Robert Browning - The Complete Works of Robert Browning - Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition

May I add that when the ‘perfervidum ingenium’ of our northern race takes the form not of youthful hero-worship, but of loyal admiration and respectful homage, it is a very genuine affair. In the present instance I may say it is no mere outburst of young undisciplined enthusiasm, but an honest expression of intellectual and moral indebtedness, the genuine and distinct tribute of many minds that have been touched to some higher issues by what you have taught them. They do not presume to speak of your place in English literature. They merely tell you by this proffered honour (the highest in their power to bestow), how they have felt your influence over them.

My own obligations to you, and to the author of Aurora Leigh, are such, that of them ‘silence is golden’. Yours ever gratefully. William Knight.

Mr. Browning was deeply touched and gratified by these professions of esteem. He persisted nevertheless in his refusal. The Glasgow nomination had also been declined by him.

On August 17, 1877, he wrote to Mrs. FitzGerald from La Saisiaz:

‘How lovely is this place in its solitude and seclusion, with its trees and shrubs and flowers, and above all its live mountain stream which supplies three fountains, and two delightful baths, a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees — I bathe there twice a day — and then what wonderful views from the chalet on every side! Geneva lying under us, with the lake and the whole plain bounded by the Jura and our own Saleve, which latter seems rather close behind our house, and yet takes a hard hour and a half to ascend — all this you can imagine since you know the environs of the town; the peace and quiet move me the most — And I fancy I shall drowse out the two months or more, doing no more of serious work than reading — and that is virtuous renunciation of the glorious view to my right here — as I sit aerially like Euripides, and see the clouds come and go and the view change in correspondence with them. It will help me to get rid of the pain which attaches itself to the recollections of Lucerne and Berne “in the old days when the Greeks suffered so much,” as Homer says. But a very real and sharp pain touched me here when I heard of the death of poor Virginia March whom I knew particularly, and parted with hardly a fortnight ago, leaving her affectionate and happy as ever. The tones of her voice as on one memorable occasion she ejaculated repeatedly ‘Good friend!’ are fresh still. Poor Virginia! …’

Mr. Browning was more than quiescent during this stay in the Savoyard mountains. He was unusually depressed, and unusually disposed to regard the absence from home as a banishment; and he tried subsequently to account for this condition by the shadow which coming trouble sometimes casts before it. It was more probably due to the want of the sea air which he had enjoyed for so many years, and to that special oppressive heat of the Swiss valleys which ascends with them to almost their highest level. When he said that the Saleve seemed close behind the house, he was saying in other words that the sun beat back from, and the air was intercepted by it. We see, nevertheless, in his description of the surrounding scenery, a promise of the contemplative delight in natural beauty to be henceforth so conspicuous in his experience, and which seemed a new feature in it. He had hitherto approached every living thing with curious and sympathetic observation — this hardly requires saying of one who had animals for his first and always familiar friends. Flowers also attracted him by their perfume. But what he loved in nature was essentially its prefiguring of human existence, or its echo of it; and it never appeared, in either his works or his conversation, that he was much impressed by its inanimate forms — by even those larger phenomena of mountain and cloud-land on which the latter dwells. Such beauty as most appealed to him he had left behind with the joys and sorrows of his Italian life, and it had almost inevitably passed out of his consideration. During years of his residence in London he never thought of the country as a source of pleasurable emotions, other than those contingent on renewed health; and the places to which he resorted had often not much beyond their health-giving qualities to recommend them; his appetite for the beautiful had probably dwindled for lack of food. 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.

*These words have more significance when taken with their context. ‘If Shakespeare was to come into the room, we should all rise up to meet him; but if that Person [meaning Christ] was to come into the room, we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of his garment.’