the intellectual energy which
produces it; art and the love of beauty from which it springs: every
power and every gift, physical and spiritual, other than love, has in it
the fatal flaw of being merely human. All these are so tainted with
creatureship, so limited and conditioned, that it is hardly too much to
say that they are, at their best, deceptive endowments. Thus, the life
of man regarded as a whole is, in its last essence, a combination of
utterly disparate elements. The distinction of the old moralists between
divinity and dust; the absolute dualism of the old ascetics between
flesh and spirit, sense and reason, find their accurate parallel in
Browning's teachings. But he is himself no ascetic, and the line of
distinction he draws does not, like theirs, pass between the flesh and
the spirit. It rather cleaves man's spiritual nature into two portions,
which are absolutely different from each other. A chasm divides the head
from the heart, the intellect from the emotions, the moral and practical
from the perceptive and reflective faculties. And it is this absolute
cleavage that gives to Browning's teaching, both on ethics and religion,
one of its most peculiar characteristics. By keeping it constantly in
sight, we may hope to render intelligible to ourselves the solution he
offers of the problem of evil, and of other fundamental difficulties of
the life of man. For, while Browning's optimism has its original source
in his conception of the unity of God and man, through the Godlike
quality of love--even "the poorest love that was ever offered"--he finds
himself unable to maintain it, except at the expense of degrading man's
knowledge. Thus, his optimism and faith in God is finally based upon
ignorance. If, on the side of love, he insists, almost in the spirit of
a Spinozist, on God's communication of His own substance to man; on the
side of knowledge he may be called an agnostic, in spite of stray
expressions which break through his deliberate theory. While "love gains
God at first leap,"

"Knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Pillar at Sebzevar_.]

A radical flaw runs through our knowing faculty. Human knowledge is not
only incomplete--no one can be so foolish as to deny that--but it is, as
regarded by Browning, essentially inadequate to the nature of fact, and
we must "distrust it, even when it seems demonstrable." No pr