In this sharp demarcation of man's being from God's, Browning never faltered. On the contrary, the individualising animus which there found expression impelled him to raise more formidable barriers about man, and to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall which cut off his view. In other words, the main current of Browning's thought [sets] strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge. At the outset he stands on the high à priori ground of Plato. Truth in its fulness abides in the soul, an "imprisoned splendour," which intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release. But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in Christmas-Eve man's mind was the image of God's, reflecting trace for trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled in a trackless ocean of ignorance. Thus for Browning, in differing moods and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, [presenting] truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his futile and illusive dreams.
[137] Paracelsus.
[138] Fifine, cxxiv.
These conflicting views were rooted in different elements of Browning's many-sided nature. His vivid intuition of his own self-consciousness formed a standing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, to which he stubbornly clung. When the optimism of the "Head" was discredited, passion-fraught instinct, under the name of the Heart, came to the rescue, and valiantly restored its authority. On the other hand, a variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give "illusion" a wider and wider scope. Sheer joy in battle had no small share. The immortal and infinite soul, projected among the shows of sense, could not be expected to do its part worthily if it saw through them: it had to believe its enemies real enemies, and its warfare a rational warfare; it had to accept time and place, and good and evil, as the things they seem. To have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in God was to be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble about the world as it is for man, like the risen Lazarus—
"witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much."
The mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phantoms to gaze upon eternal realities was himself the victim of the worst illusions; while the hero who [plunged] into that struggle was training his soul, and thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth. Thus Browning's passionate and reiterated insistence upon the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted in his inalienable faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict. The infinite soul realised itself most completely when it divested itself of the trappings of its infinity, and it worked out God's law most implicitly when it ignored God's point of view.
V.
Such a result could not be finally satisfying, and Browning's thought fastened with increasing predilection and exclusiveness upon one intense kind of vitality in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems to be transcended, and that complete immersion of the soul in a nature not its own appears not as self-abnegation but as self-fulfilment. He did not himself use this phraseology about Love; it is that of a school to which he, at no time, it would seem, made any conscious approach. But it is clear that he found in the mysterious union and transfusion of diverse being which takes place in Love, as Hegel found in the union of opposites, the clue to the nature of reality, the very core of the heart of life. He did not talk of the union of opposites, but of "infinitude wreaking itself upon the finite." God himself would have been less divine, and so, as God, less real, had he remained aloof in lonely infinity instead of uniting himself with all creation in that love which "[moves] the world and the other stars"; the "loving worm," to quote his pregnant saying once more, were diviner than a loveless God. We saw how his theology is double-faced between the pantheistic yearning to find God everywhere and the individualist's resolute maintenance of the autonomy of man. God's Love, poured through the world, inextricably blended with all its power and beauty, thrilled with answering rapture by all its joy, and striving to clasp every human soul, provided the nearest approach to a solution of that conflict which Browning's mechanical metaphysics permitted. One comprehends, then, the profound significance for him of the actual solution apparently presented by Christian theology. In one supreme, crucial example the union of God with man in consummate love had actually, according to Christian belief, taken place, and Browning probably uttered his own faith when he made St John declare that
"The acknowledgment of God in Christ
Acknowledged by thy reason solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it."[139]
[139] Death in the Desert. These lines, however "dramatic," mark with precision the extent, and the limits, of Browning's Christian faith. The evidence of his writings altogether confirms Mrs Orr's express statement that Christ was for him, from first to last, "a manifestation of divine love," by human form accessible to human love; but not the Redeemer of the orthodox creed.
For to acknowledge this was to recognise that love was divine, and that mankind at large, in virtue of their gift of love, shared in God's nature, finite as they were; that [whatever] clouds of intellectual illusion they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality as unassailable as God's own by the least glimmer of love. Whatever else is obscure or elusive in Browning, he never falters in proclaiming the absolute and flawless worth of love. The lover cannot, like the scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled; the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere act of loving he has his reward.