Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher Part 17

[Footnote A: _In a Balcony_.]

"Let man's life be true," he adds, "and love's the truth of mine." To attain this truth, that is, to const.i.tute love into the inmost law of his being, and permanent source of all his activities, is the task of man. And Browning defines that love as

"Yearning to dispense, Each one its own amount of gain thro' its own mode Of practising with life."

There is no need of ill.u.s.trating 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 circ.u.mstance 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 G.o.d. 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 a.n.a.logon, or verisimilitude, but the love of G.o.d himself in man: so that man is in this sense an incarnation of the divine. The G.o.dhood in him const.i.tutes him, so that he cannot become himself, or attain his own ideal or true nature, except by becoming perfect as G.o.d 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 creatures.h.i.+p, 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, pa.s.s 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 G.o.d and man, through the G.o.dlike 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 G.o.d is finally based upon ignorance. If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of a Spinozist, on G.o.d'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 G.o.d at first leap,"

"Knowledge means Ever-renewed a.s.surance by defeat That victory is somehow still to reach."[A]

[Footnote 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,-- Is all man's sum of faculty effects When exercised on earth's least atom, Son!

What was, what is, what may such atom be?

No answer!"[B]

[Footnote B: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

Thought plays around facts, but never reaches them. Mind intervenes between itself and its objects, and throws its own shadow upon them; nor can it penetrate through that shadow, but deals with it as if it were reality, though it knows all the time that it is not.

This theory of knowledge, or rather of nescience or no-knowledge, he gives in _La Saisiaz_, _Ferishtah's Fancies, The Parleyings_, and _Asolando_--in all his later and more reflective poems, in fact. It must, I think, be held to be his deliberate and final view--and all the more so, because, by a peculiar process, he gets from it his defence of his ethical and religious faith.

In the first of these poems, Browning, while discussing the problem of immortality in a purely speculative spirit, and without stipulating, "Provided answer suits my hopes, not fears," gives a tolerably full account of that which must be regarded as the principles of his theory of knowledge. Its importance to his ethical doctrine justifies a somewhat exhaustive examination of it.

He finds himself to be "a midway point, between a cause before and an effect behind--both blanks." Within that narrow s.p.a.ce, of the self hemmed in by two unknowns, all experience is crammed. Out of that experience crowds all that he knows, and all that he misknows. There issues from experience--

"Conjecture manifold, But, as knowledge, this comes only--things may be as I behold, Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are; I myself am what I know not--ignorance which proves no bar To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, can recognize What to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest--surmise.

If my fellows are or are not, what may please them and what pain,-- Mere surmise: my own experience--that is knowledge once again."[A]

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

Experience, then, within which he (and every one else) acknowledges that all his knowledge is confined, yields him as certain facts--the consciousness that he is, but not what he is: the consciousness that he is pleased or pained by things about him, whose real nature is entirely hidden from him: and, as he tells us just before, the a.s.surance that G.o.d is the thing the self perceives outside itself,

"A force Actual e'er its own beginning, operative thro' its course, Unaffected by its end."[A]

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

But, even this knowledge, limited as it is to the bare existence of unknown ent.i.ties, has the further defect of being merely subjective. The "experience" from which he draws his conclusions, is his own in an exclusive sense. His "thinking thing" has, apparently, no elements in common with the "thinking things" of other selves. He ignores the fact that there may be general laws of thought, according to which his mind must act in order to be a mind. Intelligence seems to have no nature, and may be anything. All questions regarding "those apparent other mortals" are consequently unanswerable to the poet. "Knowledge stands on my experience"; and this "my" is totally unrelated to all other Mes.

"All outside its narrow hem, Free surmise may sport and welcome! Pleasures, pains affect mankind Just as they affect myself? Why, here's my neighbour colour-blind, Eyes like mine to all appearance: 'green as gra.s.s' do I affirm?

'Red as gra.s.s' he contradicts me: which employs the proper term?"[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

If there were only they two on earth as tenants, there would be no way of deciding between them; for, according to his argument, the truth is apparently decided by majority of opinions. Each individual, equipped with his own particular kind of senses and reason, gets his own particular experience, and draws his own particular conclusions from it.

If it be asked whether these conclusions are true or not, the only answer is that the question is absurd; for, under such conditions, there cannot be either truth or error. Every one's opinion is its own criterion. Each man is the measure of all things; "His own world for every mortal," as the poet puts it.

"To each mortal peradventure earth becomes a new machine, Pain and pleasure no more tally in our sense than red and green."[A]

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

The first result of this subjective view of knowledge is clearly enough seen by the poet. He is well aware that his convictions regarding the high matters of human destiny are valid only for himself.

"Only for myself I speak, Nowise dare to play the spokesman for my brothers strong and weak."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

Experience, as he interprets it, that is, present consciousness, "this moment's me and mine," is too narrow a basis for any universal or objective conclusion. So far as his own inner experience of pain and pleasure goes,

"All--for myself--seems ordered wise and well Inside it,--what reigns outside, who can tell?"[A]

[Footnote A: _Francis Furini_.]

But as to the actual world, he can have no opinion, nor, from the good and evil that apparently play around him, can he deduce either

"Praise or blame of its contriver, shown a n.i.g.g.ard or profuse In each good or evil issue."[B]

[Footnote B: _La Saisiaz_.]

The moral government of the world is a subject, regarding which we are doomed to absolute ignorance. A theory that it is ruled by the "prince of the power of the air" has just as much, and just as little, validity as the more ordinary view held by religious people. Who needs be told

"The s.p.a.ce Which yields thee knowledge--do its bounds embrace Well-willing and wise-working, each at height?

Enough: beyond thee lies the infinite-- Back to thy circ.u.mscription!"[C]

[Footnote C: _Francis Furini_.]

And our ignorance of G.o.d, and the world, and ourselves is matched by a similar ignorance regarding moral matters.

"Ignorance overwraps his moral sense, Winds him about, relaxing, as it wraps, So much and no more than lets through perhaps The murmured knowledge--' Ignorance exists.'"[D]

[Footnote D: _Ibid_.]

We cannot be certain even of the distinction and conflict of good and evil in the world. They, too, and the apparent choice between them to which man is continually constrained, may be mere illusions--phenomena of the individual consciousness. What remains, then? Nothing but to "wait."

"Take the joys and bear the sorrows--neither with extreme concern!

Living here means nescience simply: 'tis next life that helps to learn."[A]

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

It is hardly necessary to enter upon any detailed criticism of such a theory of knowledge as this, which is proffered by the poet. It is well known by all those who are in some degree acquainted with the history of philosophy--and it will be easily seen by all who have any critical ac.u.men--that it leads directly into absolute scepticism. And absolute scepticism is easily shown to be self-contradictory. For a theory of nescience, in condemning all knowledge and the faculty of knowledge, condemns itself. If nothing is true, or if nothing is known, then this theory itself is not true, or its truth cannot be known. And if this theory is true, then nothing is true; for this theory, like all others, is the product of a defective intelligence. In whatsoever way the matter is put, there is left no standing-ground for the human critic who condemns human thought. And he cannot well pretend to a footing in a sphere above man's, or below it. There is thus one presupposition which every one must make, if he is to propound any doctrine whatsoever, even if that doctrine be that no doctrine can be valid; it is the presupposition that knowledge is possible, and that truth can be known.

And this presupposition fills, for modern philosophy, the place of the _Cogito ergo sum_ of Descartes. It is the starting-point and criterion of all knowledge.

It is, at first sight, a somewhat difficult task to account for the fact, that so keen an intellect as the poet's did not perceive the conclusion to which his theory of knowledge so directly and necessarily leads. It is probable, however, that he never critically examined it, but simply accepted it as equivalent to the common doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, which, in some form or other, all the schools of philosophy adopt. But the main reason will be found to lie in the fact that knowledge was not, to Browning, its own criterion or end. The primary fact of his philosophy is that human life is a moral process.

His interest in the evolution of character was his deepest interest, as he informs us; he was an ethical teacher rather than a metaphysician. He is ever willing to asperse man's intelligence. But that man is a moral agent he will in no wise doubt. This is his