For him the power and the purpose which he beheld, “if no one else beheld,” ruling in Nature and in human life were alike Love. The last word on the subject comes to us direct, unmodified by any dramatic medium—
Power is Love—
······
From the first, Power was—I knew.
Life has made clear to me
That, strive but for closer view,
Love were as plain to see.
When see? Where there dawns a day,
If not on the homely earth,
Then yonder, worlds away,
Where the strange and new have birth,
And Power comes full in play.[101]
The hope of La Saisiaz has become the assurance of the Reverie.
This recognition of “the continuity of life” is the main inspiration, the invigorating principle of Browning’s creed. Cleon felt the necessity which Reason demonstrated on La Salève. Yet again, eleven years later, the author of Asolando can speak with absolute confidence of the certainty that death will afford no interruption to the energies, the activities, the progress of the soul’s life. That he who has here “never turned his back” will there still continue the forward march. It is, in other words, the faith of Pompilia which can look beyond the limitations of the present to the boundless developments of which this life, with its struggles and apparent failures, is but the beginning: and in the hour of defeat can hold that “No work begun shall ever pause for death.”
It is in the midst of the “bustle of man’s work-time” that “the unseen” is to be greeted. Is it too much to say that Browning, in the admonition of these closing lines of the Asolando Epilogue, makes confession of his belief in the Communion of Saints? But it is characteristic that the expression of faith (if such we may account it) is made in terms which admit of no distinctly formulated definition. The command comes as an inspiration to the seen and the unseen.
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry “Speed,—fight on, fare ever
There as here!”
The underlying confidence is beyond that of the reasoning of La Saisiaz, but not far in advance of the joyful spontaneity of the Prologue
Dying we live.
Fretless and free,
Soul, clap thy pinion!
····
Body shall cumber
Soul-flight no more.
And if—admitting that Browning, even when writing La Saisiaz, possessed the assurance thus expressed—we ask why he should have rested satisfied with the confession of faith contained in its concluding line, the answer must be—that the author of La Saisiaz is to be numbered amongst that small minority of religious teachers for whom it may be claimed that “they cannot fail to recognize that the formulas which express the Truth suggested by the facts of their Creed are themselves of necessity partial and provisional.” It is impossible to doubt that with him the consciousness was strongly present, that “Formulas do not exhaust the Truth”; that “the character and expression of Doctrine ... is relative to the age.”[102] That in proportion as satisfaction is found in formula does faith lose its life-giving power. Progress being the law of life, he would, therefore, enforce upon no man as binding formulae of which the comparative inelasticity might tend to fetter mental or spiritual development. On the contrary, he would have the seeker after Truth prepared to relinquish in due time definitions once essential, since threatening to become restrictive to growth. Before all things, is to be avoided the danger of resting on that which is not the Truth itself, but merely a necessary introduction to the Truth. Hence,
The help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.[103]