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.)