He has given away his
large fortune to the poor; in a fervor of faith he plunges into every
danger, and comes out unscathed; he lives constantly in an overstrained
ecstasy, and by his mere presence, and the atmosphere which surrounds
him, forces his wife and children to live in the same state of high
nervous tension and unnatural abstraction from mundane reality and all
its concerns. His wife, Clara, who loves him ardently, is gradually worn
out by this perpetual strain, which involves a daily overdraft upon her
vitality; and finally the break comes, and she is paralyzed. For, like
everyone who comes in contact with Sang, she has had to live "beyond her
strength." She does not fully share her husband's faith, and though she
feels his influence and admires his lofty devotion, there is a
half-suppressed criticism in her mind. She feels the unwholesomeness of
thus "living by inspiration, and not by reason." When he comes to her,
"beaming always with a Sabbath joy," she would fain tune him down, if
she could, into a lower key, "the C-major of every-day life," as
Browning calls it.
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