle. And the vigour of the athlete's struggle is not in the least abated by the consciousness that all he deals with are phantoms.
"I have lived, then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught This--there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught, Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim, If--(to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!)-- If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place, And life, time--with all their chances, changes,--just probation-space, Mine, for me."[A]
[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]
And the world would not be such a probation-space did we once penetrate into its inmost secret, and know its phenomena as veritably either good or evil. There is the need of playing something perilously like a trick on the human intellect if man is to strive and grow.
"Here and there a touch Taught me, betimes, the artifice of things-- That all about, external to myself, Was meant to be suspected,--not revealed Demonstrably a cheat--but half seen through."[B]
[Footnote B: _A Bean-Stripe._]
To know objects as they veritably are, might reveal all things as locked together in a scheme of universal good, so that "white would rule unchecked along the line." But this would be the greatest of disasters; for, as moral agents, we cannot do without
"the constant shade Cast on life's shine,--the tremor that intrudes When firmest seems my faith in white."[C]
[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]
The intellectual insight that would penetrate through the vari-colour of events into the actual presence of the incandescent white of love, which glows, as hope tells us, in all things, would stultify itself, and lose its knowledge even of the good.