“I needs must blend the quality of man
  With quality of God, and so assist
  Mere human sight to understand my Life."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Bean-Stripe—­Ferishtah’s Fancies.]

But it was a profound error, which contained in it the destruction of morality and religion, as well as of knowledge, to make “the quality of God” a love that excludes reason, and the quality of man an intellect incapable of knowing truth.  Such in-congruous elements could never be combined into the unity of a character.  A love that was mere emotion could not yield a motive for morality, or a principle of religion.  A philosophy of life which is based on agnosticism is an explicit self-contradiction, which can help no one.  We must appeal from Browning the philosopher to Browning the poet.

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION.

  “Well, I can fancy how he did it all,
  Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,
  Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,
  Above and through his art—­for it gives way;
  That arm is wrongly put—­and there again—­
  A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,
  Its body, so to speak:  its soul is right,
  He means right—­that, a child may understand."[A]

[Footnote A:  Andrea del Sarto.]

I have tried to show that Browning’s theory of life, in so far as it is expressed in his philosophical poems, rests on agnosticism; and that such a theory is inconsistent with the moral and religious interests of man.  The idea that truth is unattainable was represented by Browning as a bulwark of the faith, but it proved on examination to be treacherous.  His optimism was found to have no better foundation than personal conviction, which any one was free to deny, and which the poet could in no wise prove.  The evidence of the heart, to which he appealed, was the evidence of an emotion severed from intelligence, and, therefore, without any content whatsoever.  “The faith,” which he professed, was not the faith that anticipates and invites proof, but a faith which is incapable of proof.  In casting doubt upon the validity of knowledge, he degraded the whole spiritual nature of man; for a love that is ignorant of its object is a blind impulse, and a moral consciousness that does not know the law is an impossible phantom—­a self-contradiction.

But, although Browning’s explicitly philosophical theory of life fails, there appears in his earlier poems, where his poetical freedom was not yet trammelled, nor his moral enthusiasm restrained by the stubborn difficulties of reflective thought, a far truer and richer view.  In this period of pure poetry, his conception of man was less abstract than in his later works, and his inspiration was more direct and full.  The poet’s dialectical ingenuity increased with the growth of his reflective tendencies; but his relation to the great principles of spiritual life seemed to