Robert Browning. C. H. Herford
of Paracelsus, in that "insatiable avidity of penetrating the secrets of nature" which his follower Bitiskius (approvingly quoted by Browning) ascribed to him, he saw a fascinating realisation of his own vague and chaotic "restlessness." Here was a spirit made up in truth "of an intensest life," driven hither and thither by the hunger for intellectual mastery of the universe; and Browning, far from convicting him of intellectual futility, has made him actually divine the secret he sought, and, in one of the most splendid passages of modern poetry, declare with his dying lips a faith which is no less Browning's than his own.
[5] His library, as I am informed by Prof. Hall Griffin, contained a copy of the works of Paracelsus, doubtless that used by his son.
While he thus lavished his utmost power on portraying the soaring genius of Paracelsus, as he conceived it, he turned impatiently away from the husk of popular legend by which it was half obscured. He shrank from no attested fact, however damaging; but he brushed away the accretions of folklore, however picturesque. The attendant spirit who enabled Paracelsus to work his marvellous cures, and his no less renowned Sword, were for Browning contemptible futilities. Yet a different way of treating legend lay nearer to the spirit of contemporary poetry. Goethe had not long before evolved his Mephistopheles from the "attendant spirit" attached by that same sixteenth century to the Paracelsus of Protestantism, Faust; Tennyson was already meditating a scene full of the enchantment of the Arthurian sword Excalibur. Browning's peremptory rejection of such springs of poetry marks one of his limitations as a poet. Much of the finest poetry of Faust, as, in a lower degree, of the Idylls, is won by a subtle transformation of the rude stuff of popular imagination: for Browning, with rare exceptions, this rude stuff was dead matter, impervious to his poetic insight, and irresponsive to the magic of his touch. Winnowing the full ears, catching eagerly the solid and stimulating grain, he hardly heeded the golden gleam of the chaff as it flew by.
He did not, however, refrain from accentuating his view of the story by interweaving in it some gracious figures of his own. Festus, the honest, devoted, but somewhat purblind friend, who offers Paracelsus the criticism of sober common-sense, and is vindicated—at the bar of common-sense—by his great comrade's tragic end; Michal, an exquisitely tender outline of womanhood, even more devoted, and even less distinguished; and the "Italian poet" Aprile, a creature of genius, whose single overpowering thought avails to break down the stronghold of Paracelsus's else unassailable conviction. Aprile, who lives for love as Paracelsus for knowledge, is not to be identified with Shelley, but he has unmistakable Shelleyan traits, and the dreamy pageant of his imaginary creations might stand for a summary review of Shelley's work. Had Shelley lived, he might have come nearer than any one else to fulfilling the rounded and complete ideal of which Paracelsus and Aprile were dissevered halves: the greater part of his actual achievement belonged, Browning evidently thought, to the category of those dazzling but imperfectly objective visions which he ascribes to his Aprile. But Shelley—the poet of Alastor, the passionate "lover of Love," was yet the fittest embodiment of that other finer spiritual energy which Paracelsus in his Faustian passion for knowledge had ruthlessly put from him. Sixteen years later, Browning was to define in memorable words what he held to be the "noblest and predominating characteristic of Shelley"—viz., "his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the Absolute and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge." This divining and glorifying power it is that Browning ascribes to Love; the lack of it is in his conception the tragic flaw which brings to the ground the superbly gifted genius of Paracelsus. This genuine and original tragic motive is not worked out with uniform power; his degeneration, his failures, are painted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted with either. But all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great moments in Paracelsus's career—the scene in the quiet Würzburg garden, where he conquers the doubts of Festus and Michal by the magnificent assurance of his faith in his divine calling; and that in the hospital cell at Salzburg, where his fading mind anticipates at the point of death the clearness of immortal vision as he lays bare the conquered secret of the world.
That Paracelsian secret of the world was for Browning doubtless the truth, though he never again expounded it so boldly. Paracelsus's reply to the anxious inquiry of Festus whether he is sure of God's forgiveness: "I have lived! We have to live alone to well set forth God's praise"—might stand as a text before the works of Browning. In all life he sees the promise and the potency of God—in the teeming vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies of man, in the rich conquests of his Art, in his myth-woven Nature. "God is glorified in Man, and to man's glory vowed I soul and limb." The historic Paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to connect vast conceptions of Nature akin to this with the detail of his empiric discoveries. Browning, with his mind, as always, set upon things psychical, attributes to him a parallel incapacity to connect his far-reaching vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or blockish specimens of the genus Man whom he encountered in the detail of practice. It was the problem which Browning himself was to face, and in his own view triumphantly to solve; and Paracelsus, rising into the clearness of his dying vision, becomes the mouthpiece of Browning's own criticism of his failure, the impassioned advocate of the Love which with him is less an elemental energy drawing things into harmonious fusion than a subtle weapon of the intellect, making it wise
"To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's,
To see a good in evil and a hope
In ill-success."
Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle, restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of genius—a beauty like that of Amiens or Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not yet begun to perplex or to disintegrate.
CHAPTER II.
ENLARGING HORIZONS. SORDELLO.
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine hält in derber Liebeslust
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.
—Faust.
Paracelsus, though only a series of quasi-dramatic scenes, suggested considerable undeveloped capacity for drama. From a career in which the most sensational event was a dismissal from a professorship, and the absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had elicited a tragedy of the scientific intellect. But it was equally obvious that the writer's talent was not purely dramatic; and that his most splendid and original endowments required some other medium than drama for their full unfolding. The author of Paracelsus was primarily concerned with character, and with action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both points substantially with the author of Hamlet. But while Browning's energetic temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than those which exhibit it. The two impulses derived from temperament and from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for some years the