These conflicting views were rooted in different elements of Browning’s many-sided nature.  His vivid intuition of his own self-consciousness formed a standing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, to which he stubbornly clung.  When the optimism of the “Head” was discredited, passion-fraught instinct, under the name of the Heart, came to the rescue, and valiantly restored its authority.  On the other hand, a variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give “illusion” a wider and wider scope.  Sheer joy in battle had no small share.  The immortal and infinite soul, projected among the shows of sense, could not be expected to do its part worthily if it saw through them:  it had to believe its enemies real enemies, and its warfare a rational warfare; it had to accept time and place, and good and evil, as the things they seem.  To have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in God was to be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble about the world as it is for man, like the risen Lazarus—­

            “witless of the size, the sum,
      The value in proportion of all things,
      Or whether it be little or be much.”

The mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phantoms to gaze upon eternal realities was himself the victim of the worst illusions; while the hero who plunged into that struggle was training his soul, and thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth.  Thus Browning’s passionate and reiterated insistence upon the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted in his inalienable faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict.  The infinite soul realised itself most completely when it divested itself of the trappings of its infinity, and it worked out God’s law most implicitly when it ignored God’s point of view.

V.

Such a result could not be finally satisfying, and Browning’s thought fastened with increasing predilection and exclusiveness upon one intense kind of vitality in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems to be transcended, and that complete immersion of the soul in a nature not its own appears not as self-abnegation but as self-fulfilment.  He did not himself use this phraseology about Love; it is that of a school to which he, at no time, it would seem, made any conscious approach.  But it is clear that he found in the mysterious union and transfusion of diverse being which takes place in Love, as Hegel found in the union of opposites, the clue to the nature of reality, the very core of the heart of life.  He did not talk of the union of opposites, but of “infinitude wreaking itself upon the finite.”  God himself would have been less divine, and so, as God, less real, had he remained aloof in lonely infinity instead of uniting himself with all creation in that love which “moves the world and the other stars”; the “loving worm,” to quote his pregnant saying once more, were diviner than a loveless God.