R351121A. Paracelsus.
Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, 21 November 1835, pp. 405–408.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 357–363.
The enjoying perusal of such a production as the present, does not leave the mind in the fittest state for the sober work of criticism—its weighing and balancing of merits and defects, its steady-handed application of the line and the plummet, its taking of heights and angles with the quadrant, its measuring out of beauty and sublimity, as a pedlar does his tape, by the ell and the thumb-nail. One would rather in such a case, like Wordsworth’s poet, be merely
an idler in the land;
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand—
If, indeed, to enjoy is not after all most deeply and really to understand—is not, at least, the end to which to understand is but a means, and which, being attained independently, makes that means superfluous.
Some questions may be raised as to points in the execution of Mr Browning’s poem, but there can be none as to the high poetic power displayed in it. There are, as it appears to us, some marks of haste in the composition, and we should have been better pleased with the absence both of the statement in the preface, that the poem had not been imagined six months before its publication, and of any ground for making such a statement; for we cannot doubt that the same genius which, in the space of time mentioned, produced the work as it now appears, would not have spent six months longer in brooding over its conceptions and their first rapid embodiment, without making the finished whole something still finer than it is. Even Milton, who tells us how freely the stream of his thoughts and words flowed in the act of composition, intimates at the same time, that he did not adventure upon his mighty theme, till much meditation had unrolled it before him in its whole extent:
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering; or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse;
Since first this subject for heroic song
Pleased me long choosing, and beginning late.
Even for the sake of retouching, and raising to the highest perfection to which it might have been found possible to carry it, the mere outward expression of the poetry, we could have wished that the publication had been somewhat less precipitate. Words, and the music of verse, are to poetry more than even the body is to the soul—for that seems to be only a material tenement, intended to serve for a time as a lodging, perhaps rather as a prison, to the spiritual essence it holds within it. But the words and the music of poetry grow out of the poetry which they express; they are not only its manifestation and exposition, but its produce and blossoming. As, however, in our gardens, even the fairest flowers require tending and training to bring out and shew forth all their beauty—care and pains each drooping head or straying tendril to
“Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,”—
so here, also, does the tangled wildness of nature demand the hand of art rightly to guide and distribute its luxuriance, and to dispose it into those forms which are best suited for delighting and winning us, and conveying into our hearts the full meaning and unimpaired power of the poetry. There must, it is obvious from the very nature of the thing, be always much that is purely artificial in the composition of written and rhythmical poetry; there is no natural connection between a beautiful thought and the words by which it is most adequately expressed; still less will the thought, while running into words, always at the same time flow at once, and of its own accord, into words of a particular measure and music. As well might it be expected that the hard marble, instead of being brought slowly to realize the conceptions of the sculptor by a laborious process of chiselling, should literally warm into life under his touch—or that the work of the painter, in like manner, should be finished as soon as he has fully formed in his mind the design of what he would bring out from the breathing canvas. It may, indeed, be doubted if it has ever been given to the most gifted imagination, perfectly to possess the idea of any considerable creation in any one of the Fine Arts before it has been made sensible through its appropriate medium. But if this has ever happened in the case of an architectural design, where the relations to be contemplated have an almost mathematical simplicity and precision, or in that of a piece of music, where the expression is so instantaneously the offspring of the feeling, that the one can hardly be distinguished from the other, we question very much if it has ever taken place in the case [p. 406→] either of a great work of sculpture or of the pencil, where, although the embodiment is merely material, as in architecture, the forms yet admit of being infinitely varied;—and we are quite sure that it never has in poetry, where, besides the consummate artifice demanded for such a selection and collocation of words as shall produce at the same time both a certain meaning and a certain music,—these words, from the suggestive life that is in every syllable of each of them, are at once, of all instruments of expression, the most richly endowed and the most difficult to wield, and where likewise a variety of forms, as great as is found in sculpture or in painting, is united to a comprehensiveness vastly beyond what belongs to either. So complex a production as a poem of any length from all these causes necessarily is, does not, it is evident, admit of being either premeditated by any mind, except in the shape of a very vague outline, before being actually embodied in words, or of being so embodied in an adequate manner without great elaboration.
In its chief constituent qualities Mr Browning’s style and manner of writing is, like that of every man of cultivated powers, a sufficiently true representative of his manner of thinking; even its peculiarities, whether they might, in the abstract, be accounted commendable, or the reverse, must be held to be indispensable to its perfection, because they are a reflection of mental habits which have contributed to make his poetry what it is. We do not therefore object generally to his long and often somewhat intricately involved sentences, or to forms of phraseology and construction, of occasional occurrence, which are apt for a moment to perplex or startle on the first reading, or to any other deviations of a similar kind from ordinary usage or the beaten highway prescribed by our books of authority in grammar, rhetoric, and prosody, in so far as such unusual forms are the natural and unaffected product of the writer’s genius, working its purposes in its own way. Such distinctive characteristics, when we have become familiar with them, and they have lost any slight repulsiveness with which they may have at first acted upon us, even acquire a power of enhancing the pleasure we receive from a composition otherwise eminently beautiful, and of rivetting our love for it. We do not doubt that there are, in “Paradise Lost” for instance, many peculiar forms of phraseology which the national ear has now learned not only to tolerate but to admire, but which must have surprised more than they pleased the first readers of the poem; and even some cadences of the divine verse which now linger in all memories and all hearts, but which those who first endeavoured to catch their music probably deemed forced and dissonant. But in these cases we must suppose that true art has really been present and at work, although (nothing uncommon or wonderful) the effect may have been too new and too exquisite to be all at once understood and appreciated. The result will be very different where the peculiarity is not a real excellence, but a mere trick or whim. Then the disapproval which it may expect to meet with when the blinding influences of novelty operate no longer,—the condemnatory and decisive verdict of posterity—will be still more severe than that which may have been at first passed upon it. It may then operate as powerfully to scare away the regards of men from the genuine beauties with which it may happen to be associated, as it would help in the other case to attract and fix their admiration.
Mr Browning, like every writer who aims at an original style, would do well to keep these considerations in mind, and to beware of being seduced, while seeking to produce new and bold effects, into either slovenliness or affectation. We think there is in the present poem a slight degree occasionally of both the one and the other; and to many readers it will probably appear that there is a great deal of both. There is much both in the diction and the versification which has a harsh, awkward, and disappointing effect at first; but this, in by far the greater part, arises merely from the poem not being cast in a common mould, or formed so much as most new poems are upon the ordinary models. It is not a mere additional variation of the old air; and it cannot therefore be read off-hand so readily and smoothly as the generality of the poetical productions of the day. There is a hidden soul in its harmony which must be first unwound—a retiring grace in its unwonted forms of phraseology which must be won before the poetry can be rightly enjoyed or understood. The reader of such a work has his effort to make, as well as the writer has had his—his powers of apprehension, as the other has had his powers of production, to keep on the stretch. Ever and anon he may conceive himself addressed in the words of the author of another recent eminently successful poetical attempt,—the drama of “Peter Van Artevelde”—
Here rest thee, reader sage;
Pause here, and trim thine intellectual light,
Which more than mine must make my meanings bright.
The lines of the present poem must also be traced with the aid of other light than that reflected from sun or lamp.
The work, although it appears in a dramatic form, is, as the author intimates in his preface, neither a drama nor a dramatic poem. It is an attempt, as he expresses it, “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.” “Instead of having recourse,” he adds, “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.” With these views, an imaginary character, and to a large extent also an imaginary history, are bestowed upon the famous empiric of the sixteenth century, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus ab Hohenheim, or, as he called himself, Paracelsus,—a sort of translation, we suppose, of Hohenheim, which, by the way, we take to be his family name, and not, as Mr Browning conjectures, another name for Einsiedeln, the place of his birth in the Canton of Schweitz, in Switzerland. The narrative, or rather the development of the story, is carried on by means of a series of dialogues between Paracelsus and the other persons introduced, who are only three in number, namely, Festus, and Michal, the betrothed, afterwards the wife, of Festus, the friends of his youth and early manhood, and a mad poet, to whom is given the affected and misformed name of Aprile, which, as well as we can gather from the verse, the author seems to intend that we should pronounce in three syllables, with the accent on the second. We mention this, because the name Aureole, by which Paracelsus himself is generally addressed, is, on the contrary, used without the terminative e being accounted a separate syllable. It would have been better to have retrenched that vowel altogether; and as for the other contrivance for a man’s name, it is abominable.
The first scene is entitled “Paracelsus Aspires,” and represents him conversing, in the year 1507, in a garden in the environs of Würzburg, with Festus and Michal. At this time, according to his real history, Paracelsus was only a boy of fourteen; but the strain in which he here speaks, and still more perhaps the sentiments, approaching to wonder and reverence, with which he seems to be already regarded by his two gentle friends, would better suit a date of life a few years more advanced. He has been residing, for sometime, in “this sequestered nest,” the home of Festus and his Michal; but this quiet life, bounded within a garden, does not long satisfy the airy visionary, whose mounting spirit pants for a scene on which to perform its part wide as the world itself; and filled with his dreams, and a vague confidence in his powers and destiny, he proposes to set out on the morrow, he knows not whither, to seek and to accomplish he as little knows what. Great beauty, however, is thrown over the unselfish nature of the sanguine and uplifted youth; and most eloquent, and full of gentleness withal, are his words of fire. While they talk together of their parting, Michal weeps, and can only respond to the crowd of glowing fancies with which he would colour and gild the sad prospect of the coming change, by a few simple words born of thoughts of the past and gone:—
In truth we have lived carelessly and well!
To which he answers eagerly:—
And shall, my perfect pair—each, trust me, born
For the other—nay, your very hair, when mixed,
Is of one hue. For where beside this nook
Shall you two walk, when I am far away,
And wish me prosperous fortune?
Festus, in a long and anxious controversy, afterwards strives to win him from his purpose; but every appeal is parried and repelled by the resolved enthusiast. “What shall I say?” he at last breaks forth—
What shall I say?
Festus, from childhood I have been possess’d
By a fire—by a true fire, or faint or fierce,
As from without some master, so it seem’d,
Repress’d or urged its current: this but ill
Expresses what I would convey—but rather
I will believe an angel ruled me thus,
Than that my soul’s own workings, own high nature,
So became manifest. I knew not then
What whisper’d in the evening, and spoke out
At midnight. If some mortal, born too soon,
Were laid away in some great trance—the ages
Coming and going all the while—until
His true time’s advent, and could then record
The words they spoke who kept watch by his bed,
Then I might tell more of the breath so light
Upon my eye-lids, and the fingers light
Among my hair. Youth is confused; yet never
So dull was I but when that spirit pass’d
I turn’d to him, scarce consciously, as turns
A water-snake when fairies cross his sleep:
And having this within me and about me
When Einsiedeln, its hills, and lakes, and plains
Confined me—what oppressive joy was mine
When life grew plain, and I first view’d the throng’d,
The ever-moving concourse of mankind!
Believe that ere I join’d them—ere I knew
The purpose of the pageant, or the place
Consign’d to me within its ranks—while yet
Wonder was freshest, and delight most pure—
’Twas then that least supportable appear’d
A station with the brightest of the crowd;
A portion with the proudest of them all!
And from the tumult in my breast, this only
Could I collect—that I must thenceforth die,
Or elevate myself far, far above
The gorgeous spectacle; what seem’d a longing
To trample on yet save mankind at once—
To make some unexampled sacrifice
In their behalf—to wring some wondrous good
From heaven or earth for them—to perish, winning
Eternal weal in the act; as who should dare
Pluck out the angry thunder from its cloud,
That, all its gather’d flame discharged on him,
No storm might threaten summer’s azure weather—
Yet never to be mix’d with them so much
As to have part even in my own work—share
In my own largess. Once the feat achieved,
I would withdraw from their officious praise,
Would gently put aside their profuse thanks,
Like some knight traversing a wilderness,
Who, on his way, may chance to free a tribe
Of desert-people from their dragon-foe;
When all the swarthy race press round to kiss
His feet, and choose him for their king, and yield
Their poor tents, pitch’d among the sand-hills, for
His realm; and he points, smiling, to his scarf,
Heavy with rivel’d gold—his burgonet,
Gay set with twinkling stones—and to the east,
Where these must be display’d.
The subsequent course of the conversation unfolds two further points in the present creed of the ardent adventurer, which are necessary to be remembered in accompanying the progress of his history. “Vex him no further, Festus,” says the more trusting and sympathizing Michal, “it is so!” But Festus, not yet convinced, nor to be drawn from his aim, rejoins:—
This would hold
Were it the trackless air, and not a path
Inviting you, distinct with footprints yet
Of many a mighty spirit gone that way.
——At least accept the light they lend.
To this the aspiring boy, in his untried strength, feeling no weakness, replies with utter scorn:— [p. 407→]
Their light! the sum of all is briefly this:
They labour’d after their own fashion; the fruits
Are best seen in a dark and groaning earth,
Given over to a blind and endless strife
With evils their best lore cannot abate.
No; I reject and spurn them utterly,
And all they teach. Shall I still sit beside
Their dry wells, with white lips and filmed eye,
While in the distance heaven is blue above
Mountains where sleep the unsunn’d tarns?
Afterwards, to an exclamation of Michal’s—
Then Aureole is God’s commissary! he shall
Be great and grand—and all for us!
He quickly interposes:—
No, sweet!
Not great or grand. If I can serve mankind,
’Tis well; but there our intercourse must end:
I never will be served by those I serve.
On which Festus addresses him:—
Look well to this; here is a plague-spot, veil it,
Disguise it, how you will: ’tis true, you utter
This scorn while by our side and loving us.
Tis but a spot as yet; but it will break
Into a hideous blotch if overlooked.
How can that course be safe, which from the first
Produces carelessness to human love?
——Had I been chosen like you,
I should encircle me with love—should raise
A rampart of kind wishes.
Another long speech of Paracelsus, which winds up the argument, is again rich at once in poetic beauty and in sudden flashes and half-revelations from the far places of thought. We can only give a small part of it:—
Watch narrowly
The demonstration of a truth, its birth,
And you shall trace the effluence to its spring
And source within us, where broods radiance vast,
To be elicited ray by ray, as chance
Shall favour: chance—for hitherto,
Even as we know not how those beams are born,
As little know we what unlocks their lair;
For men have oft grown old among their books
And died, case-harden’d in their ignorance,
Whose careless youth had promised what long years
Of unremitted labour ne’er perform’d:
While, contrary, it has chanced some idle day,
To autumn loiterers just as fancy-free
As the midges in the sun, has oft brought forth
A truth—produced mysteriously as cape
Of cloud grown out of the invisible mist.
Hence, may not truth be lodged alike in all,
The lowest as the highest? some slight film
The interposing bar which binds a soul?
Some film removed the happy outlet whence
It issues proudly?
* * * * *
One man shall crawl
Through life, surrounded with all stirring things,
Unmoved—and he goes mad; and from the wreck
Of what he was, by his wild talk alone,
You first collect how great a spirit he hid.
The close of this harangue, and of the scene, is as follows:—
But life
Shall yet be crown’d: twine amaranth! I am priest!
And all for yielding with a lively spirit
A poor existence—parting with a youth
Like theirs who squander every energy
Convertible to good on painted toys,
Breath-bubbles, gilded dust! And though I spurn
All adventitious aims, from empty praise
To love’s award, yet whoso deems such helps
Important, and concerns himself for me
May know even these will follow with the rest—
As in the steady rolling Mayne, asleep
Yonder, is mingled and involved a mass
Of schistous particles of ore. And even
My own affections,—laid to rest awhile—
Will waken purified, subdued alone
By all I have achieved; till then—till then …
Ah! the time-wiling loitering of a page
Through bower and over lawn, ’till eve shall bring
The stately lady’s presence whom he loves—
The broken sleep of the fisher whose rough coat
Enwraps the queenly pearl—these are faint types!
See, see, they look on me—I triumph now!
Tell me, Festus, Michal, but one thing—I have told
All I shall e’er disclose to mortal … now,
Do you believe I shall accomplish this?
Fest. I do believe!
Mich. And I, dear Aureole!
Par. Those words shall never fade from out my brain.
’Tis earnest of the end—shall never fade!
Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal,
Two points in the adventure of the diver:
One—when a beggar he prepares to plunge?
One—when a prince he rises with his pearl?
Festus, I plunge!
The date of the second part of the poem, which is entitled “Paracelsus Attains,” is 1521, and the scene is described as “The house of the Greek,” at Constantinople. It opens with a soliloquy of Paracelsus, the commencement of which is, we think, exquisitely beautiful:—
Over the waters in the vapourest west
The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold
Behind the arm of the city, which between,
Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
Like a Turk verse along a scimetar.
He then rapidly glances over his past history since he began his wanderings—and sums up the detail in the conclusion, that he has, after all his aspirations and strivings, actually accomplished nothing:—
A few blurred characters suffice to note
A stranger wander’d long in many lands,
And reap’d the fruit he coveted in a few
Discoveries, as appended here and there,
The fragmentary produce of those toils,
In a dim heap, fact and surmise together
Confusedly mass’d, as when acquired.
“Now,” he then exclaims, “I can go no farther;”—
* * * * *
But here I pause: the old Greek’s prophecy
Is like to turn out true—I shall not quit
His chamber till I know what I desire.
He afterwards adds:—
Let me weep
My youth and its brave hopes, all dead and gone,
In tears which burn. Would I were sure to win
Some startling secret in their stead! a tincture
Of force to flush old age with youth, or breed
Gold, or imprison moonbeams till they change
To opal shafts! only that, hurling it
Indignant back, I might convince myself
My aims remain’d supreme and pure as ever!
At length Aprile enters, his voice, singing some sad, wild lines, having been first heard from within. Paracelsus takes him at first for a spirit whom his spells have raised. After a while, discovering his error—and remarking—
Ah, ’tis some moon-struck creature, after all!
Such fond fools as are like to haunt this den,—
he charges him,
Tell me what thou would’st be, and what I am.
As to Know is the grand aspiration of Paracelsus, so to Love (which he has hitherto scorned) is that of Aprile:—“I,” answers the crazed voluptuary—
I would love infinitely, and be loved.
First: I would carve in stone, or cast in brass,
The forms of earth. No ancient hunter lifted
Up to the gods by his renown; no nymph
Supposed the sweet soul of a woodland tree,
Or sapphirine spirit of a twilight star,
Should be too hard for me; no shepherd-king.
Regal for his white locks; no youth who stands
Silent and very calm amid the throng,
His right hand ever hid beneath his robe
Until the tyrant pass; no law-giver;
No swan-soft woman, rubb’d with lucid oils,
Given by a god for love of her—too hard.
Having next created by all the magic of blended and contrasted colours, a world of splendour for these shapes, “fit to sustain their beauty and their strength,” “I would,” he goes on,—
I would throw down the pencil as the chisel,
And I would speak: no thought which ever stirr’d
A human breast should be untold; all passions,
All soft emotions, from the turbulent stir
Within a heart fed with desires like mine—
To the last comfort, shutting the tired lids
Of him who sleeps the sultry noon away
Beneath the tent-tree by the way-side well:
And this in language as the need should be,
Now pour’d at once forth in a burning flow,
Now piled up in a grand array of words.
This done, to perfect and consummate all,
Even as a luminous haze links star to star,
I would supply all chasms with music, breathing
Mysterious motions of the soul, no way
To be defined save in strange melodies.
The devotee of passion has also his dreams of soaring enterprise. Could he carry away some fragment of beauty from the home of his imagination—
Some trifle little heeded there, but here
The one perfection of the place—
“how gladly,” he exclaims, “would I enshrine the relic—to let my followers know what such things are!” And then follows a passage of eminent beauty:—
I would adventure nobly for their sakes:
When nights were still, and still the moaning sea,
And far away I could descry the land
Whence I departed, whither I return,
I would dispart the waves, and stand once more
At home, and load my bark, and hasten back,
And fling my gains to them, worthless or true.
“Friends,” I would say, “I went far, far for them,
Past the high rocks the haunt of doves, the mounds
Of red earth from whose sides strange trees grow out.
Past tracts of milk-white minute blinding sand,
Till, by a mighty moon, I tremblingly
Gather’d these magic herbs, berry and bud,
In haste—not pausing to reject the weeds,
But happy plucking them at any price.
To me, who have seen them bloom in their own soil,
They are scarce lovely: plait and wear them you!
And guess from what they are the springs that fed them,
The stars that sparkled o’er them, night by night,
The snakes that travell’d far to sip their dew!”
Much further discourse passes between them; till at last Paracelsus exclaims:—
Merciful God, forgive us both!
We wake at length from weary dreams; but both
Have slept in fairy-land. Though dark and drear
Appears the world before us, we no less
Wake with our wrists and ancles jewell’d still.
I, too, have sought to know as thou to love—
Excluding love as thou refused’st knowledge.
Still thou hast beauty, and I power.
“I have attained,” he adds, while they bid each other adieu, “and now I may depart.”
By the year 1526, the date of the third scene, Paracelsus has, on the recommendation of the Divinity Professor Oecolampadius, been called to fill the chair of physic and surgery at the University of Basil, where, however, a short space of brilliant popularity, obtained by the magnificent promises with which he had commenced his course of lectures, is succeeded by contempt and desertion, as the vanity of his pretensions becomes manifest. It is now that he receives a visit from his old friend Festus, the first time they had met since they parted nearly twenty years before. Festus, who has heard only of his glory, and who in the simplicity of his unambitious nature, has come to congratulate him on having at length attained the end and fulfilment of all his hopes, will scarcely be kept away by any inquiries after his own fortunes, or recurrence to the past, from this hateful theme. At last the proud, and still noble spirit of the discomfited charlatan is wrung to make, point by point, confession of all his humiliation. But the shattered state in which the whole moral frame of his friend has evidently been left by the crisis he has gone through—his brief, giddy elevation, as well as his crushing fall—is that which most overpowers poor Festus. We can give only the solemn and touching close of the deeply interesting scene:—
Fest. Hark!
Par. ’T is the melancholy wind astir
Within the trees; the embers too are grey,
Morn must be near.
Fest. Best ope the casement: see
The night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars,
Is blank and motionless: how peaceful sleep
The tree-tops all together! like an asp
The wind slips whispering from bough to bough.
Par. Ay; you would gaze on a wind-shaken tree
By the hour, nor count time lost.
Fest. So you shall gaze:
Those happy times will come again …
Par. Gone! gone!
Those pleasant times! Does not the moaning wind
Seem to bewail that we have gain’d such gains
And barter’d sleep for them?
Fest. It is our trust
That there is yet another world to mend
All error and mischance. …
Par. Another world!
And why this world, this common world, to be
A make-shift, a mere foil, how fair soever,
To some fine life to come? Man must be fed
With angel’s food, forsooth; and some few traces
Of a diviner nature which look out
Through his corporeal baseness warrant him
In a supreme contempt for all provision
For his inferior tastes—some straggling marks
Which constitute his essence, just as truly
As here and there a gem would constitute
The rock, their barren bed, a diamond. [p. 408→]
But were it so—were man all mind—the station
He gains is little enviable. From God
Down to the lowest spirit ministrant
Intelligence exists which casts our mind
Into immeasurable shade. No, no:
Love, hope, fear, faith—these make humanity;
These are its sign, and note, and character;
And these I have lost! gone; shut from me for ever,
Like a dead friend, safe from unkindness more!
See morn at length. The heavy darkness seems
Diluted; grey and clear without the stars;
The shrubs bestir and rouse themselves, as though
Some snake that weighed them down all night let go
His hold; and from the east, fuller and fuller
Day, like a mighty river, flowing in;
But clouded, wintry, desolate, and cold:
Yet see how that broad, prickly, star-shaped plant,
Half down in the crevice, spreads its woolly leaves,
All thick and glistering with diamond dew.
And you depart for Einsiedeln this day:
And we have spent all night in talk like this!
If you would have me better for your love
Revert no more to these sad themes.
Fest. One favour,
And I have done. I leave you, deeply moved;
Unwilling to have fared so well, the while
My friend has changed so sorely: if this mood
Shall pass away—if light once more arise
Where all is darkness now—if you see fit
To hope, and trust again, and strive again;
You will remember—not our love alone—
But that my faith in God’s desire that man
Should trust on his support, as I must think
You trusted, is obscured and dim through you;
For you are thus, and this is no reward:
Will you not call me to your side, dear Aureole?
But from the earth on which he is thus thrown, Paracelsus, as it were beginning life anew, and throwing behind him the very memory of all that has been, once more aspires. In the fourth scene, he and Festus meet again in a house in Colmar, in Alsatia. It is now the year 1528, and the professor has fled from Basil, and left the scoffers to enjoy their wonder and triumph unrestrained. The change that has meanwhile come over his character may be partly gathered from some of his words addressed to John Oporinus, his secretary:—
——Yet we live, as one may say,
Just as though Liechtenfels had never set
So true a value on his sorry carcass,
And learned Pütten had not frowned us dumb.
We live; and shall as surely start to-morrow
For Nuremberg, as we drink speedy scathe
To Basil in this mantling wine, suffused
With a delicate blush—no fainter tinge is born
I’ the shut heart of a bud; pledge me, good John,—
“Basil, a hot plague ravage it, and Pütter
Oppose the plague.”
He has, however, sent for Festus, to tell him all that has befallen him. “How kind,” he now exclaims, turning to him,—
How very kind, my first, best, only friend!
Why, this looks like fidelity. Embrace me:
Not a hair silver’d yet! Right: you shall live
Till I am worth your love; you shall be proud,
And I—but time will show. Did you not wonder?
I sent to you because our compact weigh’d
Upon my conscience—(you recall the night
At Basil, which the gods confound)—because
Once more I aspire! And you are here! All this
Is strange, and strange my message.
Fest. I confess,
So strange that I must think your messenger
Has mingled his own fancies with the words
Purporting to be yours.
Par. He said no more,
’Tis probable, than the precious folks I leave
Have said more roughly fifty-fold. Alack,
’T is true: poor Paracelsus is exposed
At last: a most egregious quack is he;
And those he overreach’d must spit their hate
On one who, utterly beneath contempt
Could yet deceive their topping wits.
In their discourse together which ensues, Festus while striving with pleading voice, and varied and earnestly urged argument, to bring back his friend to something nearer his first nature and his first faith,—shows himself throughout the whole, faithful still as ever in his admiration, and almost in his trust. In answer to one of his appeals, Paracelsus, letting his heart gush forth in singing, thus shadows out the course of his past voyage of life:—
Over the sea our galleys went,
Cleaving prows in order brave,
With speeding wind and a bounding wave—
A gallant armament:
Each bark built out of a forest-tree,
Left leafy and rough as first it grew,
And nail’d all over the gaping sides,
Within and without, with black-bull hides,
Seeth’d in fat and suppled in flame;
So each good ship was rude to see,
Rude and bare to outward view,
But each upbore a stately tent:
Cedar-pales in scented row
Kept out the flakes of dancing brine:
An awning droop’d the mast below,
That neither noon-tide nor star-shine,
Nor moonlight cold which maketh mad,
Might pierce the regal tenement.
When the sun dawn’d, gay and glad
We set the sail and plied the oar;
But when the night-wind blew like breath,
For joy of one day’s voyage more,
We sang together on the wide sea,
Like men at peace on a peaceful shore;
Each sail was loosed to the wind so free,
Each helm made sure by the twilight star,
And in a sleep as calm as death,
We, the voyagers from afar,
Lay stretch’d—each weary crew
In a circle round its wondrous tent,
Whence gleam’d soft light and curl’d rich scent,
And with light and perfume, music too:
At morn we started beside the mast,
And still each ship was sailing fast!
Now one morn land appeared!—a speck
Dim trembling betwixt sea and sky—
Not so the isles our voyage must find
Should meet our longing eye;
But the heaving sea was black behind
Many a night and many a day,
And land, though but a rock, was nigh;
So we broke the cedar-pales away,
And let the purple flap in the wind:
And a statue bright was on every deck!
We shouted, every man of us,
And steer’d right into the harbour thus,
With pomp and pœan glorious.
An hundred shapes of lucid stone!
All day we built its shrine for each—
A shrine of rock for every one—
Nor paused till in the westering sun
We sate together on the beach
To sing, because our task was done;
When lo! what shouts and merry songs!
What laughter all the distance stirs!
A loaded raft, and happy throngs
Of gentle islanders;
“Our isles are just at hand,” they cried!
“Like cloudlets faint in even sleeping,
Our temple-gates are open’d wide,
Our olive-groves thick shade are keeping
For these majestic forms,” they cried.
Then we awoke with sudden start
From our deep dream, and knew, too late,
How bare the rock, how desolate,
Which had received our precious freight:
Yet we call’d out—“Depart!
Our gifts, once given, must here abide:
Our work is done; we have no heart
To mar our work,” we cried.
We add also the conclusion of this scene. Few things we know in poetry surpass in beauty the manner in which the affliction that had been sustained by Festus, concealed by his calm and generous spirit till now, is here disclosed:—
I am weary,
I know not how; not even the wine-cup soothes
My brain to-night …
Do you not thoroughly despise me, Festus?
No flattery! One like you needs not be told
We live and breathe deceiving and deceived.
Do you not scorn me from your heart of hearts?
Me and my cant—my petty subterfuges—
These rhymes, and all this frothy shower of words—
My glozing self-deceit—my outward crust
Of lies, which wrap, as tetter, morphew, furfair
Wrap the sound flesh?—so see you flatter not!
Even God flatters! but my friend, at least,
Is true. I would depart, secure henceforth
Against all further insult, hate, and wrong
From puny foes: my one friend’s scorn shall brand me—
No fear of sinking deeper.
Fest. No, dear Aureole!
No, no; I came to counsel faithfully:
There are old rules, made long ere we were born,
By which I judge you. I, so fallible,
So infinitely low beside your mighty
Majestic spirit—even I can see
You won some higher law. They make that out
Sin which is no sin—weakness which is strength;
But I have only these, such as they are,
To guide me; and I blame you where they bid,
As long as any chance remains of winning
Your troubled soul to peace; the more that sorrow
Has fallen on me of late, and they have help’d me
So that I faint not under my distress.
But wherefore should I scruple to confess
That, spite of all, as brother judging brother,
Your fate is most inexplicable to me;
And should you perish yet without reward—
Some great reward—I have too hastily
Relied on love’s effect. You may have sinn’d,
But you have loved. As a mere human matter—
As I would have God deal with fragile men
In the end—I say that you will triumph yet!
Par. You have felt sorrow, Festus? ’t is because
You loved me. Sorrow, and sweet Michal yours!
Well thought on; never let her know this last
Dull winding-up of all: these miscreants dared
Insult me—me she loved; so grieve her not.
Fest. Your ill success can little grieve her now.
Par. Michal is dead! pray Christ we do not craze!
Fest. Aureole, dear Aureole, look not on me thus!
Fool, fool! this is the heart grown sorrow-proof—
I cannot bear those eyes.
Par. Nay, really dead?
Fest. ’Tis scarce a year …
Par. Stone dead! then you have laid her
Among the flowers ere this…Now, do you know
I can reveal a secret which shall comfort
Even you. I have no julep, as they think,
To cheat the grave; but a far better secret.
Know then, you did not ill to trust your love
To the cold earth: I have thought much of it—
For I believe we do not wholly die.
Fest. Aureole ....
Par. Nay, do not laugh; there is a reason
For what I say: I think the soul can never
Taste death. I am, just now, as you may see,
Very unfit to put so strange a thought
In an intelligible dress of words;
But take it as my trust, she is not dead.
Fest. But not on this account alone? you surely,
Aureole, you have believed this all along—
Par. And Michal sleeps among the roots and dews,
While I am moved at Basil, and wondering
With Nuremberg, and hoping and despairing,
As though it matter’d how the farce plays out,
So it be quickly play’d. Away, away!
Have your will, rabble!
But here we must shut the book, and not attempt to carry our hasty survey over the concluding division of the poem—although it is in this part of his task, perhaps, that the author has most of all put forth his strength. The scene here is a cell in the hospital of St Sebastian, at Salzburg, in the year 1541, in which Paracelsus, with his faithful Festus once more beside him, finds, in putting off this mortal coil, the full and final height of attainment in the perceptions that are born in him, and the power with which death fills him minute by minute, ere he plunges into the new being awaiting him, and while his foot is on the threshold of boundless life—the portals yet unopened. The declamation of the dying man, spoken from his couch, from which he rises without help—with his professor’s gown of scarlet, lined with fur, around him—his chain about his neck—his good sword, Azzoth, girt to his side—is in a very high strain of poetry. As the purified, and at length, all-illumined spirit records its onward progress from its first lofty vow, through discouragement and scorn without, and delusion, and disappointment, and conviction of ignorance, vanity, and error, within, to the height and consummation of this last earthly hour, there is much that brings back to us the grand wisdom and pealing tones of the Excursion—and Coleridge’s fine lines on that poem:—
Into my heart have I received that lay
More than historic, that prophetic lay
Wherein (high theme, by thee first sung aright)
Of the foundations and the building up
Of a human spirit thou hast dared to tell
What may be told, to the understanding mind
Revealable; and what within the mind
By vital breathings secret as the soul
Of vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart
Thoughts all too deep for words!—
——An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted!
Reviewed:
Paracelsus (RB), London: Effingham Wilson, 1835.
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