the poet, manifestations of the same beneficent purpose; and instead of duty in the sense of an autocratic imperative, or beneficent tyranny, he finds, deep beneath man’s foolishness and sin, a constant tendency towards the good which is bound up with the very nature of man’s reason and will.  If man could only understand himself he would find without him no limiting necessity, but the manifestation of a law which is one with his own essential being.  A beneficent power has loaded the dice, according to the epigram, so that the chances of failure and victory are not even; for man’s nature is itself a divine endowment, one with the power that rules his life, and man must finally reach through error to truth, and through sin to holiness.  In the language of theology, it may be said that the moral process is the spiritual incarnation of God; it is God’s goodness as love, effecting itself in human action.  Hence Carlyle’s cry of despair is turned by Browning into a song of victory.  While the former regards the struggle between good and evil as a fixed battle, in which the forces are immovably interlocked, the latter has the consciousness of battling against a retreating foe; and the conviction of coming triumph gives joyous vigour to every stroke.  Browning lifted morality into an optimism, and translated its battle into song.  This was the distinctive mark and mission which give to him such power of moral inspiration.

In order, however, to estimate the value of this feature of the poet’s work, it is necessary to look more closely into the character of his faith in the good.  Merely to attribute to him an optimistic creed is to say very little; for the worth, or worthlessness, of such a creed depends upon its content—­upon its fidelity to the facts of human life, the clearness of its consciousness of the evils it confronts, and the intensity of its realism.

There is a sense, and that a true one, in which it may be said that all men are optimists; for such a faith is implied in every conscious and deliberate action of man.  There is no deed which is not an attempt to realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously he may misunderstand its nature.  Final and absolute disbelief in an ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an impossibility in fact.  The one stultifies action, and asserts an effect without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other stultifies intellectual activity:  and both views imply that the critic has so escaped the conditions of human life, as to be able to pass a condemnatory judgment upon them.  The belief that a harmonious relation between the self-conscious agent and the supreme good is possible, underlies the practical activity of man; just as the belief in the unity of thought and being underlies his intellectual activity.  A moral order—­that is, an order of rational ends—­is postulated in