"That, through the outward sign, the inward grace allures,
And sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures,—
All by demonstrating the value of Fifine."A
A: Fifine at the Fair, xxviii.
Within his scheme of the universal good he seeks to find a place even for this gipsy creature, who traffics "in just what we most pique us that we keep." Having, in the Ring and the Book, challenged evil at its worst as it manifests itself practically in concrete characters and external action, and having wrung from it the victory of the good, in Fifine and in his other later poems he meets it again in the region of dialectic. In this sphere of metaphysical ethics, evil has assumed a more dangerous form, especially for an artist. His optimistic faith has driven the poet into a realm into which poetry never ventured before. His battle is now, not with flesh and blood, but with the subtler powers of darkness grown vocal and argumentative, and threatening to turn the poet's faith in good into a defence of immorality, and to justify the worst evil by what is highest of all. Having indicated in outward fact "the need," as well as the "transiency of sin and death," he seeks here to prove that need, and seems, thereby, to degrade the highest truth of religion into a defence of the worst wickedness.
No doubt the result is sufficiently repulsive to the abstract moralist, who is apt to find in Fifine nothing but a casuistical and shameless justification of evil, which is blasphemy against goodness itself. We are made to "discover," for instance, that
"There was just
Enough and not too much of hate, love, greed and lust,
Could one discerningly but hold the balance, shift