still more remarkable, modify the lie. So far back as the autumn
of 1860 I heard him discuss the trickery which he believed himself to
have witnessed, as dispassionately as any other non-credulous person
might have done so. The experience must even before that have passed
out of the foreground of his conjugal life. He remained, nevertheless,
subject, for many years, to gusts of uncontrollable emotion which would
sweep over him whenever the question of 'spirits' or 'spiritualism' was
revived; and we can only understand this in connection with the peculiar
circumstances of the case. With all his faith in the future, with all
his constancy to the past, the memory of pain was stronger in him than
any other. A single discordant note in the harmony of that married love,
though merged in its actual existence, would send intolerable vibrations
through his remembrance of it. And the pain had not been, in this
instance, that of simple disagreement. It was complicated by Mrs.
Browning's refusal to admit that disagreement was possible. She never
believed in her husband's disbelief; and he had been not unreasonably
annoyed by her always assuming it to be feigned. But his doubt of
spiritualistic sincerity was not feigned. She cannot have thought,
and scarcely can have meant to say so. She may have meant to say, 'You
believe that these are tricks, but you know that there is something real
behind them;' and so far, if no farther, she may have been in the
right. Mr. Browning never denied the abstract possibility of spiritual
communication with either living or dead; he only denied that such
communication had ever been proved, or that any useful end could
be subserved by it. The tremendous potentialities of hypnotism and
thought-reading, now passing into the region of science, were not then
so remote but that an imagination like his must have foreshadowed them.
The natural basis of the seemingly supernatural had not yet entered into
discussion. He may, from the first, have suspected the existence of some
mysterious force, dangerous because not understood, and for this reason
doubly liable to fall into dangerous hands. And if this was so, he
would necessarily regard the whole system of manifestations with
an apprehensive hostility, which was not entire negation, but which
rebelled against any effort on the part of others, above all of those
he loved, to interpret it into assent. The pain and anger which could be
aroused in him by an indica