Over the ball of it, Peering and prying, How I see all of it, Life there, outlying! Roughness and smoothness, Shine and defilement, Grace and uncouthness: One reconcilement.
Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just the acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something beyond its own impulsive desires:
Let us not always say, "Spite of this flesh to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry, "All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!"
Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy; there is no tragedy, properly speaking, in Browning, for the reason that passion is to him essentially good. By sheer bravado of human emotion we justify our existence, nay--
We have to live alone to set forth well God's praise.
His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana so forcibly says, "is a blind and miscellaneous vehemence."
But if all the passions have their own validity, one of them in particular is the power that moves through all and renders them all good:
In my own heart love had not been made wise To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, To know even hate is but a mask of love's.
It is the power that reaches up from earth to heaven, and the divine nature is no more than a higher, more vehement manifestation of its energy:
For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless god.
And in the closing vision of _Saul_ this thought of the identity of man's love and God's love is uttered by David in a kind of delirious ecstasy:
'T is the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!
But there is no need to multiply quotations. The point is that in all Browning's rhapsody there is nowhere a hint of any break between the lower and the higher nature of man, or between the human and the celestial character. Not that his philosophy is pantheistic, for it is Hebraic in its vivid sense of God's distinct personality; but that man's love is itself divine, only lesser in degree. There is nothing that corresponds to the tremendous words of Beatrice to Dante when he meets her face to face in the Terrestrial Paradise: