to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask. "For
Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." Browning is less concerned
to "save" the subjects of his so-called "Special Pleadings" than to
imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about
them; not naked as God made them, but clothed in the easy undress of
their own subtly plausible illusions about themselves. But the optimist
in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery
faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of
goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some
diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram's--

"Just when we're safest comes a sunset touch."

Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the
obstacles it overcame. He imagined yet more vividly than he saw, and the
stone wall which forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an
ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open door. In later life
he came with growing persistence to regard the phenomenal world as a
barrier of illusion between man and truth. But instead of chilling his
faith, the obstacle only generated that poet's philosophy of the "value
of a lie" which perturbs the less experienced reader of _Fifine_.
"Truth" was "forced to manifest itself through falsehood," won thence by
the excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy moment, till
"through the shows of sense, which ever proving false still promise to
be true," the soul of man worked its way to its final union with the
soul of God.[118]

[Footnote 118: _Fifine at the fair_, cxxiv.]

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