use the whole strength of his dialectic to try those fundamental
principles, on which the moral life of man is based. And it is this, I
believe, which we find in _Fifine_, as in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and the
_Parleyings_; not an exhibition of the argumentative subtlety of a mind
whose strength has become lawless, and which spends itself in
intellectual gymnastics, that have no place within the realm of either
the beautiful or the true.

CHAPTER V.

OPTIMISM AND ETHICS: THEIR CONTRADICTION.

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.

* * * * *

"But most it is presumption in us, when
The help of heaven we count the act of men."[A]

[Footnote A: _All's Well that Ends Well_.]

I have tried to show that one of the ruling conceptions of Browning's
view of life is that the Good is absolute, and that it reveals itself in
all the events of human life. By means of this conception, he
endeavoured to bring together the elements which had fallen asunder in
the sensational and moral pessimism of Byron and Carlyle. In other
words, through the re-interpreting power which lies in this fundamental
thought when it is soberly held and fearlessly applied, he sought to
reconcile man with the world and with God, and thereby with himself. And
the governing motive, whether the conscious motive or not, of Browning's
poetry, the secret impulse which led him to dramatise the conflicts and
antagonisms of human life, was the necessity of finding in them evidence
of the presence of this absolute Good.

Browning's optimism was deep and comprehensive enough to reject all
compromise. His faith in the good seemed to rise with the demands that
were made upon it by the misery and wickedness of man, and the
apparently purposeless waste of life and its resources. There was in it
a deliberate earnestness which led him to grapple, not only with the
concrete difficulties of individual life, but with those also that
spring from reflection and theory.

The test of a philosophic optimism, as of any optimism which is more
than a pious sentiment, must finally lie in its power to reveal the
presence of the good in actual individual evils. But there are
difficulties still nearer than those presented by concrete facts,
difficulties arising out of the very suggestion that evil i