Part 5 (2/2)
Ancona, where the poem ritten, if its last line is historically true, followed Fano, a out the purple tides,” and brown houses--”an exfoliation of the rock”--they lived for a week on fish and cold water The tour included Rimini and Ravenna, with a return to Florence by Forli and a passage through the Apennines Next year--1849--when Pen was a few 's veins, to which his wife jestingly refers, tingled but faintly; it was Mrs Browning's part to coood They visited Spezzia and glanced at the house of Shelley at Lerici; passed through olive woods and vineyards, and rested in ”a sort of eagle's nest” at the highest habitable point of the Baths of Lucca Here the baby's great cheeks grew rosier; Browning gained in spirits; and his as able ”to climb the hills and help him to lose himself in the forests” When they wandered at noon except for some bare-footed peasant or some monk with the rope around his waist, it was cohts they sat by the waterfalls in an athtness of mountain air without its keenness On one occasion they climbed by dry torrent courses five miles into the mountains, baby and all, on horseback and donkeyback--”such a congregation of htthem by” It was certainly a blessed transformation of the prostrate invalid in the upper roo could feel with regard to her and his deep desire to serve her, that he had seen of the travail of his soul, and in this matter was satisfied
The weeks at Siena of the year 1850 were not quite so prosperous
During that su had been seriously ill When sufficiently recovered she was carried by her husband to a villa in the midst of vines and olives, a mile and a half or two miles outside Siena, which commanded a noble prospect of hills and plain At first she could only remain seated in the easy-chair which he found for her in the city
For a day there was much alarm on behalf of the boy, now able to run about, who lay with heavy head and glassy eyes in a half-stupor; but presently he was astir again, and his ”singing voice” was heard in the house and garden Mrs Browning in the fresh yet war to Florence, they spent a week in the city to see the churches and the pictures by Sodoma Even little Wiedemann screamed for church-interiors and developed remarkable imitative pietis, ”to have the eyeteeth and the Puseyistical crisis over together”
This co word spoken in play, gives a correct indication of Browning's feeling, fully shared in by his wife, towards the religiousthe face of the established Church ”Puseyism” was for theion for its play-ground; they viewed it with a superior ser
Both of thee and the other could read _Mada and approved the lish Puritanis was to e to religion in a highly original poem
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 40: ”Why am I a Liberal?” Edited by Andrew Reid London, 1885]
[Footnote 41: Letters of EBB, i 442]
[Footnote 42: To Miss Mitford, August 24, 1848]
[Footnote 43: Casa Guidi Windows, i]
[Footnote 44: ”Jane Eyre” was lent to EBB by Mrs Story]
[Footnote 45: _To Miss Mitford, Feb 18, 1850_]
[Footnote 46: In January 1859, Pen was reading an Italian translation of _Monte Cristo_, and announced, to his father's and mother's amusement, that after Dumas he would proceed to ”papa's favourite book, _Madame Bovary_”]
Chapter VII
Christmas Eve and Easter Day
_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_ was published by Chapman & Hall in the year 1850 It was reported to the author that within the first fortnight two hundred copies had been sold, hich evidence of moderate popularity he was pleased; but the initial success was not maintained and subsequently the book became, like _Sordello_, a ”re days of the correspondence with Miss Barrett, when she had called upon her friend to speak as poet in his own person and to speak out, he assured her that whereas hitherto he had only iven the truth not as pure white light but broken into prismatic hues, noould try to declare directly that which was in him In place of his men and women he would have her to be a companion in his work, and yet, he adds, ”I don't think I shall let _you_ hear, after all, the savage things about Popes and iions that I must say” We can only conjecture as to whether the the's mind His wife's influence certainly was not unlikely to incline him towards the choice of a subject which had soht She knew that poetry to be of per fashi+on; that in a certain sense itideas and passions which are parts of our abiding hu into what is perh the forms which it assumes in the world in of such a poehts; she speaks of her intention of writing a sort of ”novel-poe into drawing-roo face to face and withoutthe truth as I conceive of it out plainly” Browning's poe-rooms, but it stepped boldly into churches and conventicles and the lecture-rooical professors
The spiritual life individual and the spiritual life corporate--these, to state it in a word, are the subjects dealt with in the two connected poems of his new volume; the spiritual life individual is considered in _Easter Day_; the spiritual life corporate in _Christ, with the blood of all the Puritans in him, as his wife expressed it, could not undervalue that strain of piety which had descended froles for religious liberty in the nonconforious societies of the seventeenth century and the Evangelical revival of ti around hiress of two re to embody, the Catholic as opposed to the Puritan conception of religion, the other a free criticalto preserve and ious influence The facts can be put concisely if we say that one and the saeon, the _Apologia pro vita sua_ of Newma_ of Matthew Arnold To discuss these three conceptions of religion adequately in verse would have been ienius of Dryden, and would have converted a work of art into a theological treatise But three representative scenes ht be flung out by way of con of the poet of _Christmas Eve_
To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult But the presence of hu had hitherto in his art ift of huhest or finest or subtlest kind; it was very far from the humour of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, which felt so profoundly all the incongruities, hable, of huour of its own; it was united with a capacity for exact and shrewd observation; and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of hly the work of Balzac and of Flaubertin his composition ofcall the realist in art; and the work of the realist ht serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist's ventures of iinative faith The picture of the lath-and-plaster entry of ”Mount Zion” and of the pious sheep--duly indignant at the interloper in their midst--who one by one enter the fold, if not worthy of Cervantes or of Shakespeare, is hardly inferior to the descriptive passages of dickens, and it is touched, in the s and tatters of huht, the black barricade of cloud, the sudden apparition of the arment eddies onward, become at once more supernatural and rotesquerie Is the vision of the face of Christ an illusion?
The whole face turned upon me full, And I spread myself beneath it, As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it In the cleansing sun, his wool,-- Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness Sohtness
Is this a phantom or a dream? Well, at least it is certain that the witness has seen with his hty report of her u, a wreck of whalebones” And the fat woman of Mount Zion Chapel, with Love Lane at the back of it, may help us to credit the awful vision of the Lord
Thus the poeinative sensuousness which art deuh what is sensuous is here tasked in the service of what is spiritual, and a commentary is added The central idea of the whole is that where love is, there is Christ; and the Christ of this poem is certainly no abstraction, no moral ideal, no transcendental conception of absolute charity, but very God and very race and truth Literary criticis in any other sense enious, but it is not disinterested, and some side-wind blows it far froe, he e with defective love Desiring to give salience to this idea, he deprives his little pious conventicle of every virtue except one--”love,” and no other word is written on each forehead of the worshi+ppers Browning, the artist and student of art, was not insensible to the spiritual power of beauty; and beauty is conspicuously absent from the praise and prayer that went up from Mount Zion chapel; its for, the lover of knowledge, was not insensible to the value of intelligence in things of religion; and the congregation of Mount Zion sit on ”divinely flustered”
under