“Ay, as a man should be inside the sun,
      Delirious with the plenitude of light."[56]

[Footnote 55:  The Pope, 1550 f.]

[Footnote 56:  The Pope, 1563.]

It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced home by the author of the Cenci had this other, less famous, “Roman murder-case” fallen into his hands.  The old Godwinian virus would have found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls.  Yet, though the Shelleyan affinities of Browning are here visible enough, his point of view is clearly distinct.  The revolutionary animus against institutions as the sole obstacle to the native goodness of man has wholly vanished; but of historic or mystic reverence for them he has not a trace.  He parts company with Rousseau without showing the smallest affinity to Burke.  As sources of moral and spiritual growth the State and the Church do not count.  Training and discipline have their relative worth, but the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral achievement are won by those alone in whom it breathes the heroism of aspiration and resolve.  His idealists grow for the most part in the interstices of the social organism.  He recognises them, it is true, without difficulty even in the most central and responsible organs of government.  None of his unofficial heroes—­Paracelsus or Sordello or Rabbi ben Ezra—­has a deeper moral insight than the aged Pope.  But the Pope’s impressiveness for Browning and for his readers lies just in his complete emancipation from the bias of his office.  He faces the task of judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, whose wisdom, like other men’s, depends upon the measure of his God-given judgment, and flags with years.  His “grey ultimate decrepitude” is fallible, Pope though he be; and he naively submits the verdict it has framed to the judgment of his former self, the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in the world.  This summing-up of the case is in effect the poet’s own, and is rich in the familiar prepossessions of Browning’s individualist and unecclesiastical mind.  He vindicates Caponsacchi more in the spirit of an antique Roman than of a Christian; he has open ears for the wisdom of the pagan world, and toleration for the human Euripides; scorn for the founder of Jesuitism, sympathy for the heretical Molinists; and he blesses the imperfect knowledge which makes faith hard.  The Pope, like his creator, is “ever a fighter,” and his last word is a peremptory rejection of all appeals for mercy, whether in the name of policy, Christian forgiveness, or “soft culture,” and a resolve to

     “Smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part,
      Ending, so far as man may, this offence.”