The test of a philosophic optimism, as of any optimism which is more than a pious sentiment, must finally lie in its power to reveal the presence of the good in actual individual evils.  But there are difficulties still nearer than those presented by concrete facts, difficulties arising out of the very suggestion that evil is a form of good.  Such speculative difficulties must be met by a reflective mind, before it can follow out the application of an optimistic theory to particular facts.  Now, Browning’s creed, at least as he held it in his later years, was not merely the allowable exaggeration of an ecstatic religious sentiment, the impassioned conviction of a God-intoxicated man.  It was deliberately presented as a solution of moral problems, and was intended to serve as a theory of the spiritual nature of things.  It is, therefore, justly open to the same kind of criticism as that to which a philosophic doctrine is exposed.  The poet deprived himself of the refuge, legitimate enough to the intuitive method of art, when, in his later works, he not only offered a dramatic solution of the problem of life, but definitely attempted to meet the difficulties of speculative ethics.

In this chapter I shall point out some of these difficulties, and then proceed to show how the poet proposed to solve them.

A thorough-going optimism, in that it subdues all things to the idea of the supreme Good, and denies to evil the right even to dispute the absoluteness of its sway, naturally seems to imply a pantheistic theory of the world.  And Browning’s insistence on the presence of the highest in all things may easily be regarded as a mere revival of the oldest and crudest attempts at finding their unity in God.  For if all, as he says, is for the best, there seems to be no room left for the differences apparent in the world, and the variety which gives it beauty and worth.  Particular existences would seem to be illusory and evanescent phenomena, the creations of human imagination, itself a delusive appearance.  The infinite, on this view, stands over against the finite, and it overpowers and consumes it; and the optimism, implied in the phrase that “God is all,” turns at once into a pessimism.  For, as soon as we inquire into the meaning of this “all,” we find that it is only a negation of everything we can know or be.  Such a pantheism as this is self-contradictory; for, while seeming to level all things upwards to a manifestation of the divine, it really levels all downwards to the level of mere unqualified being, a stagnant and empty unknowable.  It leaves only a choice between akosmism and atheism, and, at the same time, it makes each of the alternatives impossible.  For, in explaining the world it abolishes it, and in abolishing the world it empties itself of all signification; so that the Godhood which it attempts to establish throughout the whole realm of being, is found to mean nothing.  “It is the night, in which all cows are black.”