And here again I am tempted to abscond behind those blessed words _Platonische Ideen_ and _Begriffe, universalia ante rem_ and _universalia post rem_, which offer so convenient an escape from the difficulty of meaning what one says. It would be so easy with those counters of German metaphysicians and the schoolmen to explain how it is that Browning has a philosophy of generalised notions, and yet so often misses the form of generalisation special to the poet. The fact is his philosophy is not so much inherent in his writing as imposed on it from the outside. His theory of love does not expand like Dante's into a great vision of life wherein symbol and reality are fused together, but is added as a commentary on the action or situation. And on the other hand he does not accept the simple and pathetic incompleteness of life as a humbler poet might, but must try with his reason to reconcile it with an ideal system: Over the ball of it, Peering and prying, How I see all of it, Life there, outlying! Roughness and smoothness, Shine and defilement, Grace and uncouthness: One reconcilement. Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just the acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something beyond its own impulsive desires: Let us not always say, "Spite of this flesh to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry, "All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy; there is no tragedy, properly speaking, in Browning, for the reason that passion is to him essentially good. By sheer bravado of human emotion we justify our existence, nay-- We have to live alone to set forth well God's praise. His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana so forcibly says, "is a blind and miscellaneous vehemence." But if all the passions have their own validity, one of them in particular is the power that moves through all and renders them all good: In my own heart love had not been made wise To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, To know even hate is but a mask of love's. It is the power that reaches up from earth to heaven, and the divine nature is no more than a higher, more vehement manifestation of its energy: For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless god. And in the closing vision of _Saul_ this thought of the identity of man's love and God's love is uttered by David in a kind of delirious ecstasy: 'T is the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!