Part 13 (1/2)
Looks old, fantastic and i that fades and fades
Two possessions, out of what life has brought, remain with her--the babe, hile yet unborn had converted her from a sufferer to a defender, and the friend who has saved her soul Evenin Pompilia's nature The little Gaetano, whoe; he will grow great, strong, stern, a tall young uess what she was like, who ht of her He too withdraws into the dream of earth She can never lose him, and yet lose hiive hiht to God, without a further care,” so to be safe But one experience of Pos by itslaid her babe aith God, she ratitude”; and her last breath shall spend itself in doing service to earth by striving to ht what earth will for a time possess and then, forever, heaven--God's servant, man's friend, the saviour of the weak, the foe of all who are vile--and to the gossips of Arezzo and of Roht-of-love priest, Caponsacchi
If any point in the whole long poe and the Book_, can be described as central, it must be found in the relations, each to the other, of Caponsacchi and Po, could hardly be told otherwise than in poetry, for it needs the faith that coh spiritual beauty to render it comprehensible and credible, and such beauty is best expressed by art
It is easy to convince the world of a passion between the sexes which is simply animal; nor is art much needed to help out the proof Happily the hurees their parts, and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread But the love that is wholly spiritual see, and if it be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing phantom-like, tenuous, and cold But, in truth, this reality once experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an ardour as passionate as any that is known to man Its special note is a deliverance fro other than self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in religious conversion; when Bunyan, for exahteousness and saw that righteousness above him in the eternal heavens, he walked as ahis joy to the crows upon the plough-land; and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real altitude
If a poet can succeed in lifting up our hearts so that they s, he has contributed an iment towards an interpretation of hu has assuredly done The sense of a power outside oneself whose influence invades the just-awakened man, the conviction that the secret of life has been revealed, the lying passive and prone to the influx of the spirit, the illus have passed away and that all things have become new, the acceptance of a supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire i with a fidelity which if reached solely by i, for who can discover these h a personal experience?[101] If the senses co-operate--as perhaps they do--in such uration, senses taken up into the spirit--”Whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell” When Caponsacchi bears the body of Pompilia in a swoon to her chamber in the inn at Castelnuovo, it is as if he bore the host From the first moment when he set eyes upon her in the theatre,
A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad,
he is delivered from his frivolous self, he is solemnized and awed; the form of his worshi+p is self-sacrifice; his first word to her--”I am yours ”--is
An eternity Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth O' the soul that then broke silence
To abstain froain would be joy more than pain if this were duty to her and to God For him theis sues: ”You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith”
There is another kind of faith which coht and action and trial, and the long fidelity of a life It is that of which Milton speaks in the lines:
Till old experience do attain To so of Prophetic strain
This is the faith of Browning's Pope Innocent, who up to extreence both on the earthward and the Godward sides, and who, being wholly delivered from self by that devotion to duty which is the habit of his ment upon them alhteousness And yet he is entirely huerent and also an old man, learned in the secrets of the heart, patient in the inquisition of facts, weighing his document of evidence, burdened by the sense of responsibility, cheered also by the opportunity of true service, grave but not sad--
Siacious, mild yet resolute, With prudence, probity and--what beside Frorey ultimate decrepitude,” yet visited by the spiritual fire which touches a soul whose robe of flesh is worn thin; not unassailed by doubts as to the justice of his final decision, but assured that his part is confidently to make the best use of the pohich he has been entrusted; young of heart, if also old, in his rejoicing in goodness and his antipathy to evil
_The Ring and the Book_ is a great receptacle into which Browning poured, with an affluence that perhaps is excessive, all his powers--his searchings for truth, his passion, his casuistry, his feeling for beauty, his tenderness, his gift of pity, his veiled memories of as most precious in the past, his hopes for the future, his worldly knowledge, his unworldly aspirations, his humour, such as it was, robust rather than delicate Could the three ues which tell how in various ways it strikes a Roue, could the speeches of the two advocates have been briefly set over, one against the other, instead of being drawn out at length, we 's s as we find them, and perhaps a skilled writer knows his own business best Never was Browning's mastery in narrative displayed with such effect as in Caponsacchi's account of the flight to Roed with lyrical enthusiasnant as in his realisation of the s of intellect and the intuitions of the spirit shown by hith with such a lucid subtlety as in the deliberations and decisions of the Pope The whole poe , and the coift ha the years of smithcraft ”in memoriam”; in memory and also with a hope
The British Public, who addresses at the close of his poe so many years, nohen he was not far fro and the Book_ almost immediately passed into a second edition The decade from 1869 onwards is called by Mrs Orr the fullest period in Browning's life His social occupations and entertainments both in London and for a time as a visitor at country-houses becay for work as well as for play During these ten years no fewer than nine new volumes of his poetry appeared None of theotten; it is the scene of only two or three short pieces, which are included in the volume of 1876--_Pacchiarotto and hoorked in distemper; with other Poeards their origin fall with a single exception into two groups; first those of ancient Greece, suggested by Browning's studies in classical draree, are connected with his sus in France and Switzerland The dreaau is Leicester Square; but this also is one of the poelish in its characters and their surroundings Such a grouping of the works of the period is of a superficial nature, and it can be readily diss into pro, while resolved to work out as in hiestions He had acquired certain methods which he could apply to almost any topic He had confidence that any subject on which he concentrated his powers of mind could be compelled to yield material of interest It cannot be said that he exercised always a wise discretion in the choice of subjects; these ought to have been excellent in themselves; he trusted too much to the successful issue of the play of his own intellect and i and the Book_ had given hie draue
Noas prepared to stretch the draue beyond the bounds, and new devices were invented to keep it froinary disputants intervene in the ue; there are objections, replies, retorts; a second player in the gaainst himself
In the story of the Roled with fact, and truth with falsehood, with a view totruth in the end the ht of throwing himself into intellectual syonism or at least experienced an inward sense of alienation
The characteristic offalsehood to yield up truth, for ever (to e the treacherous water with the feet in order that the head her into the pure air enius united an intellect which delighted in the investigation of complex proble itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it united an analytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an intuitive power springing frole a Gordian knot in order that in a ht be cut with the sword of the spirit In the earlier poems his spiritual ardours and intuitions were often present throughout, and without latency, without reserve; ih no intervening or resisting ree in some subsequent poems, while the supreme authority resides in the spiritual intuitions or the passions of the heart, their instantaneous, decisive aits until a prolonged casuistry has accomplished its utmost; falsehood seems almost more needful in the process of the poet than truth And yet it is never actually so Rather to the poet, as a moral explorer, it appeared a kind of cowardice to seek truth only where it h all winding ways of error; it is thrown out as a spot of intense illuround of darkness; it leaps forth as the flash of the search-light piercing through a mist The masculine characters in the poe's intellectual casuistry--a Hohenstiel-Schwangau, an Aristophanes; and they are made to say the best and the most truthful words that can be uttered by such as they are and from such positions as theirs; the female characters, a Balaustion, the Lady of Sorrows in _The Inn Album_, and others are often revealers of sudden truth, which with theher and clearer standpoint--or a dictate of pure human passion Eminent --ht up out of the habitual ways and the lower levels of prudence, takes its guidance and inspiring h some noble ardour of the heart Therefore it did not seees of a laborious book in creating a tangle and eood, of truth and falsehood, in view of the fact that a shi+ningforward and do its work of severing absolutely and finally right fro's readers longed at times, and not without cause, for the old directness and the old pervading presence of spiritual and impassioned truth[102]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 93: Letter to Miss Blagden, Feb 24, 1870, given by Mrs Orr, p 287]
[Footnote 94: Vivid descriptions of Le Croisic at an earlier date may be found in one of Balzac's short stories]