Oh! such a life as he resolved to live,
When he had learned it.
······
Sooner, he spurned it.[43]
We can almost detect the voice of Cleon in the urgency of the student’s contemporaries. “Live now or never,” since “time escapes.” In the reply lies the clue to the immensity of difference between the two positions—
Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.[44]
In the one instance, life being lived in the light of the “Forever,” it is possible to perceive with Pompilia that “No work begun shall ever pause for death”:[45] and life, whatever its trials and limitations, becomes to the believer in immortality very well worth the living. Thus the Christian conception of human life transcends the pagan as the designs of the Italian painters surpass in their suggestive inspiration the perfection of the more purely technical achievements of Greek art. The whole discussion is so peculiarly characteristic of Browning’s work that it seemed impossible to omit this comparison in the present connection, even though we shall be again obliged to revert to the Grammarian, and the theory exemplified in his history, in analyzing the defence of Bishop Blougram.
In passing, then, to the concluding section of Cleon’s reply to Protus, we are met by no exclusively Greek utterance; the voice is the voice of humanity unfettered by limitations of race or mental training.
“But,” sayest thou ...
... “What
Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die:
Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,
And Æschylus, because we read his plays!”
Why, if they live still, let them come and take
Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup,
Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive? (ll. 301-308.)
It is self-abnegation, carried to an extent rendering impossible the preservation of the race, which can look to happiness, or even to satisfaction, in the prospect of annihilation so long as posterity shall enjoy the fruits of a life of labour—which may express all its yearnings towards immortality in the petition:
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: ...
·······
So to live is heaven:
·······
This is life to come
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven ...
·······
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense.
Yet the mind which originated these nobly philosophic lines found it impossible to continue literary work when severed from the human comradeship and sympathy, criticism and inspiration to which the heart, even more than the brain, had grown accustomed. After the death of Mr. G. H. Lewes we are told—in the author’s own words—that “The writing seems all trivial stuff,” ... and that work is resorted to as “a means of saving the mind from imbecility.”[46] We shall find Browning himself refusing, in the hour of bereavement, to admit the satisfaction to be derived from a contemplation of the progress of the race through individual sacrifice and loss of personal identity; the satisfaction of the knowledge that
Somewhere new existence led by men and women new,
Possibly attains perfection coveted by me and you;
·········
[Whilst we] working ne’er shall know if work bear fruit.
Others reap and garner—
We, creative thought, must cease
In created word, thought’s echo, due to impulse long since sped!