LECTURE VII
LA SAISIAZ

The peculiar interest attaching to Christmas Eve and Easter Day is wholly absent from La Saisiaz; for here is no uncertainty as to the identity of the speaker, no soliloquist interposed between the author and his public. The dramatic interest absent, the personal interest is, however, proportionately stronger. As in Prospice the closing lines are unmistakably the outcome of an overwhelming torrent of feeling, so in the later poem the problems demanding consideration have been forced into prominence by the events of the hour; and the mourner, who was “ever a fighter,” will not rest until he has confronted them, and has done all that may be fairly and honestly done towards the settlement of tormenting doubts and fears. Thus, in La Saisiaz, we get, perhaps, the sole example in Browning’s work of a direct attempt on his part to give to the world a rational and sustained argument, resulting in his personal decision as to the questions immediately involved; the immortality of the soul and the relation of its future to its present phase of existence. It is to this deliberate design that the striking difference in character of these two similarly inspired poems may be mainly attributable: that the joyful assurance of Prospice is succeeded by the reasoned hope of La Saisiaz. The mourner hesitates to launch himself upon the waves of faith until he has argued the questions before him in so far as they are capable of argument. For the confidence of Prospice that

The fiend-voices that rave
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become ... a peace out of pain:

we have the hope of La Saisiaz,

No more than hope, but hope—no less than hope. (l. 535.)

In place of the triumphant certainty of future reunion,

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,

is the answering query—sole response to the question as to mutual recognition in another world

Can it be, and must, and will it? (l. 390.)

But the problems of La Saisiaz are not capable of solution by argument; there comes a stage at which it is inevitable that faith must supplement and succeed the reasoning powers of the intellect. “Man’s truest answer” is, after all, but human: the finite may not grasp the Infinite; and, looking upon the Infinite as revealed through Nature, man can but reflect

How were it did God respond?

It is the necessary failure in the attainment of a satisfactory conclusion by ratiocinative methods alone which causes the apparent uncertainty: apparent rather than actual, since, wherever in the course of the discussion feeling is allowed free exercise, there faith—or hope—prevails. In Prospice, reasoning offers no check to the emotions, and faith holds complete sway. Though Faith and Reason are no antagonistic forces, the ventures of Faith must yet transcend the powers of Reason, and Reasoning, whilst it may define, is incapable of limiting the province of Faith, since even “true doctrine is not an end in itself: it cannot carry us beyond the region of the intellect.... All formulas are of the nature of outlines: they define by exclusion as well as by comprehension; and no object in life is isolated. Our premisses in spiritual subjects, therefore, are necessarily incomplete, and even logical deductions from them may be false.”[91]

But whatever the intellectual questionings and uncertainties occurring in the course of the poem itself, the prologue is a pure lyric of spiritual triumph. Though actually the outcome of the premises preceding and the conclusions following the argument between Fancy and Reason, no suggestion of effort is apparent in the joyous song of the soul freed from the trammels of the body to “wander at will,” in the fruition of its fuller life. The reference to its mortal tenement recalls no painful element in the process of material decay; only autumn woods, the glowing colours of fading leaves and mosses.

Waft of soul’s wing!
What lies above?
Sunshine and Love,
Skyblue and Spring!
Body hides—where?
Ferns of all feather,
Mosses and heather,
Yours be the care!

Of the circumstances immediately giving rise to this personal expression of feeling the briefest notice will suffice, the bare facts being stated beneath the title in the latest edition of the works; whilst for the details necessary to fill in the outline, we have only to turn to the poem itself, reading the first 140 lines. Miss Egerton-Smith was one of Browning’s oldest women friends, but it was not until many years after their first meeting in Florence that their intercourse seems to have become a really important factor in the lives of both: when, after the return to England following his wife’s death, the poet temporarily established himself in London with his sister as housekeeper. Miss Egerton-Smith would appear to have been of a nature not readily responsive to the demands of ordinary social intercourse; a nature likely to make special appeal to the man who saw in imperfection, perfection hid, and in complete temporal adaptability the exclusion of possibilities of future growth. Hence we find him writing in the moment of bereavement:

You supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world:
May be! flower that’s full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that’s furled.
But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand
Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand
—Maybe, throb of heart, beneath which,—quickening farther than it knew,—
Treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue.
Disembosomed, re-embosomed,—must one memory suffice,
Prove I knew an Alpine-rose which all beside named Edelweiss? (ll. 123-130.)

At the time of the chief intercourse between the two friends, Browning’s health rendered it necessary for him to leave England during a part of each year, and for four successive summers Miss Egerton-Smith had been the companion of the brother and sister in their foreign sojourns, when that of 1877 was interrupted by her sudden death from heart disease on the night of September 14th. The villa “La Saisiaz” (in the Savoyard dialect “the Sun”), at which the party was staying, was situated above Geneva, and almost immediately beneath La SalÈve, the summit of which was the destination of the expedition occupying Miss Egerton-Smith’s thoughts at the time of her death. The shock to her friends was wholly unexpected, as she had been in better health than was usual to her during the days immediately preceding. To Browning it would appear to have been at first overwhelming. It was not long, however, before the emotional and intellectual faculties were sufficiently under control to render the arguments of La Saisiaz a possibility. When he added the concluding lines in “London’s mid-November,” only six weeks had elapsed since that “summons” in the Swiss village which had meant for him temporary bereavement of affection and friendship.

A. The first 400 lines of the poem proper—exclusive of the prologue—constitute a prelude to the formal debate conducted between Fancy and Reason, designed as a rational and logical course of argument by which the writer would assure himself of the immortality of the soul as a no less reasonable hypothesis than is the self-evident fact of the mortality of the body: that the assumption with which instinct forces him to start is also the goal to which reason ultimately draws him. The assumption—

That’s Collonge, henceforth your dwelling. All the same, howe’er disjoints
Past from present, no less certain you are here, not there. (ll. 24-25.)

The conclusion—that even though

O’er our heaven again cloud closes ...
Hope the arrowy, just as constant, comes to pierce its gloom. (ll. 542-543.)

Line 44 may be not unfitly taken as significant of the whole course of thought

What will be the morning glory, when at dusk thus gleams the lake?(i) The first part of the prelude (if we may so call it), occupying 139 lines, calls for little more comment than that already necessitated by the foregoing consideration of the circumstances giving rise to the poem. (ii) In taking the solitary walk to the summit of La SalÈve five days after Miss Egerton-Smith’s death, the poet recalls the circumstances of their last climb together; and as he stands looking down upon Collonge, that final resting-place of the body, the question recurs—

Here I stand: but you—where?

The heart has already assured itself that, in spite of the occupation of that dwelling-place at Collonge, the certainty remains, “you are here, not there.” But this assurance has proved transitory as the feeling which engendered it. No “mere surmise” will suffice concerning a matter “the truth of which must rest upon no legend, that is no man’s experience but our own.”[92] So to the author of La Saisiaz the suggestion as to proofs of spiritual survival presents itself only to be rejected.

What though I nor see nor hear them? Others do, the proofs abound!

Such second-hand evidence is inadmissible.

My own experience—that is knowledge. (l. 264.)
········
Knowledge stands on my experience: all outside its narrow hem,
Free surmise may sport and welcome! (ll. 272-273.)

Here, as with the uncompromising investigator of Easter Day, the fact that credence in a certain tenet is desirable, is advantageous, proves cause for rejection rather than acceptance. All evidence must be sifted with the utmost care. Thus the question is stated in line 144, the answer, or attempted answer to which, is to occupy the entire poem—

Does the soul survive the body?

The second part of the question is on a different platform—

Is there God’s self, no or yes?

The existence of God is accepted at the outset of the enquiry as a premise on which the subsequent argument may be based: as is also the existence of the soul: it is the condition of immortality alone which is to be proved. And the poet puts the question, determined to face the truth—whether it meets his “hopes or fears.” It would be difficult to find a more characteristic assertion of Browning’s usual attitude than that of lines 149-150.

Weakness never need be falseness: truth is truth in each degree
—Thunderpealed by God to Nature, whispered by my soul to me.

(iii) But the events of the preceding days have converted the abstract enquiry, “Does the soul survive the body?” into one of vital personal import.

Was ending ending once and always, when you died? (l. 172.)

Hence suggests itself the further question, a necessary sequel to the first. If death is not the ending of the soul’s life, what is the nature of that immortality, the actuality of which the speaker seeks to establish? We have already seen Cleon emphatically repudiating the theory of Protus as to the satisfaction afforded by a vicarious immortality, “what thou writest, paintest, stays: that does not die.” Equally unsatisfactory to human nature is the suggestion in the present instance of a prolongation and renewal of life by influences transmitted to succeeding generations. And yet is the certainty of the thirteenth century possible to the nineteenth? “Phrase the solemn Tuscan fashioned.”

I believe and I declare—
Certain am I—from this life I pass into a better, there
Where that lady lives of whom enamoured was my soul.

With this assurance all would be well.

(iv) Now, the mere possibility of propounding questions such as the foregoing, involves the existence of that which asks, and of that to which the enquiry is addressed with at least an anticipation, however vague, of obtaining an answer. In other words, the existence of an intelligent being and an external source of intelligence to which its questionings are directed. These are the only facts on which the speaker would insist as a basis for subsequent argument: but of the certainty of these he is absolutely assured. That their existence is beyond proof he holds as testimony to their reality.

Call this—God, then, call that—soul, and both—the only facts for me.
Prove them facts? that they o’erpass my power of proving, proves them such:
Fact it is I know I know not something which is fact as much. (ll. 222-224.)

God and the soul. The primary fact of life and that which is dependent on the primary. That the soul knows not whence it came nor whither it goes is no argument against either its existence and immortality, or the existence and omnipotent and omniscient control of a divine Being. The relative positions of the rush and the stream lend themselves to the illustration of this assertion. Whatever the purpose of life, it is yet possible that man should exist without possessing assured knowledge concerning his future destiny. All that the rush may conjecture of the course of the stream is “mere surmise not knowledge”: nevertheless, the existence of the stream is a fact as self-evident to the onlooker as is that of the rush. Therefore—

Ask the rush if it suspects
Whence and how the stream which floats it had a rise, and where and how
Falls or flows on still! What answer makes the rush except that now
Certainly it floats and is, and, no less certain than itself,
Is the everyway external stream that now through shoal and shelf
Floats it onward, leaves it—may be—wrecked at last, or lands on shore
There to root again and grow and flourish stable evermore.
—May be! mere surmise not knowledge: much conjecture styled belief,
What the rush conceives the stream means through the voyage blind and brief. (ll. 226-234.)

Thus all man’s conjecture as to his future existence is but conjecture: surmise based upon probabilities deduced from the present conditions of life and accumulated experience.

(v) And is then this fact of the present existence of the soul cause sufficient to demand belief in its immortality? The affirmative answer, “Because God seems good and wise,” proves inadequate when the eyes of the enquirer are turned to a world in which evil is manifestly existent, and not only existent, but frequently predominant. The possibility of reconciling such conditions with the design of a beneficent omnipotence is only attained through the acceptance of belief in a future life which shall disentangle the complexities of the present; which shall render perfect that which is imperfect; complete that which is incomplete. Without such a prospect of the ultimate solution of its problems life would be unintelligible, therefore impossible as the work of an intelligent being: hence the existence of God is denied by implication, and the premise originally accepted (l. 222) is rejected. This question is treated more fully later in the poem (ll. 335-348).

But, granted this possibility of a future, then

Just that hope, however scant,
Makes the actual life worth leading.With hope the poet would rest satisfied, since certainty is neither possible, nor, in view of the educative purpose which he claims for life, desirable. Upon this recognition of “life, time,—with all their chances,” as “just probation-space,” rests one of the main dogmas of Browning’s teaching—suggested or expressed in countless passages throughout his works; embodied in most concise form perhaps in the concluding stanzas of Abt Vogler. This life being the prelude to another, failure becomes “but a triumph’s evidence for the fulness of the days,” when for the evil of the present shall be “so much good more”: when, indeed, all those unfulfilled hopes which had “promised joy” to the author of La Saisiaz, shall find soul-satisfying fulfilment. And all we have willed or dreamed of good shall exist. So long as Eternity may be held to “affirm the conception of an hour,” all the seeming inconsistencies of life may admit of solution.

In this passage of La Saisiaz recurs also that suggestion so characteristic of Browning—introduced dramatically in Easter Day, to be met with again later in the expositions nominally ascribed to Ferishtah—the theory of the adaptation of the entire universe, as known to man, to the needs and development of the individual soul. As in Easter Day is depicted by the Vision the work of

Absolute omnipotence,
Able its judgments to dispense
To the whole race, as every one
Were its sole object; (E. D., ll. 662-665.)

so again in A Camel-driver is emphasized the individual character of the final Judgment:

Thou and God exist—
So think!—for certain: think the mass—mankind—
Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone!
Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,—
Thee and no other,—stand or fall by them!
That is the part for thee: regard all else
For what it may be—Time’s illusion.

Similarly here the entire scheme of life is to be regarded from the individual standpoint; all outside the “narrow hem” of personal experience can be but the result of surmise. Therefore

Solve the problem: “From thine apprehended scheme of things, deduce
Praise or blame of its contriver, shown a niggard or profuse
In each good or evil issue! nor miscalculate alike
Counting one the other in the final balance, which to strike,
Soul was born and life allotted: ay, the show of things unfurled
For thy summing-up and judgment,—thine, no other mortal’s world!” (ll. 287-292.)

With the acceptance, however, of the doctrine, “His own world for every mortal,” recurs again the disturbing reflection inevitable to the contemplation of that world whether in its personal relation, or as a training-ground for “some other mortal.” Were the extreme transitoriness and the preponderance of pain indispensable factors in the scheme of instruction?

Can we love but on condition, that the thing we love must die?
Needs then groan a world in anguish just to teach us sympathy? (ll. 311-312.)

Certainly personal experience has resulted in the conclusion:

Howsoever came my fate,
Sorrow did and joy did nowise,—life well weighed,—preponderate! (ll. 333-334.)

In the discussion which follows (ll. 335-348) the fact of the existence of these evils is employed to enforce the admission of the necessity of a future life. It is in fact the earlier argument (ll. 235, et seq.) repeated and elaborated. How are the existing conditions of life to be reconciled with the belief in the over-ruling Providence of a God whose name is synonymous with goodness, wisdom, and power? Here each attribute is dealt with categorically—Was it proof of the divine Goodness that within the limits of the poet’s personal experience

The good within [his] range
Or had evil in admixture or grew evil’s self by change? (ll. 337-338.)

Again could it be deemed a token of the divine Wisdom that

Becoming wise meant making slow and sure advance
From a knowledge proved in error to acknowledged ignorance? (ll. 339-340.)

Finally, seeing that Power must within itself include the force known as Will, could that indeed rank as omnipotence, which was incapable of securing for man even the enjoyment of life possessed by the worm which, on the hypothesis of the non-existence of a future world, becomes “man’s fellow-creature,” man too being thus but the creature of an hour? Since with the loss of his immortal destiny passes also the reason (according to Browning’s reiterated theory) of his imperfection as compared with the more complete physical perfection of the lower world of animal life. If, then, such a consummation is the sole outcome of the Creator’s work the conclusion is inevitable, that the Goodness, Wisdom, and Power ascribed to Him must be limited in range and capacity. Thus again the premise originally accepted as a basis of argument has to be rejected—a God possessing merely human attributes is no God. But once more also, though in stronger terms, the conclusion of ll. 242-243:

Only grant a second life, I acquiesce
In this present life as failure, count misfortune’s worst assaults
Triumph, not defeat, assured that loss so much the more exalts
Gain about to be. (ll. 358-361.)Thus all experience fairly considered goes to prove the necessity for a future life; and with the hope of such a future is closely interwoven the need also for reunion with those who have already tested the grounds of their belief:

Grant me (once again) assurance we shall each meet each some day.
···········
Worst were best, defeat were triumph utter loss were utmost gain. (ll. 387-389.)

B. Nevertheless, the soul refuses even yet to accept, without that which it deems reasonable proof, the justice of its intuitions and of its hopes arising from experience. It will assume the position of arbitrator in the debate which it permits between the sometime opposing forces of Reason and Fancy, as to the results of an acceptance of that belief, for an assurance of the truth of which it yearns.

Fancy. To the facts already admitted as the basis of argument Fancy may, therefore, add a third, “that after body dies soul lives again.”

Reason. In accepting the challenge to employ these three facts—God, the soul, a future life—in a rational development of the present phase of existence, Reason would reply that deductions from experience suggest that the future life must necessarily prove an advance on the old. This being so, the most prudent course is obviously that which would take, without delay, the step leading from the lower to the higher; always allowing that there is no existent law restrictive of man’s free will in this matter.

What shall then deter his dying out of darkness into light? (l. 441.)

Fancy. The deterrent is to be found in the suggestion by Fancy of the law rendering penal “voluntary passage from this life to that.”

He shall find—say, hell to punish who in aught curtails the term. (l. 463.)Reason. And what influence upon life it must be asked will this new knowledge exert? Life, says Reason, would thus be reduced to a condition of stagnation. The absolute certainty involved in this exact knowledge of the future would stultify action in the present. A result similar to that which, according to Karshish, was attained in the case of Lazarus. The things of this world matter not in view of an ever-present realization of Eternity. The use of faith is at an end as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” since all is clear, definite and, further still, unalterable to the inward vision.

Fancy. Again Fancy interposes with the suggestion that this equal realization of future and present must be accompanied by an appreciation of the worth of life temporal and its opportunities, of the eternal import of the deeds wrought in the flesh. Thus the future life completely revealed would not, as Reason holds, supersede the uses of this, but would serve rather as an incentive to action in the present, on the assumption that the virtual reward of performance is reserved for the after-time.

Reason. The final position is then examined by Reason. To the original premises—the existence of the soul, an intelligent being, and of a God, the author of an intelligible universe in which man’s lot is cast—has been added the certainty of a future world, but a world into which man may not pass until his allotted term has been fulfilled on earth. Further, that in this world to come are to be dealt out allotments of happiness or misery in exact relative proportion to the deeds accomplished during the period of mortal life. That by laws as unerring and relentless as those of Nature’s code, pain will follow evil-doing, pleasure will succeed acts of self-devotion to that which is esteemed goodness and truth. Absolute certainty in all things spiritual being thus established, free will becomes but a name, and the probationary character of life is at an end. Here again a reminiscence of the discussion contained in the early stanzas of Easter Day when the Second Speaker suggests that faith may be

A touchstone for God’s purposes,
Even as ourselves conceive of them.
Could he acquit us or condemn
For holding what no hand can loose,
Rejecting when we can’t but choose?
As well award the victor’s wreath
To whosoever should take breath
Duly each minute while he lived—
Grant heaven, because a man contrived
To see its sunlight every day
He walked forth on the public way. (E. D., iv, ll. 59-70.)

So La Saisiaz

Thenceforth neither good nor evil does man, doing what he must.
Lay but down that law as stringent “wouldst thou live again, be just!”
As this other “wouldst thou live now, regularly draw thy breath!
For, suspend the operation, straight law’s breach results in death—”
And (provided always, man, addressed this mode, be sound and sane)
Prompt and absolute obedience, never doubt, will law obtain! (ll. 497-502.)

The difference between the sanction attaching to laws moral and spiritual, and to those of Nature is not, Reason would hold, the result of defective power on the part of the legislator. Some definite purpose is existent in the scheme of the universe in accordance with which

Certain laws exist already which to hear means to obey;
Therefore not without a purpose these man must, while those man may
Keep and, for the keeping, haply gain approval and reward. (ll. 515-517.)

C. In short, the conclusion reached is that already propounded as the outcome of experience—that uncertainty is one of the essential attributes of life temporal. That in its probationary character lies its educative influence. That since “assurance needs must change this life to [him]” the author of La Saisiaz, no less than the soliloquist of Easter Day, would willingly continue in that state of probation which fosters growth and development; would cling to that uncertainty which allows of the existence of hope.

As employed by Reason, and generally throughout the poem, the word hope possesses more than the comparatively vague significance commonly attaching to it: it becomes practically synonymous with faith. In a similar sense the term occurs in the Epistle to the Romans,[93] when the writer asserts that “we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope” (the argument which Browning is here using). “For what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” It is further noticeable that here, as elsewhere in Browning, is rejected the belief in a future which shall, in the words of Paracelsus, reduce the present world to the position of “a mere foil ... to some fine life to come.”[94] The necessity for a future life is throughout the argument based upon the fact that immortality is needed to render intelligible the conditions attendant upon life temporal. It is the unintelligibility of life, if cut short by death, which demands its renewal beyond the grave.

The concluding lines of the poem proper (immediately preceding the supplementary stanza), although not directly essential to the argument, are especially interesting from the allusions contained in them and the resulting inferences which have met with some diversity of interpretation.

Thanks, thou pine-tree of Makistos, wide thy giant torch I wave. (l. 579.)

is thus explained by Dr. Berdoe in his Browning Cyclopaedia.

“The reference to Makistos is from the Agamemnon of Æschylus. The town of Makistos had a watch-tower on a neighbouring eminence, from which the beacon lights flashed the news of the fall of Troy to Greece. Clytemnestra says

Sending a bright blaze from Ide,
Beacon did beacon send,
Pass on—the pine-tree—to Makistos’ watch-place.”

This pine tree, as “the brand flamboyant,” which should replenish the beacon-fire of Makistos, Browning takes as symbolic of fame. The Knowledge and Learning of Gibbon constitute the trunk—

This the trunk, the central solid Knowledge
... rooted yonder at Lausanne [where Gibbon’s History was finished].

But Learning is hardly permitted “its due effulgence,” being “dulled by flake on flake of [the] Wit”—nourished at Ferney (sometime the home of Voltaire). To the Learning of Gibbon, the Wit of Voltaire is added in “the terebinth-tree’s resin,” the “all-explosive Eloquence” of Rousseau and of Diodati:[95] whilst in the heights, above all “deciduous trash,” climbs the evergreen of the ivy, significant of the immortality of Byron’s poetic fame. Having lifted “the coruscating marvel,” the watcher on La SalÈve would likewise stand as a beacon to those millions who

Have their portion, live their calm or troublous day,
Find significance in fireworks.

That by his help they may

Confidently lay to heart ... this:
“He there with the brand flamboyant, broad o’er night’s forlorn abyss,
Crowned by prose and verse; and wielding, with Wit’s bauble, Learning’s rod ...
Well? Why, he at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God.”Of these three concluding lines Dr. Berdoe writes: “Many writers have thought that ... the poet referred to himself. Of course, any such idea is preposterous; the reference was to Voltaire. Mr. Browning, apart from the question of the egotism involved, could not say of himself, ‘he at least believed in soul.’ There was no minimizing of religious faith in the poet. Still less could he speak of himself as ‘crowned by prose and verse.’” Whence arises Dr. Berdoe’s misapprehension? Apart from the context the significance might not be obvious; taken in connection with the passage immediately preceding, it is valuable as adding emphasis to the conclusions of the foregoing argument, and proclaiming in unmistakable language the worth to Browning as a personal possession of that creed which he has just declared himself to hold. Reflecting upon the widespread influence of those literary men whose presence has rendered celebrated the region lying before him, he attributes it to the “phosphoric fame” which attended the path of each. “Famed unfortunates” all, yet “the world was witched” and became enslaved by their pessimistic theories of life. Forced to believe because “the famous bard believed!” because the renowned man of letters could say, “Which believe—for I believe it.” Such being the power of fame as an agency for influencing the human mind, what might not the author of La Saisiaz achieve, were he, too, armed with this “brand flamboyant!” No pessimistic creed is his, but that which involving an absolute belief in God and in the soul would thence deduce a confidence in “that power and purpose” existent throughout life, indicated and recognized by the presence and revelations of “hope the arrowy.” So would he gather in one the fame of his predecessors in the literary world; would become as Rousseau, “eloquent, as Byron prime in poet’s power”:

Learned for the nonce as Gibbon, witty as wit’s self Voltaire.

Thus would he stand “crowned by prose and verse.” And why? Because the millions still take “the flare for evidence,” and “find significance” in the fireworks of fame. Only by wielding “the brand flamboyant” may he succeed in impressing upon mankind his own supreme assurance. To this end he would desire Fame.

It remains to assign to La Saisiaz the position which, as a declaration of faith, it occupies in relation to the poems we have already considered. In Caliban, dealing with a peculiar phase of “Natural Theology,” we found the suggestions of a deity those derived from the conceptions of a semi-savage being, with whom the intellectual development would seem to have outrun the moral. Passing to the reflections of Cleon, with the Greek theory and practice of life there set forth, we reached the utmost heights attainable by paganism. In Bishop Blougram’s Apology the unbelief threatening was not that of paganism in the early interpretation of the word, but of the paganism which would substitute authority for faith. With Christmas Eve came the individual choice of creed, the voluntary acceptance of the position of worshipper at one of the narrow shrines of human invention; but an acceptance which involved likewise a personal faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ. The faith thus accepted received fuller analysis and investigation through the questionings of Easter Day. But all these poems are, as we have been forced to conclude, more or less dramatic in character, the first three wholly, the two last to a degree which we have attempted to define. Only with La Saisiaz do we reach the undisguised and definite expression of Browning’s personal faith, the basis, though not the culmination of which, is emphatically asserted as a belief in the soul and in God.At first sight it may appear disappointing to many readers that the irreducible minimum of the creed should contain but these two tenets. On this ground, indeed, we might have been tempted, had such a transposition been justifiable to place La Saisiaz before, instead of after, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, allowing the profession of faith on La SalÈve to serve as a foundation for the superstructure supplied by the arguments of the listener without the Lecture Hall at GÖttingen. On consideration, however, nothing is discoverable in the position occupied by the author of La Saisiaz to render untenable that held by the soliloquist of Christmas Eve or the First Speaker of Easter Day. There is, as we have indeed noticed, a marked similarity between the arguments employed in the two last cases (La Saisiaz and Easter Day) and in the conclusions reached: in both, the assurance that in the probationary character of this present life, with its possibilities for spiritual development through the exercise of faith, lies its main value.

Mrs. Sutherland Orr admits that Browning “was no less, in his way, a Christian when he wrote La Saisiaz than when he published A Death in the Desert and Christmas Eve and Easter Day, or at any period subsequent to that in which he accepted without questioning what he had learned at his mother’s knee. He has repeatedly written or declared in the words of Charles Lamb: ‘If Christ entered the room I should fall on my knees’; and again in those of Napoleon: ‘I am an understander of men, and He was no man.’ He has even added: ‘If he had been, he would have been an imposter.’” But she has already remarked of the poem that “It is conclusive both in form and matter as to his heterodox attitude towards Christianity.” And she continues: “The arguments, in great part negative, set forth in La Saisiaz for the immortality of the soul, leave no place for the idea, however indefinite, of a Christian revelation on the subject.”[96] We may indeed regret that such criticism should result from a study of the poem; but, after all, do the truths discussed in La Saisiaz involve any immediate question either of the acceptance or rejection of a Christian revelation on this or on any subject? Do they not go deeper, if we may so say, than Christianity itself? Until faith in these fundamental truths has been unassailably established, no basis for Christianity has been secured. To him who is not yet “sure of God,” the revelation of God in Christ can have little meaning. For whilst far more than the belief necessarily implied in the confession on La SalÈve must be held essential to the fulness of life, without it no superstructure of faith is possible. Its very strength would seem to lie in the fact that, avoiding the limitations of strictly defined dogma, it “leaves place” for all subsequent revelations of spiritual truth.

And what is “the Christian revelation” on these matters? The questions concerning death, immortality, and future recognition and reunion, ever suggesting themselves in new form to the human heart and intellect, are yet unanswered. Even that “acknowledgment of God in Christ” to which the dying Evangelist points as to the solution of “all questions in the earth and out of it,”[97] implies the acceptance of a creed not necessarily involving a revelation of the future life. The teaching of the Gospel serves as present inspiration of a faith content to leave the future in the confidence

Our times are in His hand
Who saith “A whole I planned.”[98]

Life eternal is there defined, not with reference to a future state, but as the knowledge of God, the beginnings of which are attainable here and now, by present service and self-devotion: to him who should do the will should the doctrine be made known.[99] The record of the intercourse between the Master and His disciples during the forty days following the resurrection is silent concerning any lifting of the veil before which they so consciously stood. That Browning was a Christian in the broadest, deepest, and possibly in the least conventional acceptation of the term, it was the attempt of the last Lecture to demonstrate by a consideration of the dramatic poems bearing reference to Christianity and its relation to human life. And there is no word throughout La Saisiaz which should preclude belief in the conclusions of David in Saul or of St. John in A Death in the Desert. To the man who was “very sure of God”—who had recognized the Divine revelation in Nature—an acceptance of the more immediate and special revelation was but a natural sequence. “Ye believe in God, believe also in me”:[100] when the assertion holds good the command is not difficult of fulfilment. Whilst extreme caution is necessary in dealing with a matter in which the student is too readily tempted to “find what he desires to find,” the historical and logical necessity for an Incarnation was, as we have seen, so favourite a theme with Browning for dramatic treatment, that it is wellnigh impossible to dissociate the personal interest. This subject the reflections of La Saisiaz do not directly approach.

He at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God.

The creed so expressed meant for the author a gain, once experienced, too great to remain unshared. No mere abstract belief, but an assurance of which he could assert

Fact it is I know I know not something which is fact as much. (l. 224.)For him the power and the purpose which he beheld, “if no one else beheld,” ruling in Nature and in human life were alike Love. The last word on the subject comes to us direct, unmodified by any dramatic medium—

Power is Love—
······
From the first, Power was—I knew.
Life has made clear to me
That, strive but for closer view,
Love were as plain to see.
When see? Where there dawns a day,
If not on the homely earth,
Then yonder, worlds away,
Where the strange and new have birth,
And Power comes full in play.[101]

The hope of La Saisiaz has become the assurance of the Reverie.

This recognition of “the continuity of life” is the main inspiration, the invigorating principle of Browning’s creed. Cleon felt the necessity which Reason demonstrated on La SalÈve. Yet again, eleven years later, the author of Asolando can speak with absolute confidence of the certainty that death will afford no interruption to the energies, the activities, the progress of the soul’s life. That he who has here “never turned his back” will there still continue the forward march. It is, in other words, the faith of Pompilia which can look beyond the limitations of the present to the boundless developments of which this life, with its struggles and apparent failures, is but the beginning: and in the hour of defeat can hold that “No work begun shall ever pause for death.”It is in the midst of the “bustle of man’s work-time” that “the unseen” is to be greeted. Is it too much to say that Browning, in the admonition of these closing lines of the Asolando Epilogue, makes confession of his belief in the Communion of Saints? But it is characteristic that the expression of faith (if such we may account it) is made in terms which admit of no distinctly formulated definition. The command comes as an inspiration to the seen and the unseen.

Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry “Speed,—fight on, fare ever
There as here!”

The underlying confidence is beyond that of the reasoning of La Saisiaz, but not far in advance of the joyful spontaneity of the Prologue

Dying we live.
Fretless and free,
Soul, clap thy pinion!
····
Body shall cumber
Soul-flight no more.

And if—admitting that Browning, even when writing La Saisiaz, possessed the assurance thus expressed—we ask why he should have rested satisfied with the confession of faith contained in its concluding line, the answer must be—that the author of La Saisiaz is to be numbered amongst that small minority of religious teachers for whom it may be claimed that “they cannot fail to recognize that the formulas which express the Truth suggested by the facts of their Creed are themselves of necessity partial and provisional.” It is impossible to doubt that with him the consciousness was strongly present, that “Formulas do not exhaust the Truth”; that “the character and expression of Doctrine ... is relative to the age.”[102] That in proportion as satisfaction is found in formula does faith lose its life-giving power. Progress being the law of life, he would, therefore, enforce upon no man as binding formulae of which the comparative inelasticity might tend to fetter mental or spiritual development. On the contrary, he would have the seeker after Truth prepared to relinquish in due time definitions once essential, since threatening to become restrictive to growth. Before all things, is to be avoided the danger of resting on that which is not the Truth itself, but merely a necessary introduction to the Truth. Hence,

The help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.[103]

Only through such employment of the means may the end be attained, since whether it be concerning “God the Truth,” “the eternal power,” or “the love that tops the might, the Christ in God,” in all

New lessons shall be learned ...
Till earth’s work stop and useless time run out.[104]