tality and the larger
scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this world
is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream,
the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other
words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself,
that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted.
And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness
implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the
first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies in
the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines
requires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated as
the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that
Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of
man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and
obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have
provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God
has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous
superiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning
reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not been
crucified He would not have been as great as thousands of wretched
fanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this
point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be
referred to "Saul." But these are emphatically the two main doctrines
or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly
as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in
the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by
a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of
faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about
them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something
to be added.

Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an
optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies
a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His
theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies
God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good
argument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackest
and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his
optimism w