"Indulging every instinct of the soul
There, where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing."B
B: Ibid.
But as long as he is man, he has
"Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become."
In Paracelsus, Fifine at the Fair, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and many of his other poems, Browning deals with the problem of human life from the point of view of development. And it is this point of view, consistently held, which enables him to throw a new light on the whole subject of ethics. For, if man be veritably a being in process of evolution, if he be a permanent that always changes from earliest childhood to old age, if he be a living thing, a potency in process of actualization, then no fixed distinctions made with reference to him can be true. If, for instance, it be asked whether man is rational or irrational, free or bound, good or evil, God or brute, the true answer, if he is veritably a being moving from ignorance to knowledge, from wickedness to virtue, from bondage to freedom, is, that he is at once neither of these alternatives and both. All hard terms of division, when applied to a subject which grows, are untrue. If the life of man is a self-enriching process, if he is becoming good, and rational, and free, then at no point in the movement is it possible to pass fixed and definite judgments upon him. He must be estimated by his direction and momentum, by the whence and whither of his life. There is a sense in which man is from the first and always good, rational and free; for it is only by the exercise of reason and freedom that he exists as man. But there is also a sense in which he is none of these; for he is at the first only a potency not yet actualized. He is not rational, but becoming rational; not good, but becoming good; not free, but aspiring towards freedom. It is his prayer that "in His light, he may see light truly, and in His service find perfect freedom."
In this frank assumption of the point of view of development. Browning suggests the question whether the endless debate regarding freedom, and necessity, and other moral terms, may not spring from the fact, that both of the opposing schools of ethics are fundamentally unfaithful to the subject of their inquiry. They are treating a developing reality from an abstract point of view, and taking for granted,—what cannot be true of man, if he grows in intellectual power and moral goodness—that he is either good or evil, either rational or irrational, either free or bond, at every moment in the process. They are treating man from a static, instead of from a kinetic point of view, and forgetting that it is his business to acquire the moral and intellectual freedom, which he has potentially from the first—
"Some fitter way express
Heart's satisfaction that the Past indeed
Is past, gives way before Life's best and last,