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 C