We might explain and make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we are not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he disapproved.

We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the history of their sins.

But we should throw the world into an uproar if we hinted that they had any.

Thus the decencies of civilisation do not merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to praise him.
Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to humanise a scoundrel.

This is one typical side of the real optimism of Browning.