[Footnote A: _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_.]
Thus it is the decisive deed that gains the poet's approval. He finds the universe a great plot against a pied morality. Even Guido claims some kind of regard from him, since "hate," as Pompilia said, "was the truth of him." In that very hate we find, beneath his endless subterfuges, something real, at last. And since, through his hate, he is frankly measuring his powers against the good at work in the world, there cannot remain any doubt of the issue. To bring the rival forces face to face is just what is wanted.
"I felt quite sure that God had set Himself to Satan; who would spend A minute's mistrust on the end?"[B]
[Footnote B:_Count Gismond_.]
It is the same respect for strenuous action and dislike of compromise, that inspired the pathetic lines in which he condemns the Lost Leader, who broke "From the van and the free-men, and sunk to the rear and the slaves." For the good pursues its work without him.
"We shall march prospering,--not thro' his presence; Songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre; Deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence, Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: _Blot out his name_, then, record one lost soul more, One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels, One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!"[A]
[Footnote A: _The List Leader_.]
Everywhere Browning's ethical teaching has this characteristic feature of vigorous decisiveness. As Dr. Westcott has said, "No room is left for indifference or neutrality. There is no surrender to an idle optimism. A part must be taken and maintained. The spirit in which Luther said '_Pecca fortiter_' finds in him powerful expression." Browning is emphatically the poet-militant, and the prophet of struggling manhood.
His words are like trumpet-calls sounded in the van of man's struggle, wafted back by the winds, and heard through all the din of conflict by his meaner brethren, who are obscurely fighting for the good in the throng and crush of life. We catch the tones of this heart-strengthening music in the earliest poems he sung: nor did his courage fail, or vigour wane, as the shades of night gathered round him. In the latest of all his poems, he still speaks of
"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake."
"No, at noon-day in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 'Strive and thrive'! cry 'Speed!--fight on, fare ever There as here.'"[A]
[Footnote A: Epilogue to _Asolande_.]
These are fit words to close such a life. His last act is a kind of re-enlistment in the service of the good; the joyous venturing forth on a new war under new conditions and in lands unknown, by a heroic man who is sure of himself and sure of his cause.
But now comes the great difficulty. How can the poet combine such earnestness in the moral struggle with so deep a conviction of the ultimate nothingness of evil, and of the complete victory of the good?
Again and again we have found him pronounce such victory to be absolutely necessary and inevitable. His belief in God, his trust in His love and might, will brook no limit anywhere. His conviction is that the power of the good subjects evil itself to its authority.
"My own hope is, a sun will pierce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; That, after Last, returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched; That what began best, can't end worst.
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."[B]
[Footnote B: _Apparent Failure_.]
It is the poet himself and not merely the sophistic aesthete of _Fifine_ that speaks:--
"Partake my confidence! No creature's made so mean But that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate, Its supreme worth: fulfils, by ordinance of fate, Its momentary task, gets glory all its own, Tastes triumph in the world, pre-eminent, alone."
"As firm is my belief, quick sense perceives the same Self-vindicating flash illustrate every man And woman of our mass, and prove, throughout the plan, No detail but, in place allotted it, was prime And perfect."[A]
[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_, xxix.]
But if so,--if Helen, Fifine, Guido, find themselves within the plan, fulfilling, after all, the task allotted to them in the universal scheme, how can we condemn them? Must we not plainly either modify our optimism and keep our faith in God within bounds, or, on the other hand, make every failure "apparent" only, sin a phantom, and the distinction between right and wrong a helpful illusion that stings man to effort--but an illusion all the same?
"What but the weakness in a Faith supplies The incentive to humanity, no strength Absolute, irresistible comforts.
How can man love but what he yearns to help?"[B]
[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1649-1652.]
Where is the need, nay, the possibility, of self-sacrifice, except where there is misery? How can good, the good which is highest, find itself, and give utterance and actuality to the power that slumbers within it, except as resisting evil? Are not good and evil relative? Is not every criminal, when really known, working out in his own way the salvation of himself and the world? Why cannot he, then, take his stand on his right to move towards the good by any path that best pleases himself: since move he must. It is easy for the religious conscience to admit with Pippa that
"All service ranks the same with God-- With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last or first."[A]
[Footnote A: _Pippa Passes_.]
But, if so, why do we admire her sweet pre-eminence in moral beauty, and in what is she really better than Ottima? The doctrine that
"God's in His heaven-- All's right with the world!"[B]
[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]
finds its echo in every devout spirit from the beginning of the world: it is of the very essence of religion. But what of its moral consequences? Religion, when thoroughly consistent, is the triumphant reconciliation of all contradictions. It is optimism, the justification of things as the process of evolving the good; and its peace and joy are just the outcome of the conviction, won by faith, that the ideal is actual, and that every detail of life is, in its own place, illumined with divine goodness. But morality is the condemnation of things as they are, by reference to a conception of a good which ought to be. The absolute identification of the actual and ideal extinguishes morality, either in something lower or something higher. But the moral ideal, when reached, turns at once into a stepping-stone, a dead self; and the good formulates itself anew as an ideal in the future. So that morality is the sphere of discrepancy, and the moral life a progressive realization of a good that can never be complete. It would thus seem to be irreconcilably different from religion, which must, in some way or other, find the good to be present, actual, absolute, without shadow of change, or hint of limit or imperfection.
How, then, does the poet deal with the apparently fundamental discrepancy between religion, which postulates the absolute and universal supremacy of God, and morality, which postulates the absolute supremacy of man within the sphere of his own action, in so far as it is called right or wrong?
This difficulty, in one or other of its forms, is, perhaps, the most pressing in modern philosophy. It is the problem of the possibility of rising above the "Either, Or" of discrepant conceptions, to a position which grasps the alternatives together in a higher idea. It is at bottom the question, whether we can have a philosophy at all; or whether we must fall back once more into compromise, and the scepticism and despair which it always brings with it.
It is just because Browning does not compromise between the contending truths that he is instructive. The value of his solution of the problem corresponds accurately to the degree in which he holds both the absoluteness of God's presence in history, and the complete independence of the moral consciousness. He refused to degrade either God or man. In the name of religion, he refuses to say that "a purpose of reason is visible in the social and legal structures of mankind"--_only_ "on the whole "; and in the name of morality, he refuses to "assert the perfection of the actual world" as it is, and by implication to stultify all human endeavour. He knew the vice of compromising, and strove to hold both the truths in their fulness.
That he did not compromise God's love or power, and make it dominant merely "on the whole," leaving within His realm, which is universal, a limbo for the "lost," is evident to the most casual reader.
"This doctrine, which one healthy view of things, One sane sight of the general ordinance-- Nature,--and its particular object,--man,-- Which one mere eyecast at the character Of Who made these and gave man sense to boot, Had dissipated once and evermore,-- This doctrine I have dosed our flock withal.
Why? Because none believed it."[A]
[Footnote A: _The Inn Album_.]
"O'er-punished wrong grows right," Browning says. Hell is, for him, the consciousness of opportunities neglected, arrested growth; and even that, in turn, is the beginning of a better life.
"However near I stand in His regard, So much the nearer had I stood by steps Offered the feet which rashly spurned their help.
That I call Hell; why further punishment?"[B]
[Footnote B: _A Camel-Driver._]
Another ordinary view, according to which evil is self-destructive, and ends with the annihilation of its servant, he does not so decisively reject. At least, in a passage of wonderful poetic and philosophic power, which he puts into the mouth of Caponsacchi, he describes Guido as gradually lapsing towards the chaos, which is lower then created existence. He observes him
"Not to die so much as slide out of life, Pushed by the general horror and common hate Low, lower,--left o' the very ledge of things, I seem to see him catch convulsively, One by one at all honest forms of life, At reason, order, decency and use, To cramp him and get foothold by at least; And still they disengage them from _his_ clutch.
"And thus I see him slowly and surely edged Off all the table-land whence life upsprings Aspiring to be immortality."
There he loses him in the loneliness, silence and dusk--
"At the horizontal line, creation's verge.
From what just is to absolute nothingness."[A]
[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, 1911-1931.]