Browning’s optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat inadequate word, was a result of experience—­experience which is for some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or disillusioning experience.  An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of experience.  If he really wished to be a type of experience he would climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples.  Browning’s faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity of colour.  He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in which it is used by the worldling advanced in years.  He rather used it in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at revivalist meetings.  In the Salvation Army a man’s experiences mean his experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was much the same.  But the revivalists’ confessions deal mostly with experiences of prayer and praise; Browning’s dealt pre-eminently with what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love.

And this quality of Browning’s optimism, the quality of detail, is also a very typical quality.  Browning’s optimism is of that ultimate and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and sound, and smell, and handling of things.  If a man had gone up to Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, “Do you think life is worth living?” it is interesting to conjecture what his answer might have been.  If he had been for the moment under the influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he would have said, “Existence is justified by its manifest design, its manifest adaptation of means to ends,” or, in other words, “Existence is justified by its completeness.”  If, on the other hand, he had been influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have said, “Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness,” or, in other words, “Existence is justified by its incompleteness.”  But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question “Is life worth living?” with the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, “Crimson toadstools in Hampshire.”  Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him.  To his traditions hope was traced to order, to his speculations hope was traced to disorder.  But to Browning himself hope was traced to something like red toadstools.  His mysticism was not of that idle and wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere abstraction, is symbolical of a flower.  With him the great concrete experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and speculations about them always second.  And in this point we find the real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems.