Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life—the thing which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general outlook—more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his passion for humanity as humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let us take them for granted—let us examine man as a separate phenomenon, so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest, next to mankind, was art in all its branches—a correlative aspect, that is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in expression of our subtlest inward life. Man was, for him, the proper study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit—differing there from Byron, almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature." Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook; and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.
In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for flabbiness—there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker ways. After Pauline—rejected utterance of his green-sickness—the wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up, "as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed do all for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted, but no claim shall be formulated on either side. This is the true faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more axiomatically than Browning ever said it:
"He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"
—but Browning's whole existence announced that axiom, and triumphantly proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such was his marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!) conduct—what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far hinders it—when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for Browning, lay in loving greatly.
Thus, for example, it is notable that, except The Laboratory and Fifine at the Fair, none of his poems of men and women turns upon jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (in Fifine), even the departure from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be (she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be deep and true as well as brilliant.
For Browning, how love comes is not important. It may be by the high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our dearest memory.
"What is he buzzing in my ears?
'Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'
Ah, reverend sir, not I!"
And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man "used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again—the "suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it were, with the bottles on the bedside table.
"At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune."
Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the details. . . . She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,'"