Part 6 (1/2)

the pig-of-lead-like pressure Of the preaching man's immense stupidity

The pastor, whose words so sway his enraptured flock, les the Holy Scriptures with a fine irreverence, and pours forth his doctrine with an entirely self-satisfied indifference to reason and common sense Nor has love accomplished its perfect work, for the interloper who stands at the entry is eyed with inquisitorial glances of pious exclusiveness--how has a Gallio such as he ventured to take his station a the elect?

Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, ly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English dissent, and the supre a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional forht These are the precise subjects of Browning's so adds that in Mount Zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where love is, there is Christ

Of English nonconfor can write, as it were, from within; he writes of Roman Catholic forms of worshi+p as one who stands outside; his sympathy with the prostrate multitude in St

Peter's at Ronition of an objective fact than springing fro For a moment he is carried away by the tide of their devout enthusiasms; but he recovers himself to find indeed that love is also here and therefore Christ is present, but the worshi+ppers fallen under ”Roross yoke,” are very infants in their need of these sacred buffooneries and posturings and petticoatings; infants

Peevish as ever to be suckled, Lulled with the same old baby-prattle With interh the tier infantile, but capable of standing and walking, ”not to speak of trying to cli with Roence; it is quite possible to be on the sa as crude as he in misconception He does not seriously consider the Catholic idea which regards things of sense as made luminous by the spirit of which they are the envoys and the h for him to declare his own creed which treats any intermediary between the human soul and the Divine as an obstruction or a veil:

My heart does best to receive in meekness That mode of worshi+p, asleft behind, His All in All appears serene With the thinnest hu the mystic lamps, the seven, The many motions of his spirit, Pass as they list to earth from heaven

This was the creed of Milton and of Bunyan; and yet with both Milton and Bunyan the iery of the senses is es of the spirit

Froen, with its destructive and reconstructive criticis is even farther removed than he is from the ritualisms of the Roman basilica Yet no caricature can be entle in his aspect, so for into the air with a pure abstracted look, proceeds in a grave sweet voice to exhibit and analyse the sources of thefinds intellect indeed but only the shadow of love He argues that if the ”myth” of Christ be dissolved, the authority of Christ as a teacher disappears; Christ is even inferior to other moralists by virtue of the fact that He made personal claims which cannot be sustained And whatever may be Christ's merit as a teacher of the truth, the motive to action which His life and words supplied must cease to exist if it be shown that the divine sacrifice of God ination At every point the criticis is as far apart as it is possible to conceive fros of Matthew Arnold The one writer regards the ”rave-clothes of a risen Christ whose essential virtue lies in his sweet reasonableness and his morality touched with enthusiasm The other believes that if the wonderful story of love be proved a fable, a profound alteration--and an alteration for the worse--has been ious consciousness of Christendom And undoubtedly the difference between the supernatural and the natural theories of Christianity is far greater than Arnold represented it to be But Browning at this date very inadequately conceived the power of Christ as a revealer of the fatherhood of God In that revelation, whether the Son of God was hu power, and a hest energies of the soul That such is the case has been abundantly evidenced by the facts of history Browning finds only en lecture-room; and of course it was easy to adapt his Professor's lecture so as to arrive at this conclusion But the process and the conclusion are alike unjust

Having traversed the various forms of Christian faith and scepticism, the speaker in _Christmas Eve_ declines into a mood of lazy benevolence and mild indifferentism towards each and all of these Has not Christ been present alike at the holding-forth of the poor dissenting son of thunder, who tore God's word into shreds, at the tinklings and posturings and incense-fumes of Roman pietism, and even at the learned discourse which dissolved the myth of his own life and death? Why, then, over-strenuously take a side? Why not regard all phases of belief or no-belief with equal and serene regard? Such a 's feelings The hem of Christ's robe passes wholly at this point from the hand of the seer of visions in his poem One best way of worshi+p there needs must be; ours may indeed not be the absolutely best, but it is our part, it is our probation to see that we strive earnestly after what is best; yes, and strive with ains which we have found

Itall wanderers to the one fold at last As for us, we must seek after Hiht, our purest passion Here Browning speaks fro Only, we may ask, what if one's truest self lie so syh to include a Montaigne as well as a Pascal or a Browning? assuredly the world without its Montaigne would be a poorer and a less hospitable dwelling-place for the spirits ofcomplained to her husband of what she terms the asceticism of _Easter Day_, the second part of his volume of 1850; his reply was that it stated ”one side of the question” ”Don't think,” Mrs Browning says, ”that he has taken to the cilix--indeed he has not--but it is his way to _see_ things as passionately as other people _feel_ theious life in Churches and societies, nothing of the communities of public worshi+p For the writer of this poes exist--God, the individual soul, and the world regarded as the testing place and training place of the soul

Browning has here a rigour of moral or spiritual earnestness which may be called, by any one who so pleases, Puritan in its kind and its intensity; he feels the need, if we are to attain any approxiirt loin Two difficulties in the Christian life in particular he chooses to consider--first, the difficulty of faith in the things of the spirit, and especially in what he regards as the essential parts of the Christian story; and secondly, the difficulty of obeying the injunction to renounce the world That we cannot grow to our highest attainan philosophy--that of living according to nature, he regards as evident, for nature itself is warped and roans and travails, and from its discords how shall we frame a harmony? It was always his habit of er and confront a doubt, and if there were anywhere a lurking fear, to draw this forth froht, even at the risk of some mortal ill Therefore he will press for an answer to his present questionings; he will try conclusions to the utter with a touch of scorn, assures us that evidences of spiritual realities, evidences of Christianity--as they are styled--external and internal will be readily found by hih they are for him ants to be convinced But in truth faith is a noble venture of the spirit, an aspiring effort towards what is best, even though what is best ropes blindly in unquestionably solid clay; better be like the grasshopper ”that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun” A grasshopper's leap sunwards--that is e signify by this word ”faith”

But the difficulties of the Christian life only shi+ft their place when faith by whatever means has been won We are bidden to renounce the world: what does the injunction mean? in ay shall it be obeyed?

”Ascetic” Mrs Browning named this poem; and ascetic it is if by that e understand the counselling and exhorting to a noble exercise and discipline; but Browning even in his poe can be more fatal than his to asceticism in the narrower sense of the word To renounce the world, if interpreted aright, is to extinguish or suppress no faculty that has been given to hest uses:

”Renounce the world!”--Ah, were it done Byone by one Your limbs off, with your wise head last, How easy were it!--how soon past, If once in the believing her renunciation is this--to choose the things of the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as s of sense to press through these to the things of the spirit which lie behind and beyond and above them

Such, and such alone, is the asceticis suy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue A certain self-denial it her joy And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what h with only a fuller potency? In the choice between sense and spirit, or, to put it her and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also itsof this ible--if it be not the moment in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and developed for other lives to co is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of criticism which detaches the idea of beauty froreater artists But the solehts that are taken up by beauty in such work, for exaelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its peculiar character as a thing of beauty And armour, we know, 's doctrine h his poetry; but at his best--as in _Rabbi ben Ezra_ or _Abt Vogler_--the thought of the poem is needful in the dance of lyrical enthusiasm, as the male partner who takes hands with beauty, and to separate the the dance to a sudden close Both are present in _Easter Day_, and we e already quoted froined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web Here the poet's iination is as intense in its presentation of Christ the doomsman:

He stood there Like the snific pall Mantled in massive fold and fall His head, and coiled in snaky swathes About His feet; night's black, that bathes All else, broke, grizzled with despair, Against the soul of blackness there

A gesture told the ht hand which based the chin,-- That intense meditation fixed On His procedure,--pity mixed With the fulfilment of decree

Motionless thus, He spoke to me, Who fell before His feet, a ration of the Judgment Day is perhaps over-laboured, a descriptive _tour de force_, horror piled upon horror with accumulative power,--a picture somewhat too much in the manner of Martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublilow of Milton's hell is intenser, and Milton's majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flament Day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul The speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven The sentence pronounced upon him is in accordance with the election of his oill--let earth, with all its beauty of nature, all its gifts of human art, all its successes of the intellect, as he had conceived and chosen them, be his To his despair, he finds that what he had prized in life, and what is now granted to hi him happiness or even content The plenitude of beauty, of which all partial beauty was but a pledge, is forever lost to hilory of art, which lay beyond its poor actual attainrasps of guess Which pull the more into the less,

is lost And as to earth's best possession--love--had he ever h human love of that which it forthshadows--the love that is perfect and divine? Earth is no longer earth to the doomed man, but the star of the God Rephan of which we read in one of Browning's latest poems; in the horror of its blank and passionless uniformity, untroubled by any spiritual presences, he cowers at the Judge's feet, and prays for darkness, hunger, toil, distress, if only hope be also granted hih the dread disguise As the whole God within his eyes Embraced me

The Doomsman has in ahas the burden of a prophecy to utter, he utters it, after the manner of earlier prophets, as a vision His art is sensuous and passionate; his arguinative experiences