s a form of
good. Such speculative difficulties must be met by a reflective mind,
before it can follow out the application of an optimistic theory to
particular facts. Now, Browning's creed, at least as he held it in his
later years, was not merely the allowable exaggeration of an ecstatic
religious sentiment, the impassioned conviction of a God-intoxicated
man. It was deliberately presented as a solution of moral problems, and
was intended to serve as a theory of the spiritual nature of things. It
is, therefore, justly open to the same kind of criticism as that to
which a philosophic doctrine is exposed. The poet deprived himself of
the refuge, legitimate enough to the intuitive method of art, when, in
his later works, he not only offered a dramatic solution of the problem
of life, but definitely attempted to meet the difficulties of
speculative ethics.

In this chapter I shall point out some of these difficulties, and then
proceed to show how the poet proposed to solve them.

A thorough-going optimism, in that it subdues all things to the idea of
the supreme Good, and denies to evil the right even to dispute the
absoluteness of its sway, naturally seems to imply a pantheistic theory
of the world. And Browning's insistence on the presence of the highest
in all things may easily be regarded as a mere revival of the oldest and
crudest attempts at finding their unity in God. For if _all_, as he
says, is for the best, there seems to be no room left for the
differences apparent in the world, and the variety which gives it beauty
and worth. Particular existences would seem to be illusory and
evanescent phenomena, the creations of human imagination, itself a
delusive appearance. The infinite, on this view, stands over against the
finite, and it overpowers and consumes it; and the optimism, implied in
the phrase that "God is all," turns at once into a pessimism. For, as
soon as we inquire into the meaning of this "all," we find that it is
only a negation of everything we can know or be. Such a pantheism as
this is self-contradictory; for, while seeming to level all things
upwards to a manifestation of the divine, it really levels all downwards
to the level of mere unqualified being, a stagnant and empty unknowable.
It leaves only a choice between akosmism and atheism, and, at the same
time, it makes each of the alternatives impossible. For, in explaining
the world it abolishes it, and in abolishing the world it empties itself