Within his scheme of the universal good he seeks to find a place even for this gipsy creature, who traffics “in just what we most pique us that we keep.”  Having, in the Ring and the Book, challenged evil at its worst as it manifests itself practically in concrete characters and external action, and having wrung from it the victory of the good, in Fifine and in his other later poems he meets it again in the region of dialectic.  In this sphere of metaphysical ethics, evil has assumed a more dangerous form, especially for an artist.  His optimistic faith has driven the poet into a realm into which poetry never ventured before.  His battle is now, not with flesh and blood, but with the subtler powers of darkness grown vocal and argumentative, and threatening to turn the poet’s faith in good into a defence of immorality, and to justify the worst evil by what is highest of all.  Having indicated in outward fact “the need,” as well as the “transiency of sin and death,” he seeks here to prove that need, and seems, thereby, to degrade the highest truth of religion into a defence of the worst wickedness.

No doubt the result is sufficiently repulsive to the abstract moralist, who is apt to find in Fifine nothing but a casuistical and shameless justification of evil, which is blasphemy against goodness itself.  We are made to “discover,” for instance, that

                           “There was just
  Enough and not too much of hate, love, greed and lust,
  Could one discerningly but hold the balance, shift
  The weight from scale to scale, do justice to the drift
  Of nature, and explain the glories by the shames
  Mixed up in man, one stuff miscalled by different names."[A]

[Footnote A:  Fifine at the Fair, cviii.]

We are told that—­

  “Force, guile were arms which earned
  My praise, not blame at all.”

Confronted with such utterances as these, it is only natural that, rather than entangle the poet in them, we should regard them as the sophistries of a philosophical Don Juan, powerful enough, under the stress of self-defence, to confuse the distinctions of right and wrong.  But, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, such an apparent justification of evil cannot be avoided by a reflective optimist; and it is implicitly contained even in those religious utterances of Rabbi Ben Ezra, Christmas Eve, and A Death in the Desert, with which we not only identify the poet but ourselves, in so far as we share his faith that

  “God’s in His heaven,—­
  All’s right with the world.”