Cristina's last words are addressed, in vindication of her deed, to the priest (Lebel), who is aghast at its ferocity. He, she says, has received the culprit's confession, and would not divulge it for a crown. The church at Avon[[113]] must tell how her secrets have been guarded by him to whom she had entrusted them.
"MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND FUSELI" is the mournful yet impassioned expression of an unrequited love.
"ADAM, LILITH, AND EVE" illustrates the manner in which the typical man and woman will proceed towards each other: the latter committing herself by imprudent disclosures when under the influence of fear, and turning them into a joke as soon as the fear is past; the former pretending that he never regarded them as serious.
"IXION" is an imaginary protest of this victim of the anger of Zeus, wrung from him by his torments, as he whirls on the fiery wheel.[[114]] He has been sentenced to this punishment for presuming on the privileges which Zeus had conferred upon him, and striving to win Heré's[[115]] love; and he declares that the punishment is undeserved: "he was encouraged to claim the love of Heré, together with the friendship of Zeus; he has erred only in his trust in their professions. And granting that it were otherwise—that he had sinned in arrogance—that, befriended by the gods, he had wrongly fancied himself their equal: one touch from them of pitying power would have sufficed to dispel the delusion, born of the false testimony of the flesh!" He asks, with indignant scorn, what need there is of accumulated torment, to prove to one who has recovered his sight, that he was once blind; and in this scorn and indignation he denounces the gods, whose futile vindictiveness would shame the very nature of man; he denounces them as hollow imitations of him whom they are supposed to create: as mere phantoms to which he imparts the light and warmth of his own life. Then rising from denunciation to prophecy, he bids his fellow-men take heart. "Let them struggle and fall! Let them press on the limits of their own existence, to find only human passions and human pettiness in the sphere beyond; let them expiate their striving in hell! The end is not yet come. Of his vapourized flesh, of the 'tears, sweat, and blood' of his agony, is born a rainbow of hope; of the whirling wreck of his existence, the pale light of a coming joy. Beyond the weakness of the god his tormenter he descries a Power, unobstructed, all-pure.
"Thither I rise, whilst thou—Zeus, keep the godship and sink!"
If any doubt were still possible as to Mr. Browning's attitude towards the doctrine of eternal punishment, this poem must dispel it.
"JOCHANAN HAKKADOSH" relates how a certain Rabbi was enabled to extend his life for a year and three months beyond its appointed term, and what knowledge came to him through the extension. Mr. Browning professes to rest his narrative on a Rabbinical work, of which the title, given by him in Hebrew, means "Collection of many lies;" and he adds, by way of supplement, three sonnets, supposed to fantastically illustrate the old Hebrew proverb, "From Moses to Moses[[116]] never was one like Moses," and embodying as many fables of wildly increasing audacity. The main story is nevertheless justified by traditional Jewish belief; and Mr. Browning has made it the vehicle of some poetical imagery and much serious thought.
Jochanan Hakkadosh was at the point of death. He had completed his seventy-ninth year. But his faculties were unimpaired; and his pupils had gathered round him to receive the last lessons of his experience; and to know with what feelings he regarded the impending change. Jochanan Hakkadosh had but one answer to give: his life had been a failure. He had loved, learned, and fought; and in every case his object had been ill-chosen, his energies ill-bestowed. He had shared the common lot, which gives power into the hand of folly, and places wisdom in command when no power is left to be commanded. With this desponding utterance he bade his "children" farewell.
But here a hubbub of protestation arose. "This must not be the Rabbi's last word. It need not be so;" for, as Tsaddik, one of the disciples, reminded his fellows, there existed a resource against such a case. Their "Targums" (commentaries) assured them that when one thus combining the Nine Points of perfection was overtaken by years before the fruits of his knowledge had been matured, respite might be gained for him by a gift from another man's life: the giver being rewarded for the wisdom to which he ministered by a corresponding remission of ill-spent time. The sacrifice was small, viewed side by side with the martyrdoms endured in Rome for the glory of the Jewish race.[[117]] "Who of those present was willing to make it?" Again a hubbub arose. The disciples within, the mixed crowd without, all clamoured for the privilege of lengthening the Rabbi's life from their own. Tsaddik deprecated so extensive a gift. "Their teacher's patience should not be overtaxed, like that of Perida (whose story he tells), by too long a spell of existence." He accepted from the general bounty exactly one year, to be recruited in equal portions from a married lover, a warrior, a poet, and a statesman; and, the matter thus settled, Jochanan Hakkadosh fell asleep.
Four times the Rabbi awoke, in renewed health and strength: and four times again he fell asleep: and at the close of each waking term Tsaddik revisited him as he sat in his garden—amidst the bloom or the languors, the threatenings or the chill, of the special period of the year—and questioned him of what he had learned. And each time the record was like that of the previous seventy-nine years, one of disappointment and failure. For the gift had been drawn in every case from a young life, and been neutralized by its contact with the old. As a lover, the Rabbi declares, he has dreamed young dreams, and his older self has seen through them. He has known beforehand that the special charms of his chosen one would prove transitory, and that the general attraction of her womanhood belonged to her sex and not to her. As a warrior, he has experienced the same process of disenchantment. For the young believe that the surest way to the Right and Good, is that, always, which is cut by the sword: and that the exercise of the sword is the surest training for those self-devoting impulses which mark the moral nature of man. The old have learned that the most just war involves, in its penalties, the innocent no less than the guilty; that violence rights no wrong which time and patience would not right more fully; and that for the purposes of self devotion, unassisted love is more effective than hate. (Picturesque illustrations are made to support this view.) As poet, he has recalled the glow of youthful fancy to feel it quenched by the experience of age: to see those soaring existences whose vital atmosphere is the future, frozen by their contact with a dead past. As statesman, he has looked out upon the forest of life, again seeing the noble trees by which the young trace their future path. And, seeing these, he has known, that the way leads, not by them, but among the brushwood and briars which fill the intervening space; that the statist's work is among the mindless many who will obstruct him at every step, not among the intellectual few by whom his progress would be assisted.