"Knowledge means
Ever renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach;
But love is victory, the prize itself."[140]
[140] Pillar of Sebzevir.
This aspect of Browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social consciousness in Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that the absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. In Love was concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion—
"Love is incompatible
With falsehood,—purifies, assimilates
All other passions to itself."[141]
[141] Colombe's Birthday.
And the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act [of] humanity the breath of love could quicken into pervading fire.[142] Love was only the most intense and potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are wont, in Browning, suddenly to break like a flame from the straw and dross of a brutish or sophisticated consciousness, confounding foresight and calculation, but giving endless stimulus to hope. Even in the contact with sin and sorrow Browning saw simply the touch of Earth from which Love, like Antaeus, sprang into fuller being; they were the "dread machinery" devised to evolve man's moral qualities, "to make him love in turn and be beloved."[143]
But with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence Love was for Browning, also, the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, "the energy of integration," as Myers has finely said, "which makes a cosmos of the sum of things," the element of permanence, of law. True, its harmony was of the kind which admits discord and eschews routine; its law that which is of eternity and not of yesterday; its stability that which is only assured and fortified by the chivalry that plucks a Pompilia, or an Alcestis, from their legal doom. The true anarchist, as he sometimes dared to hint, was the cold unreason of duty which, as in Bifurcation, keeps lovers meant for each other apart. It is by love that the soul solves the problem—so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello—of "fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying the needs of Time and Eternity at once;[144] for Love, belonging [equally] to both spheres, can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord:
"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray
And star for star, one richness where they mixed,
As this and that wing of an angel, fixed
Tumultuary splendours."
[144] Sordello, sub fin.