Strive and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”
Now this is fine doctrine, lofty, strenuous, stimulating. It appeals to the will, which is man’s central power. It proclaims the truth that virtue must be active in its essence though it may also be passive in its education, positive in its spirit and negative only by contrast.
But it is in the working out of this doctrine into an ethical system that Browning enters upon dangerous ground, and arrives at results which seem to obscure the clearness, and to threaten the stability of the moral order, by which alone, if the world’s greatest teachers have been right, the ultimate good of humanity can be attained. Here, it seems to me, his teaching, especially in its latter utterances, is often confused, turbulent, misleading. His light is mixed with darkness. He seems almost to say that it matters little which way we go, provided only we go.
He overlooks the deep truth that there is an activity of the soul in self-restraint as well as in self-assertion. It takes as much courage to dare not to do evil as it does to dare to do good. The hero is sometimes the man who stands still. Virtue is noblest when it is joined to virility. But virility alone is not virtue nor does it always lead to moral victory. Sometimes it leads straight towards moral paralysis, death, extinction. Browning fails to see this, because his method is dramatic and because he dramatizes through himself. He puts himself into this or the other character, and works himself out through it, preserving still in himself, though all unconsciously, the soul of something good. Thus he does not touch that peculiar deadening of spiritual power which is one result of the unrestrained following of impulse and passion. It is this defect in his vision of life that leads to the dubious and interrogatory moral of such a poem as The Statue and the Bust.
Browning values the individual so much that he lays all his emphasis upon the development of stronger passions and aspirations, the unfolding of a more vivid and intense personality, and has comparatively little stress to lay upon the larger thought of the progress of mankind in harmony and order. Indeed he poetizes so vigorously against the conventional judgments of society that he often seems to set himself against the moral sentiments on which those conventional judgments, however warped, ultimately rest. “Over and over again in Browning’s poetry,” says a penetrating critic, “we meet with this insistence on the value of moments of high excitement, of intense living, of full experience of pleasure, even though such moments be of the essence of evil and fruitful in all dark consequences.”
Take for example his treatment of love. He is right in saying “Love is best.” But is he right in admitting, even by inference, that love has a right to take its own way of realizing itself? Can love be at its best unless it is obedient to law? Does it not make its truest music when it keeps its place in the harmony of purity and peace and good living? Surely the wild and reckless view of love as its own law which seems to glimmer through the unconsumed smoke of Browning’s later poems, such as Fifine at the Fair, The Inn Album, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, needs correction by a true flash of insight like that which we find in two lines of One Word More:
“Dante, who loved well because he hated,
Hated wickedness that hinders loving.”
Browning was at times misled by a perilous philosophy into a position where the vital distinction between good and evil dissolved away in a cloud of unreality. In Ferishtah’s Fancies and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance, any one who has the patience to read them will find himself in a nebulous moral world. The supposed necessity of showing that evil is always a means to good tempts to the assertion that it has no other reality. Perhaps it is altogether an illusion, needed to sting us into conflict, but really non-existent. Perhaps it is only the shadow cast by the good,—or “the silence implying sound.” Perhaps it is good in disguise, not yet developed from the crawling worm into the creature with wings. After this fashion the whimsical dervish Ferishtah strews his beans upon the table.