This philosophy is, however, ill-suited to the dark ministers of fate; and an oracular explosion from the earth’s depths startles them back into sobriety; in which condition they repudiate the new knowledge which has been born of them, flinging it back on their accomplice with various expressions of disgust.  They admit, nevertheless, that the web of human destiny often defeats their spinning; its intended good and evil change places with each other; the true significance of life is only revealed by death; and though they still refuse to yield to Apollo’s demand, they compromise with it:  Admetus shall live, if someone else will voluntarily die for him.  It is true they neutralize their concession by deriding the idea of such a devoted person being found; and Apollo also shows himself a stranger to the decrees of the higher powers by making wrong guesses as to the event; but the whole episode is conceived in a humorous and very human spirit which especially reveals itself in the attitude of the contending parties towards each other.  The Fates display throughout a proper contempt for what they regard as the showy but unsubstantial personality of the young god; and the natural antagonism of light and darkness, hope and despair, is as amusingly parodied in the mock deference and ill-disguised aversion with which he approaches them.  Apollo finally vindicates Mr. Browning’s optimistic theism by claiming the gifts of Bacchus, youngest of the gods, for the beneficent purpose and anterior wisdom of Zeus.

The one serious idea which runs through the poem is conveyed in its tribute to the power of wine:  in other words, to the value of imagination as supplement to and interpreter of fact.  Its partial, tentative, and yet efficient illumining of the dark places of life is vividly illustrated by Apollo:  and he only changes his imagery when he speaks of Reason as doing the same work.  It is the imaginative, not the scientific “reason” which Mr. Browning invokes as help in the perplexities of experience;[122] as it is the spiritual, and not scientific “experience” on which, in the subsequent discussions, he will so emphatically take his stand.[123]

In the first “parleying” Mr. Browning invokes the wisdom of BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE on certain problems of life:  mainly those of the existence of evil and the limitations of human knowledge; and the optimistic views in which he believes Dr. Mandeville to concur with him are brought to bear on the more gloomy philosophy of Carlyle, some well-known utterances of whom are brought forward for confutation.  The chief points of the argument are as follows:—­

Carlyle complains that God never intervenes to check the tyranny of evil, so that it not only prevails in the present life, but for any sure indications which exist to the contrary may still do so in the life to come.  It would be something, he thinks, if even triumphant wrong were checked, although (here we must read between the lines) this would be tantamount to the condoning of evil in all its less developed forms; better still if he who has the power to do so habitually crushed it at the birth.