C: The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1375-1383.
The poet thus brings the natural world, the history of man, and the nature of God, within the limits of the same conception. The idea of love solves for Browning all the enigmas of human life and thought.
"The thing that seems
Mere misery, under human schemes,
Becomes, regarded by the light
Of love, as very near, or quite
As good a gift as joy before."A
A: Easter Day.
Taking Browning's work as a whole, it is scarcely possible to deny that this is at once the supreme motive of his art, and the principle on which his moral and religious doctrine rests. He is always strong and convincing when he is dealing with this theme. It was evidently his own deepest conviction, and it gave him the courage to face the evils of the world, and the power as an artist to "contrive his music from its moans." It plays, in his philosophy of life, the part that Reason fills for Hegel, or the Blind Will for Schopenhauer; and he is as fearless as they are in reducing all phenomena into forms of the activity of his first principle. Love not only gave him firm footing amid the wash and welter of the present world, where time spins fast, life fleets, and all is change, but it made him look forward with joy to "the immortal course"; for, to him, all the universe is love-woven. All life is but treading the "love-way," and no wanderer can finally lose it. "The way-faring men, though fools, shall not err therein."
Since love has such an important place in Browning's theory of life, it is necessary to see what he means by it. For love has had for different individuals, ages and nations, a very different significance; and almost every great poet has given it a different interpretation. And this is not unnatural. For love is a passion which, beginning with youth and the hey-day of the blood, expands with the expanding life, and takes new forms of beauty and goodness at every stage. And this is equally true, whether we speak of the individual or of the human race.