—Browning (“Sordello”).
When the scrimmage and riot was at the highest point, Elsworth suddenly found himself separated from his companions, and involved in a rush of people who were making for the street. These persons were anxious to escape from the violence that had suddenly come upon them, and taking rapid stock of affairs, thought it best to be outside. So, in a very few moments, Elsworth was in Oxford Street, with no chance of getting back to the scenes which he had just so unwillingly left. He turned down the Seven Dials, and as he walked towards the Strand had time to feel heartily ashamed of himself and that night’s work. Had he not had nearly enough of this sort of thing? Was it for this he had read and worked, earned honours, learned many and great things, profited by the labours of the past, which surely could not have come to him through such channels as he was likely to prove? For several days past he had been immersed in the study of Browning’s “Paracelsus.” He had seen how that hero of medicine had torn himself away from home and friends, and all his loved surroundings, to go far into the distant world to gather, with enormous difficulty, hints and scraps of medical learning which were but the veriest crumbs compared to the loaded tables now set before the student of the healing art; how, with poor means, great hardships, and the scantiest help, in opposition to the teaching of its appointed professors, doing violence to the received notions of his time, he had struck out a path for himself, through the trackless forest to the unexplored country where lay, he felt and knew by the inner light that guided him, the key to the true treatment of the hurts and troubles of men’s bodies—all this against tears and entreaties such as often hold a man back from attempting new and great things. And how, after many wanderings and contentions, much violence, and opposition, he had seized, Prometheus like, Divine gifts for men, all by his own great soul, fortified by faith in God and love to man: and had dowered the human race with gifts greater than kings and captains ever won for it, and blessings for which the art of medicine yet sings his praises. While he, Elsworth, standing as it were high on the shoulders of the discoverers of the past, had been using his time at best to acquire a mere means of livelihood, his predecessors, who had helped him to all this knowledge, had been glad to win from nature, by years of work, one by one those secrets he was using so lightly. He was overcome by shame and the sense of his unfitness for such a work as he had dared to undertake.
Paracelsus,—the Paracelsus made known to this age, not by the false portraits limned by his contemporaries and enemies but as drawn by the master hand of Browning,—seemed to step out from the dark past and forbid his progress on a path he had traversed. A horrible sense of degradation took possession of him. He had once held a lofty ideal. When at Oxford, when his faith in God was a real working faith, he had often vowed himself to the service of humanity. That the saints of the Church, the fathers of the faith, the apostles, the prophets, the teachers of the past should have all worked to hand down to him—Elsworth—this noble, Divine light of Christian faith, which alike impelled his adhesion and claimed his co-operation; and for him to receive all, and then hesitate to give in his turn his best years and his whole heart to the world’s needs, was surely but to be repelled on its suggestion. But faith was gone, intellect had usurped the place of will, the will was unsanctified, and the man in brain and heart a chariot whose steeds rushed uncontrolled along the beaten track of habit, and were carrying him—whither? If there were no hereafter—nothing beyond this life—was it worth while to go on with this devilry, this riot, this attempt to drag the better part, the reason, into the mire, with the swine? Why not forsake it all, and now while there was time for repentance? The man was pulled up short: thrown back like a horse on his haunches. A great gulf in these few minutes was opened between him and the past; and not Paul when smitten down on Damascus road was blinder as to the future than Elsworth on this night in Seven Dials, amongst the suspicious men and bedraggled women, who passed him as he moved listlessly along, arrested by the scream of a conscience that would be heard at least once more, and whose voice had unspeakable terrors for him. For he was made for better things—that he always had felt; he was not vile, debauched, debased, as some of his companions were. He had fought against light; he had struggled not to believe, not that he might give the reins to his passions, but that he might deify intellect. He thought it was cowardly to leave those poor lads in the fight, but it was useless to go back; and even if he could have saved them from arrest, he dare not engage in any more of that work—away with that at least; it was too horrible to think of any more. So on he went, scolding himself, calling himself by every opprobrious epithet, and berating himself back into manhood again. He had reached Chelsea; it was almost too late to get a lodging, but he would try; for the conviction began to dawn upon him that he should not go back one single step into the past, but there and then break with it all, and be a man, and live a man’s life. He prayed—once more repeated, “Our Father, which art in heaven;” it seemed very unphilosophical, very unscientific. He had often sent out aspirations to “the Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” to “the one Consensus of the whole,” to “the Eternal Verity,” but it was long since Elsworth had said “Our Father;” he felt that in doing so he had reopened that long closed “window towards the Infinite,” and had once more let in the light of the Divine and supernatural wisdom without which he had been groping along. He found a clean, but mean lodging in a little eating-house down by the river, and went to bed. Surely a voice out of heaven had called him that night. Not clearer was Paul’s arrest—not plainer Loyola’s, “Hitherto, but no farther”—than this to him to-night. So, ever, when there is a work for a man that he must do, that he is sealed and set apart for, when the full time comes he shall hear the call; if not in the still small voice and the whispering wind, then in the fire and thunders of Sinai.
Elsworth felt that night, as he lay restlessly tossing on the rough bed, that he had gone about his whole work at the hospital the wrong way. Thus had not Paracelsus done! How he cried at the outset of his career:
“I can abjure so well the idle arts
These pedants strive to learn and teach; black arts,
Great works, the secret and sublime, forsooth—
Let others prize; too intimate a tie
Connects me with our God! A sullen fiend
To do my bidding, fallen and hateful sprites