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Bentarasko Benta Section 16
Page 04
In the Council, generally called _Concilium Africanum_, held A.D. 408, "stage-playes and spectacles are forbidden on the Lord's-day, Christmas-day, and other solemn Christian festivalls." Theodosius the younger, in his laws _de Spectaculis_, in 425, forbade shows or games on the Nativity, and some other feasts. And in the Council of Auxerre, in Burgundy, in 578, disguisings are again forbidden, and at another Council, in 614, it was found necessary to repeat the prohibitory canons in stronger terms, declaring it to be unlawful to make any indecent plays upon the Kalends of January, according to the profane practices of the pagans. But it is also recorded that the more devout Christians in these early times celebrated the festival without indulging in the forbidden excesses.
On leaving Montrigone, with a pleasant sense of having made acquaintance with a new and, in many respects, interesting work, I could not get the sacristan and our difference of opinion out of my head. What, I asked myself, are the differences that unhappily divide Christendom, and what are those that divide Christendom from modern schools of thought, but a seeing of Joachims as the Virgin's grandmothers on a larger scale? True, we cannot call figures Joachim when we know perfectly well that they are nothing of the kind; but I registered a vow that henceforward when I called Joachims the Virgin's grandmothers I would bear more in mind than I have perhaps always hitherto done, how hard it is for those who have been taught to see them as Joachims to think of them as something different. I trust that I have not been unfaithful to this vow in the preceding article. If the reader differs from me, let me ask him to remember how hard it is for one who has got a figure well into his head as the Virgin's grandmother to see it as Joachim.
Browning, on the other hand, kept his raptures and his processes severely to himself. He never seems to have given the smallest hint as to how he conceived a poem or worked it out. He was as reticent about his occupation as a well-bred stockbroker, and did his best in society to give the impression of a perfectly decorous and conventional gentleman, telling strings of not very interesting anecdotes, and making a great point of being ordinary. Indeed, I believe that Browning was haunted by the eighteenth-century idea that there was something not quite respectable about professional literature, and that, like Gray, he wished to be considered a private gentleman who wrote for his amusement. When in later years he took a holiday, he went not for secret contemplation, but to recover from social fatigue. Browning is really one of the most mysterious figures in literature in this respect, because his inner life of poetry was so entirely apart from his outer life of dinnerparties and afternoon calls. Inside the sacred enclosure, the winds of heaven blow, the thunder rolls; he proclaims the supreme worth of human passion, he dives into the disgraceful secrets of the soul: and then he comes out of his study a courteous and very proper gentleman, looking like a retired diplomatist, and talking like an intelligent commercial traveller--a man whose one wish appeared to be as good-humouredly like everyone else as he conveniently could.
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