Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher Part 19

"Think!

Could I see plain, be somehow certified All was illusion--evil far and wide Was good disguised,--why, out with one huge wipe Goes knowledge from me. Type needs ant.i.type: As night needs day, as s.h.i.+ne needs shade, so good Needs evil: how were pity understood Unless by pain? "[A]

[Footnote A: _Francis Furini_.]

Good and evil are relative to each other, and each is known only through its contrary.

"For me (Patience, beseech you!) Knowledge can but be Of good by knowledge of good's opposite-- Evil."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

The extinction of one of the terms would be the extinction of the other.

And, in a similar manner, clear knowledge that evil is illusion and that all things have their place in an infinite divine order would paralyze all moral effort, as well as stultify itself.

"Make evident that pain Permissibly masks pleasure--you abstain From out-stretch of the finger-tip that saves A drowning fly."[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

Certainty on either side, either that evil is evil for evermore, irredeemable and absolute, a drench of utter dark not illuminable by white; or that it is but mere show and semblance, which the good takes upon itself, would alike be ruinous to man. For both alternatives would render all striving folly. The right att.i.tude for man is that of ignorance, complete uncertainty, the equipoise of conflicting alternatives. He must take his stand on the contradiction. Hope he may have that all things work together for good. It is right that he should nourish the faith that the antagonism of evil with good in the world is only an illusion; but that faith must stop short of the complete conviction that knowledge would bring. When, therefore, the hypothesis of universal love is confronted with the evils of life, and we ask how it can be maintained in the face of the manifold miseries everywhere apparent, the poet answers, "You do not know, and cannot know, whether they are evils or not. Your knowledge remains at the surface of things.

You cannot fit them into their true place, or p.r.o.nounce upon their true purpose and character; for you see only a small arc of the complete circle of being. Wait till you see more, and, in the meantime, hope!"

"Why faith--but to lift the load, To leaven the lump, where lies Mind prostrate through knowledge owed To the loveless Power it tries To withstand, how vain!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Reverie_--_Asolando_.]

And, if we reply in turn, that this necessary ignorance leaves as little room for his scheme of love as it does for its opposite, he again answers: "Not so! I appeal from the intellect, which is detected as incompetent, to the higher court of the moral consciousness. And there I find the ignorance to be justified: for it is the instrument of a higher purpose, a means whereby what is best is gained, namely, _Love_."

"My curls were crowned In youth with knowledge,--off, alas, crown slipped Next moment, pushed by better knowledge still Which nowise proved more constant; gain, to-day, Was toppling loss to-morrow, lay at last --Knowledge, the golden?--lacquered ignorance!

As gain--mistrust it! Not as means to gain: Lacquer we learn by: ...

The prize is in the process: knowledge means Ever-renewed a.s.surance by defeat That victory is somehow still to reach, But love is victory, the prize itself: Love--trust to! Be rewarded for the trust In trust's mere act."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Pillar at Sebzevar_.]

Now, in order to complete our examination of this theory, we must follow the poet in his attempt to escape from the testimony of the intellect to that of the heart. In order to make the most of the latter, we find that Browning, especially in his last work, tends to withdraw his accusation of utter incompetence on the part of the intellect. He only tends to do so, it is true. He is tolerably consistent in a.s.serting that we know our own emotions and the phenomena of our own consciousness; but he is not consistent in his account of our knowledge, or ignorance, of external things. On the whole, he a.s.serts that we know nothing of them. But in _Asolando_ he seems to imply that the evidence of a loveless power in the world, permitting evil, is irresistible.[A] To say the least, the testimony of the intellect, such as it is, is more clear and convincing with regard to evil than it is with regard to good. Within the sphere of phenomena, to which the intellect is confined, there seems to be, instead of a benevolent purpose, a world ruled by a power indifferent to the triumph of evil over good, and either "loveless" or unintelligent.

[Footnote A: _See pa.s.sage just quoted._]

"Life, from birth to death, Means--either looking back on harm escaped, Or looking forward to that harm's return With tenfold power of harming."[B]

[Footnote B: _A Bean-Stripe._]

And it is not possible for man to contravene this evidence of faults and omissions: for, in doing so, he would remove the facts in reaction against which his moral nature becomes active. What proof is there, then, that the universal love is no mere dream? None! from the side of the intellect, answers the poet. Man, who has the will to remove the ills of life,

"Stop change, avert decay, Fix life fast, banish death,"[C]

[Footnote C: _Reverie_--_Asolando_.]

has not the power to effect his will; while the Power, whose limitlessness he recognizes everywhere around him, merely maintains the world in its remorseless course, and puts forth no helping hand when good is p.r.o.ne and evil triumphant. "G.o.d does nothing."

"'No sign,'--groaned he,-- No stirring of G.o.d's finger to denote He wills that right should have supremacy On earth, not wrong! How helpful could we quote But one poor instance when He interposed Promptly and surely and beyond mistake Between oppression and its victim, closed Accounts with sin for once, and bade us wake From our long dream that justice bears no sword, Or else forgets whereto its sharpness serves.'"[A]

[Footnote A: _Bernard de Mandeville._]

But he tells us in his later poems, that there is no answer vouchsafed to man's cry to the Power, that it should reveal

"What heals all harm, Nay, hinders the harm at first, Saves earth."[B]

[Footnote B: _Reverie--Asolando._]

And yet, so far as man can see, there were no bar to the remedy, if "G.o.d's all-mercy" did really "mate His all-potency."

"How easy it seems,--to sense Like man's--if somehow met Power with its match--immense Love, limitless, unbeset By hindrance on every side!"[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

But that love nowhere makes itself evident. "Power," we recognize,

"finds nought too hard, Fulfilling itself all ways, Unchecked, unchanged; while barred, Baffled, what good began Ends evil on every side."[A]

[Footnote A: _Reverie--Asolando_.]

Thus, the conclusion to which knowledge inevitably leads us is that mere power rules.

"No more than the pa.s.sive clay Disputes the potter's act, Could the whelmed mind disobey Knowledge, the cataract."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

But if the intellect is thus overwhelmed, so as to be almost pa.s.sive to the pessimistic conclusion borne in upon it by "resistless fact," the heart of man is made of another mould. It revolts against the conclusion of the intellect, and climbs

"Through turbidity all between, From the known to the unknown here, Heaven's 'Shall be,' from earth's 'Has been.'"[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

It grasps a fact beyond the reach of knowledge, namely, the possibility, or even the certainty, that "power is love." At present there is no substantiating by knowledge the testimony of the heart; and man has no better anchorage for his optimism than faith. But the closer view will come, when even our life on earth will be seen to have within it the working of love, no less manifest than that of power.

"When see? When there dawns a day, If not on the homely earth, Then, yonder, worlds away, Where the strange and new have birth, And Power comes full in play."[D]

[Footnote D: _Ibid_.]

Now, what is this evidence of the heart, which is sufficiently cogent and valid to counterpoise that of the mind; and which gives to "faith,"

or "hope," a firm foothold in the very face of the opposing "resistless"

testimony of knowledge?

Within our experience, to which the poet knows we are entirely confined, there is a fact, the significance of which we have not as yet examined.

For, plain and irresistible as is the evidence of evil, so plain and constant is man's recognition of it as evil, and his desire to annul it.

If man's mind is made to acknowledge evil, his moral nature is made so as to revolt against it.

"Man's heart is _made_ to judge Pain deserved nowhere by the common flesh Our birth-right--bad and good deserve alike No pain, to human apprehension."[A]

[Footnote A: _Mihrab Shah_--_Ferishtah's Fancies_.]