But when a friend once said to him:'You have not a great love for nature,have you?'he had replied:'Yes,I have,but I love men and women better;'and the admission,which conveyed more than it literally expressed,would have been true I believe at any,up to the present,period of his history.Even now he did not cease to love men and women best;but he found increasing enjoyment in the beauties of nature,above all as they opened upon him on the southern slopes of the Alps;and the delight of the aesthetic sense merged gradually in the satisfied craving for pure air and brilliant sunshine which marked his final struggle for physical life.A ring of enthusiasm comes into his letters from the mountains,and deepens as the years advance;doubtless enhanced by the great --perhaps too great --exhilaration which the Alpine atmosphere produced,but also in large measure independent of it.Each new place into which the summer carries him he declares more beautiful than the last.It possibly was so.
A touch of autumnal freshness had barely crept into the atmosphere of the Saleve,when a moral thunderbolt fell on the little group of persons domiciled at its base:Miss Egerton-Smith died,in what had seemed for her unusually good health,in the act of preparing for a mountain excursion with her friends --the words still almost on her lips in which she had given some directions for their comfort.
Mr.Browning's impressionable nervous system was for a moment paralyzed by the shock.It revived in all the emotional and intellectual impulses which gave birth to 'La Saisiaz'.
This poem contains,besides its personal reference and association,elements of distinctive biographical interest.It is the author's first --as also last --attempt to reconstruct his hope of immortality by a rational process based entirely on the fundamental facts of his own knowledge and consciousness --God and the human soul;and while the very assumption of these facts,as basis for reasoning,places him at issue with scientific thought,there is in his way of handling them a tribute to the scientific spirit,perhaps foreshadowed in the beautiful epilogue to 'Dramatis Personae',but of which there is no trace in his earlier religious works.
It is conclusive both in form and matter as to his heterodox attitude towards Christianity.He 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 impostor.'But 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.Christ remained for Mr.Browning a mystery and a message of Divine Love,but no messenger of Divine intention towards mankind.
The dialogue between Fancy and Reason is not only an admission of uncertainty as to the future of the Soul:it is a plea for it;and as such it gathers up into its few words of direct statement,threads of reasoning which have been traceable throughout Mr.Browning's work.
In this plea for uncertainty lies also a full and frank acknowledgment of the value of the earthly life;and as interpreted by his general views,that value asserts itself,not only in the means of probation which life affords,but in its existing conditions of happiness.
No one,he declares,possessing the certainty of a future state would patiently and fully live out the present;and since the future can be only the ripened fruit of the present,its promise would be neutralized,as well as actual experience dwarfed,by a definite revelation.
Nor,conversely,need the want of a certified future depress the present spiritual and moral life.It is in the nature of the Soul that it would suffer from the promise.The existence of God is a justification for hope.
And since the certainty would be injurious to the Soul,hence destructive to itself,the doubt --in other words,the hope --becomes a sufficient approach to,a working substitute for it.
It is pathetic to see how in spite of the convictions thus rooted in Mr.Browning's mind,the expressed craving for more knowledge,for more light,will now and then escape him.
Even orthodox Christianity gives no assurance of reunion to those whom death has separated.It is obvious that Mr.Browning's poetic creed could hold no conviction regarding it.He hoped for such reunion in proportion as he wished.There must have been moments in his life when the wish in its passion overleapt the bounds of hope.
'Prospice'appears to prove this.But the wide range of imagination,no less than the lack of knowledge,forbade in him any forecast of the possibilities of the life to come.He believed that if granted,it would be an advance on the present --an accession of knowledge if not an increase of happiness.He was satisfied that whatever it gave,and whatever it withheld,it would be good.In his normal condition this sufficed to him.
'La Saisiaz'appeared in the early summer of 1878,and with it 'The Two Poets of Croisic',which had been written immediately after it.
The various incidents of this poem are strictly historical;they lead the way to a characteristic utterance of Mr.Browning's philosophy of life to which I shall recur later.
In 1872Mr.Browning had published a first series of selections from his works;it was to be followed by a second in 1880.
In a preface to the earlier volume,he indicates the plan which he has followed in the choice and arrangement of poems;and some such intention runs also through the second;since he declined a suggestion made to him for the introduction or placing of a special poem,on the ground of its not conforming to the end he had in view.
It is difficult,in the one case as in the other,to reconstruct the imagined personality to which his preface refers;and his words on the later occasion pointed rather to that idea of a chord of feeling which is raised by the correspondence of the first and last poems of the respective groups.But either clue may be followed with interest.
