Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“
[ocr errors]

become an object of personal interest with the first reading; people have doubtless skipped a dozen of its speeches. But let each speech, or perhaps each part of the poem, be taken on its own merits, and let Paracelsus talk as long as he pleases, without a hankering that he should be interrupted by his friends. In other words, accept it as a meditative poem, too grave to entertain a reminiscence of the theatre, and too earnestly developing a great idea to unbend in many solaces of the romance or lyric, and its vitality will enrich hours of quiet leisure. It is filled with a rare knowledge of human motives and the operations of the mind. Sometimes other thought and illustration are remote, and the reader cannot immediately possess a conception of the page. Whoever wearily turns the leaves, then, in suspicion that some thing obscure from ultra refinement or collateral analogies seeks to detain him, will miss many passages capable of a generous yield to small labor. It is dangerous to turn the leaves too hurriedly. Sometimes the coupling of a natural grace with a very subtle thought has all the surprise of wit. Again, a gem with a new flash and color will be dug out of lines that look most unpromisingly didactic. Unlike Sordello, this poem contains no passages out of which the process of condensation has squeezed the little conjunctive particles which keep the sense alive till the lines are little more than strings of verbs and We released once twenty-five lines of Sordello from Mr. Browning's hydraulic pressure, and it did not recover its normal state short of half a sheet of English. It is plain that ether cannot be inhaled in cakes. In Paracelsus, the natural elasticity of thought is never so cruelly compressed.

nouns.

This poem contains Mr. Browning's noblest lyric. Paracelsus sings it, and it embodies the story of his life's failure. It is

"The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung

To their first fault, and withered in their pride."

The unbalanced activity of his intellect sallied forth impetuously after knowledge; unbalanced by wants of the heart, and untrained by a renouncing, scientific study. Without the one, he became the solitary, joyless misanthrope, using his knowledge for contemptuous comparison, and blunting his nerves in sudden. fits of riot; wanting the other, he was compelled to resort to the shifts of the empiric, to justify the great pretence which his youthful ambition set up among his fellows. Between

Paracelsus and Cagliostro was the difference of motive. The hero of the diamond necklace was nothing but an adroit and hungry swindler. But the mystical chemist, carrying his newly-discovered laudanum in the hilt of his sword, and permitting people to believe it a spirit, was the victim of a position honestly, but prematurely assumed by his inordinate desires. He sings

"We knew, too late,

How bare the rock, how desolate,

To which we had flung our precious freight."

Whether we consider the perfection of its versification, or the sustained and delicate illustration, it would be difficult to match this lyric. After becoming familiar with the poem, the frame warms as you approach it, and you anticipate its movement as you do the choice passage in a symphony. The poem prepares for it, and lets you into the change of key with grace and a sweet surprise: and it is impossible to imagine a single letter or comma of it, whose alteration would not mar the melody. His buoyant ambition puts out to sea, with the glow and rhythm of youth itself:

"Over the sea our galleys went,

With cleaving prows in order brave,

To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,-
A gallant armament -"

There is joy, triumph, a stunning disappointment, and pure pathos for its close.

But Paracelsus has become a confirmed alien from human love. His undiminished ambition has grown gross from his occasional excesses and enforced deceits; whenever the friend of his youth seeks to open before him a nobler aspiration, asking to let God "kindly pioneer a path" for him into His love and service, the jaded spirit slinks back to its clay, oppressed by a friendliness that only reminds him of his weakness.

"No, no; learn better and look deeper, Festus !
If you knew how a devil sneers within me,
While you are talking now of this, now that,
As though we differed scarcely save in trifles!"

All this obstinate and petulant resistance is truthfully delineated. Just as truthful is the occasional flaming forth of the old thoughts, mixed with the hope of a new youth estab

lished in God's love, which the shattered brain will refuse to realize :

"How very full

Of wormwood 'tis, that just at altar service,
The rapt hymn rising with the rolling smoke,
When glory dawns, and all is at the best
The sacred fire may flicker, and grow faint,
And die, for want of a wood-piler's help!
Thus jades the flagging body, and the soul
Is pulled down in the overthrow."

Not so, or, if at all, yet soon to recover its best ideas, and vindicate in some condition, and in the ranks of some service, the pains-taking hand of the Creator. Paracelsus already gathers the embers together, to make out by the tremulous light the long missing fugitive, who comes back at last, asking to be recognized, "the instinct of that happy time" when he vowed his help to man. They know each other, the outcast ideal and the repentant parent-spirit; reconciled, at last, they depart for meeker latitudes, leaving beggary and ruin :

God's lamp

- "I press
Close to my breast its splendor, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day."

What the poet Aprile told him about excluding Love from his earthly service is all true; love and knowledge, "halves of one dissevered world." He pledged his faith to Aprile, but the demoniac intellect soon struck again at the soaring quarry, and sent it into denser air. The touching song of Aprile, that won him so long ago, comes back to the failing sense, with its pathos deepened by his ill-fortune, its lines of truth chiselled out clear by his remorse. The words of warning remain to be his epitaph:

[ocr errors]

"Lost, lost! yet come,

With our wan troop make thy home:

we trusted thou shouldst speak

God's message, which our lips, too weak,

Refused to utter.

How shall we better arm the spirit?

Who next shall thy post of life inherit ?—

How guard him from thy ruin?"

Paracelsus is a noble poem. To the service of this great,

neglected thought which it contains, Mr. Browning has brought all the manifoldness of his genius. The careful analysis of moral states and tendencies is scarcely less rich in diction than the passages of feeling and description; the illustration is always inevitable and completely finished. From beginning to end, it is full of mental life; the discourse has the serious probable air, shared by all of Mr. Browning's characters. They talk with right good-will, under the stress of the moment; all their moods are reported as earnestly as if they were the actors in some popular subject of yesterday, instead of being so far removed by the abstraction both of time and thought. Moreover, we believe that Mr. Browning has described the precise variety to which Paracelsus belonged. If we consult history, we shall find that he is put down as half-mystic, halfquack, with a dash of enthusiasm. Now and then, some one will acknowledge that his chemical works are full of suggestion, and that, like Swedenborg, he has vaguely anticipated several results of modern investigation. But we nowhere find stated the exact amount of manliness and genuine purpose which he possessed; for he had them. No man will write, work, persevere as he did, for the sake of sustaining a life-long deception. Your veritable quack lives from hand to mouth, shuffling cards, dabbling in stocks, and paying dividends to stockholders out of the principal, blowing forth Mississippi and South Sea bubbles

turning up, like friend Waring, in Russia, to sell the czar his latest invention; in Spain, to manage the commissariat of grumbling peninsular armies; in New York, with the plan of a great Western city, not yet emerged from the primeval element. Your literary quack, none the less veritable for his pen, is half chiffonier, half thief, picking in the dust-heaps around clubs and athenæums, dining out, and embezzling all the private scandal, soon to appear in a biography of authors; making very plausible volumes with an editorial scissors, and selling himself to whatsoever interest is momentarily deluded by his cheapness. But, so far as motive is concerned, we would as soon call Jacob Behmen a systematic charlatan, as Aureolus Paracelsus. The chemist never would have worked so, if he merely wished to get a living. And the story of his indignant demolition of the canon, who refused to pay him for the successful employment of the miraculous laudanum, and his quarrel with the authorities, who took the canon's part, is a mark of honesty. The genuine quack goes constantly lubricated, and, like the snail, is always careful to carry his retreat with

-

him. He avoids a quarrel with the true currish skulk. He takes care not to spoil his business by any special demonstrations of manhood. If the object of Paracelsus was to enjoy a premature fame, in the notoriety which his treatises and lectures procured, he would have discontinued his investigations when he fell into disgrace; would have taken to preaching, perhaps, and made his living out of the Reformation; or become court physician, under a new name, in Constantinople or London. We believe that Mr. Browning's poem resuscitates, by the spell of analogy and analysis, the verita ble Paracelsus- we mean, his motives and conflicts. He has put into his mouth some noble theology, which Paracelsus may or may not have dimly divined, some acute criticism and exquisite poetry, all of which we will credit to the writer. But we have the moral and nervous structure of the man, the cause of his failure, the key to this variety of humanity wherever found. We have no doubt that Paracelsus, in the second state, upon application, would endorse every line that purports to represent his prevailing tendencies and characteristic defect. Plenty of popes and kings there would serve as diagrams, while he lectured to the effect, that he was like a man who mistakes a taste for the drama for dramatic talent, whose youthful enthusiasm pledges him for life to a position in which clap-trap is a species of self-defence, and the need of self-defence excludes all nobler second-thoughts. To tell this painful and salutary story, Mr. Browning has well selected Paracelsus, expanding the meagre notices of his life into the finished history of a soul. The poem reminds us of the feats of Professor Agassiz, who reproduces those extinct hybrids from the hint of a scale or a vertebra. It will last till men have ceased to love life, thought, and nature.

We notice that, now and then, Mr. Browning affects an unnecessary intensity; his pen is caught by the paper with a scratch and a spatter. One of the best meditations of Paracelsus is slightly marred in this way. The following is only a conceit, put with great vigor:

"Make no more giants, God!

But elevate the race at once! We ask

To put forth just our strength, our human strength,

All starting fairly, all equipped alike,

Gifted alike, all eagle-eyed, true-hearted

See if we cannot beat thy angels yet!"

« AnkstesnisTęsti »