One near one is too far.
"A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen."B
B: By the Fireside.
The throwing down of the limits that wall a man within himself, the mingling of his own deepest interests with those of others, always marks love; be it love of man for maid, parent for child, or patriot for his country. It opens an outlet into the pure air of the world of objects, and enables man to escape from the stuffed and poisonous atmosphere of his narrow self. It is a streaming outwards of the inmost treasures of the spirit, a consecration of its best activities to the welfare of others. And when this is known to be the native quality and quintessence of love, no one can regard it anywhere, or at any time, as out of place. "Prize-lawful or prize-lawless" it is ever a flower, even though it grow, like the love of the hero of Turf and Towers, in slime. Lust, fleshly desire, which has been too often miscalled love, is its worst perversion. Love spends itself for another, and seeks satisfaction only in another's good. But last uses up others for its own worst purposes, wastes its object, and turns the current of life back inwards, into the slush and filth of selfish pleasure. The distinction between love and its perversion, which is impossible in the naive life of an animal, ought to be clear enough to all, and probably is. Nor should the sexual impulse in human beings be confused with fleshly desire, and treated as if it were merely natural, "the mere lust of life" common to all living things,—"that strive," as Spinoza put it, "to persevere in existing." For there is no purely natural impulse in man; all that he is, is transfused with spirit, whether he will or no. He cannot act as a mere animal, because he cannot leave his rational nature behind him. He cannot desire as an innocent brute desires: his desire is always love or lust. We have as little right to say that the wisdom of the sage is nothing but the purblind savagery of a Terra del Fuegian, as we have to assert that love is nothing but a sexual impulse. That impulse rather, when its potency is set free, will show itself, at first confusedly, but with more and more clearness as it expands, to be the yearning of soul for soul. It puts us "in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality; but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom." The height to which this passion lifts man, is just what makes possible the fall into a sensuality and excess of brutishness, in comparison with which animal life is a paradise of innocence.
If this is clearly recognized, many of the idle questions of casuistry that are sometimes raised regarding sexual love and marriage will cease to trouble. For these questions generally presuppose the lowest possible view of this passion. Browning shows us how to follow with serene security the pure light of the emotion of love, amidst all the confused lawlessness of lustful passion, and through all the intricacies of human character. Love, he thinks, is never illicit, never unwise, except when it is disloyal to itself; it never ruins, but always strives to enrich its object. Bacon quotes with approval a saying "That it is impossible to love, and to be wise." Browning asserts that it is impossible to love and not be wise. It is a power that, according to the Christian idea which the poet adopts, has infinite goodness for its source, and that, even in its meanest expression, is always feeling its way back to its origin, flowing again into the ocean whence it came.
So sparklingly pure is this passion that it could exorcise the evil and turn old to new, even in the case of Léonce Miranda. At least Browning, in this poem, strives to show that, being true love, though the love of an unclean man for an unclean woman, it was a power at war with the sordid elements of that sordid life. Love has always the same potency, flame is always flame,