"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-drockh, "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!