One Christmas night
they drifted into a quarrel, in the course of which the son seized his
father, and was about to turn him out of doors: when the latter, with
unaccustomed mildness, bade him stay his hand. Just so, he said, in his
youth, had he proceeded against his own father; and at just this stage
of the proceeding had a voice in his heart bidden him desist.... And the
son thus appealed to desisted also.

This fact is told by Aristotle[104] as an instance of the hereditary
nature of anger. But Mr. Browning sees more in it than that. If, he
declares, Nature creates hard hearts, it is a power beyond hers which
softens them; and in his version of "Halbert and Hob" this supernatural
power completes the work it has begun. The two return in silence to
their fireside. The next morning the father is found dead. The son has
become a harmless idiot, to remain so till the end of his life.

"IVAN IVANOVITCH" is the reproduction, with fictitious names and
imaginary circumstances, of a popular Russian story, known as "The
Judgment of God." A young woman travelling through the forest on a
winter's night, is attacked by wolves, and saves her own life by
throwing her children to them. But when she reaches her village, and
either confesses the deed or stands convicted of it, one of its
inhabitants, by trade a carpenter and the Ivan Ivanovitch of the idyl,
lifts the axe which he is plying, and strikes off her head: this
informal retribution being accepted, by those present, as in conformity
with the higher law.

Mr. Browning has raised the mother's act out of the sphere of vulgar
crime, by the characteristic method of making her tell her story: and
show herself, as she may easily have been, not altogether bad; though a
woman of weak maternal instincts, and one whose nature was powerless
against the fear of pain, and the impulse to self-preservation. She
describes with appalling vividness the experiences of the night: the
moonlit forest--the snow-covered ground--the wolves approaching with a
whispering tread, which seems at first but the soughing of a gentle
wind--the wedge-like, ever-widening mass, which emerges from the trees;
then the flight, and the pursuit: the latter arrested for one moment by
the sacrifice of each victim; to be renewed the next, till none is left
to sacrifice: one child dragged from the mother's arms; another shielded
by her whole body, till the wolf's teeth have fastened in her flesh; and
though she betra