Browning held with equal tenacity to the idea of a universal benevolent order, and to the idea of the moral freedom of man within it.  He was driven in opposite directions by two beliefs, both of which he knew to be essential to the life of man as spirit, and both of which he illustrates throughout his poems with an endless variety of poetic expression.  He endeavoured to find God in man and still to leave man free.  His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality.  The vigour of his ethical doctrine is as pre-eminent, as the fulness of his conviction of the absolute sway of the Good.  Side by side with his doctrine that there is no failure, no wretchedness of corruption that does not conceal within it a germ of goodness, is his sense of the evil of sin, of the infinite earnestness of man’s moral warfare, and of the surpassing magnitude of the issues at stake for each individual soul.  So powerful is his interest in man as a moral agent, that he sees nought else in the world of any deep concern.  “My stress lay,” he said in his preface to Sordello (1863), “on the incidents in the development of a soul:  little else is worth study.  I, at least, always thought so—­you, with many known and unknown to me, think so—­others may one day think so.”  And this development of a soul is not at any time regarded by the poet as a peaceful process, like the growth of a plant or animal.  Although he thinks of the life of man as the gradual realization of a divine purpose within him, he does not suppose it to take place in obedience to a tranquil necessity.  Man advances morally by fighting his way inch by inch, and he gains nothing except through conflict.  He does not become good as the plant grows into maturity.  “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”

  “No, when the fight begins within himself,
  A man’s worth something.  God stoops o’er his head,
  Satan looks up between his feet,—­both tug—­
  He’s left, himself, i’ the middle:  the soul awakes
  And grows.  Prolong that battle through this life! 
  Never leave growing till the life to come."[A]

[Footnote A:  Bishop Blougram.]

Man is no idle spectator of the conflict of the forces of right and wrong; Browning never loses the individual in the throng, or sinks him into his age or race.  And although the poet ever bears within him the certainty of victory for the good, he calls his fellows to the fight as if the fate of all hung on the valour of each.  The struggle is always personal, individual like the duels of the Homeric heroes.

It is under the guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning.  It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—­the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe’s artistic morality:  it is valour in the battle of life.  His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power that is within him, and throw himself upon life with the whole energy of his being.  It is better even to seek evil with one’s whole mind, than to be lukewarm in goodness.  Whether you seek good or evil, and play for the counter or the coin, stake it boldly!