of darkness grown vocal and argumentative, and threatening to turn the
poet's faith in good into a defence of immorality, and to justify the
worst evil by what is highest of all. Having indicated in outward fact
"the need," as well as the "transiency of sin and death," he seeks here
to prove that need, and seems, thereby, to degrade the highest truth of
religion into a defence of the worst wickedness.

No doubt the result is sufficiently repulsive to the abstract moralist,
who is apt to find in _Fifine_ nothing but a casuistical and shameless
justification of evil, which is blasphemy against goodness itself. We
are made to "discover," for instance, that

"There was just
Enough and not too much of hate, love, greed and lust,
Could one discerningly but hold the balance, shift
The weight from scale to scale, do justice to the drift
Of nature, and explain the glories by the shames
Mixed up in man, one stuff miscalled by different names."[A]

[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_, cviii.]

We are told that--

"Force, guile were arms which earned
My praise, not blame at all."

Confronted with such utterances as these, it is only natural that,
rather than entangle the poet in them, we should regard them as the
sophistries of a philosophical Don Juan, powerful enough, under the
stress of self-defence, to confuse the distinctions of right and wrong.
But, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, such an apparent
justification of evil cannot be avoided by a reflective optimist; and it
is implicitly contained even in those religious utterances of _Rabbi Ben
Ezra, Christmas Eve_, and _A Death in the Desert_, with which we not
only identify the poet but ourselves, in so far as we share his faith
that

"God's in His heaven,--
All's right with the world."

The poet had far too much speculative acumen to be ignorant of this, and
too much boldness and strength of conviction in the might of the good,
to refuse to confront the issues that sprang from it. In his later
poems, as in his earlier ones, he is endeavouring to justify the ways of
God to man; and the difficulties which surround him are not those of a
casuist, but the stubborn questionings of a spirit, whose religious
faith is thoroughly earnest and fearless. To a spirit so loyal to the
truth, and so bold to follow its leading, the suppression of such
problems is impossible; and, consequently, it was inevitable that he
should