REASON.  “In that case the wise man will live.  But whether the part he chooses in it be that of actor or of looker-on, he will endure his life with indifference.  Relying on the promises of the future, he will take success or failure as it comes, and accept ignorance as a matter of course.”

FANCY.  “I concede more still.  Man shall not only be compelled to live:  he shall know the value of life.  He shall know that every moment he spends in it is gain or loss for the life to come—­that every act he performs involves reward or punishment in it.”

REASON.  “Then you abolish good and evil in their relation to man; for you abolish freedom of choice.  No man is good because he obeys a law so obvious and so stringent as to leave him no choice; and such would be the moral law, if punishment were demonstrated as following upon the breach of it; reward on its fulfilment.  Man is free, in his present state, to choose between good and evil—­free therefore to be good; because he may believe, but has no demonstrated certainty, that his future welfare depends on it.”

It is thus made clear that only in man’s present state of limited knowledge is a life of probation conceivable; while only on the hypothesis that this life is one of probation, can that of a future existence be maintained.  Mr. Browning ends where he began, with a hope, which is practically a belief, because to his mind the only thinkable approach to it.

A vivid description of the scenes amidst which the tragedy took place accompanies this discussion.

“CLEON” is a protest against the inadequacy of the earthly life; and the writer is supposed to be one of those Greek poets or thinkers to whom St. Paul alludes, in a line quoted from Aratus in the Acts, and which stands at the head of the poem.  Cleon believes in Zeus under the attributes of the one God; but he sees nothing in his belief to warrant the hope of immortality; and his love of life is so intense and so untiring that this fact is very grievous to him.

He is stating his case to an imaginary king—­Protus—­his patron and friend; whose convictions are much the same as his own, but who thinks him in some degree removed from the common lot:  since his achievements in philosophy and in art must procure him not only a more perfect existence, but in one sense a more lasting one.  Cleon protests against this idea.

“He has,” he admits, “done all which the King imputes to him.  If he has not been a Homer, a Pheidias, or a Terpander, his creative sympathies have united all three; and in thus passing from the simple to the complex, he has obeyed the law of progress, though at the risk perhaps of appearing a smaller man.”

“But his life has not been the more perfect on that account.  Perfection exists only in those more mechanical grades of being, in which joy is unconscious, but also self-sufficing.  To grow in consciousness is to grow in the capability and in the desire for joy; to decline rather than advance, in the physical power of attaining it.  Man’s soul expands; his ‘physical recipiency’ remains for ever bounded.”