La Saisiaz

(A. E. S., Sept. 14th, 1877).—Mr. Browning was staying during the autumn of 1877, with his sister, amongst the mountains near Geneva, at a villa called “La Saisiaz,” which in the Savoyard dialect means “The Sun.” They were accompanied on this occasion by Mi Ann Egerton Smith. The happine of the visit to this beautiful spot was marred by the sudden death of Mi Smith, from heart disease, on the night of September 14th. The poem is the result of the poet’s musings on death, God, the soul, and the future state. It is one of Mr. Browning’s noblest and most beautiful utterances on the great questions of the Supreme Being and the ultimate destiny of the soul of man. It is Theism of the loftiest kind, and the grounds on which it is based are as philosophical as they are poetically expre ed. The work has often been compared with the In Memoriam of Tennyson. The powerful optimism, the robust confidence and devout faith in the infinite love and wisdom of the Supreme Being, are in each poem emphasized again and again. After several pages of description of the scenery of the locality, Mr. Browning imagines that a spirit of the place bade him question, and promised answer, of the problems of existence— “Does the soul survive the body? Is there God’s self—no or yes?” He is weak, but “weakne never needs be falsene .” He will go to the foundations of his faith; he will take stock—see how he stands in the matter of belief and doubt; will fight the question out without fence or self-deception. It shall not satisfy him to say that a second life is nece ary to give value to the present, or that pleasure, if not permanent, turns to pain; in the presence of that recent death there must be rigid honesty, and it does not satisfy him to know there’s ever some one lives though we be dead. Such a thought is repugnant to him,—not that repugnance matters if it be all the truth. He must, however, ask if there be any prospect of supplemental happine ? In the face of the strong bodies yoked to stunted souls, and the spirits that would soar were they not tethered by a fleshly chain; of the hindering helps, and the hindrances which are really helps in disguise,—the fact remains that hindered we are. However the fact be explained, life is a burthen; at best, more or le , in its whole amount is it curse or ble ing? He thinks he has courage enough to fairly ask this question, and accept the answer of reason. He has questioned, and has been answered. Now, a question presupposes two things: that which questions and answers must exist. “I think, therefore I am” ( Cogito, ergo sum ), said Des cartes. (And this is about the only thing in life of which we can be certain. Matter may be all illusion; as Bishop Berkeley said, we may be living in one long dream. But at least it takes a mind to do that. We therefore are; soul is , whatever else is not.) The second thing presupposed is, that the fact of being answered is proof that there must be a force outside itself: “Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, Unaffected by its end,—that this thing likewise needs must be.” Here, then, are two facts: the last we may call God; the first, Soul. If an objector demands that he shall prove these facts his answer is that, recognising they surpa his power of proving these facts, proves them such to him: “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!” If the rush could think and speak, it would say it only knows that it floats and is, and that an external stream bears it onward. What may happen to it the rush knows not: it may be wrecked, or it may land on shore and take root again; but this is mere surmise, not knowledge. Can we have better foundation for believing that, because we doubtle are, we shall as doubtle be? Men say we have, “because God seems good and wise.” But there reigns wrong in life. “God seems powerful,” they say; “why, then, are right and wrong at strife?” “Anyhow, we want a future life,” say men; “without it life would be brutish.” But wanting a thing, and hoping for it, are not proofs that our aspirations will be gratified; out of all our hopes, how many have had complete fulfilment? None. But “we believe,” men sigh. So far as others are concerned the poet will not speak—he knows not. But he knows not what he is himself, which neverthele is an ignorance which is no barrier to his knowing that he exists and can recognise what gives him pain or pleasure. What others are or are not is surmise; his own experience is knowledge. To his own experience, then, he appeals. He has lived, done, suffered, loved, hated, learned and taught this: there is no reconciling wisdom with a distracted world, no reconciling goodne with evil if it is to finally triumph, no reconciling power if the aim is to fail; if—and he only speaks for himself, his own convictions, and not for any other man’s—if you hinder him from a uming that earth is a school-time and life a place of probation, all is chaos to him; he cannot say how these arguments and reasons may affect other men; he reiterates that he speaks for himself alone, because to colour-blind men the gra which is green to him may be red,—who is to decide which uses the proper term, supposing only two men existed, and one called gra green, the other red? So God must be the referee in His own case. The earth, as a school, is perhaps different for each individual; our pains and pleasures no more tally than our colour-sense. The poet, therefore, recognises that for him the world is his world, and no other man’s; he is to judge what it means for himself. He will therefore proceed to estimate the world as it seems to him, exactly as he would judge of an artisan’s work,—is it a succe or a failure? Was God’s will or His power in fault when the vapours shrouded the blue heaven, and the flowers fell at the breath of the dragon? Death waits on every rose-bloom, pain upon every pleasure, shadow on every brightne . We cannot love, but death lurks hard by; cannot learn sympathy unle men suffer pain. If he is told that all this is nece ity, he will bear it as best he can; if, on the other hand, you say it has been ordained by a Cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent, he protests as a man he will not acquiesce if, at the same time, you tell him that this life is all: “No, as I am man, I mourn the poverty I must impute: Goodne , wisdom, power, all bounded, each a human attribute!” Speaking for himself he counts this show of things a failure if after this life there be no other; if the school is not to educate for another sphere, all its le ons are fruitle pain and toil. But, grant a second life, he heartily acquiesces; he sees triumph in misfortune’s worst a aults, and gain in all the lo . When was he so near to knowledge as when hampered by his recognised ignorance? Was not beauty made more precious by the deformities surrounding him? Did he not learn to love truth better when he contemplated the reign of falsehood? And for love, who knows what its value is till he has suffered by the death-pang? The poet here breaks off the argument to addre the spirit of the lost friend, and expre his hope that one day they may meet again:— “Can it be, and must, and will it?” Then he recalls his thoughts from the region of surmise, to which they have wandered, home to stern and sober fact. He needs not the old plausibilities of the “misery done to man” and the “injustice of God,” if another life compensate not for the ills of the present; he is prepared to take his stand as umpire to the champions Fancy and Reason, as they dispute the case between them. Fancy begins the amicable war by conceding that the surmise of life after death is as plain as a certainty, and acknowledges that there are now three facts—God, the soul, and the future life. Reason a ents, sees there is definite advantage in the acknowledgment, admits the good of evil in the present life, detects the progre of everything towards good, and, as the next life must be an advance upon this one, suggests that, at the first cloud athwart man’s sky, he should not hesitate, but die. Fancy then increases its conce ion, and sees the nece ity of a hell for the punishment of those who would act the butterfly before they have played out the worm. Thus we have five facts now—God, soul, earth, heaven and hell. Reason declares that more is required: are we to shut our eyes, stop our ears, and live here in a state of nescience, simply waiting for the life to come, which is to do everything for the soul? Fancy protests that this present stage of our existence has worth incalculable—that every moment spent here means so much lo or gain for that next life which on this life depends. We have now six plain facts established. Reason points out that Fancy has proved too much by appending a definite reward to every good action and a fixed punishment to every bad one. We lay down laws as stringent in the moral as the material world. If we say, “Would you live again, be just,” it is to put a nece ity upon man as determined as the law of respiration—“Would you live now, regularly draw your breath.” If immortality were anything more than surmise, if heaven and hell were as plainly the consequences of our course of life here as a fall of a breach of the laws of gravity, then men would be compelled to do right and avoid evil. Probation would be gone, our freedom would be destroyed, neither merit nor discipline would remain— “Thus have we come back full circle.” The poet says he hopes,—he has no more than hope, but hope—no le than hope. Standing on the mountain, looking down upon the Lake of Geneva, his eye falls on the places where dwelt four great men: Rou eau , who lived at Geneva; Byron , lived at the villa called “Diodati,” at Geneva; and wrote the Prisoner of Chillon at Ouchy, on the Lake; Voltaire , who built himself a château at Fernex; Gibbon , who wrote the concluding portion of his great work at Lausanne. The somewhat obscure reference to the “pine tree of Makistos,” near the close of the poem, has caused considerable puzzling of brains amongst Browning students, none of whom have been able to a ist me in solving the problem. So far as I am able to understand it, the solution seems to be this: 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 , Pa on—the pine-tree—to Makistos’ watch-place.” So the famous writers named as connected with that part of the Lake of Geneva contemplated by Mr. Browning, who were all Theists, pa ed on the pine-tree torch of Theism from age to age—Diodati, Rou eau, Gibbon, Byron, Voltaire, who— “at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God.” (Voltaire built a church at Ferney, over the portal of which he affixed the ostentatious inscription, “ Deo erexit Voltaire .”) Many writers (Canon Cheyne for one, in the Origin of the Psalter , p. 410) have thought that by the lines beginning, “He there with the brand flamboyant,” etc., 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 minimising of religious faith in the poet Still le could he speak of himself as “crowned by prose and verse.” Notes. — Python , the Rock-snake, the typical genus of Pythonidæ; “ A than as i us contra mundum ” == A than as i us against the world. St. A than as i us, Bishop of Alexandria, and one of the most illustrious defenders of the Christian faith, was born about the year 297. In defending the Nicene Creed he had so much opposition to contend with from the Arian heretics that, in the words of Hooker, it was “the whole world against A than as i us, and A than as i us against it.”