ard to maintain side by side
with strong doctrinal convictions, it seems amongst the worst of evils
that man should be endowed with fallacious faculties, and cursed with a
futile desire for true knowledge which is so strong, that it cannot be
quenched even in those who believe that truth can never be attained. It
is the very best men of the world who cry

"Oh, this false for real,
This emptiness which feigns solidity,--
Ever some grey that's white, and dun that's black,--
When shall we rest upon the thing itself,
Not on its semblance? Soul--too weak, forsooth,
To cope with fact--wants fiction everywhere!
Mine tires of falsehood: truth at any cost!"[A]

[Footnote A: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

The poet himself was burdened in no small degree with this vain desire
for knowing the truth; and he recognized, too, that he was placed in a
world which seems both real and beautiful, and so well worth knowing.
Yet, it is this very failure of knowledge--a failure which, be it
remembered, is complete and absolute, because, as he thinks, all facts
must turn into phantoms by mere contact with our "relative
intelligences,"--which he constitutes into the basis of his optimistic
faith.

So high is the dignity and worth of the moral life to Browning, that no
sacrifice is too great to secure it. And, indeed, if it were once
clearly recognized that there is no good thing but goodness, nothing of
supreme worth, except the realization of a loving will, then doubt,
ignorance, and every other form of apparent evil would be fully
justified--provided they were conditions whereby this highest good is
attained. And, to Browning, ignorance was one of the conditions. And
consequently, the dread pause in the music which agnosticism brings, is
only "silence implying sound"; and the vain cry for truth, arising from
the heart of the earth's best men, is only a discord moving towards
resolution into a more rapturous harmony.

I do not stay here to inquire whether sure knowledge would really have
this disastrous effect of destroying morality, or whether its failure
does not rather imply the impossibility of a moral life. I return to the
question asked at the beginning of this chapter, and which it is now
possible to answer. That question was: How does Browning reconcile his
hypothesis of universal love with the natural and moral evils existing
in the world?

His answer is quite explicit. The poet solves the problem by casting
doub