"'AT LAST,' the Vision exclaimed, 'thou choosest LOVE. And hast thou not seen that the mightiness of Love was curled inextricably about the power and the beauty which attached thee to the world—that through them it has vainly striven to clasp thee? Abide by thy choice. Take the show for the name's sake. Reject the reality as manifested in Him who created, and then died for thee. Reject that Tale, as more fitly invented by the sons of Cain—as proving too much love on the part of God.'"
"Terrified and despairing, I cowered before Him, imploring the remission of the sentence, praying that the old life might be restored to me, with its trials, its limitations; but with their accompanying hope that it might lead to the life everlasting."
"When I 'lived' again, the plain was silvered over with dew; the dawn had broken."
Looking back on this experience, the narrator is disposed to regard it as having been a dream. It has nevertheless been a turning-point in his existence; for it has taught him to hear in every blessing which attaches him to the earth, a voice which bids him renounce it. And though he still finds it hard to be a Christian, and is often discouraged by the fact, he welcomes his consciousness of this: since it proves that he is not spiritually stagnating—not cut off from the hope of heaven.
Mr. Browning is, for the time being, outside the discussion. His own feelings might equally have dictated some of the arguments on either side; and although he silences the second speaker, he does not mean to prove him in the wrong. He is at one with the first speaker, when he suggests that certainty in matters of belief is no more to be desired than to be attained; but that personage regards uncertainty as justifying presumptions of a dogmatic kind; while its value to Mr. Browning lies precisely in its right to exclude them. And, again; while the value of spiritual conflict is largely emphasized in his works, he disagrees with the man of faith in "Easter-Day" as with the dogmatic believer in "Christmas-Eve," as to the manner in which it is to be carried on. According to these the spirit fights against life: according to him it fights in, and by means of, its opportunities. From his point of view human experience is an education: from theirs it is a snare.
So much of personal truth as these poems contain will be found re-stated in "La Saisiaz," written twenty-eight years later, and which impresses on it the seal of maturer thought and more direct expression.
"LA SAISIAZ" (Savoyard for "The Sun") is the name of a villa among the mountains near Geneva, where Mr. Browning, with his sister and a friend of many years standing, spent part of the summer of 1877. The poem so christened is addressed to this friend, and was inspired by her death: which took place with appalling suddenness while they were there together. The shock of the event re-opened the great questions which had long before been solved by Mr. Browning's mind: and within sight of the new-made grave, he re-laid the foundations of his faith, that there is another life for the soul.
The argument is marked by a strong sense of the personal and therefore relative character of human experience and knowledge. It accepts the "subjective synthesis" of some non-theistic thinkers, though excluding, of course, the negations on which this rests; and its greater maturity is shown by the philosophic form in which the author's old religious doctrine of personal (or subjective) truth has been re-cast. He assumes here, it is true, that God and the soul exist. He considers their existence as given, in the double fact that there is something in us which thinks or perceives,[[61]] and something outside and beyond us, which is perceived by it; and this subject and object, which he names the Soul and God, are to him beyond the necessity of farther proof, because beyond the reach of it. He might therefore challenge for his conclusions something more than an optional belief. He guards himself, nevertheless, against imposing the verdict of his own experience on any other man: and both the question and the answer into which the poem resolves itself begin for his own spirit and end so.
Mr. Browning knows himself a single point in the creative series of effect and cause: at the same moment one and the other: all behind and before him a blank. Or, more helpless still, he is the rush, floated by a current, of which the whence and whither are independent of it, and which may land it to strike root again, or cast it ashore a wreck. He asks himself, as he is whirled on his "brief, blind voyage" down the stream of life, which of these fates it has in store for him. Knowing this, that God and the soul exist—no less than this, and no more—he asks himself whether he is justified in believing that, because his present existence is beyond a doubt, its renewal is beyond doubt also: that the current, which has brought him thus far, will land him, not in destruction, but in another life.
"Everything," he declares, "in my experience—and I speak only of my own—testifies to the incompleteness of life, nay, even to its preponderating unhappiness. The strong body is found allied to a stunted soul. The soaring soul is chained by bodily weakness to the ground. Help turns to hindrance, or discloses itself too late in what we have taken for such. Every sweet brings its bitter, every light its shade; love is cut short by death:"—