The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
it. He had carefully collected all the known facts of the great discoverer’s life, and interpreted them with a sympathy which was no less an intuition of their truth than a reflection of his own genius upon them. We are enabled in some measure to judge of this by a paper entitled ‘Paracelsus, the Reformer of Medicine’, written by Dr. Edward Berdoe for the Browning Society, and read at its October meeting in 1888; and in the difficulty which exists for most of us of verifying the historical data of Mr. Browning’s poem, it becomes a valuable guide to, as well as an interesting comment upon it.
Dr. Berdoe reminds us that we cannot understand the real Paracelsus without reference to the occult sciences so largely cultivated in his day, as also to the mental atmosphere which produced them; and he quotes in illustration a passage from the writings of that Bishop of Spanheim who was the instructor of Paracelsus, and who appears as such in the poem. The passage is a definition of divine magic, which is apparently another term for alchemy; and lays down the great doctrine of all mediaeval occultism, as of all modern theosophy — of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man.
The same clue will guide us, as no other can, through what is apparently conflicting in the aims and methods, anomalous in the moral experience, of the Paracelsus of the poem. His feverish pursuit, among the things of Nature, of an ultimate of knowledge, not contained, even in fragments, in her isolated truths; the sense of failure which haunts his most valuable attainments; his tampering with the lower or diabolic magic, when the divine has failed; the ascetic exaltation in which he begins his career; the sudden awakening to the spiritual sterility which has been consequent on it; all these find their place, if not always their counterpart, in the real life.
The language of Mr. Browning’s Paracelsus, his attitude towards himself and the world, are not, however, quite consonant with the alleged facts. They are more appropriate to an ardent explorer of the world of abstract thought than to a mystical scientist pursuing the secret of existence. He preserves, in all his mental vicissitudes, a loftiness of tone and a unity of intention, difficult to connect, even in fancy, with the real man, in whom the inherited superstitions and the prognostics of true science must often have clashed with each other. Dr. Berdoe’s picture of the ‘Reformer’ drawn more directly from history, conveys this double impression. Mr. Browning has rendered him more simple by, as it were, recasting him in the atmosphere of a more modern time, and of his own intellectual life. This poem still, therefore, belongs to the same group as ‘Pauline’, though, as an effort of dramatic creation, superior to it.
We find the Poet with still less of dramatic disguise in the deathbed revelation which forms so beautiful a close to the story. It supplies a fitter comment to the errors of the dramatic Paracelsus, than to those of the historical, whether or not its utterance was within the compass of historical probability, as Dr. Berdoe believes. In any case it was the direct product of Mr. Browning’s mind, and expressed what was to be his permanent conviction. It might then have been an echo of German pantheistic philosophies. From the point of view of science — of modern science at least — it was prophetic; although the prophecy of one for whom evolution could never mean less or more than a divine creation operating on this progressive plan.
The more striking, perhaps, for its personal quality are the evidences of imaginative sympathy, even direct human insight, in which the poem abounds. Festus is, indeed, an essentially human creature: the man — it might have been the woman — of unambitious intellect and large intelligence of the heart, in whom so many among us have found comfort and help. We often feel, in reading ‘Pauline’, that the poet in it was older than the man. The impression is more strongly and more definitely conveyed by this second work, which has none of the intellectual crudeness of ‘Pauline’, though it still belongs to an early phase of the author’s intellectual life. Not only its mental, but its moral maturity, seems so much in advance of his uncompleted twenty-third year.
To the first edition of ‘Paracelsus’ was affixed a preface, now long discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect of the author’s completed work; for it lays down the constant principle of dramatic creation by which that work was to be inspired. It also anticipates probable criticism of the artistic form which on this, and so many subsequent occasions, he selected for it.
‘I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset — mistaking my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common — judge it by principles on which it was never moulded, and subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. I therefore anticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as the purpose for which they were at first instituted is kept in view. I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves — and all new facilities placed at an author’s disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected… .’
Mr. Fox reviewed this also in the ‘Monthly Repository’. The article might be obtained through the kindness of Mrs. Bridell-Fox; but it will be sufficient for my purpose to refer to its closing paragraph, as given by her in the ‘Argosy’ of February 1890. It was a final expression of what the writer regarded as the fitting intellectual attitude towards a rising poet, whose aims and methods lay so far beyond the range of the conventional rules of poetry. The great event in the history of ‘Paracelsus’ was John Forster’s article on it in the ‘Examiner’. Mr. Forster had recently come to town. He could barely have heard Mr. Browning’s name, and, as he afterwards told him, was perplexed in reading the poem by the question of whether its author was an old or a young man; but he knew that a writer in the ‘Athenaeum’ had called it rubbish, and he had taken it up as a probable subject for a piece of slashing criticism. What he did write can scarcely be defined as praise. It was the simple, ungrudging admission of the unequivocal power, as well as brilliant promise, which he recognized in the work. This mutual experience was the introduction to a long and, certainly on Mr. Browning’s part, a sincere friendship.
Chapter 6
1835-1838
Removal to Hatcham; some Particulars — Renewed Intercourse with the second Family of Robert Browning’s Grandfather — Reuben Browning — William Shergold Browning — Visitors at Hatcham — Thomas Carlyle — Social Life — New Friends and Acquaintance — Introduction to Macready — New Year’s Eve at Elm Place — Introduction to John Forster — Miss Fanny Haworth — Miss Martineau — Serjeant Talfourd — The ‘Ion’ Supper — ’Strafford’ — Relations with Macready — Performance of ‘Strafford’ — Letters concerning it from Mr. Browning and Miss Flower — Personal Glimpses of Robert Browning — Rival Forms of Dramatic Inspiration — Relation of ‘Strafford’ to ‘Sordello’ — Mr. Robertson and the ‘Westminster Review’.
It was soon after this time, though the exact date cannot be recalled, that the Browning family moved from Camberwell to Hatcham. Some such change had long been in contemplation, for their house was now too small; and the finding one more suitable, in the latter place, had decided the question. The new home possessed great attractions. The long, low rooms of its upper storey supplied abundant accommodation for the elder Mr. Browning’s six thousand books. Mrs. Browning was suffering greatly from her chronic ailment, neuralgia; and the