nor, even by the help of evolution, say anything wiser about genius than that “the wind bloweth where it listeth.”  No doubt the poet’s optimism indicates a native sturdiness of head and heart.  He had the invaluable endowment of a pre-disposition to see the sunny side of life, and a native tendency to revolt against that subjectivity, which is the root of our misery in all its forms.  He had little respect for the Welt-schmerz, and can scarcely be civil to the hero of the bleeding heart.

  “Sinning, sorrowing, despairing,
    Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked—­
  Should I give my woes an airing,—­
    Where’s one plague that claims respect?

  “Have you found your life distasteful? 
    My life did, and does, smack sweet. 
  Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? 
    Mine I saved and hold complete. 
  Do your joys with age diminish? 
    When mine fail me I’ll complain. 
  Must in death your daylight finish? 
    My sun sets to rise again.

* * * * *

  “I find earth not grey but rosy,
    Heaven not grim but fair of hue. 
  Do I stoop?  I pluck a posy. 
    Do I stand and stare?  All’s blue."[A]

[Footnote A:  At the Mermaid.]

Browning was no doubt least of all men inclined to pout at his “plain bun”; on the contrary, he was awake to the grandeur of his inheritance, and valued most highly “his life-rent of God’s universe with the tasks it offered and the tools to do them with.”  But his optimism sent its roots deeper than any “disposition”; it penetrated beyond mere health of body and mind, as it did beyond a mere sentiment of God’s goodness.  Optimisms resting on these bases are always weak; for the former leaves man naked and sensitive to the evils that crowd round him when the powers of body and mind decay, and the latter is, at best, useful only for the individual who possesses it, and it breaks down under the stress of criticism and doubt.  Browning’s optimism is a great element in English literature, because it opposes with such strength the shocks that come from both these quarters.  His joyousness is the reflection in feeling of a conviction as to the nature of things, which he had verified in the darkest details of human life, and established for himself in the face of the gravest objections that his intellect was able to call forth.  In fact, its value lies, above all, in this,—­that it comes after criticism, after the condemnation which Byron and Carlyle had passed, each from his own point of view, on the world and on man.

The need of an optimism is one of the penalties which reflection brings.  Natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world.  The fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man; he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force Nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now first felt.  Optimism is the expression of man’s new reconciliation with his world; as the opposite doctrine of pessimism is the consciousness of an unresolved contradiction.  Both are a judgment passed upon the world, from the point of view of its adequacy or inadequacy to meet demands, arising from needs which the individual has discovered in himself.