A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 16

All there is breathless expectation, ecstatic awe; for the mystery of the ma.s.s is in process of consummation, and in another moment the tinkling of the silver bell will announce to the prostrate crowd the actual presence of their Lord; will open to them the vision of the coming heavenly day. Here, too, is faith, though obscured in a different manner. Here, too, is _love_: the love which in bygone days hurled intellect from its throne, and trampled on the glories of ancient art--which instructed its votaries to feel blindly for its new and all-sufficient life, as does the babe for its mother's breast--which consecrates even now the deepest workings of the heart and mind to the service of G.o.d. And Christ enters the Basilica, into which, after a momentary doubt, he himself follows Him.

They float onwards again, and again he is left alone but for the hem of the garment; for Christ has entered the lecture-hall of a rationalistic German professor, and into this He will not bid His disciple follow Him; but the interior of the building is open, as before, to the disciple's mental sight. The lecturer is refres.h.i.+ng his hearers' convictions by an inquiry into the origin of the Christian Myth and the foundation of fact on which it rests; and he arrives at the conclusion that Christ was a man, but whose work proved Him all but Divine; His Gospel quite other than those who heard it believed, but in value nearly the same.

The spectator begins musing on the anomalies of this view. "Christ, only a man, is to be reverenced as something more. On what ground?--The ground of intellect?--Yet he teaches us only what a hundred others have taught, without claiming to be wors.h.i.+pped on account of it--The ground of goodness?--But goodness is due from each man to his fellows; it is no t.i.tle to sovereignty over them." And he thus sums up his own conviction.

"He may be called a _saint_ who best teaches us to keep our lives pure; he a _poet_ whose insight dims that of his fellow-men. He is no less than this, though guided by an instinct no higher than that of the bat; no more, though inspired by G.o.d. All gifts are from G.o.d, and no multiplying of gifts can convert the creature into the Creator. Between Him who created goodness, and made it binding on the conscience of man: and him who reduces it to a system, of which the merits may be judged by man: lies the interval which separates Nature, who decrees the circulation of the blood, from the observer Harvey, who discovered it.

One man is Christ, another Pilate; beyond their dust is the Divinity of G.o.d."

"And the 'G.o.d-function' with regard to virtue was first to impress its truths on every human breast; and secondly, to give a motive for carrying them out; and this motive could be given only by one, who, being life's Lord, died for the sake of men. Whoever conceives this love, and takes this proof to his heart, has found a new motive, and has also gained a truth."

But Christ lingers within the hall "Is there something after all in that lecture which finds an echo in the Christian soul? Yes, even there.

There is the ghost of love, if nothing more, in the utterance of that virgin-minded man, with the 'wan, pure look,' and the frail life burning itself away in the striving after truth. For his critical tests have reduced the pearl of price to ashes, and yet left it, in his judgment, a pearl; and he bids his followers gather up their faith as an almost perfect whole; go home and venerate the myth on which he has experimented, adore the man whom he has proved to be one. And if his learning itself be loveless, it may claim our respect when a tricksy demon has let it loose on the Epistles of St. Paul, as it claims our grat.i.tude when expended on secular things. It is at least better than the ignorance which hates the word of G.o.d, if it cannot wholly accept it; while these, his disciples, who renounce the earth, and chain up the natural man on a warrant no more divine than this, are by so much better than he who at this moment judges them. Let them carry the doctrine by which they think themselves carried, as does the child his toy-horse. He will not deride nor disturb them."

The subject of these experiences has reached a state of restful indifference. "He will adhere to his own belief, and be tolerant towards his neighbour's: since the two only differ as do two different refractions of a single ray of light. He will study, instead of criticizing, the different creeds which are fused into one before the universal Father's throne."

But this is not the lesson he has been intended to learn. The storm, breaking out afresh, catches up and dashes him to the ground, while the vesture, which he had let slip during his last musings, recedes swiftly from his sight. Then he knows that there is one "way," and he knows also that he may find it; and in this new conviction he regains his hold of the garment, and at one bound has reentered the little chapel, which he seems never indeed to have left. The sermon is ending, and he has heard it all. He still appreciates its faults of matter and manner; but he no longer rejects the draught of living water, because it comes to him with some taste of earth. What the draught can do is evidenced by those wrecks of humanity which are finding renewal there. There his choice shall rest; for, nowhere else, so he seems to conclude, is the message of Love so simply and so directly conveyed.

A great part of the narrative is written in a humorous tone, which shows itself, not only in thought and word, but in a jolting measure, and even grotesque rhymes. The speaker desires it to be understood that he is not the less in earnest for this apparent "levity;" and the levity is quite consistent with religious seriousness in such a person as the poem depicts. But, as I have shown, it is alone enough to prove that the author is not depicting himself. The poem reflects him more or less truly in the doctrine of Divine Love, the belief in personal guidance, and the half-contemptuous admiration with which the speaker regards those who will mortify the flesh in obedience to a Christ-_man_. But it belies the evidence of his whole work when, as in Section XVII., it represents moral truth as either innate to the human spirit, or directly revealed to it; and we shall presently notice a still greater discrepancy which it shares with its companion poem.[59]

"_Easter-Day_"[60] deals with the deeper issues of scepticism and faith; and opens with a dialogue in which the two opposite positions are maintained. Both speakers start from the belief in G.o.d, and the understanding that Christianity is unproved; but the one accepts it in faith: the other regards it as, for the time being, negatived.

The man of faith begins by exclaiming, how hard it is to be (practically) a Christian; and how disproportionate to our endeavour is our success in becoming so. The sceptic replies that to his mind the only difficulty is belief. "Let the least of G.o.d's commands be proved authentic: and only an idiot would shrink from martyrdom itself, with the certain bliss that would reward it." The man of faith, who is clearly the greater pessimist of the two, thinks the world too full of suffering to be placed, by any knowledge, beyond the reach of faith--beyond the necessity of being taken upon trust. And his adversary concedes that absolute knowledge would--where it was applicable--destroy its own end. In social life, for instance, it would do away with all those acts of faith, those instinctive judgments and feelings, which are the essence _of_ life. But he thinks one may fairly desire a better touchstone for the purposes of G.o.d than human judgment or feeling; and that, if we cannot know them with scientific certainty, one must wish the balance of probability to lie clearly on one side.

The man of faith is of opinion that this much of proof exists for everyone who chooses to seek it. "The burning question is how we are to shape our lives. For himself he is impelled to follow the Christian precept, and renounce the world." The sceptic denies that G.o.d demands such a sacrifice, and sees only man's ingrat.i.tude in the impression that He does so. The man of faith admits that it would be hard to have made the sacrifice, and be rewarded only by death; while the many unbelievers who have virtually made it for one or other of the hobbies which he describes, have at least its success to repay them. But even so, he continues, he would have chosen the better part; for he would have chosen Hope,--the hope which aspires to a loftier end. "His opponent, it is true, hopes also; but _his_ hopes are blind. They are not those of St. Paul, but those which, according to aeschylus, the t.i.tan gave to men, to spice therewith the meal of life, and prevent their devouring it in too bitter haste; and if hope--or faith--is meant to be something more than a relish...!"

The opponent protests against this attack upon the "trusting ease" of his existence, and declares that his interlocutor is not doing as he would be done by. Whereupon the first speaker relates something which befell him on the Easter-Eve of three years ago, and which startled him out of precisely such a condition.

He was crossing the common, lately spoken of by their friend, and musing on life and the last judgment: when the following question occured to him: what would be his case if he died and were judged at that very moment? "From childhood," he continues, "I have always insisted on knowing the worst; and I now plunged straight into the recesses of my conscience, prepared for what spectre might be hidden there. But all I encountered was _common sense_, which did its best to a.s.sure me that I had nothing to fear: that, considering all the difficulties of life, I had kept my course through it as straight, and advanced as rapidly as could be expected." (More reflections, half serious half playful ensue.) "Suddenly I threw back my head, and saw the midnight sky on fire. It was a _sea_ of fire, now writhing and surging; now sucked back into the darkness, now overflowing it till its rays poured downwards on to the earth. I felt that the Judgment Day had come. I felt also, in that supreme moment of consciousness, that I had chosen the world, and must take my stand upon the choice. I defended it with the courage of despair. 'G.o.d had framed me to appreciate the beauties of life; I could not put the cup untasted aside; He had not plainly commanded me to do so; He knew how I had struggled to resign myself to leaving it half full; h.e.l.l could be no just punishment for such a mood as that.'"

"Another burst of fire. A brief ecstasy which confounded earth and heaven. Then ashes everywhere. And amid the wreck--like the smoke pillared over Sodom--mantled in darkness as in a magnific pall which turned to grey the blackness of the night--pity mingled with judgment in the intense meditation in which his gaze was fixed--HE stood before me.

I fell helpless at His feet. He spoke:

'The judgment is past; dispensed to every man as though he alone were its object. _Thy_ sin has been the love of earth. Thou hast preferred the finite to the infinite--the fleshly joys to the spiritual. Be this choice thy punishment. Thou art shut out from the heaven of spirit. The earth is thine for ever.'"

"My first impulse was one of delighted grat.i.tude. 'All the wonders--the treasures of the natural world, are _mine_?'"

"'Thine,' the Vision replied,'if such shows suffice thee; if thou wilt exchange eternity for the equivalent of a single rose, flung to thee over the barrier of that Eden from which thou art for ever excluded.'"

"'Not so,' I answered. 'If the beauties of nature are thus deceptive, my choice shall be with Art--art which imparts to nature the value of human life. I will seek man's impress in statuary, in painting....'"

"'Obtain that,' the Vision again rebuked me, 'the one form with its single act, the one face with its single look: the failure and the shame of all true artists who felt the whole while they could only reproduce the part.'"

And again the Vision expatiates on the limited nature of the earthly existence--the limited horizon which reduces man to the condition of the lizard pent up in a chamber in the rock--the destined shattering of the prison wall which will quicken the stagnant sense to the impressions of a hitherto unknown world--the spiritual hunger with which the saints, content in their earthly prison, still hail the certainty of deliverance.

"'Let me grasp at Mind,' I then entreated,--'whirl enraptured through its various spheres. Yet no. I know what thou wilt say. Mind, too, is of the earth; and all its higher inspirations proceed from another world--are recognized as doing so by those who receive them. I will catch no more at broken reeds. I will relinquish the world, and take Love for my portion. I will love on, though love too may deceive me, remembering its consolations in the past, struggling for its rewards in the future.'"

"'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 G.o.d.'"

"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 a.s.sumes here, it is true, that G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 ash.o.r.e 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 G.o.d 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:"--

"I must say--or choke in silence--'Howsoever came my fate, Sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well-weighed,--preponderate.'

By necessity ordained thus? I shall bear as best I can; By a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? No, as I am man!

Such were G.o.d: and was it goodness that the good within my range Or had evil in admixture or grew evil's self by change?

Wisdom--that becoming wise meant making slow and sure advance From a knowledge proved in error to acknowledged ignorance?

Power? 'tis just the main a.s.sumption reason most revolts at! power Unavailing for bestowment on its creature of an hour, Man, of so much proper action rightly aimed and reaching aim, So much pa.s.sion,--no defect there, no excess, but still the same,-- As what const.i.tutes existence, pure perfection bright as brief For yon worm, man's fellow-creature, on yon happier world--its leaf!

No, as I am man, I mourn the poverty I must impute: Goodness, wisdom, power, all bounded, each a human attribute!"

(vol. xiv. p. 183.)

"If we regard this life as final, we must relinquish our conception of the power of G.o.d: for His work is then open to human judgment, in the light of which it yields only imperfect results."

"But let us once a.s.sume that our present state is one of probation, intended by G.o.d as such: and every difficulty is solved. Evil is no longer a mark of failure in the execution of the Divine Scheme: it becomes essential to it; my experience indeed represents it as such. I cannot conceive evil as abolished without abrogation of the laws of life. For it is not only bound up with all the good of life; it is often its vehicle. Gain is enhanced by recent loss. Ignorance places us nearest to knowledge. Beauty is most precious, truth most potent, where ugliness and falsehood prevail; and what but the loss of Love teaches us what its true value has been?"

"May I then accept the conclusion that this life will be supplemented by a better one?"

Mr. Browning initiates his final inquiry by declaring that he will accept only the testimony of fact. He rejects surmise, he seeks no answer in the beauties or in the voices of nature; none in the minds of his fellow-men; none even in the depths of his sentient self with its "aspiration" and "reminiscence:" its plausible a.s.surances that G.o.d would be "unjust," and man "wronged," if a second life were not granted to us.

And here he seems for a moment to deny, what he has elsewhere stated, and everywhere implied, in the poem: that his own spirit must be to him, despite its isolation and weakness, the one messenger of Divine truth.

But he is only saying the same thing in a different way. He rejects the spontaneous utterance of his own spirit; but relies on its conclusions.

He rejects it as pleader; but const.i.tutes it judge. And this distinction is carried out in a dialogue, in which Fancy speaks for the spontaneous self; Reason for the judicial--the one making its _thrusts_, and the other _parrying_ them. The question at issue has, however, slightly s.h.i.+fted its ground; and we find ourselves asking: not, "is the Soul immortal?" but "what would be the consequence to life of its being proved so?"

FANCY. "The soul exists after death. I accept the surmise as certainty: and would see it put to use during life."

REASON. "The 'use' of it will be that the wise man will die at once: since death, in the absence of any supernatural law to the contrary, must be clear gain. The soul must fare better when it has ceased to be thwarted by the body; and we have no reason to suppose that the obstructions which have their purpose in this life would be renewed in a future one. Are we happy? death rescues our happiness from its otherwise certain decay. Are we sad? death cures the sadness. Is life simply for us a weary compromise between hope and fear, between failure and attainment? death is still the deliverer. It must come some day. Why not invoke it in a painless form when the first cloud appears upon our sky?"

FANCY. "Then I concede this much: the certainty of the future life shall be saddled with the injunction to live out the present, or accept a proportionate penalty."

REASON. "In that case the wise man will live. But whether the part he chooses in it be that of actor or of looker-on, he will endure his life with indifference. Relying on the promises of the future, he will take success or failure as it comes, and accept ignorance as a matter of course."

FANCY. "I concede more still. Man shall not only be compelled to live: he shall know the value of life. He shall know that every moment he spends in it is gain or loss for the life to come--that every act he performs involves reward or punishment in it."

REASON. "Then you abolish good and evil in their relation to man; for you abolish freedom of choice. No man is good because he obeys a law so obvious and so stringent as to leave him no choice; and such would be the moral law, if punishment were _demonstrated_ as following upon the breach of it; reward on its fulfilment. Man is free, in his present state, to choose between good and evil--free therefore to be good; because he may believe, but has no demonstrated _certainty_, that his future welfare depends on it."