VII
It's wiser being good than bad;
It's safer being meek than fierce:
It's fitter being sane than mad.
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.
The poem Rephan, the title of which was taken from the Book of Acts, has the same pleasant teaching we find in the play by Ludwig Fulda, called Schlaraffenland, published in 1899. In this drama, a boy, ragged, cold, and chronically hungry, falls asleep in a miserable room, and dreams that he is in a country of unalloyed delight. Broiled chickens fly slowly by, easy to clutch and devour: expensive wardrobes await his immediate pleasure, and every conceivable wish is instantly and completely fulfilled. For a short time the boy is in ecstasies of joy: then the absence of effort, of counterbalancing privation, begins to make his heart dull: finally the paradise becomes so intolerable that he wakes with a scream—wakes in a dark, cold room, wakes in rags with his belly empty: and wakes in rapture at finding the good old earth of struggle and toil around him.
Contentment is stagnation: development is happiness. The mystery of life, its uncertainty, its joys paid for by effort, these make human existence worth while.
Browning delights to prove that the popular longing for static happiness would result in misery: that the sharp sides of life sting us into the real joy of living. He loves to take popular proverbs, which sum up the unconscious pessimism of humanity, and then show how false they are to fact. For example, we hear every day the expression, "No rose without a thorn," and we know very well what is meant. In The Ring and the Book, Browning says:
So a thorn comes to the aid of and completes the rose.