R350816A. Paracelsus.
The Atlas, 16 August 1835, p. 520.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 348–349.
There is nothing more easy than to detect the difference between the genius that gives to Poetry its influence over our feelings, and the mere taste or talent that constructs agreeable and even faultless verse, which we read with facility, but without emotion. On the other hand, there is nothing more difficult than to describe the precise merits of that kind of verse which forms the average production of the day. The faults and beauties of genius stand out palpably; the defects and excellences of mediocrity melt into each other, and can hardly be separated. It is impossible to discriminate by them the distinctive claims of minor poetry. We feel on the instant where it fails—that it is deficient in weight, in breadth of colouring, in energy, in thought; but we possess no means of conveying to others an accurate idea of its innate languor, except by numerous quotations. A great portion of contemporary verse is of this description: possessing the charm of fluency and verbal prettiness, combined with well-balanced versification, and propriety of purpose; but wanting all the higher and inner qualities that constitute that miracle of expression which we call Poetry. The causes of failure lie deeper than the reader, who catches the music and is pleased, although, perhaps, not satisfied, is aware. Not alone do such poetasters lack the fine temperament, the exquisite sensibility, the acute sympathies that are a part of the poet’s nature, but their minds are essentially feeble. It is in this that they mainly sink—not by the weight of dullness, but the want of power. They believe that the beauty lies all upon the surface; that graphic diction, buoyant spirits, profuse imagery, and the interest that is produced by mechanical surprises, the rosin-flashes and claptraps of the verse, are all that are necessary. They trim their little garden with laborious zeal, while the true poet is communing with Nature on the Mountains or in the Forests. All great poets who have survived their age, and penetrated to posterity with honours renewing and increasing round their works, have been deep thinkers. They did not seize upon the colours of the rainbow and the glitter of the stars, and imagine that they had swept the heavens of their glory; but they raised the veil from the empyrean, and gazed upon the elemental fire at its source. Poetry without thought is but the costume of the bride—it wants the glowing body, the bounding heart, the yearning spirit of life. Wherever there is poetry that has made a strong impression upon men’s minds, there, too, is Philosophy, although it may never have taken a definite shape either in the conceptions of the poet or the apprehension of the reader.
How, then, are we to speak of the volumes before us? With some ambitious pretensions in one or two of them, and a slight vein of poetical feeling in them all, there is not one of them that can maintain a permanent place. But they are of very different degrees of merit, and cannot be dismissed in a general sentence.
The selection of the story of Paracelsus—whose life is one of the well-known real romances of the times of Luther—was ill-judged for the uses of poetry. It would have answered all the purposes of that mingled web of truth and fiction which we find in the historical novel. The materials are capable of expansion and variety—the superstitions of the age acted upon either by the advanced knowledge or the presumptuous quackery, as the author might choose, of his hero—and the fluctuating career through many lands of a man who stood alone in the world, and was at least a marvel in his time, would have afforded ample opportunity for the display of power in the development of character, and the portraiture of the manners and modes of thinking of a period that gave birth to a great Moral Revolution. But in the poem we miss all these accessories. Paracelsus is utterly by himself—we see none of the influences that moved around him, and touched him not—we hardly hear the buz of the crowd afar off, whose pressure upon his spirit is actually necessary to be shown in order that we may comprehend the grandeur of his isolation amongst men. The object of Mr. Browning seems to have been to describe the progress of the mind of Paracelsus from the dawning of his passion to achieve the great secret of life, through its various changes, until, worn out by scoffs and opposition, he expired in the hospital of St. Sebastian. The form in which this is attempted can scarcely be called dramatic, although it is in dialogue, for the whole use of the three persons who are introduced is to give Paracelsus an excuse for talking, and to draw out his character through his own confessions. In Mr. Browning’s version, Paracelsus is described to be more the dupe of his own insanity than the empyric he is described to have been by the majority of his contemporaries. The cures he effected were, no doubt, considered to be a species of sorcery, and if, as it is believed, he was acquainted with the virtues of mercury, much of the mystery is at once cleared up. As to his ravings about Galen, his pretended power over apparitions, and the insolent quackery of his style—they were probably as much the results of a highly excited imagination, as of a design to impose upon ignorance and credulity. But it is certain that Paracelsus was deluded himself by his own weakness, or that he attempted to practise a very grave delusion on the world. The magnum opus and the elixir vitæ, even in the sixteenth century, were worthy only of a charlatan. The poem is divided into five parts. The first describes Paracelsus before his departure for his travels, when his mind is full of the teeming future—the second discovers him at the house of the Greek in Constantinople, whom he visited for the purpose of obtaining the tincture of Trismegistus; here his interview with a marvellous person, Aprile, a sort of impersonation of the passion of Love, is about as incomprehensible as Luther’s dialogues with the devil, or the meeting between Paracelsus and the ghost of Galen in the vestibule of the temple—the third is a rumination upon the past and present, after he is called to fill the chair at Basil, from whence he was subsequently driven out by the multitude, who denounced him for a quack—the fourth exhibits his renewed determination to travel, and baffle the malignity that pursues him—and the fifth his death in a cell of the hospital of St. Sebastian at Salzburg. We will make room for one or two passages, to exemplify the spirit in which the subject has been treated. In the last part we find Festus, the fast friend of Paracelsus, watching him in his cell, and trying to recover from him some acknowledgments of his life. We quote the following for the sake of the beautiful description of the dying man:—
Par. What’s life to me?
Where’er I look is fire, where’er I listen
Music, and where I tend bliss evermore.
Yet I can not refrain: ’t is a refined
Delight to view those chances once again.
I am so near the perils I escape,
That I must play with them and turn them over,
To feel how fully they are past and gone.
Still it is like some further cause exists
For this peculiar mood—some hidden purpose;
Did I not tell you something of it, Festus?
I had it fast, but it has somehow slipt
Away from me; it will return anon.
Fest. (Indeed his cheek seems young again, his voice
Complete with its old tones—that little laugh
Concluding every phrase; with up-turn’d eye,
As though one stoop’d above his head, to whom
He look’d for confirmation and approval:
Where was it gone so long, so well preserved?
And the fore-finger pointing as he speaks,
Like one who traces in an open book
The matter he declares; ’t is many a year
Since I remark’d it last: and this in him …
But now a ghastly wreck!)
The pervading power and omnipresence of the Deity is thus finely described by Paracelsus.
In every pore of this fast-fading frame
I felt, I knew what God is, what we are,
What life is—how God tastes an infinite joy
In infinite ways—one everlasting bliss,
From whom all being emanates, all power
Proceeds; in whom is life for evermore,
Yet whom existence in its lowest form
Includes; where dwells enjoyment there is He!
With still a flying point of bliss remote—
A happiness in store afar—a sphere
Of distant glory in full view; thus climbs
Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever!
The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
The molten ore bursts up among the rocks—
Winds into the stone’s heart—outbranches bright
In hidden mines—spots barren river-beds—
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask—
God joys therein! The wroth sea’s waves are edged
With foam, white as the bitten lip of Hate:
When in the solitary waste strange groups
Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,
Staring together with their eyes on flame,
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride!
Then all is still: earth is a wintry clod;
But spring wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
Over its breast to waken it; rare verdure
Buds here and there upon rough banks, between
The wither’d tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face:
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms,
Like chrysalids impatient for the air;
The shining doors [sic] are busy; beetles run
Along the furrows, ants make their ado;
Above birds fly in merry flocks—the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain, and God renews
His ancient rapture! Thus he dwells in all,
From life’s minute beginnings, up at last
To man—the consummation of this scheme
Of being—the completion of this sphere
Of life.
From these specimens the tone and character of the poem may be fairly inferred. Perhaps they are favourable examples, for we find that the metre in many places is very discordant, and still more frequently prosaic: that the thought often labours through a haze of ambiguous words, and that there is on the whole too much straining after the metaphysical, too much gloom and singularity. But it is in the conception that the great defect lies. The picture of the mental struggles of Paracelsus is very incomplete. The hues flit like the colours of the expiring dolphin. It wants consistency in the colouring and in the progress: it does not rise gradually to a sublime height and vanish—it suggests expectations that it does not fulfil. Mr. Browning has built up his ambitious designs like the Titans, and, like them, has failed to reach heaven. But it would be unjust to deny that he possesses powers far above the ordinary level, that he possesses an eloquence of no common order, and that, with patient toil—which, except in parts, he does not seem to have bestowed upon this poem—he may accomplish a work of higher aim and more enduring spirit.
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[Editors’ note: the review continues with comments on four other volumes of poetry; these we omit.]
Reviewed:
Paracelsus (RB), London: Effingham Wilson, 1835.
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