so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.  One of the most practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human being, because that justification would involve the admission of things which may not conventionally be admitted.  We might explain and make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we are not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he disapproved.  We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the history of their sins.  But we should throw the world into an uproar if we hinted that they had any.  Thus the decencies of civilisation do not merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to praise him.

Browning, in such poems as “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” breaks this first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to humanise a scoundrel.  This is one typical side of the real optimism of Browning.  And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, the excuse of every ne’er-do-well.  There is little danger that men will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves before men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as Sludge the Medium.  There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God.

It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with Browning’s character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by such a generalisation as the above.  Browning’s was a simple character, and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods.  Probably in a great many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first charcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest.  Browning, as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism.  But as he worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the man’s skin and testify to the man’s ideals.  However this may be, it is worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in connection with one of the most famous of these monologues.