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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.
 

But even to his favourite disciple the sage is unable so to impart the secret that Tsaddik's mind shall really embrace it.

The spirit of the saint of Israel is also the spirit of that wise Dervish of Browning's invention (1884), the Persian Ferishtah. The volume is frankly didactic, and Browning, as becomes a master who would make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures. In reading Ferishtah's Fancies we might suppose that we were in the Interpreter's House, and that the Interpreter himself was pointing a moral with the robin that has a spider in his mouth, or the hen walking in a fourfold method towards her chickens. The discourses of the Dervish are in the main theological or philosophical; the lyrics, which are interposed between the discourses or discussions, are amatory. In Persian Poetry much that at first sight might be taken for amatory has in its inner meaning a mystical theological sense. Browning reverses the order of such poetry; he gives us first his doctrine concerning life or God, and gives it clothed in a parable; then in a lyric the subject is retracted into the sphere of human affections, and the truth of theology condenses itself into a corresponding truth respecting the love of man and woman.

Throughout the series of poems it is not a Persian Dervish who is the speaker and teacher; we hear the authentic voice of the Dervish born in Camberwell in the year 1812—Ferishtah-Browning. The doctrine set forth is the doctrine of Browning; the manner of speech is the manner of the poet. The illustrations and imagery are often Oriental; the ideas are those of a Western thinker; yet no sense of discordance is produced. The parable of the starving ravens fed by an eagle serves happily as an induction; let us become not waiters on providence, but workers with providence; and to feed hungry souls is even more needful than to feed hungry bodies:

 
I starve in soul:
So may mankind: and since men congregate
In towns, not woods—to Ispahan forthwith!
 

Such is the lesson of energetic charity. And the lesson for the acceptance of providential gifts is that put in words by the poor melon-seller, once the Shah's Prime Minister—words spoken in the spirit of the afflicted Job—"Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?"¹⁴³ Or rather—Shall not our hearts even in the midst of evil be lifted up in gratitude at the remembrance of the good which we have received? Browning proceeds, under a transparent veil of Oriental fable, to consider the story of the life of Christ. Do we believe in that tale of wonder in the full sense of the word belief? The more it really concerns us, the more exacting grow our demands for evidence of its truth; an otiose assent is easy, but this has none of the potency of genuine conviction. And, after all, intellectual assent is of little importance compared with that love for the Divine which may co-exist as truly with denial as with assent. The Family sets forth, through a parable, the wisdom of accepting and living in our human views of things transcendent. Why pray to God at all? Why not rather accept His will and His Providential disposition of our lives as absolutely wise, and right? That, Browning replies, may be the way of the angels. We are men, and it is God's will that we should feel and think as men:

 
Be man and nothing more—
Man who, as man conceiving, hopes and fears,
And craves and deprecates, and loves and loathes,
And bids God help him, till death touch his eyes
And show God granted most, denying all.
 

The same spirit of acceptance of our intellectual and moral limitations is applied in The Sun to the defence of anthropomorphic religion. Our spirit, burdened with the good gifts of life, looks upward for relief in gratitude and praise; but we can praise and thank only One who is righteous and loving, as we conceive righteousness and love. Let us not strive to pass beyond these human feelings and conceptions. Perhaps they are wholly remote from the unknown reality. They are none the less the conceptions proper to humanity; we have no capacities with which to correct them; let us hold fast by our human best, and preserve, as the preacher very correctly expressed it, "the integrity of our anthropomorphism." The "magnified non-natural man," and "the three Lord Shaftesburys" of Matthew Arnold's irony are regarded with no fine scorn by the intellect of Browning. His early Christian faith has expanded and taken the non-historical form of a Humanitarian Theism, courageously accepted, not as a complete account of the Unknowable, but as the best provisional conception which we are competent to form. This theism involves rather than displaces the truth shadowed forth in the life of Christ. The crudest theism would seem to him far more reasonable than to direct the religious emotions towards a "stream of tendency."

The presence of evil in a world created and governed by One all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving, is justified in Mirhab Shah as a necessity of our education. How shall love be called forth unless there be the possibility of self-sacrifice? How shall our human sympathy be perfected unless there be pain? What room is there for thanks to God or love of man if earth be the scene of such a blank monotony of well-being as may be found in the star Rephan? But let us not call evil good, or think pain in itself a gain. God may see that evil is null, and that pain is gain; for us the human view, the human feeling must suffice. This justification of pain as a needful part of an education is, however, inapplicable to never-ending retributive punishment. Such a theological horror Browning rejects with a hearty indignation, qualified only by a humorous contempt, in his apologue of A Camel-driver; her driver, if the camel bites, will with good cause thwack, and so instruct the brute that mouths should munch not bite; he will not, six months afterwards, thrust red-hot prongs into the soft of her flesh to hiss there. And God has the advantage over the driver of seeing into the camel's brain and of knowing precisely what moved the creature to offend. The poem which follows is directed against asceticism. Self-sacrifice for the sake of our fellows is indeed "joy beyond joy." As to the rest—the question is not whether we fast or feast, but whether, fasting or feasting, we do our day's work for the Master. If we would supply joy to our fellows, it is needful that we should first know joy ourselves—

 
Therefore, desire joy and thank God for it!
 

Browning's argument is not profound, and could adroitly be turned against himself; but his temperament would survive his argument; his capacity for manifold pleasures was great, and he not only valued these as good in themselves, but turned them to admirable uses. A feast of the senses was to him as spiritually precious as a fast might be to one who only by fasting could attain to higher joys than those of sense. And this, he would maintain, is a better condition for a human being than that which renders expedient the plucking out of an eye, the cutting off of a hand. Joy for Browning means praise and gratitude; and in recognising the occasions for such praise and thanks let us not wind ourselves too high. Let us praise God for the little things that are so considerately fitted to our little human wants and desires. The morning-stars will sing together without our help; if we must choose our moment for a Te Deum, let it be when we have enjoyed our plate of cherries. The glorious lamp in the Shah's pavilion lightens other eyes than mine; but to think that the Shah's goodness has provided slippers for my feet in my own small chamber, and of the very colour that I most affect! Nor, in returning thanks, should it cause us trouble that our best thanks are poor, or even that they are mingled with an alloy of earthly regards, "mere man's motives—"

 
Alas, Friend, what was free from this alloy,—
Some smatch thereof,—in best and purest love
Preferred thy earthly father? Dust thou art,
Dust shall be to the end.
 

Our little human pleasures—do they seem unworthy to meet the eye of God? That is a question put by distrust and spiritual pride. God gives each of us His little plot, within which each of us is master. The question is not what compost, what manure, makes fruitful the soil; we need not report to the Lord of the soil the history of our manures; let us treat the ground as seems best, if only we bring sacks to His granary in autumn. Nay, do not I also tickle the palate of my ass with a thistle-bunch, so heartening him to do his work?

In A Pillar at Sebzevah, Ferishtah-Browning confronts the objection that he has deposed knowledge and degraded humanity to the rank of an ass whose highest attainment is to love—what? "Husked lupines, and belike the feeder's self." The Dervish declares without shrinking the faith that is in him:—

 
"Friend," quoth Ferishtah, "all I seem to know
Is—I know nothing save that love I can
Boundlessly, endlessly."
 

If there be knowledge it shall vanish away; but charity never faileth. As for knowledge, the prize is in the process; as gain we must mistrust it, not as a road to gain:—

 
Knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach,
But love is victory, the prize itself.
 

Grasping at the sun, a child captures an orange: what if he were to scorn his capture and refuse to suck its juice? The curse of life is this—that every supposed accession to knowledge, every novel theory, is accepted as a complete solution of the whole problem, while every pleasure is despised as transitory or insubstantial. In truth the drop of water found in the desert sand is infinitely precious; the mirage is only a mirage. Browning, who in this volume puts forth his own doctrine of theism, his justification of prayer, his belief in a superintending providence, his explanation of the presence of evil in the world, is, of course, no Pyrrhonist. He profoundly distrusts the capacity of the intellect, acting as a pure organ of speculation, to unriddle the mysteries of existence; he maintains, on the other hand, that knowledge sufficient for the conduct of our lives is involved in the simple experiences of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. In reality Browning's attitude towards truth approaches more nearly what has now begun to style itself "Pragmatism" than it approaches Pyrrhonism; but philosophers whose joy is to beat the air may find that it is condemnatory of their methods.

In his distrust of metaphysical speculation and in regarding the affections as superior to the intellect, Browning as a teacher has something in common with Comte; but there is perhaps no creed so alien to his nature as the creed of Positivism. The last of Ferishtah's discourses is concerned with the proportion which happiness bears to pain in the average life of man, or rather—for Browning is nothing if he is not individualistic—in the life of each man as an individual. The conclusion arrived at is that no "bean-stripe"—each bean, white or black, standing for a day—is wholly black, and that the more extended is our field of vision the more is the general aspect of the "bean-stripe" of a colour intermediate between the extremes of darkness and of light. Before the poem closes, Browning turns aside to consider the Positivist position. Why give our thanks and praise for all the good things of life to God, whose existence is an inference of the heart derived from its own need of rendering gratitude to some Being like ourselves? Are not these good things the gifts of the race, of Humanity, and its worthies who have preceded us and who at the present moment constitute our environment of loving help? Ferishtah's reply, which is far from conclusive, must be regarded as no discussion of the subject but the utterance of an isolated thought. Praise rendered to Humanity and the heroes of the race simply reverts to the giver of the praise; his own perceptions of what is praiseworthy alone render praise possible; he must first of all thank and praise the giver of such perceptions—God. It is strange that Browning should fail to recognise the fact that the Positivist would immediately trace the power of moral perception to the energies of Humanity in its upward progress from primitive savagery to our present state of imperfect development.

It has been necessary to transcribe in a reduced form the teaching of Ferishtah, for this is the clearest record left by Browning of his own beliefs on the most important of all subjects, this is an essential part of his criticism of life, and at the same time it is little less than a passage of autobiography. The poems are admirable in their vigour, their humour, their seriousness, their felicity of imagery. Yet the wisdom of Ferishtah's Fancies is an old man's wisdom; we perceive in it the inner life, as Baxter puts it, in speaking of changes wrought by his elder years, quitting the leaves and branches and drawing down to the root. But when in prologue or epilogue to this volume or that Browning touches upon the great happiness, the great sorrow of his own life, he is always young. Here the lyrical epilogue is inspired by a noble enthusiasm, and closes with a surprise of beauty. What if all his happy faith in the purpose of life, and the Divine presence through all its course, were but a reflex from the private and personal love that had once been his and was still above and around him? Such a doubt contained its own refutation:

 
Only, at heart's utmost joy and triumph, terror
Sudden turns the blood to ice: a chill wind disencharms
All the late enchantment! What if all be error—
If the halo irised round my head were, Love, thine arms?
 

All the more, if this were so, must the speaker's heart turn Godwards in gratitude. The whole design of the volume with its theological parables and its beautiful lyrics of human love implies that there is a correspondency between the truths of religion and the truths of the passion of love between man and woman.

Chapter XVII
Closing Works and Days

Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, published in 1887, Browning's last volume but one, betrays not the slightest decline in his mental vigour. It suffers, however, from the fact that several of the "Parleyings" are discussions—emotional, it is true, as well as intellectual—of somewhat abstract themes, that these discussions are often prolonged beyond what the subject requires, and that the "People of Importance" are in some instances not men and women, but mere sounding-boards to throw out Browning's own voice. When certain aspects or principles of art are considered in Fra Lippo Lippi, before us stands Brother Lippo himself, a living, breathing figure, on whom our interest must needs fasten whatever may be the subject of his discourse. There is of course a propriety in connecting a debate on evil in the world as a means to good with the name of the author of "The Fable of the Bees," there is no impropriety in connecting a study of the philosophy of music with the name of Charles Avison the Newcastle organist; but we do not make acquaintance through the parleyings with either Avison or Mandeville. This objection does not apply to all the poems. The parleying With Daniel Bartoli is a story of love and loss, admirable in its presentation of the heroine and the unheroic hero. We are interested in Francis Furini, "good priest, good man, good painter," before he begins to preach his somewhat portentous sermon on evolution. And in the case of Christopher Smart, the question why once and only once he was a divinely inspired singer is the question which most directly leads to a disclosure of his character as a poet. The volume, however, as a whole, while Browning's energy never flags, has a larger proportion than its predecessors of what he himself terms "mere grey argument"; and, as if to compensate this, it is remarkable for sudden outbursts of imagination and passion, as if these repressed for a time had carried away the dykes and dams, and went on their career in full flood. The description of the glory of sunrise in Bernard de Mandeville, the description of the Chapel in Christopher Smart, the praise of a woman's beauty in Francis Furini, the amazing succession of mythological tours de force in Gerard de Lairesse, the delightful picture of the blackcap tugging at his prize, a scrap of rag on the garden wall, amid the falling snow of March, in the opening of Charles Avison—these are sufficient evidence of the abounding force of Browning's genius as a poet at a date when he had passed the three score years and ten by half an added decade. Nor would we willingly forget that magical lyric of life and death, of the tulip beds and the daisied grave-mound—"Dance, yellows and whites and reds"—which closes Gerard de Lairesse. Wordsworth's daffodils are hardly a more jocund company than Browning's wind-tossed tulips; he accepts their gladness, and yet the starved grass and daisies are more to him than these:

 
Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows
On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows:
Dance you, reds and whites and yellows!
 

Of failure in intellectual or imaginative force the Parleyings show no symptom. But the vigour of Browning's will did a certain wrong to his other powers. He did not wait, as in early days, for the genuine casual inspirations of pleasure. He made it his task to work out all that was in him. And what comes to a writer of genius is better than what is laboriously sought. We may gather wood for the altar, but the true fire must descend from heaven. The speed and excitement kindled by one's own exertions are very different from the varying stress of a wind that bears one onward without the thump and rattle of the engine-room. It would have been a gain if Browning's indomitable steam-engines had occasionally ceased to ply, and he had been compelled to wait for a propitious breeze.

Philosophy, Love, Poetry, Politics, Painting (the nude, with a discourse concerning evolution), Painting again (the modern versus the mythological in art), Music, and, if we add the epilogue, the Invention of Printing—these are the successive themes of Browning's Parleyings, and they are important and interesting themes. Unfortunately the method of discussion is neither sufficiently abstract for the lucid exposition of ideas, nor sufficiently concrete for the pure communication of poetic pleasure. Abstract and concrete meet and take hands or jostle, too much as skeleton and lady might in a danse Macabre. The spirit of acquiescence—strenuous not indolent acquiescence—with our intellectual limitations is constantly present. Does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun? Well, did not Prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service? Is the fire a little thing beside the immensity in the heavens above us?

 
Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed—
Which, in the large, who sees to bless?
 

Or again—it is Christopher Smart, who triumphs for once so magnificently in his "Song to David," and fails, with all his contemporaries, in the poetry of ambitious instruction. And why? Because for once he was content with the first step that poetry should take—to confer enjoyment, leaving instruction—the fruit of enjoyment—to come later. True learning teaches through love and delight, not through pretentious didactics,—a truth forgotten by the whole tribe of eighteenth century versifiers. And once more—does Francis Furini paint the naked body in all its beauty? Right! let him study precisely this divine thing the body, before he looks upward; let him retire from the infinite into his proper circumscription:

 
Only by looking low, ere looking high,
Comes penetration of the mystery.
 

So also with our view of the mingled good and evil in the world; perhaps to some transcendent vision evil may wholly disappear; perhaps we shall ourselves make this discovery as we look back upon the life on earth. Meanwhile it is as men that we must see things, and even if evil be an illusion (as Browning trusts), it is a needful illusion in our educational process, since through evil we become aware of good. Thus at every point Browning accepts here, as in Ferishtah's Fancies, a limited provisional knowledge as sufficient for our present needs, with a sustaining hope which extends into the future. On the other hand, if your affair is not the sincerity of thought and feeling, but a design to rule the mass of men for your own advantage, you must act in a different spirit. Do not, in the manner of Bubb Doddington, attempt to impose upon your fellows with the obvious and worn-out pretence that all you do has been undertaken on their behalf and in their interests. There is a newer and a better trick than that. Assume the supernatural; have a "mission "; have a "message"; be earnest, with all the authority of a divine purpose. Play boldly this new card of statesmanship, and you may have from time to time as many inconsistent missions and messages as ambitious statecraft can suggest to you. Through all your gyrations the admiring crowd will still stand agape. Was Browning's irony of a cynical philosophy of statesmanship suggested by his view of the procedure of a politician, whom he had once admired, whose talents he still recognised, but from whom he now turned away with indignant aversion? However this may have been, his poems which touch on politics do not imply that respect for the people thinking, feeling, and moving, in masses which is a common profession with the liberal leaders of the platform. Browning's liberalism was a form of his individualism; he, like Shakespeare, had a sympathy with the wants and affections of the humblest human lives; and, like Shakespeare, he thought that foolish or incompetent heads are often conjoined with hearts that in a high degree deserve respect.

Asolando, the last volume of a long array, was published in London on the last day of Browning's life. As he lay dying in Venice, telegraphed tidings reached his son of the eager demand for copies made in anticipation of its appearance and of the instant and appreciative reviews; Browning heard the report with a quiet gratification. It is happy when praise in departing is justified, and this was the case with a collection of poems which to some readers seemed like a revival of the poetry of its author's best years of early and mid manhood. Asolando is, however, in the main distinctly an autumn gathering, a handful of flowers and fruit belonging to the Indian summer of his genius. The Prologue is a confession, like that of Wordsworth's great Ode, that a glory has passed away from the earth. When first he set eyes on Asolo, some fifty years previously, the splendour of Italian landscape seemed that of

 
Terror with beauty, like the Bush
Burning yet unconsumed
 

Now, while the beauty remains, the flame is extinct—"the Bush is bare." Browning finds his consolation in the belief that he has come nearer to the realities of earth by discarding fancies, and that his wonder and awe are more wisely directed towards the transcendent God than towards His creatures. But in truth what the mind confers is a fact and no fancy; the loss of what Browning calls the "soul's iris-bow" is the loss of a substantial, a divine possession. The Epilogue has in it a certain energy, but the thews are those of an old athlete, and through the energy we are conscious of the strain. The speaker pitches his voice high, as if it could not otherwise be heard at a distance. The Reverie, a speculation on the time when Power will show itself fully and therefore be known as love, has some of that vigorous intellectual garrulity which had grown on Browning during the years when unhappily for his poetry he came to be regarded chiefly as a prophet and a sage. An old man rightly values the truths which experience has made real for him; he repeats them again and again, for they constitute the best gift he can offer to his disciples; but his utterances are not always directly inspired; they are sometimes faintly echoed from an earlier inspiration. In the Reverie, while accepting our limitations of knowledge, which he can term ignorance in its contrast with the vast unknown, Browning discovers in the moral consciousness of man a prophecy of the ultimate triumph of good over what we think of as evil, a prophecy of the final reconciliation of love with power. And among the laws of life is not merely submission but aspiration:

 
Life is—to wake not sleep,
Rise and not rest, but press
From earth's level where blindly creep
Things perfected, more or less,
To the heaven's height, far and steep,
Where amid what strifes and storms
May wait the adventurous quest,
Power is love.
 

The voice of the poet of Paracelsus and of Rabbi Ben Ezra is still audible in this latest of his prophesyings. And therefore he welcomes earth in his Rephan, earth, with its whole array of failures and despairs, as the fit training-ground for man. Better its trials and losses and crosses than a sterile uniformity of happiness; better its strife than rest in any golden mean of excellence. Nor are its intellectual errors and illusions without their educational value. It is better, as Development, with its recollections of Browning's childhood, assures us that the boy should believe in Troy siege, and the combats of Hector and Achilles, as veritable facts of history, than bend his brow over Wolfs Prolegomena or perplex his brain with moral philosophies to grapple with which his mind is not yet competent. By and by his illusions will disappear while their gains will remain.

The general impression left by Asolando is that of intellectual and imaginative vigour. The series of Bad Dreams is very striking and original in both pictorial and passionate power. Dubiety is a poem of the Indian Summer, but it has the beauty, with a touch of the pathos, proper to the time. The love songs are rather songs of praise than of passion, but they are beautiful songs of praise, and that entitled Speculative, which is frankly a poem of old age, has in it the genuine passion of memory. White Witchcraft does in truth revive the manner of earlier volumes. The

 
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn
 

told of in a poem of 1855 is present, with a touch of humour to guard it from its own excess in the admirable Inapprehensiveness. The speaker who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he gallantly accepts his humble rôle in the tragi-comedy of foiled passion:—

 
"No, the book
Which noticed how the wall-growths wave," said she,
"Was not by Ruskin."
I said "Vernon Lee."
 

And in the uttered "Vernon Lee" lies a vast renunciation half comical and wholly tragic. There are jests in the volume, and these, with the exception of Ponte dell' Angelo, have the merit of brevity; they buzz swiftly in and out, and do not wind about us with the terror of voluminous coils, as sometimes happens when Browning is in his mood of mirth. There are stories, and they are told with spirit and with skill. In Beatrice Signorini the story-teller does justice to the honest jealousy of a wife and to the honest love of a husband who returns from the wanderings of his imagination to the frank fidelity of his heart. Cynicism grows genial in the jest of The Pope and the Net. In Muckle-Mouth Meg, laughter and kisses, audible from the page, and a woman's art in love-craft, turn tragedy in a hearty piece of comedy. The Bean-Feast presents us with the latest transformation of the Herakles ideal, where a good Christian Herakles, Pope Sixtus of Rome, makes common cause with his spiritual children in their humble pleasures of the senses. And in contrast with this poem of the religion of joy is the story of another ruler of Rome, the too fortunate Emperor Augustus, who, in the shadow of the religion of fear and sorrow, must propitiate the envy of Fate by turning beggar once a year. A shivering thrill runs through us as we catch a sight of the supreme mendicant's "sparkling eyes beneath their eyebrows' ridge":

 
"He's God!" shouts Lucius Varus Rufus: "Man
And worms'-meat any moment!" mutters low
Some Power, admonishing the mortal-born.
 

There were nobler sides of Paganism than this with which Browning seems never to have had an adequate sympathy. And yet the religion even of Marcus Aurelius lacked something of the joy of the religion of the thankful Pope who feasted upon beans.¹⁴⁴

In the winter which followed his change of abode from Warwick Crescent to the more commodious house in De Vere Gardens, the winter of 1887-1888, Browning's health and strength visibly declined; a succession of exhausting colds lowered his vitality; yet he maintained his habitual ways of life, and would not yield. In August 1888 he started ill for his Italian holiday, and travelled with difficulty and distress. But the rest among the mountains at Primiero restored him. At Venice he seemed as vigorous as he was joyous. And when he returned to London in February 1889 the improvement in his strength was in a considerable measure maintained. Yet it was evident that the physical vigour which had seemed invincible was on the ebb. In the early summer he paid the last of those visits, which he so highly valued, to Balliol College, Oxford. The opening week of June found him at Cambridge. Mr Gosse has told how on the first Sunday of that month Browning and he sat together "in a sequestered part of the beautiful Fellows' Garden of Trinity," under a cloudless sky, amid the early foliage with double hawthorns in bloom, and how the old man, in a mood of serenity and without his usual gesticulation, talked of his own early life and aspirations. He shrank that summer, says Mrs Orr, from the fatigue of a journey to Italy and thought of Scotland as a place of rest. But unfavourable weather in early August forbade the execution of the plan. An invitation from Mrs Bronson to her house at Asolo, to be followed by the pleasure of seeing his son and his son's wife in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, were attractions not to be resisted, and in company with Miss Browning, he reached the little hill-town that had grown so dear to him without mishap and even without fatigue.