Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

But Paracelsus had learned a lesson through Aprile which the Apollo of Keats had not learned. He does not accept kingship at the expense of Aprile as Apollo would do at the expense of Hyperion. He includes in his final theory of life all that is beautiful in Aprile’s or Shelley’s ideal and adds to it all that is beautiful of the Keats ideal. The form of his philosophy is evolutionary, and up to the time of his meeting with Aprile had expressed itself as the search for knowledge. Through Aprile his philosophy becomes imbued with soul, the attributes of which are the spirit of love and the spirit of beauty, one of which conserves and immortalizes beauty, the other of which searches out new beauty.

So, working hand in hand, they become one, while the search for knowledge, thus spiritualized, becomes the search for beauty always inspired by love. The aim of the evolutionary process thus becomes the unfolding of ever new phases of beauty in which God takes endless delight, and to the final enjoyment of which mankind shall attain.

To sum up, Browning’s solution of the problem in the Paracelsus theory of life is reached not only through a synthesis of the doctrines of evolution as applied to universal activities, cosmic and human, prophetic, on the one hand, of the most advanced scientific thought of the century, but it is a synthesis of these and of the art-spirit in its twofold aspect of love and beauty as already expressed in the poetry of Shelley and Keats.

It is not in the least probable that Browning set to work consciously to piece together these ideals. That is not the method of the artist! But being familiar to him in the two best beloved poets of his youth, they had sunk into his very being, and welled forth from his own subconsciousness, charged with personal emotion, partly dramatic, partly the expression of his own true feeling at the time, and the result be it said is one of the most inspiring and beautiful passages in English poetry.

Paracelsus

At the end of his life and the end of the century Herbert Spencer, who had spent years of labor to prove the fallacies in all religious dogmas, and who had insisted upon religion’s being entirely relegated to intellectually unknowable regions of thought, spoke in his autobiography of the mysteries inherent in life, in the evolution of human beings, in consciousness, in human destiny—mysteries that the very advance of science makes more and more evident, exhibits as more and more profound and impenetrable, adding:

“Thus religious creeds, which in one way or other occupy the sphere that rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the more, the more it seeks, I have come to regard with a sympathy based on community of need: feeling that dissent from them results from inability to accept the solutions offered, joined with the wish that solutions could be found.”

Loyal to the last to his determination to accept as knowledge only what the intellect could prove, he never permitted himself to come under the awakening influence of an Aprile, yet like Browning’s ancient Greek, Cleon, he longed for a solution of the mystery.

At the dawn of the century, and in his youth, Browning ventured upon a solution. In the remainder of this and the next chapter I shall attempt to show what elements in this solution the poet retained to the end of his life, how his thought became modified, and what relation his final solution bears to the final thought of the century.