Nor, spite of doubts, the promptings of mercy, the friends plucking his sleeve to stay his arm, does he fear “to handle a lie roughly”; or shrink from sending the criminal to his account, though it be but one day before he himself is called before the judgment seat.  The same energy, the same spirit of bold conflict, animates Guido’s adoption of evil for his good.  At all but the last moment of his life of monstrous crime, just before he hears the echo of the feet of the priests, who descend the stair to lead him to his death, “he repeats his evil deed in will.”

  “Nor is it in me to unhate my hates,—­
  I use up my last strength to strike once more
  Old Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face,
  To trample underfoot the whine and wile
  Of beast Violante,—­and I grow one gorge
  To loathingly reject Pompilia’s pale
  Poison my hasty hunger took for food."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­Guido, 2400-2406.]

If there be any concrete form of evil with which the poet’s optimism is not able to cope, any irretrievable black “beyond white’s power to disintensify,” it is the refusal to take a definite stand and resolute for either virtue or vice; the hesitancy and compromise of a life that is loyal to nothing, not even to its own selfishness.  The cool self-love of the old English moralists, which “reduced the game of life to principles,” and weighed good and evil in the scales of prudence, is to our poet the deepest damnation.

  “Saint Eldobert—­I much approve his mode;
  With sinner Vertgalant I sympathize;
  But histrionic Sganarelle, who prompts
  While pulling back, refuses yet concedes,—­

* * * * *

  “Surely, one should bid pack that mountebank!”

In him, even

               “thickheads ought to recognize
  The Devil, that old stager, at his trick
  Of general utility, who leads
  Downward, perhaps, but fiddles all the way!"[A]

[Footnote A:  Red Cotton Nightcap Country.]

For the bold sinner, who chooses and sustains his part to the end, the poet has hope.  Indeed, the resolute choice is itself the beginning of hope; for, let a man only give himself to anything, wreak himself on the world in the intensity of his hate, set all sail before the gusts of passion and “range from Helen to Elvire, frenetic to be free,” let him rise into a decisive self-assertion against the stable order of the moral world, and he cannot fail to discover the nature of the task he has undertaken, and the meaning of the power without, against which he has set himself.  If there be sufficient strength in a man to vent himself in action, and “try conclusions with the world,” he will then learn that it has another destiny than to be the instrument of evil.  Self-assertion taken by itself is good; indeed, it is the very law of every life, human and other.