Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher Part 8

But the matchless moral insight of the Pope leads to a different conclusion, and the poet again retrieves his faith. The Pope puts his first trust "in the suddenness of Guido's fate," and hopes that the truth may "be flashed out by the blow of death, and Guido see one instant and be saved." Nor is his trust vain. "The end comes," said Dr.

Westcott. "The ministers of death claim him. In his agony he summons every helper whom he has known or heard of--

"'Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--G.o.d--'

"and then the light breaks through the blackest gloom:

"'Pompilia! will you let them murder me?'

"In this supreme moment he has known what love is, and, knowing it, has begun to feel it. The cry, like the intercession of the rich man in Hades, is a promise of a far-off deliverance."

But even beyond this hope, which is the last for most men, the Pope had still another.

"Else I avert my face, nor follow him Into that sad obscure sequestered state Where G.o.d unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain: _which must not be_."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 2129-2132.]

This phrase, "which must not be," seems to me to carry in it the irrefragable conviction of the poet himself. The same faith in the future appears in the words in which Pompilia addresses her priest.

"O lover of my life, O soldier-saint, No work begun shall ever pause for death!

Love will be helpful to me more and more I' the coming course, the new path I must tread, My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that!"[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Seek--Pompilia_, 1786-1790.]

For the poet, the death of man brings no change in the purpose of G.o.d; nor does it, or aught else, fix a limit to His power, or stultify by failure the end implied in all G.o.d's work, nature no less than man himself--to wit, that every soul shall learn the lesson of goodness, and reflect the devine life in desire, intelligence, and will.

Equally emphatic, on some sides at least, is Browning's rejection of those compromises, with which the one-sided religious consciousness threatens the existence of the moral life. At times, indeed, he seems to teach, as man's best and highest, a pa.s.sive acquiescence in the divine benevolence; and he uses the dangerous metaphor of the clay and potter's wheel. _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ bids us feel

"Why time spins fast, why pa.s.sive lies our clay";

and his prayer is,

"So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Rabbi Ben Ezra_.]

But this att.i.tude of quiescent trust, which is so characteristic of religion, is known by the poet to be only a phase of man's best life. It is a temporary resting-place for the pilgrim: "the country of Beulah, whose air is very sweet and pleasant, where he may solace himself for a season." But, "the way lies directly through it," and the pilgrim, "being a little strengthened and better able to bear his sickness," has to go forward on his journey. Browning's characteristic doctrine on this matter is not acquiescence and resignation. "Leave G.o.d the way" has, in his view, its counterpart and condition--"Have you the will!"

"For a worm must turn If it would have its wrong observed by G.o.d."[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book--Pompilia,_ 1592-1593.]

The root of Browning's joy is in the need of progress towards an infinitely high goal. He rejoices

"that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled."

The bliss of endeavour, the infinite worth of the consciousness of failure, with its evidence of coming triumph, "the spark which disturbs our clod," these are the essence of his optimistic interpretation of human life, and also of his robust ethical doctrine.

"Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!

Be our joys three-parts pain!

Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Rabbi Ben Ezra._]

And he prolongs the battle beyond time, for the battle is the moral life and man's best, and therefore G.o.d's best in man. The struggle upward from the brute, may, indeed end with death. But this only means that man "has learned the uses of the flesh," and there are in him other potencies to evolve:

"Other heights in other lives, G.o.d willing."

Death is the summing up of this life's meaning, stored strength for new adventure.

"The future I may face now I have proved the past;" and, in view of it, Browning is

"Fearless and unperplexed When I wage battle next, What weapons to select, what armour to indue."

He is sure that it will be a battle, and a winning one. There is no limiting here of man's possibility, or confining of man's endeavour after goodness.

"Strive and Thrive! cry 'Speed,' fight on, fare ever There as here,"

are the last words which came from his pen.

Now, it may fairly be argued that these allusions to what death may mean, and what may lie beyond death, valuable as they may be as poetry, cannot help in philosophy. They do not solve the problem of the relation between morality and religion, but merely continue the antagonism between them into a life beyond, of which we have no experience. If the problem is to be solved, it must be solved as it is stated for us in the present world.

This objection is valid, so far as it goes. But Browning's treatment is valuable all the same, in so far as it indicates his unwillingness to limit or compromise the conflicting truths. He, by implication, rejects the view, ordinarily held without being examined, that the moral life is preliminary to the joy and rest of religion; a brief struggle, to be followed by a sudden lift out of it into some serene sphere, where man will lead an angel's life, which knows no imperfection and therefore no growth. He refuses to make morality an accident in man's history and "to put man in the place of G.o.d," by identifying the process with the ideal; he also refuses to make man's struggle, and G.o.d's achievement within man, mutually exclusive alternatives. As I shall show in the sequel, movement towards an ideal, actualizing but never actualized, is for the poet the very nature of man. And to speak about either G.o.d or man (or even the absolute philosopher) as "the last term of a development" has no meaning to him. We are not first moral and then religious, first struggling with evil and then conscious of overcoming it. G.o.d is with us in the battle, and the victory is in every blow.

But there lies a deeper difficulty than this in the way of reconciling morality and religion, or the presence of both G.o.d and man in human action. Morality, in so far as it is achievement, might conceivably be immediately identified with the process of an absolute good; but morality is always a consciousness of failure as well. Its very essence and verve is the conviction that the ideal is not actual. And the higher a man's spiritual attainment, the more impressive is his view of the evil of the world, and of the greatness of the work pressing to be done.

"Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold I say unto you, 'Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.'" It looks like blasphemy against morality to say "that G.o.d lives in eternity and has, therefore, plenty of time."

Morality destroys one's contentment with the world; and its language seems to be, "G.o.d is not here, but there; the kingdom is still to come."

Nor does it rest with condemning the world. It also finds flaws in its own highest achievement; so that we seem ever "To mock ourselves in all that's best of us." The beginning of the spiritual life seems just to consist in a consciousness of complete failure, and that consciousness ever grows deeper.

This is well ill.u.s.trated in Browning's account of Caponsacchi; from the time when Pompilia's smile first "glowed" upon him, and set him--

"Thinking how my life Had shaken under me--broken short indeed And showed the gap 'twixt what is, what should be-- And into what abysm the soul may slip"--[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book_--_Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, 485-488.]

up to the time when his pure love for her revealed to him something of the grandeur of goodness, and led him to define his ideal and also to express his despair.

"To have to do with nothing but the true, The good, the eternal--and these, not alone In the main current of the general life, But small experiences of every day, Concerns of the particular hearth and home: To learn not only by a comet's rush But a rose's birth--not by the grandeur, G.o.d, But the comfort, Christ. _All this_ how _far away_ Mere delectation, meet for a minute's dream!"[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid._ 2089-2097.]

So illimitably beyond his strength is such a life, that he finds himself like the drudging student who

"Trims his lamp, Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close, Dreams, 'Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!'-- Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes To the old solitary nothingness."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book_--_Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, 2098-2103.]