Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

Of practising with life."

There is no need of illustrating further the doctrine, so evident in Browning, that "love" is the ideal which in man's life makes through conflict for its own fulfilment. From what has been already said, it is abundantly plain that love is to him a divine element, which is at war with all that is lower in man and around him, and which by reaction against circumstance converts its own mere promise into fruition and fact. Through love man's nature reaches down to the permanent essence, amid the fleeting phenomena of the world, and is at one with what is first and last. As loving he ranks with God. No words are too strong to represent the intimacy of the relation. For, however limited in range and tainted with alien qualities human love may be, it is still "a pin-point rock of His boundless continent." It is not a semblance of the divine nature, an analogon, or verisimilitude, but the love of God himself in man: so that man is in this sense an incarnation of the divine. The Godhood in him constitutes him, so that he cannot become himself, or attain his own ideal or true nature, except by becoming perfect as God is perfect.

But the emphasis thus laid on the divine worth and dignity of human love is balanced by the stress which the poet places on the frailty and finitude of every other human attribute. Having elevated the ideal, he degrades the actual. Knowledge and the intellectual energy which produces it; art and the love of beauty from which it springs: every power and every gift, physical and spiritual, other than love, has in it the fatal flaw of being merely human. All these are so tainted with creatureship, so limited and conditioned, that it is hardly too much to say that they are, at their best, deceptive endowments. Thus, the life of man regarded as a whole is, in its last essence, a combination of utterly disparate elements. The distinction of the old moralists between divinity and dust; the absolute dualism of the old ascetics between flesh and spirit, sense and reason, find their accurate parallel in Browning's teachings. But he is himself no ascetic, and the line of distinction he draws does not, like theirs, pass between the flesh and the spirit. It rather cleaves man's spiritual nature into two portions, which are absolutely different from each other. A chasm divides the head from the heart, the intellect from the emotions, the moral and practical from the perceptive and reflective faculties. And it is this absolute cleavage that gives to Browning's teaching, both on ethics and religion, one of its most peculiar characteristics. By keeping it constantly in sight, we may hope to render intelligible to ourselves the solution he offers of the problem of evil, and of other fundamental difficulties of the life of man. For, while Browning's optimism has its original source in his conception of the unity of God and man, through the Godlike quality of love—even "the poorest love that was ever offered"—he finds himself unable to maintain it, except at the expense of degrading man's knowledge. Thus, his optimism and faith in God is finally based upon ignorance. If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of a Spinozist, on God's communication of His own substance to man; on the side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray expressions which break through his deliberate theory. While "love gains God at first leap,"

"Knowledge means

Ever-renewed assurance by defeat

That victory is somehow still to reach."^A

A: A Pillar at Sebzevar.

A radical flaw runs through our knowing faculty. Human knowledge is not only incomplete—no one can be so foolish as to deny that—but it is, as regarded by Browning, essentially inadequate to the nature of fact, and we must "distrust it, even when it seems demonstrable." No professed agnostic can condemn the human intellect more utterly than he does. He pushes the limitedness of human knowledge into a disqualification of it to reach truth at all; and makes the conditions according to which we know, or seem to know, into a deceiving necessity, which makes us know wrongly.

"To know of, think about,—