Life and Letters of Robert Browning [29]
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