II.
His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God, Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile antagonists or antitheses. That their opposition is not ultimate, that evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which it could not securely rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he vindicated the "infinity" of God and the soul by banishing all the "finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. The infinite soul, imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] "which ever proving false still promise to be [true]," until death opens the prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being; and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence.
[124] Fifine at the Fair.
But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning's mental make which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by theological prepossessions, in check. His most intense consciousness, his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its ground. This "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for "intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood; Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced that "Time was done, Eternity begun."
Body and Time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved into illusion. His actual [pictures] of departed souls suggest a state very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust upon Matter and distended in Time, to the timeless Infinitude it had forgone. It does not escape from Time, but only passes on from the limited section of Time known as life, into another section, without limit, known as Eternity. And if it escapes from Body, at least Browning represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a garb of flesh. Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in another world, will find her unknown lover's leaf in her hand, and "remember, and understand."
And just as Matter and Time invade Browning's spiritual eternity, so his ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release. Two conceptions, in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of his thought, contend in Browning's mind. Now it is a state of emancipation from earthly limits,—when the "broken arcs" become "perfect rounds" and "evil" is transformed into "so much good more," and "reward and repose" succeed the "struggles"[125] by which they have been won. But at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a sudden transformation but a continuation of the slow educative process of earth in a succession of preliminary heavens before the consummate state is reached. "Progress," in short, was too deeply [ingrained] in Browning's conception of what was ultimately good, and therefore ultimately real, not to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by some casual backdoor of involuntary intuition. Even in that more gracious state "achievement lacked a gracious somewhat"[126] to his indomitable fighting instinct.
[125] Saul, xvii.
[126] One Word More.
"Soul resteth not, and mine must still advance,"
he had said in Pauline, and the soul that ceased to advance ceased for Browning, in his most habitual mood, to exist. The "infinity" of the soul was not so much a gift as a destiny, a power of hungering for ever after an ideal completeness which it was indefinitely to pursue and to approach, but not to reach. Far from having to await a remote emancipation to become completely itself, the soul's supremest life was in its hours of heroic stress, when it kept some dragon of unbelief quiet underfoot, like Michael,
"Who stands calm, just because he feels it writhe."
It was at this point that the athletic energy of Browning's nature told most palpably upon the complexion of his thought. It did not affect its substance, but it altered the bearing of the parts, giving added weight to all its mundane and positive elements. It gave value to every challenging obstruction akin to that which allured him to every angular and broken surface, to all the "evil" which balks our easy perception of "good."[127] [Above] all, by idealising effort, it created a new ethical end which every strenuous spirit could not merely strive after but fulfil, every day of its mortal life; and thus virtually transferred the focus of interest and importance from "the next world's reward and repose" to the vital "struggles in this."
[127] Bishop Blougram.
Browning's characteristic conception of the nature and destiny of man was thus not a compact and consistent system, but a group of intuitions nourished from widely different regions of soul and sense, and undergoing, like the face of a great actor, striking changes of expression without material change of feature under the changing incidence of stress and glow. The ultimate gist of his teaching was presented through the medium of conceptions proper to another school of thought, which, like a cryptogram, convey one meaning but express another, He had to work with categories like finite and infinite, which the atomic habits of his mind thrust into exclusive opposition; whereas the profoundest thing that he had to say was that the "infinite" has to be achieved in and through the finite, that just the most definitely outlined action, the most individual purpose, the most sharply expressive thought, the most intense and personal passion, are the points or saliency in life which most surely catch the radiance of eternity they break. The white light was "blank" until shattered by refraction; and Browning is less Browning when he glories in its unbroken purity than when he rejoices in the prism, whose obstruction alone
"shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white."[128]
We have now to watch Browning's efforts to interpret this profound and intimate persuasion of his in terms of the various conceptions at his disposal.[129]
[128] Deaf and Dumb.
[129] On the matter of this section cf. Mr A.C. Pigou's acute and lucid discussions, Browning as a Religious Teacher, ch. viii. and ix.