His
often excellent practical rule to "do the duty nearest to hand" may be
used to gag the intellect in its search after the goal; so that even his
Everlasting Yea, as a predetermined affirmation, may ultimately result in
a deeper negation.
[Footnote: _Vide_ Professor Jones's _Browning as a Philosophical and
Religious, Teacher_, pp. 66-90.]
"Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God,"
has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration.
The _first_ is _Surrender_ to something higher and wider than ourselves.
That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the
self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct
theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's
criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on
Happiness, which he should rather have referred to as the result of
Labour and of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the
pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The _second_ aspect of his
"Duty" is _Work_. His master Goethe is to him as Apollo to Hercules, as
Shakespeare to Luther; the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like
the Schreckhorn rent and riven; the words of the former are oracles, of
the latter battles; the one contemplates and beautifies truth, the other
wrestles and fights for it.
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