words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, there is something about his appearance which indicates that he should have another leg and another eye.  The poem suggests admirably that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be greater than the whole.  And from this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life.  For nothing is more certain than that though this world is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, the fact does remain that we have named it “a strange world.”  In other words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted.  And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness implies completeness, life implies immortality.  This then was the first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning:  the hope that lies in the imperfection of man.  The second of the great Browning doctrines requires some audacity to express.  It can only be properly stated as the hope that lies in the imperfection of God.  That is to say, that Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of man, were also his privileges.  He held that these stubborn sorrows and obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have provoked the envy of the Almighty.  If man has self-sacrifice and God has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous superiority.  And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning reads into the story of the Crucifixion.  If the Creator had not been crucified He would not have been as great as thousands of wretched fanatics among His own creatures.  It is needless to insist upon this point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be referred to “Saul.”  But these are emphatically the two main doctrines or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of God.  They are great thoughts, thoughts written by a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust.  But about them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something to be added.

Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an optimist.  His theory, that man’s sense of his own imperfection implies a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism.  His theory that man’s knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies God’s knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good argument for optimism.  But any one will make the deepest and blackest and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism.  Because