CHAPTER VII.

ETHICAL TEACHING.

HAT the world is on the whole a benefit to

TH

everyone is, according to Emerson, the only

reason to be given for its existence. It is the only reason that Browning gives, the only one that seems to him in the least convincing, and one that is confirmed not merely by every star that lights the heavens, but by every stone that blocks the pathway. What Tennyson called his "depressing optimism' is a part of the fabric of his thought, and he is never weary of explaining by the faith that is in him all that seems to be perverse and unsound and futile in our complex data of experience. His acquiescence in the existing order of things is militant: with Antoninus he inquires: "But that which does not make a man worse, how can it make a man's life worse?"

For his peculiar mind the "problem of evil" hardly exists, so plain does it look to him that ultimately "evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound," and that the temptations, struggles, and grim failures through which we pass are not even checks to our upward progress, but

Machinery just meant

To give thy soul its bent,

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

This feature of the teaching which is the confessed aim of the greater part of his poetry, stands out in strong relief, and most of his readers find in it encouragement and exhilaration. It is like a bright invincible armour with which to protect our vulnerable temperaments, attacked on every side by visible sins and horrors and mistakes in battalions. It suggests a vision of the Judgment day infinitely removed from that evoked by Milton's decree that whoever disobeys

Breaks union, and that day,

Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Int' utter darkness, deep ingulfed, his place
Ordained without redemption, without end.

It substitutes for the languor of despondency into which those oppressed by misfortune are inclined to fall, a zest of energy to climb the rugged places, and reach, by means of the only path open, heights of character and the joy of victory.

Optimism so definite and so strenuous almost necessarily implies belief in an absolutely powerful and loving Creator. At the end of Asolando, as in Paracelsus, Browning emphasises the sympathetic working of "power" and "love" in the plan of the universe; and repeatedly in the intervening poems we meet these same expressions used with the same significance. "God's love, in Browning's mind,"

Professor Royce explains, " does not mean merely or even mainly his tenderness or pity for us, or his desire to see us happy in his own arbitrarily appointed way, but his delight in our very oddities, in the very narrowness of our ardent individuality. It means his sharing of our very weaknesses, his sympathy with even our low views of himself, so long as all these things mean our growing like the plant in the mine that has never seen the light. If God views our lives in this way, then, and only then, does he love us. He must love us, at the very least, as the artist loves his creations, heartily, open-mindedly, joyously, not because we are all fashioned in one abstract image, but because in our manifoldness we all together reflect something of the wealth of life in which he abounds. This is the view of Aprile, never later abandoned by Browning."

Such an interpretation of God's love for man is too personal and concrete to exclude the idea of the Incarnation, and in many of Browning's poems-in Saul, and in Christmas Eve and Easter Day, and in Karshish-we get suggestions of the fundamental doctrine of Christianity. Browning did not, however, permit himself to argue the question, or even to impress it as strongly as he impresses his hope of immortality upon the reader. In La Saisiaz this hope is based first on the assumption that no divine intelligence would illogically destroy souls for which such elaborate processes of discipline had been prepared ; and, secondly, on the conviction born of passionate

desire that the dead shall meet and know each other; the conviction which Dante recorded and Browning echoed :

"Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there where that lady lives of whom my soul was enamoured."

This optimism of cheering and bracing belief has been called the defiance of facts, and certain facts the strong "fighter" of Prospice did indeed defy. Whatever the apparent depth of night and storm, or stress of battle, he

Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

Sleep to wake.

How unlike is this impetus of faith in a Godgoverned universe to the agnostic temper can be seen in no way more clearly than by comparing Browning's moral attitude with that of Matthew Arnold, his peer in brave interrogation of problems transcending codes and dogmas. In Arnold's philosophy, the impersonal sense of honour, the obligation of nobility, is so deeply rooted that neither creed nor hope is required for its support:

Hath man no second life ?-Pitch this one high!
Sits there no Judge in Heaven, our sins to see?-

More strictly then the inward judge obey!

Was Christ a man like us? Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!

In Rabbi ben Ezra Browning exuberantly expresses the overwhelming gratitude of a responsive nature toward a Creator who has conceived an earth so fair, a destiny so inspiring, opportunities so superbly difficult, such salutary afflictions, such stimulating rebuffs, such a resisting element to cleave on one's journey toward the happy goal where passion, malice, and delusion shall be destroyed for ever. The prayer of the Rabbi is the exultant recognition of the healthy soul that labour and striving are not merely endurable, but joyous, provided the mental and moral system is unimpaired by disease. The strong man delighteth to run in a race and a buoyant spirit has no quarrel with fate:

Gifts should prove their use

I own the past profuse

Of power each side, perfection every turn ;
Eyes, ears took in their dole,

Brain treasured up the whole ;

Should not the heart beat once, "How good to live and learn"?

Not once beat "Praise be thine !

I see the whole design,

I who saw power see now Love perfect, too:

Perfect I call thy plan:

Thanks that I was a man!

Maker, remake, complete,-I trust what thou shalt do!"

It is interesting to know that the Ben Ezra, or Ibn Ezra, of history, whom Browning chose in this case for his mouthpiece, actually held these views of life in the face of worldly unsuccess. "I strive to grow rich," he is reported to have said, "but the stars are