R360300A. Paracelsus.
Fraser’s Magazine, March 1836, pp. 362–374.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 364–372.
ASINARII SCENICI*
the second series
The asses of Algiers, as we have been kindly and disinterestedly informed by Tom Campbell, are of two kinds,—one of the old Biblical size, that might take Saul upon his back—the other very diminutive, and most wretchedly treated. We know not whether our readers recollect a certain paper,** in our January No. for 1833, in which we vindicated, in connexion with several dramatic aspirants, the dignity of the ass. Our own attention was only the other week called to it, by the receipt of a letter from one of the same aspirants therein named, who thought it not too late in the day, though more than two years after publication, to remark on our remarks, to criticise our criticisms. Another proof of the truth of Hamlet’s saying, “There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year;” or of some other proverb, equally germain, or otherwise, to the matter.
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*Editors’ note: In addition to the comments on RB’s Paracelsus and Henry Taylor’s Philip van Artevelde, here reprinted, this review included criticism of The Sister’s Tragedy and The Dorins, which we omit.
**Asinarii Scenici, vol. vii. p. 96, No. for Jan. 1833.
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Yes, we have vindicated the dignity of the long-eared creature, whose delight is in braying—that dignity which was felt by the Biblical penmen, by Spenser, by Wordsworth, by Coleridge, and by Cornelius Agrippa, with whom we profoundly “discoursed the mysteries of the ass.” Who shall call him again a stupid brute? If any be so stupid as to commit this great offence against good manners, let him betake him to some field, wherein ass and horse suffer unwilling imprisonment from the surrounding hedges. Which of these twain will contrive the means of escape? The ass! and the horse, the apparently nobler animal, will contentedly follow his leader through the breach which he has made in the proud limitary bushes. See, then, how goodly it is not to judge according to appearances, but to judge a righteous judgment.
Many of those who ride or drive these poor miscalled brutes, are less intelligent than they. Many an ass is percipient of the opposing angel, to whom the false equestrian Balaam is blind. Many an assherd also rides a nobler creature than himself,—as the Irelands, the Malones, the Boadens, sought to rise to power and profit on the reputation of Shakespeare; and many a dull writer, like them, seeks to lash, and spur, and saddle, and curb the public with similar designs, and probably, for a while, not without success.
“The ass,” says Miss Sarah Stickney, in her Poetry of Life, “is certainly less poetical than picturesque; but still it is poetical, in its patient endurance of suffering, in its association with the wandering outcasts from society, whose tents are in the wilderness, and whose ‘lodging is on the cold ground,’—in its humble appetites, and in its unrepining submission to the most abject degradation. Let us hope that the patience of the ass arises from its own insensibility, and that its sufferings, though frequent, are attended with less acuteness of sensation; but they are sufferings still, borne with a meekness that looks so much like the Christian virtue, resignation, that, in contemplating the hard condition of this degraded animal, the heart is softened with feelings of sorrow and compassion, and we long to rescue it from the yoke of the oppressor.
“I have often thought there was something peculiarly affecting in the character of the young ass—something almost saddening to the soul in its sudden starts of short-lived frolic. In its appearance there is a strange unnatural mixture of infant glee, with a mournful and almost venerable gravity. Its long melancholy ears are in perfect contrast with its innocent and happy face. It seems to have heard, what is [p. 363→] seldom heard in extreme youth, the sad forebodings of its latter days; and when it crops the thistle, and sports among the briers, it appears to be with the vain hope of carrying the spirit of joy along with it through the after vicissitudes of its hard and bitter lot.”
Shew us a man of genius any where, in history, biography, or living presence, and this shall be his picture. Such shall be his endurance, his sufferings; and yet through all such, whether by choice or compulsion, his resignation, simplicity, cheerfulness. But to the world he shall seem a fool—and by the dunces of the world shall be called one. “A man of genius no sooner appears, but the host of dunces are up in arms to repel the invading alien.” Why, to the present day, Paracelsus, to whom the science of chemistry owed so much, is described in all orthodox books, and heterodox too, as a quack of the first water; yet, undoubtedly, he was a man of great genius, as were many of the astrologists, and alchemists, and mystics, whom the world still looks on with a jaundiced vision. It has now, however, been given to a poet to vindicate the character of Paracelsus in all its phases.
All hail, Robert Browning! Verily, thou art a man after our own heart! and to the ass Paracelsus thou hast been, like poor dear departed Coleridge, “wonderous kind.” And may a “fellow feeling,” which we are not ashamed to confess, make us as kind to thee: for “the merciful man is merciful to his beast”—and, like one, we will ride thee as true critic should ride true poet, and not, in ignoble imitation of certain beggars on horseback, to the devil.
Heavens! what a veritable ass was Paracelsus! “As Paracelsus,” says the Biographie Universelle, “displays every where an ignorance of the rudiments of the most ordinary knowledge, it is not probable that he should have ever studied seriously in the schools: he contented himself with visiting the universities of Germany, France, and Italy; and in spite of his boasting himself to have been the ornament of those institutions, there is no proof of his having legally acquired the title of doctor, which he assumes. It is only known that he applied himself long, under the direction of the wealthy Sigismond Fugger, of Schwartz, to the discovery of the Magnum Opus.”
What a basis is here for an aspiring character! The level was so low from which he started, that an ordinary soar would seem sublime. The lark, for this reason, appears to ascend higher than he does; and there would be something majestic in the plunge of the ass, but that he kicks up his heels behind. This is certainly awkward to the bystander; but we hold that to the creature itself it is the most natural and easy way of manifesting his own importance, and of making a clear stage and no favour. And Paracelsus himself, according to our beloved Robert Browning, deems such an act worthy of illustration by no mean comparisons:
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.
Previous, however, to this daring experiment, he takes sweet counsel, while quietly cropping the thistle, with his friends, this same Festus, and the fair betrothed Michal; and thus, accordingly, the drama opens:
Scene—Würzburg; a Garden in the Environs. 1507.
Hallo! we are driving too hard, and have not let Robert Browning say what he ought for himself. His poem or drama, or poetic or dramatic dialogue, “is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers, whose aim it is to set forth any phenomena of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons and events; and, instead of having recourse 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.” Moreover, he is careful to tell us—and it behoves us to listen well—that a work like his depends more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success: indeed, he eloquently adds, “were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the [p. 364→] scattered lights into one constellation—a lyre or a crown.”
Now, then, for the commencement of the play. Here it is:
Par. Come close to me, dear friends; still closer—thus;
Close to the heart which, though long time roll by
Ere it again beat quicker, press’d to yours,
As now it beats—perchance a long, long time—
At least henceforth your memories shall make
Quiet and fragrant as befits their home.
Nor shall my memory want a home in yours.
Alas! that it requires too well such free
Forgiving love as shall embalm it there!
For if you would remember me aright—
As I was born to be—you must forget
All fitful, strange, and moody waywardness,
Which e’er confused my better spirit, to dwell
Only on moments such as these, dear friends;
My heart no truer, but my words and ways
More true to it: as Michal, some months hence,
Will say, this autumn was a pleasant time
For some few sunny days; and overlook
Its bleak wind, hankering after pining leaves.
Autumn would fain be sunny—I would look
Liker my nature’s truth; and both are frail,
And both beloved for all their frailty.
Michal. Aureole!
Par. Drop by drop! she is weeping like a child!
Not so…I am content—more than content;
Nay, autumn wins you best by this its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay…
Look up, sweet Michal, nor esteem the less
The stain’d and drooping vines their grapes bow down—
Those creaking trees bent with their fruit—and see
That apple-tree with a rare after-birth
Of peeping blooms sprinkled its wealth among;
And for the winds—what wind that ever raved
Shall vex that ash that overlooks the rest,
So proud it wears its berries? Ah! at length,
The old smile meet for her, the lady of this
Sequestered nest! This kingdom, limited
Alone by one old populous green wall,
Tenanted by the ever busy flies,
Grey crickets, and shy lizards, and quick spiders,
All families of the silver-threaded moss—
Which look through, near, this way, and it appears
A stubble-field, or a crane-brake—a marsh
Of bulrush whitening in the sun: laugh, now!
Fancy the crickets, each one in his house,
Looking out and wondering at the world—or best,
The painted snail, with his gay shell of dew,
Travelling to see the glossy balls high up
Hung by the caterpillar, like gold lamps.
Doubtless, the versification of this extract is very imperfect; there is, however, in its roughness, that which keeps the sense above the sound, and makes us attend to it whether we will or not. There is the poetry of sound; there is the poetry of words; there is the poetry of thought; there is the poetry of ideas. Little of the two first find we here—much, very much of the third—and more than glimpses of the fourth; that light which shineth in a dark place—like the light of the stars, themselves unseen the while.
We should have told the reader that the first section of this poem-drama is entitled “Paracelsus aspires.” Hitherto Paracelsus has been engaged only in the low walks of life. His biographers say that he was born in 1493, at Einsiedeln, a little town in the canton of Schw[e]itz, some leagues distant from Zurich. His proper name was Hohenheim, which he translated into Paracelsus. Take his proper title and style in full,— Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus ab Hohenheim! His father, who exercised the profession of medicine at Villach, in Carinthia, was nearly related to George Bombast de Hohenheim, who became in the event grand prior of the order of Malta. Nevertheless, though our Paracelsus was not from the dregs of the people, as pretended by Thomas Erastus, his sworn enemy, yet it appears that his elementary education was much neglected, and that he spent part of his youth in pursuing the life common to the travelling literati of the age; that is to say, in wandering from country to country, predicting the future from the inspection of the stars and the lines of the hand, evoking apparitions, and repeating the different operations of magic and alchemy, in which he had been initiated, whether by his father or by various ecclesiastics, among the number of whom he particularises the [p. 365→] Abbot Tritheim, and many German bishops.
We pause at this point. His elementary education neglected! We suspect some mystification here. Theophrastus Paracelsus thought, as Cornelius Agrippa did, on the vanity of the arts and sciences. He pretended to boast of being ignorant of them—deeming that to be even suspected of them was derogatory to those claims which he set up, not without reason, of right to proceed in the investigation of truth with a pure mind, unprejudiced by education, and all that the world calls knowledge. Of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil he would not be supposed to have eaten—but only of the Tree of Life, which bears twelve manner of fruits, and all for the healing of the nations. It was in his character as a mystic that he pleaded ignorance, that he boasted of stupidity. It was not as a man of learning, but as a man of genius, that he sought to work—not to repeat, but to discover, to produce. It was in utter contempt of all that he had been taught and could learn in the schools, that he vaunted himself in primitive nakedness, and was not ashamed. He might have been clothed once, however; but he stripped off the garments, as if each were a poisoned robe. More fortunate than Hercules, he succeeded in displaying his noble proportions in statuesque nudity; nevertheless, he too became a sacrifice in the end. For the frail flesh is itself raiment, that invests the spirit; and it is not until divested of the integuments of skin and gristle, that the soul is denuded and free—not until then, that it may be contemplated in the majesty of its purity, its sublimity and its simplicity, its perfection and oneness.
Let Paracelsus have been well-educated, then, and well-born—thus may the charge and the confession of his ignorance and natal barbarism be reconciled therewith. In proportion as we wear these limbs, these animal aprons, we are so far forth brutes—asses, in the worst sense. But Paracelsus has determined to doff the skin, and, by way of reversing the old fable, to shew himself the lion under. And we discern that such aspiration has been conceived by him and communicated to his two friends; and that, to fulfil the purpose of his soul, he has determined to take his departure from their abode of peace and retirement. “Where,” he demands of them,
Where beside this nook
Shall you two walk, when I am far away,
And wish me prosperous fortune! Stay! that plant
Shall never wave its tangles lightly and softly,
As a queen’s languid and imperial arm,
Which scatters crowns among her lovers, but you
Shall be reminded to predict some great
Success to me.
Success!—there was the plague spot. Not for itself did he seek the sublime end at which he aimed, but for the dominion which it would give him over his fellow men and the world’s goods—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, mingled with his motives. The moral power was to give him all its vigour, and to unfold all its mysteries, for this result. Alas! and thus corruption crept in—nay, was already there; it was plain that the mixed being (the human nature) had not washed itself clean and pure and single. For that the last cathartic process was needed, which fools call death and wise men life. Let us see, under these circumstances, how he gets on.
Not for the entreaties of his friends will he “reject God’s great commission, and so die.” And “still,” he adds,
And still I listen for your true love’s sake.
Yet how has grown that love? Even in a long
And patient cherishing of the self-same spirit
It now would quell—as though a mother should hope
To stay the lusty manhood of the child
Once weak upon her knees. I was not born
Informed and fearless from the first, but shrank
From aught which marked me out apart from men.
I would have lived their life and striven their strife—
Eluding Destiny, if that might be—
But you first guided me through doubt and fear,
And taught me to know them and know myself.
And now that I am strong and full of hope;
That I can from my soul reject all aims,
Save those your earnest words made plain to me;
Now that I touch the brink of my design,
When I would have a triumph in their eyes, [p. 366→]
A glad cheer in their voices,—Michal weeps,
And Festus ponders gravely.
This is beautiful and touching; and thus proceeds the pathetic struggle, in a stream not loud but deep. But to what aspired Paracelsus? To know! This he will not in terms acknowledge; but states his case thus:
I profess no other share
In the selection of my lot, than in
My ready answer to the will of God,
Who summons me to be his organ: he
Whose innate strength supports him shall succeed
No better than the sages.
And, not long after this, he breaks out into the following fine frenzy:
No; I have nought to fear! who will may know
The secret’st workings of my soul. What though
It be so?—if indeed the strong desire
Eclipse the aim in me?—if splendour break
Upon the outset of my path alone,
And duskest shade succeed? What fairer seal
Shall I require to my authentic mission
Than this fierce energy? this instinct striving,
Because its nature is to strive? enticed
By the security of no broad course—
Where error is not, but success is sure.
How know I else such glorious fate my own,
But in the restless irresistible force
That works within me? Is it for human will
To institute such impulses? Still less
To disregard their promptings? What should I
Do, kept among you all; your loves, your cares,
Your life—all to be mine? Be sure that God
Ne’er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart.
Ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss!
What full-grown power informs her from the first!
Why she not marvels, strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky!
Be sure they sleep not whom God needs; nor fear
Their holding light his charge, when every hour
That finds that charge delayed is a new death.
Thus for the faith in which I trust; and hence
I can abjure so well the secret arts
These pedants strive to learn—the magic they
So reverence. I shall scarcely seek to know
If it exist: too intimate a tie
Connects me with our God. A sullen friend
To do my bidding—fallen and hateful sprites
To help me—what are these, at best, beside
God every where, sustaining and directing,
So that the earth shall yield her secrets up,
And every object shall be charged to strike,
To teach, to gratify, and to suggest?
Similar passages are frequent—glowing periods. He speaks of the angel—the good genius that animated him in childhood and youth almost palpably—he felt, as it were, his passing, and “turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns a water-snake when fairies cross his sleep.” He flatters himself that, having done all the good he could for men, even through his own hurt, he could “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, pitched 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 stars—and to the east,
Where these must be displayed.
Retrospections crowd upon him of visions and voices impelling him to the search after knowledge. Changes, in consequence, took place in him—all things wore a different hue:
Pregnant with vast consequence—
Teeming with grand results—loaded with fate;
So that, when quailing at the mighty range
Of secret truths yearning for birth, I haste
To contemplate undazzled some one truth,
Its bearings and effects alone, at once
What was a speck expands into a star,
Demanding life to be explored alone—
Till I near craze. I go to prove my soul!
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive!—what time, what circuit first, [p. 367→]
I ask not: but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow,
In some time—his good time—I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time!
It is in vain that Festus urges that this feeling of Paracelsus would hold good in argument, if it were “the trackless air, and not a path inviting him, distinct with foot-prints yet of many a mighty spirit gone that way.” Paracelsus utterly refuses to sit beside the “dry wells” of learning, “with white lips and filmed eye, while in the distance heaven is blue above mountains where sleep the unsunned tarns.” He likewise shews, notwithstanding all his professions of philanthropy, a scorn of his kind, which looks not well. He will teach it; but will never in return be served by those he serves. Now, that course can never be safe which from the first produces a carelessness to human love. The man who cuts himself from human weal cannot thrive. One passage, in which Festus urges these truths home, reminds us of some of Wordsworth’s grandeurs:
I will no longer seek
To overlook the truth, that there would be
A monstrous spectacle upon the earth
Beneath the pleasant sun, among the trees,
A being knowing not what love is.
Well, then, without sympathy for the present or the past, the wilful man will go forth on his Herculean labours. He wants no help from the lore and precepts of old sages, since
Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe:
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness; and around,
Wall within wall, the gross flesh hems it in:
Perfect and true perception—which is truth;
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Which blinds it, and makes error: and ‘to know’
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may dart forth,
Than in effecting entry for the light
Supposed to be without. 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, I say—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-hardened in their ignorance,
Whose careless youth had promised what long years
Of unremitted labour ne’er performed:
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? seeing that the soul
Is deathless (we know well), but oftener cooped
A prisoner and a thrall, than a throned power;
That it strives weakly in the child, is loosed
In manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled
By age and waste, set free at last by death:
That not alone when life flows, still do truth
And power emerge, but also when strange chance
Affects its current; in unused conjunction,
When sickness breaks the body—hunger, watching,
Excess, or languor—oftenest death’s approach—
Peril, deep joy or wo. 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.
Seeing all this, why should I pine in vain
Attempts to win some day the august form
Of Truth to stand before me, and compel
My dark unvalued frame to change its nature,
And straight become suffused with light—at best
For my sole good—leaving the world to seek
Salvation out as it best may, or follow [p. 368→]
The same long thorny course? No, I will learn
How to set free the soul alike in all,
By searching out the laws by which the flesh
Accloys the spirit.
We could shed “tears, such as angels weep,” over passages like these. We could?—we have! We have not grown up poet and critic to our present stature without similar struggles. What, then, is our sympathy with the following?—
We may not be doomed
To cope with seraphs, but at least the rest
Shall cope with us. Make no more giants, God!
But elevate the race at once! We ask
But to put forth our strength, our human strength,
All starting fairly, all equipped alike,
Gifted alike, and eagle-eyed, true-hearted.
See if we cannot beat thy angels yet.
Anon the struggle is brought to an end, and Paracelsus goes forth. The second section is entitled “Paracelsus attains.” Attains what? His story tells us that Paracelsus travelled among the mountains of Bohemia, in the East, and in Sweden, in order to inspect the labours of the miners, to be initiated in the mysteries of the Oriental adepts, and to observe the secrets of nature and the famous mountain of loadstone. He professed also to have visited Spain, Portugal, Prussia, Poland, and Transylvania, where he communicated freely, not merely with the physicians, but with the old women, charlatans, and conjurors of those several lands. It is even believed that he extended his journeyings as far as Egypt and Tartary, and that he accompanied the son of the khan of the Tartars to Constantinople, for the purpose of obtaining the secret of the tincture of Trismegistus, from a Greek who inhabited that capital. At Constantinople, in the very house of the Greek, and in the year 1521, is the scene of Paracelsus’ attainment.
Over the waters in the vaporous 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.
At such time he contemplates the scroll containing the chronicle of his life, which he had written up to that period; and, as the result of his thoughts, meditates the probability of his not leaving that chamber till he knows what he desires, according to the old Greek’s prophecy. While in this state of suspense, his mind revolves his whole past life, and fathoms the depths of his being. It appears to him that he is less human than he was, previous to his feeling “the wolfish hunger after knowledge,” which he is now about to sate for ever. Life now to him consists of one idea. Circumstances have been connected with his progress which make reflection bitter; and he feels fain to weep his youth and its brave hopes, all dead and gone, in tears which burn. “Would,” he exclaims at last,
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 supreme and pure as ever!
From this point he becomes audacious, out of very agony—it might have risen to a degree of intensity that would threaten madness, but that he hears a voice from within singing some wild verses, breathing melancholy and despair; and presently after Aprile enters, hailing Paracelsus as king! The dialogue that succeeds is in a style of raving ecstasy, which gives birth to some very poetic snatches. Paracelsus feels himself on the verge of arriving at his secret. “I am,” he says, “the mortal who aspired to know—and thou?” “I,” responds Aprile, “would love infinitely, and be loved!” He continues to expatiate on his aspirations and endeavours, and, as the result, would challenge thus his Maker: “I have gone through the loveliness of life, create for me, if not for men—or take me to thyself, eternal, infinite Love!” A fine vein of poetry breaks out in all Aprile’s speeches; and unless Paracelsus can acknowledge a yet higher rapture, he is made to feel that he merits not to be the master genius of the two. Gleams of truth reach Paracelsus through the utterances of frenzy. Has one excluded love—the other has refused knowledge. Nor may the omission be now repaired on the part of Aprile; for this is his mor- [p. 369→] tal hour—these oracular sayings are his last words. Now see what Paracelsus attains, and how he attains it.
Par. Die not, Aprile: we must never part.
Are we not halves of one dissevered world,
Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part? never!
Till thou, the lover, know; and I, the knower,
Love—until both are saved. Aprile, hear!
God, he will die upon my breast! Aprile!
Apr. To speak but once, and die! yet by his side.
Hush! hush!—Ha! go you ever girt
With phantoms, powers? I have created such,
But these seem real as I.
Par. Whom can you see
Through the accursed darkness?
Apr. Stay; I know,
I know them: who should know them well as I?
White brows, lit up with glory;—poets all!
Par. Let him but live, and I have my reward!
Apr. Yes; I see now—God is the Perfect Poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations:
Had you but told me this at first!…
Hush! hush!
Par. Live! for my sake, because of my great sin,
To help my brain, oppressed by these wild worlds
And their deep import. Live! ’tis not too late:
I have a quiet house for us, and friends.
Michal shall smile on you…Hear you? hear thus,
And breathe my breath: I shall not lose one word
Of all your speech—one little word, Aprile.
Apr. No, no…Crown me? I am not one of you!
’Tis he, the king, you seek. I am not one…
Par. Thy spirit, at least, Aprile, let me love!…
I have attained, and now I may depart!
Such is the conclusion of the second section. The third introduces us again to our old friend Festus, in the house of Paracelsus, at Basil, in the year 1526. It is intended to embody the secret influences which substantiated the accidents of his destiny about this time, when, on the recommendation of Œcolampadius, he filled a chair of physic and surgery at the University of Basil. Many astonishing cures, wrought on eminent personages, had procured him great celebrity. Paracelsus began his professorship by burning publicly, in the amphitheatre, the works of Avicenna and Galen, assuring his auditors that the latchets of his shoes were more instructed than those two physicians; that all the universities, all the writers put together, were less gifted than the hairs of his beard and of the crown of his head; and that, finally, he was to be regarded as the legitimate monarch of medicine. “You shall follow me,” cried he, “you, Avicenna, Galen, Rhasis, Montagnana, Mesue!—you, gentlemen of Paris, Montpellier, Germany, Cologne, Vienna, and all soever whom the Rhine and the Danube nourish! you who inhabit the isles of the sea! you, likewise, Dalmatians, Athenians! thou, Arab; thou, Greek! thou, Jew!—all shall follow me, and the monarchy shall be mine!”
Now, then, for the poem again. Festus is discovered congratulating his friend on his success. Paracelsus puts him off for some time with certain beautiful reminiscences of his own happy home. Speaking of Michal, he inquires—
Does she still sing alone, bird-like,
Not dreaming you are near? Her carols dropped
In flakes through that old leafy bower built under
The sunny wall at Würzburg, from her lattice
Among the trees above, while I, unseen,
Sate conning some rare roll from Tritheim’s shelves,
Much wondering notes so simple could divert
My mind from study. Those were happy days!
Respect all such as sing when all alone.
Festus. Scarcely alone—her children, you may guess, are wild beside her.
Par. Ah, those children quite
Unsettle the pure picture in my mind:
A girl—she was so perfect, so distinct.
No change, no change! Not but this added grace
May blend and harmonise with its compeers,
And Michal may become her motherhood;
But ’tis a change—and I detest all change,
And most a change in aught I loved long since.
With all this dislike of change, however, Festus discovers that he Paracel- [p. 370→] sus himself is much changed in many important respects. Many ambages Paracelsus takes to ward off this searching remark. The following is capital:
Festus, strange secrets are let out by Death,
Who blabs so oft the follies of this world:
I, as you know, am Death’s familiar oft.
I helped a man to die some few weeks since,
Warped even from his go-cart to one end—
To live on prince’s smiles, reflected from
A mighty herd of favorites. No mean trick
He left untried, and truly well nigh wormed
All traces of God’s finger out of him.
He died, grown old, and just an hour before—
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes—
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said, that, in spite of thick air and closed doors,
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, hare-bells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to him.
Just so, allowing I am passing wise,
It seems to me much worthier argument
Why pansies, eyes that laugh, are lovelier
Than violets, eyes that dream—(your Michal’s choice,
Than all fools find to wonder at in me,
Or in my fortunes, &c. &c.
The truth must out: Paracelsus is not happy amidst all his honours. His lecture-room might be crowded; but he despised the praise of brute multitudes. He felt, likewise, that he had not succeeded in his aim, however much he might have excited the noisy plaudits of ignorant wonder. What the world deemed success was none to him. He feels that truth is as far from him as ever; and fears that he has thrown his life away. Nay, for his former high-flown hopes, he is now willing to substitute a host of petty, vile delights, that he once hated. He seems to think that to pause altogether would be well for him—would serve, indeed, as a seal to his sincerity. “To be consistent,” he exclaims,
I should die at once!
I calculated on no after-life;
Nay, was assured no such could be for me,
Yet—(how crept in, how fostered, I know not)
Here am I with as passionate regret
For youth, and health, and love so vainly lavished,
As if their preservation had been first
And foremost in my thoughts; and this strange fact
Humbled me wondrously, and had due force
In rendering me the less averse to follow
A certain counsel, a mysterious warning.
It is to Aprile that he refers. He had indeed essayed to live like that mad poet for a while—to love alone. Notwithstanding his sense of failure, however, he has still a consciousness that he preceded his age. Especially he boasts of “the day when he let them know the gods of Israel—Aëtius, Oribasius, Galen, Rhasis, and Avicenna and Averröes, were blocks.” It may assist in rendering the character of Paracelsus intelligible, to state that he was contemporary with Luther, and Zuinglius, and Melancthon, and that he was a Protestant, and his books were deemed scandalous for that reason. Some reflections on their career occur in this dialogue, in which the hero and his friend have spent the night. But now day dawns, and Festus departs for Einsiedeln. Thus ends the third part of Paracelsus.
The two concluding parts are named like the two first, Paracelsus aspires, and Paracelsus attains—his last attainment being the last of all men, Death! What we have hitherto passed has been beautiful—what we have to discuss is sublime. It is a fine philosophical commentary on the portion of the life to which it relates. The biographer tells us, that at Basil it was speedily perceived that the new professor was no better than an egregious quack. Scarcely, says this Asinarius, had a year elapsed before his lectures had fairly driven away an audience incapable of comprehending their emphatic jargon. That which above all contributed to sully his reputation was the debauched life he led. According to the testimony of Oporinus, who lived two years in his intimacy, Paracelsus scarcely ever ascended the lecture-desk unless half drunk, and only dictated to his secretaries when in a state of intoxication: if summoned to attend the sick, he rarely proceeded thither without previously drenching himself with wine. He was accustomed to retire to bed without changing his clothes; sometimes he spent the night in pothouses [p. 371→] with the peasantry, and in the morning knew no longer what he was about; and, nevertheless, up to the age of twenty-five, his only drink had been water. At length, fearful of being punished for a serious outrage on a magistrate, he fled from Basil towards the end of the year 27, and took refuge in Alsatia, whither he caused Oporinus to follow with his chemical apparatus.
This account is evidently written with no partiality for Paracelsus, who, being a man of genius, had enemies as a matter of course, whose false testimonies are reflected in this amalgam. Paracelsus was right in regard to the magistrate’s affair, at any rate. One Liechtenfels, a canon, having been rescued in extremis by the “laudanum” of Paracelsus, refused to come down with the stipulated fee, and was supported in his meanness by the authorities, whose interference Paracelsus could not brook. His own liberality was allowed by his bitterest foes, who found a ready solution of his indifference to profit in a certain sword-handle, which was supposed to enshrine a demon. The sword had been given to him by a prince whom he had restored. The notion of its being inhabited is a popular notion that has even passed into our own literature. In Jonson’s Volpone, Act II. Scene II., there is the following allusion:
Ne had been known the Danish Gonswart,
Or Paracelsus with his long sword.
Also, in Hudibras, part ii. canto 3.
Bombastes kept a devil’s bird
Shut in the pummel of his sword,
That taught him all the cunning pranks
Of past and future mountebanks.
However this may be, his freedom from the besetting sin of a profession he abhorred, as he curiously says somewhere, “Quis quæso deinceps honorem deferat professione tali, quæ à tam facinorosis nebulonibus obitur et administratur?” is recorded in his epitaph, which affirms, “Bona sua in pauperes distribuenda colocandaque erogavit,” honoravit, or ordinavit—for accounts differ.
The fourth part opens at Colma, in Alsatia, 1528. Paracelsus and Festus are together, with John Oporinus, the secretary of the former—who, to his eternal shame, did his best to libel his master’s memory. Oporinus is sent out to prepare for a journey to Nuremberg, and then the two friends are left alone to their consultations:
Alack,
’Tis true; poor Paracelsus is exposed
At last,—a most egregious quack is he;
And those he overreached must spit their hate
On one who, utterly beneath contempt,
Could yet deceive their topping wits.
What is he to do now? In the sport of indecision, he breaks out into singing—verses of his own composing! He will now accept all helps, and despise nothing: he will not only know, but enjoy—ay, even the most sensual delights; for in all joy there is gain, whatever it be. But with all this Paracelsus manifests such a feeling of his superiority, expresses so much scorn for his opponents, that Festus is compelled to exclaim, “He who sneers thus is a god!” Still his thirst for truth is ardent; and then again he bursts out into one of his wild songs—a song which, in an allegory, gives his past history. Take it, good Asinarius! and tell us how thou likest it.
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 nailed all over the gaping sides,
Within and without with black-bull hides,
Seethed in fat and supplied 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 drooped the mast below,
That neither noontide nor star-shine,
Nor moonlight cold which maketh mad,
Might pierce the regal tenement.
When the sun dawned, 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 stretched—each weary crew
In a circle round its wond’rous tent,
Whence gleamed soft light and curled rich scent,
And with light and perfume, music, too: [p. 372→]
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 steered right into the harbour thus,
With pomp and pæan 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 opened 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 called out—‘Depart!
Our gifts, once given, must here abide:
Our work is done; we have no heart
To mar our work,’ we cried.
This ballad Paracelsus subsequently calls
The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung
To their first fault, and withered in their pride.
The dialogue that follows is, in parts, highly poetical—the conclusion is pathetic. See how he is brought back to humanity by the mention of Michal’s death:
Par. You have felt sorrow, Festus? ’tis because
You love 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 mattered how the farce plays out,
So it be quickly played. Away, away!
Have your will, rabble! while we fight the prize,
Troop you in safety to the snug backseats,
And leave a clear arena for the brave
About to perish for your sport. Behold!
The manner in which Paracelsus concealed scepticism is detected, even in the expression of his belief—a conviction triumphing over some preceding state of unacknowledged doubt—is beyond all praise. It is a revelation of the heart’s depths, which startles almost as much as would the laying bare the bases of the world!—that is, the mind susceptible of receiving the specific impression. There are few among the Asinarii capable of being so moved. The trump of the last angel will fail to awaken the dulness of some apprehensions.
But now Paracelsus attains his final possession. We find him in a cell in [p. 373→] the hospital of St. Sebastian, at Salzburg, 1541, with his beloved Festus again, watching him and warding him on the bed of his last illness. Touching, and even terrible, is the soliloquy of Festus, while the ruined patient is sleeping—for our poet is not afraid to go to the extreme limits of pious audacity. The familiar addresses to the Deity, in which the author here delights, have their counterparts in many a religious diary and confession.
At length Paracelsus awakens from his disturbed slumbers, and raves about Aprile and his music—of loving and knowing—of the gods’ laughter at mortal failures—and of the few truths obtained by him, though at the cost of his life.
Fest. A light
Will struggle through these thronging words at last,
As in the angry and tumultuous west
A soft star trembles through the drifting clouds:
These are the strivings of a spirit which hates
So sad a vault should coop it, and calls up
The past to stand between it and its fate:
Were he at Einsiedeln—or Michal here.
Par. Cruel..I seek her now—I kneel—I shriek—
I clasp her vesture—but she fades, still fades;
And she is gone,—sweet human love is gone!
’Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels
Reveal themselves to you; they sit all day
Beside you, and lie down at night by you,
Who care not for their presence—muse or sleep—
And all at once they leave you and you know them!
We are so fooled, so cheated! Even now
* * * *
Lost, lost! Thus things are ordered here! God’s creatures!
And yet he takes no pride in us! none! none!
Truly there needs another life to come!
If this be all—(I must tell Festus that)
And other life awaits us not—for one
I say ’tis a poor cheat, a stupid bungle,
A wretched failure. I, for one, protest
Against it—and I hurl it back with scorn!
And thus he proceeds, still rising in eloquence and vehemence—until he returns to mental sanity, and converses rationally with Festus on his state. The latter partakes much of his friend’s enthusiasm, and reflects his character. He demands from the Deity that the claims of Paracelsus on his death bed should be respected:
I am for noble Aureole, God!
I am upon his side, come weal or wo!
His portion shall be mine! He has done well!
I would have sinned, had I been strong enough,
As he has sinned! Reward him, or I wave
Reward! If thou can’st find no place for him,
He shall be king elsewhere, and I will be
His slave for ever!....There are two of us!
And then, in his turn, he too breaks forth into singing, as had his master in a former part. At length Paracelsus announces that he is dying; and attaining, in that feeling, new perceptions. While he is thus conversing, Festus is compelled to remark as follows:
Indeed, his cheek seems young again, his voice
Complete with its old tones,—that little laugh
Concluding every phrase; with upturned eye,
As though one stooped above his head, to whom
He looked 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; ’tis many a year
Since I remarked it last: and this in him
But now a ghastly wreck.
And thus reinvigorated for the last time, that his important confession may be confided to the heart of Festus, he magnificently rhapsodises through many pages on his past state and future prospects. He speaks of “the happy time” when first he vowed himself to man; but the great purpose could not be fulfilled under the conditions of mortality. Hence the wretchedness that attended the degree of success to which he formerly attained, its unsatisfactoriness, and its final discomfiture. His creed is pantheistic in its tendency—nay, in its basis; but developes itself in a glorious hope, and a breaking away into a pure spirit element, which whoso breathes once shall live for ever
I have done well, though not all well.
As yet men cannot do without contempt.
’Tis for their good, and therefore fit awhile
That they reject me and speak scorn of me;
But after, they will know me well: I stoop [p. 374→]
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud;
But ’tis but for a time: I press God’s lamp
Close to my breast—it’s splendour, soon or late
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.
That prophecy has been fulfilled, in the production of this very excellent dramatic poem or romance. We confess that we like it better than Mr. Taylor’s Philip van Artevelde, though both works of kindred spirits. They differ in this, however; that one is a mechanic, the other an organic piece of work. Mr. Taylor’s romance has been highly praised in the quarterly reviews; but we must claim to reckon him rather among the Asinarii than among the Asini. He would ride the public by these means—and might have ridden it, if he had presented himself as a living man for its back. But he preferred the character of a curiously constructed skeleton, of which the different parts were taken from many others; and out of all, this Apelles proceeded to form his bony beauty, as an anatomical study. Now the public will not be ridden by Death—for the public is an ass, and his pale majesty is suited already with a pale horse. Death on the pale Ass would be laughed at; and the asinine has already so much contempt, that it cannot well endure more. As an anatomical study, however, Philip van Artevelde is an excellent subject; and we have no doubt that it will be properly esteemed— and it deserves high estimation—in the schools whither it is relegated.
Oh! many are the poets that are sown
By nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine;
Yet, wanting the accomplishment of verse,
Go to the grave unthought of,—
exclaims Wordsworth—and, after him, Byron, in the person of Dante, eulogises the poets who ne’er penned their inspiration, and yet were greater than those who have. In these passages we find the original of Mr. Taylor’s reflections, in the person of Artevelde, on the death of Launoy:
He was one
Of many thousands such that die betimes,
Whose story is a fragment known to few.
Then comes the man who has the luck to live,
And he is a prodigy. * * *
The world knows nothing of its greatest men.
And thus, throughout the piece, the reader will find the materials of it to be derived from the Lake school poetry and the German systems of transcendentalism. Not so in Paracelsus. We see the thoughts growing up, and acquiring body and stature. The stream is flowing. Defects there are in the work; but these belong to it because it is a moving, breathing thing. Artevelde is almost faultless; but only because it is made-up—a pattern article—to shew not life in itself, but skill in its maker. This we would not have said at an earlier day, both out of respect to the poet and his first critic; but now that the experiment has been tried with the public, and nothing that we can utter may harm its success, we feel entitled to speak out, if only to shew that we are not to be nose-led by authority, however high, or deceived by appearances, however specious. Imitation is not creation—cleverness is not genius—compilation is not inspiration. Paracelsus took six months to write; we wish the poet had spent six years upon it. Artevelde took six years, we wish the author had admitted us to its perusal when only six months old. The one period, however, is as much too short as is the other too long, for a perfectly healthy gestation. In the one, the soul has not been suffered to mature life; in the other, the body has had a chance of outlasting it. Nevertheless, give us life, passion, motion, growth. The premature infant is yet lovely; the posthumous carcass is only proper for the dissecting-room. There it will be a curiosity—there it is one; and no little may be learned from a sedulous examination of its structure and proportions.
[John Heraud]
Reviewed:
Paracelsus (RB), London: Effingham Wilson, 1835.
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