rength to strike once more
Old Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face,
To trample underfoot the whine and wile
Of beast Violante,--and I grow one gorge
To loathingly reject Pompilia's pale
Poison my hasty hunger took for food."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book_--_Guido_, 2400-2406.]

If there be any concrete form of evil with which the poet's optimism is
not able to cope, any irretrievable black "beyond white's power to
disintensify," it is the refusal to take a definite stand and resolute
for either virtue or vice; the hesitancy and compromise of a life that
is loyal to nothing, not even to its own selfishness. The cool self-love
of the old English moralists, which "reduced the game of life to
principles," and weighed good and evil in the scales of prudence, is to
our poet the deepest damnation.

"Saint Eldobert--I much approve his mode;
With sinner Vertgalant I sympathize;
But histrionic Sganarelle, who prompts
While pulling back, refuses yet concedes,--

* * * * *

"Surely, one should bid pack that mountebank!"

In him, even

"thickheads ought to recognize
The Devil, that old stager, at his trick
Of general utility, who leads
Downward, perhaps, but fiddles all the way!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Red Cotton Nightcap Country._]

For the bold sinner, who chooses and sustains his part to the end, the
poet has hope. Indeed, the resolute choice is itself the beginning of
hope; for, let a man only give _himself_ to anything, wreak _himself_ on
the world in the intensity of his hate, set all sail before the gusts of
passion and "range from Helen to Elvire, frenetic to be free," let him
rise into a decisive self-assertion against the stable order of the
moral world, and he cannot fail to discover the nature of the task he
has undertaken, and the meaning of the power without, against which he
has set himself. If there be sufficient strength in a man to vent
himself in action, and "try conclusions with the world," he will then
learn that it has another destiny than to be the instrument of evil.
Self-assertion taken by itself is good; indeed, it is the very law of
every life, human and other.

"Each lie
Redounded to the praise of man, was victory
Man's nature had both right to get and might to gain."[B]

[Footnote B: _Fifine at the Fair_, cxxviii.]

But it leads to the revelation of a higher law than