The poet had far too much speculative acumen to be ignorant of this, and too much boldness and strength of conviction in the might of the good, to refuse to confront the issues that sprang from it.  In his later poems, as in his earlier ones, he is endeavouring to justify the ways of God to man; and the difficulties which surround him are not those of a casuist, but the stubborn questionings of a spirit, whose religious faith is thoroughly earnest and fearless.  To a spirit so loyal to the truth, and so bold to follow its leading, the suppression of such problems is impossible; and, consequently, it was inevitable that he should use the whole strength of his dialectic to try those fundamental principles, on which the moral life of man is based.  And it is this, I believe, which we find in Fifine, as in Ferishtah’s Fancies and the Parleyings; not an exhibition of the argumentative subtlety of a mind whose strength has become lawless, and which spends itself in intellectual gymnastics, that have no place within the realm of either the beautiful or the true.

CHAPTER V.

OPTIMISM AND ETHICS:  THEIR CONTRADICTION.

  “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
  Which we ascribe to heaven.  The fated sky
  Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
  Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.

* * * * *

  “But most it is presumption in us, when
  The help of heaven we count the act of men."[A]

[Footnote A:  All’s Well that Ends Well.]

I have tried to show that one of the ruling conceptions of Browning’s view of life is that the Good is absolute, and that it reveals itself in all the events of human life.  By means of this conception, he endeavoured to bring together the elements which had fallen asunder in the sensational and moral pessimism of Byron and Carlyle.  In other words, through the re-interpreting power which lies in this fundamental thought when it is soberly held and fearlessly applied, he sought to reconcile man with the world and with God, and thereby with himself.  And the governing motive, whether the conscious motive or not, of Browning’s poetry, the secret impulse which led him to dramatise the conflicts and antagonisms of human life, was the necessity of finding in them evidence of the presence of this absolute Good.

Browning’s optimism was deep and comprehensive enough to reject all compromise.  His faith in the good seemed to rise with the demands that were made upon it by the misery and wickedness of man, and the apparently purposeless waste of life and its resources.  There was in it a deliberate earnestness which led him to grapple, not only with the concrete difficulties of individual life, but with those also that spring from reflection and theory.