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, with which evidence of moderate
popularity he was pleased; but the initial success was not maintained
and subsequently the book became, like _Sordello_, a "remainder." As
early as 1845, in the opening 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 made men and women utter themselves on his behalf and had given the
truth not as pure white light but broken into prismatic hues, now he
would 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 imaginative religions that I must say." We can
only conjecture as to whether the theme of the poem of 1850 was already
in Browning's mind. His wife's influence certainly was not unlikely to
incline him towards the choice of a subject which had some immediate
relation to contemporary thought. She knew that poetry to be of
permanent value must do more than reflect a passing fashion; that in a
certain sense it must in its essence be out of time and space,
expressing ideas and passions which are parts of our abiding humanity.
Yet she recognised an advantage in pressing into what is permanent
through the forms which it assumes in the world immediately around the
artist. And even in 1845 the design of such a poem as her own _Aurora
Leigh_ was occupying her thoughts; she speaks of her intention of
writing a sort of "novel-poem, running into the midst of our
conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, 'where angels
fear to tread'; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the
Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out
plainly." Browning's poem did not rush into drawing-rooms, but it
stepped boldly into churches and conventicles and the lecture-rooms of
theological 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 _Christmas Eve._ Browning,
with the blood of all the Puritans in him, as his wife expressed it,
could not undervalue that strain of piety which had descended from the
exiles at Geneva and had run on through the struggles for religious
liberty in the nonconformist religious societies of the seventeenth
century and the Evangelical revival of times less remote. Looking around
him he had seen in his own day the progress of two remarkable
movements--one embodying, or professing to embody, the Catholic as
opposed to the Puritan conception of religion, the other a free
critical movement, tending to the disintegration of the traditional
dogma of Christianity, yet seeking to preserve and maintain its ethical
and even in part its religious influence. The facts can be put concisely
if we say that one and the same epoch produced in England the sermons of
Spurgeon, the _Apologia pro vita sua_ of Newman, and the _Literature and
Dogma_ of Matthew Arnold. To discuss these three conceptions of religion
adequately in verse would have been impossible even for the
argumentative genius of Dryden, and would have converted a work of art
into a theological treatise. But three representative scenes might be
painted, and some truths of passionate feeling might be flung out by way
of commentary. Such was the design of the poet of _Christmas Eve_.
To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult. But
the presence of humour might save the sublimities from a fall, and
Browning had hitherto in his art made but slight and occasional use of a
considerable gift of humour which he possessed. It was humour not of the
highest or finest or subtlest kind; it was very far from the humour of
Shakespeare or of Cervantes, which felt so profoundly all the
incongruities, majestic, pathetic, and laughable, of human nature. But
it had a rough vigour 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
malice. One who esteemed so highly the work of Balzac and of Flaubert
might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we
now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to
sustain and vindicate the idealist's ventures of imaginative 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 manner of Dickens, with pity for these rags and tatters of humanity.
The night, the black barricade of cloud, the sudden apparition of the
moon, the vast double rainbow, and He whose sweepy garment eddies
onward, become at once more supernatural and more unquestionably real
because sublimity springs out of grotesquerie. 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
Some defiled, discoloured web--
So lay I saturate, with brightness.
Is this a phantom or a dream? Well, at least it is certain that the
witness has seen with his mortal eyes the fat weary woman, and heard the
mighty report of her umbrella, "wry and flapping, 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 poem has the imaginative sensuousness which art demands; it is
not an argument but a series of vivid experiences, though 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 man, the Christ of Nazareth, who dwelt
among men, full of grace and truth. Literary criticism which would
interpret Browning's meaning in any other sense may be ingenious, but it
is not disinterested, and some side-wind blows it far from the mark.
Love with defective knowledge, he maintains, is of more spiritual worth
than knowledge 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
worshippers. 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
forms of worship are burlesque and uncouth. Browning, 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
the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching man's immense stupidity.
The pastor, whose words so sway his enraptured flock, mangles 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 among the elect?
Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, might have discoursed with a
charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English
dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play
upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae. And Matthew
Arnold would have been right. These are the precise subjects of
Browning's somewhat rough-and-ready satire. But Browning adds that in
Mount Zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where love
is, there is Christ.
Of English nonconformity in its humblest forms Browning can write, as it
were, from within; he writes of Roman Catholic forms of worship as one
who stands outside; his sympathy with the prostrate multitude in St.
Peter's at Rome is of an impersonal kind, founded rather upon the
recognition of an objective fact than springing from an instinctive
feeling. 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 worshippers fallen under
"Rome's gross 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 intermixture of the rattle.
And this, though the time has come when love would have them no longer
infantile, but capable of standing and walking, "not to speak of trying
to climb." Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman Catholic
dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite
possible to be on the same side as Browning without being 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 ministers. It is enough 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 worship, as most to his mind,
Where earthly aids being left behind,
His All in All appears serene
With the thinnest human veil between,
Letting 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 imagery of the senses is employed as the means not of
concealing but revealing the things of the spirit.
From the lecture-room of Göttingen, with its destructive and
reconstructive criticism, Browning is even farther removed than he is
from the ritualisms of the Roman basilica. Yet no caricature can be more
amiable than his drawing of the learned Professor, so gentle in his
aspect, so formidable in his conclusions, who, gazing into the air with
a pure abstracted look, proceeds in a grave sweet voice to exhibit and
analyse the sources of the myth of Christ. In the Professor's
lecture-room Browning finds 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 manifest
in the flesh is no more than a figment of the devout imagination. At
every point the criticism of Browning is as far apart as it is possible
to conceive from the criticism set forth in the later writings of
Matthew Arnold. The one writer regards the "myth" as no more than the
grave-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 made in
the religious 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 human or divine, lay a truth of surpassing power, and a
motive of action capable of summoning forth the purest and highest
energies of the soul. That such is the case has been abundantly
evidenced by the facts of history. Browning finds only much learning and
the ghost of dead love in the Göttingen 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 mood of amiable
indifferentism is abhorrent to Browning'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 worship 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
might and main to confer upon our fellows the gains which we have found.
It may be God's part--we trust it is--to bring all wanderers to the one
fold at last. As for us, we must seek after Him and find Him in the mode
required by our highest thought, our purest passion. Here Browning
speaks from his central feeling. Only, we may ask, what if one's truest
self lie somewhere hidden amid a thousand hesitating sympathies? And is
not the world spacious enough 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 of men.
Mrs Browning complained 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_ them."
_Easter Day_ has nothing to say of religious life in Churches and
societies, nothing of the communities of public worship. For the writer
of this poem only three things 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 approximation to
the Christian ideal, of the lit lamp and the girt 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 attainment by the old method enjoined by
pagan philosophy--that of living according to nature, he regards as
evident, for nature itself is warped and marred; it groans and travails,
and from its discords how shall we frame a harmony? It was always his
habit of mind, he tells us, from his childhood onwards, to face a danger
and confront a doubt, and if there were anywhere a lurking fear, to draw
this forth from its hiding-place and examine it in the light, 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 uttermost.
As to the initial difficulty of faith, Browning 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 him who desires to find; convincing enough they are for him who
wants 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 may never be attained. The mole gropes 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 what
we signify by this word "faith."
But the difficulties of the Christian life only shift their place when
faith by whatever means has been won. We are bidden to renounce the
world: what does the injunction mean? in what way shall it be obeyed?
"Ascetic" Mrs Browning named this poem; and ascetic it is if by that
word we understand the counselling and exhorting to a noble exercise and
discipline; but Browning even in his poem by no means wears the cilix,
and no teaching 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 man, but rather
to put each faculty to its highest uses:
"Renounce the world!"--Ah, were it done
By merely cutting one by one
Your limbs off, with your wise head last,
How easy were it!--how soon past,
If once in the believing mood.
The harder and the higher renunciation is this--to choose the things of
the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as
means of our earthly discipline and development, the things 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 asceticism to which Browning summons his
disciple; it is the asceticism of energy 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 may demand,
but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. And if life
with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the
spirit shines through with only a fuller potency? In the choice between
sense and spirit, or, to put it more generally, in the choice between
what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its
means of growth. And what is the meaning of this mortal life--this
strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible--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 come?
To forget that Browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of
criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our
humanity addressed by the greater artists. But the solemn thoughts that
are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of Michael
Angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its
peculiar character as a thing of beauty. And armour, we know, may be as
lovely to the mere senses as a flower. Browning's doctrine may sometimes
protrude gauntly through 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 them would bring the dance to a sudden close. Both are
present in _Easter Day_, and we must watch the movement of the two. In a
passage already quoted from _Christmas Eve_ the face of Christ is nobly
imagined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web. Here the poet's
imagination is as intense in its presentation of Christ the doomsman:
He stood there. Like the smoke
Pillared o'er Sodom, when day broke--
I saw Him. One magnific 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 mood within--
That wrapped right 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 mass,
No man now.
The picture of the final conflagration 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 sublimity of
terror. The glow of Milton's hell is intenser, and Milton's majestic
instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames. The real
awfulness of Browning's Judgment 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 own will--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 him cannot
bring him happiness or even content. The plenitude of beauty, of which
all partial beauty was but a pledge, is forever lost to him. The glory
of art, which lay beyond its poor actual attainments, is lost. The joy
of knowledge, with all those
grasps of guess
Which pull the more into the less,
is lost. And as to earth's best possession--love--had he ever made a
discovery through 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 him:
Then did the form expand, expand--
knew Him through the dread disguise
As the whole God within his eyes
Embraced me.
The Doomsman has in a moment become the Saviour. In all this, if
Browning has 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 argument is transformed into a series of imaginative
experiences.
Mrs. Browning's illness during the summer and early autumn of 1850 left
her for a time more shaken in health than she had been since her
marriage. But by the spring of the following year she had recovered
strength; and designs of travel were formed, which should include Rome,
North Italy, Switzerland, the Rhine, Brussels, Paris and London. Almost
at the moment of starting for Rome at the end of April, the plans were
altered; the season was too far advanced for going south; ways and means
must be economised; Rome might be postponed for a future visit; and
Venice would make amends for the present sacrifice. And Venice in May
and early June did indeed for a time make amends. "I have been between
heaven and earth," Mrs. Browning wrote, "since our arrival at Venice."
The rich architecture, the colour, the moonlight, the music, the
enchanting silence made up a unity of pleasures like nothing that she
had previously known. When evening came she and her husband would follow
the opera from their box hired for "two shillings and eightpence
English," or sit under the moon in the piazza of St Mark sipping coffee
and reading the French papers. But as the month went by, Browning lost
appetite and lost sleep. The "soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere"
which suited Mrs. Browning made him, after the first excitement of
delight, grow nervous and dispirited. They hastened away to Padua, drove
to Arqua, "for Petrarch's sake," passed through Brescia in a flood of
white moonlight, and having reached Milan climbed--the invalid of
Wimpole Street and her husband--to the topmost point of the cathedral.
From the Italian lakes they crossed by the St Gothard to Switzerland,
and omitting part of their original scheme of wandering, journeyed in
twenty-four hours without stopping from Strasburg to Paris.
In Paris they loitered for three weeks. Mrs. Browning during the short
visit which followed her marriage had hardly seen the city. Bright
shop-windows, before which little Wiedemann would scream with pleasure,
restaurants and dinners _à la carte_, full-foliaged trees and gardens in
the heart of the town were a not unwelcome exchange for Italian
church-interiors and altar-pieces. Even "disreputable prints and
fascinating hats and caps" were appreciated as proper to the genius of
the place, and the writer of _Casa Guidi Windows_ had the happiness of
seeing her hero, M. le President, "in a cocked hat, and with a train of
cavalry, passing like a rocket along the boulevards to an occasional
yell from the Red." By a happy chance they lighted in Paris upon
Tennyson, now Poet-laureate, whom Mrs. Browning had hitherto known only
through his poems; he was in the friendliest mood, and urged that they
should make use of his house and servants during their stay in England,
an offer which was not refused, though there was no intention of
actually taking advantage of the kindness. As for England, the thought
of it, with her father's heart and her father's door closed against her,
was bitter as wormwood to Mrs. Browning. "It's only Robert," she wrote,
"who is a patriot now, of us two."
English soil as they stepped ashore was a puddle, and English air a
fog. London lodgings were taken at 26 Devonshire Street, and, although
Mrs. Browning suffered from the climate, they were soon dizzied and
dazzled by the whirl of pleasant hospitalities. An evening with Carlyle
("one of the greatest sights in England"), a dinner given by Forster at
Thames Ditton, "in sight of the swans," a breakfast with Rogers, daily
visits of Barry Cornwall, cordial companionship of Mrs. Jameson, a
performance by the Literary Guild actors, a reading of _Hamlet_ by Fanny
Kemble--with these distractions and such as these the two months flew
quickly. It was in some ways a relief when Pen's faithful maid Wilson
went for a fortnight to see her kinsfolk, and Mrs. Browning had to take
her place and substitute for social racketing domestic cares. The one
central sorrow remained and in some respects was intensified. She had
written to her father, and Browning himself wrote--"a manly, true,
straight-forward letter," she informs a friend, "... everywhere generous
and conciliating." A violent and unsparing reply was made, and with it
came all the letters that his undutiful daughter had written to Mr.
Barrett; not one had been read or opened. He returned them now, because
he had not previously known how he could be relieved of the obnoxious
documents. "God takes it all into his own hands," wrote Mrs. Browning,
"and I wait." Something, however, was gained; her brothers were
reconciled; Arabella Barrett was constant in kindness; and Henrietta
journeyed from Taunton to London to enjoy a week in her company.
It was at Devonshire Street that Bayard Taylor, the distinguished
American poet and critic, made the acquaintance of the Brownings, and
the record of his visit gives a picture of Browning at the age of
thirty-nine, so clearly and firmly drawn that it ought not to be omitted
here: "In a small drawing-room on the first floor I met Browning, who
received me with great cordiality. In his lively, cheerful manner, quick
voice, and perfect self-possession, he made the impression of an
American rather than an Englishman. He was then, I should judge, about
thirty-seven years of age, but his dark hair was already streaked with
gray about the temples. His complexion was fair, with perhaps the
faintest olive tinge, eyes large, clear, and gray, nose strong and well
cut, mouth full and rather broad, and chin pointed, though not
prominent. His forehead broadened rapidly upwards from the outer angle
of the eyes, slightly retreating. The strong individuality which marks
his poetry was expressed not only in his face and head, but in his whole
demeanour. He was about the medium height, strong in the shoulders, but
slender at the waist, and his movements expressed a combination of
vigour and elasticity." Mrs Browning with her slight figure, pale face,
shaded by chestnut curls, and grave eyes of bluish gray, is also
described; and presently entered to the American visitor Pen, a
blue-eyed, golden-haired boy, who babbled his little sentences in
Italian.
When, towards the close of September, Browning and his wife left London
for Paris, Carlyle by his own request was their companion on the
journey. Mrs Browning feared that his irritable nerves would suffer from
the vivacities of little Pen, but it was not so; he accepted with good
humour the fact that the small boy had not yet learned, like his own
Teufelsdröckh, the Eternal No: "Why, sir," exclaimed Carlyle, "you have
as many aspirations as Napoleon!"[47] At Dieppe, Browning, as Carlyle
records, "did everything, fought for us, and we--that is, the woman, the
child and I--had only to wait and be silent." At Paris in the midst of
"a crowding, jangling, vociferous tumult, the brave Browning fought for
us, leaving me to sit beside the woman." An apartment was found on the
sunny side of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, "pretty, cheerful, carpeted
rooms," far brighter and better than those of Devonshire Street, and
when, to Browning's amusement, his wife had moved every chair and table
into the new and absolutely right position, they could rest and be
thankful. Carlyle spent several evenings with them, and repaid the
assistance which he received in various difficulties from Browning's
command of the language, by picturesque conversations in his native
speech: "You come to understand perfectly," wrote Mrs Browning, "when
you know him, that his bitterness is only melancholy, and his scorn
sensibility." A little later Browning's father and sister spent some
weeks in Paris. Here, at all events, were perfect relations between the
members of a family group; the daughter here was her father's comrade
with something even of a maternal instinct; and the grandfather
discovered to his great satisfaction that his own talent for drawing had
descended to his grandchild.
The time was one when the surface of life in Paris showed an unruffled
aspect; but under the surface were heavings of inward agitation. On the
morning of December 2nd the great stroke against the Republic was
delivered; the _coup d'état_ was an accomplished fact. Later in the day
Louis Napoleon rode under the windows of the apartment in the Avenue des
Champs-Elysées, from the Carrousel to the Arc de l'Étoile. To Mrs
Browning it seemed the grandest of spectacles--"he rode there in the
name of the people after all." She and her husband had witnessed
revolutions in Florence, and political upheavals did not seem so very
formidable. On the Thursday of bloodshed in the streets--December
4th--Pen was taken out for his usual walk, though not without certain
precautions; as the day advanced the excitement grew tense, and when
night fell the distant firing on the boulevards kept Mrs. Browning from
her bed till one o'clock. On Saturday they took a carriage and drove to
see the field of action; the crowds moved to and fro, discussing the
situation, but of real disturbance there was none; next day the theatres
had their customary spectators and the Champs-Elysées its promenaders.
For the dishonoured "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité," as Mrs. Browning
heard it suggested, might now be inscribed "Infanterie, Cavallerie,
Artillerie."
Such may have been her husband's opinion, but such was not hers. Her
faith in the President had been now and again shaken; her faith in the
Emperor became as time went on an enthusiasm of hero-worship. The
display of force on December 2nd impressed her imagination; there was a
dramatic completeness in the whole performance; Napoleon represented the
people; a democrat, she thought, should be logical and thorough; the
vote of the millions entirely justified their chief. Browning viewed
affairs more critically, more sceptically. "Robert and I," writes his
wife jestingly, "have had some domestic _émeutes_, because he hates
some imperial names." He detested all Buonapartes, he would say, past,
present, and to come,--an outbreak explained by Mrs Browning to her
satisfaction, as being only his self-willed way of dismissing a subject
with which he refused to occupy his thoughts, a mere escapade of feeling
and known to him as such. When all the logic and good sense were on the
woman's side, how could she be disturbed by such masculine infirmities?
Though only a very little lower than the angels, he was after all that
humorous being--a man.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 47: "Mrs Orr's Life and Letters of R.B.," 173.]