R350815A. Paracelsus.
The Spectator, 15 August 1835, pp. 780–781.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 347–348.
The obvious scheme of this poem is to indicate the biography of Paracelsus, by representing him in the leading events of his life; which, for dramatic convenience, are arranged under five divisions. In the first scene or section, the founder of modern chemistry and the impudent but accomplished quack appears, resolved to throw himself upon the world. The advice and entreaties of his friend and fellow student Festus, and the tears of Michal his friend’s betrothed, are vain: he feels himself driven by an inward impulse to achieve greatness, though he has no definite idea of his object or his means. Fourteen years have passed at the opening of the second scene, and Paracelsus is discovered at Constantinople in the house of the Greek from whom he was fabled to have learned the secret of the tincture of Trismegistus. Here he encounters Aprile,—a person who to the unsentimental reader will merely appear a mad poet crazed for love, or rather for the want of love; and, after a long and uninteresting colloquy between the two, the scene closes. An interval of seven years more elapses, and the third act discovers Paracelsus at Basil, in the height of his celebrity, when Europe rang with the fame of his cures, and when the lectures of rival professors were deserted for those of the man who was supposed to possess the secrets of the philosopher’s stone and of the elixir vitæ. By his own desire, Festus has paid him a visit; and to him he unfolds, in a familiar though mocking dialogue, the disappointment of the high aspirations with which he started in life; and his general scorn of mankind; he even hints at his non-possession of the supernatural powers ascribed to him. The fourth act shows him ignominiously discarded from Basil, yet with a doubtful reputation still clinging to him, and still nursing thoughts of high emprize, but he is shaken by hearing of the death of his friend’s wife, and at once repudiates the life-preserving power with which ignorance had invested him—
“I have no julep, as they think
To cheat the grave.”
The next act occurs after a lapse of thirteen years: the scene is the hospital at Saltzburg; the persons are again Festus and Paracelsus; the incident is the alchemist’s death.
The defect in the structure of this poem is palpable: there is neither action nor incident, scarcely even a story to excite the attention of the reader. Of this the author seems to be in some sort conscious; stating that he has “endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama, and to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phœnomenon of the mind or of the passions by the operations of persons and events; and that instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis he desired to produce, he has ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and has suffered the agency by which it is influenced and deter- [p. 781→] mined to be generally discernible in its effects alone.” But admitting all this to have been designed, the design may still be very injudicious: for the form of dialogue precludes those descriptions and digressions by which the author in a narrative poem can vary his subjects and “interchange delights;” whilst the fundamental plan renders the whole piece a virtual soliloquy, each person of the drama speaking up to Paracelsus, in order to elicit his feelings, thoughts, or opinions. For these reasons, we conceive that such a poem contains in its structure the elements of tediousness, which no execution could obviate; and, unfortunately, the execution of Paracelsus is not of a nature to overcome difficulties. Evidences of mental power, perhaps of poetical talent, are visible throughout; but there is no nice conception and development of character, nothing peculiar or striking in the thoughts, whilst the language in which they are clothed gives them an air of mystical or dreamy vagueness.
One reason of this is clear enough: “the poem had not been imagined six months ago,”—a space of time much too short to mature the design of so difficult a subject and to write some four thousand lines. Another probably is, that the author was labouring with an idea which he had not distinctly conceived, or which at least he has not been able to evolve. From some scattered passages, and a word or two printed in capital letters, Paracelsus seems to have been designed for a sceptico-philosophical poem, in which the nothingness of human science and human affections—the vanity of striving to know or of seeking to love—should have been shown by examples. Paracelsus exhibiting the unattainableness of knowledge, Aprile that of love. Treated in the method of our author, such a design might have tasked the genius of Byron; who would, after all, have pointed a false moral. The true human philosophy is materialism,—to limit our notions of earthly happiness to our present existence, rendering invention and thought subordinate to mundane advantages, and quietly dismissing the more occult mysteries of nature, as things beyond our comprehension, and which as we cannot learn it is unnecessary for us to know. Those who would penetrate beyond this world, and investigate the origin of material things, or the essence of psychological nature, must not dream in science, but repose on faith. Nor is this opinion heretical. The Devil could find no better way of commencing temptation, than by exciting wonder and speculative discontent.
“Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires,”
are the means by which evil was introduced into Eden, and by which it still flourishes on earth.
Reviewed:
Paracelsus (RB), London: Effingham Wilson, 1835.
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