It is this notion that every nature must express its own truth which underlies a poem like "Fifine at the Fair." Through expressing the truth of itself, and so grasping at half truths, even at the false, it finally reaches a higher truth. A nature like Guido's was not born with a faculty for development. He simply had to live out his own hate. The man in "Fifine" had the power of perceiving an ideal, but not the power of living up to it without experimentation upon lower planes of living, probably the most common type of man to-day. There are others like Norbert or Mertoun, in whom the ideal truth is the real truth of their natures and for whom life means the constant expansion of this ideal truth within them. In many of the varying types of men and women portrayed by Browning there is the recognition of the possibility of psychic development either by means of experience or by sudden intuitions, and if, as in the case of Guido, there is no development in this life, there is hope in a future existence in a universe ruled by a God of love. In his views upon human character and its possibilities of development Browning is, of course, in touch with the scientific views on the subject which filled the air in all later nineteenth-century thought, changing the orthodox ideal of a static humanity born in sin and only to be saved by belief in certain dogmas to that of a humanity born to develop; changing the notion that sin was a terrible and absolutely defined entity, against which every soul had ceaselessly to war, into the notion that sin is a relative evil, consequent upon lack of development, which, as the human soul advances on its path, led by its inborn consciousness of the divine to be attained, will gradually disappear. But the evil which results from this lack of development in individuals to other individuals, and to society at large, brings a problem which as we have already seen in the first chapter is not so easy of solution. Yet Browning solves it, for is it not through the combat with this evil that the soul is given its real opportunity for development? Pain and suffering give rise to the thirst for happiness and joy, and through the arousing of sympathy and pity, the desire that others shall have happiness and joy, therefore to be despairing and pessimistic about evil or to wish for its immediate annihilation would really be suicidal to the best interests of the human race; nay, he even goes farther than this, as is hinted in one of his last poems, "Rephan," and imagines that any other state than one of flux between good and evil would be monotonous: "Startle me up, by an Infinite Discovered above and below me--height And depth alike to attract my flight, "Repel my descent: by hate taught love. Oh, gain were indeed to see above Supremacy ever--to move, remove, "Not reach--aspire yet never attain To the object aimed at! Scarce in vain,-- As each stage I left nor touched again.