Cunliffe — Browning’s Idealism. 
677 
at end, Wrong will prove right” (Bephan.) Evil is “no orb 
itself” but merely the cloud thrown across the orb of good to 
make it manifest (Reverie). “The evil is null, is naught, is 
silence implying sound.” (Abt Vogler). Evil is merely an ap¬ 
pearance, not reality—a mode of Time, having no place in the 
Eternal Mind. In a letter written in 1881 1 Browning de¬ 
scribes time and space as “purely conceptions of our own, 
wholly inapplicable to intelligence of another kind—with 
whom,, as I made Luria say, there is an everlasting moment of 
creation, if one at all—past, present and future, one and the 
same state.” 2 
All that is at all 
Lasts ever past recall; 
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure. 
{Rabbi Ben Ezra XXVII.) 
But this absolute truth must not be used by man as a basis of 
action in this life, in which he lives not by the absolute but by 
the relative. Browning puts this knowledge into the mouths 
of two very distinct classes—the opportunists like Prince 
Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Bishop Blougram, and the Don Juan 
of Fifine, to whom “evil proves good, wrong right;” to their 
own undoing; and the dying seers who learn the absolute truth 
at the very end of life, and when it is too late to apply it in ac¬ 
tion. When John the Evangelist is dying in the desert, the 
truth, breaking bounds, o’erfloods his soul, and as he saw sin 
and death, he sees now 
the need yet transiency of both 
The good and glory consummated thence. 
(A Doathin the Desert 219-220.) 
But to realize this in human life is fatal to the soul—it re¬ 
duces man to a state of apathy, like that of Lazarus after his 
resurrection (Karshish), or it ruins him by obliterating the 
distinction between right and wrong, which, though non-exist¬ 
ent in the mind of God, is a necessary means to human pro- 
1 Quoted in The Life of Robert Browning by W. Hall Griffin and H. C. 
Minchin. 
2 The reference to Luria is to V. 233-237. 
