Ever some grey that's white, and dun that's black,—
When shall we rest upon the thing itself,
Not on its semblance? Soul—too weak, forsooth,
To cope with fact—wants fiction everywhere!
Mine tires of falsehood: truth at any cost!"A
A: A Bean-Stripe.
The poet himself was burdened in no small degree with this vain desire for knowing the truth; and he recognized, too, that he was placed in a world which seems both real and beautiful, and so well worth knowing. Yet, it is this very failure of knowledge—a failure which, be it remembered, is complete and absolute, because, as he thinks, all facts must turn into phantoms by mere contact with our "relative intelligences,"—which he constitutes into the basis of his optimistic faith.
So high is the dignity and worth of the moral life to Browning, that no sacrifice is too great to secure it. And, indeed, if it were once clearly recognized that there is no good thing but goodness, nothing of supreme worth, except the realization of a loving will, then doubt, ignorance, and every other form of apparent evil would be fully justified—provided they were conditions whereby this highest good is attained. And, to Browning, ignorance was one of the conditions. And consequently, the dread pause in the music which agnosticism brings, is only "silence implying sound"; and the vain cry for truth, arising from the heart of the earth's best men, is only a discord moving towards resolution into a more rapturous harmony.
I do not stay here to inquire whether sure knowledge would really have this disastrous effect of destroying morality, or whether its failure does not rather imply the impossibility of a moral life. I return to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter, and which it is now possible to answer. That question was: How does Browning reconcile his hypothesis of universal love with the natural and moral evils existing in the world?