Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

The poem as a whole does not concern us here except as a background for its final thoughts. In order, however, to put the situation clearly before readers not already familiar with it, I venture to transcribe a portion of a former analysis of my own.

Paracelsus aspires to the acquisition of absolute knowledge and feels born within him the capabilities for attaining this end, and, when attained, it is to be devoted to enlarging the possibilities of man’s life. The whole race is to be elevated at once. Man may not be doomed to cope with seraphs, yet by the exercise of human strength alone he hopes man may one day beat God’s angels.

He is a revolter, however, against the magical and alchemistic methods of his age, which seek for the welfare of men through the elixir of youth or the philosopher’s stone. He especially disclaims such puerile schemes in the passionate moment when he has realized how futile all his lifelong efforts have been. He stands, indeed, at the threshold of a new world. He has a glimmering of the true scientific methods which would discover first the secrets of life’s laws, and then use these natural laws to bring about life’s betterment, instead of hoping for salvation through the discovery of some magic secret by means of which life’s laws might be overcome. Yet he is sufficiently of his own superstitious age to desire and expect fairly magical results from the laws he hopes to discover. The creed which spurs him to his quest is his belief that truth is inborn in the soul, but to set this truth free and make it of use to mankind correspondences in outer nature must be found. An intuitive mind like Paracelsus’s will recognize these natural corollaries of the intuition wherever it finds them; and these are what Paracelsus goes forth over the earth to seek and find, sure he will “arrive.” One illustration of the results so obtained is seen in the doctrine of the signatures of plants according to which the flowers, leaves, and fruits of plants indicate by their color or markings, etc., the particular diseases they are intended to cure. The real Paracelsus practised medicine upon this theory.

Though such methods are a long distance from those of the modern scientist, who deduces his laws from careful and patient observation of nature, they go a step toward his in seeking laws in nature to correspond to hypotheses born of intuition.

Browning’s presentation of the attitude of mind and the place held by Paracelsus in the development of science is exactly in line with the most recent criticisms of this extraordinary man’s life. According to these he fluctuated between the systems of magic then prevalent and scientific observation, but always finally threw in the balance of his opinion on the side of scientific ways of working; and above all made the great step from a belief in the influence of nature upon man to that of the existence of parallelisms between nature processes and human processes.

Though he thus opened up new vistas for the benefit of man, he must necessarily be a failure, from his own point of view, with his “India” not found, his absolute truth unattained; and it is upon this side that the poet dwells. For a moment he is somewhat reassured by the apparition of Aprile, scarcely a creature of flesh and blood, more the spirit of art who aspires to love infinitely and has found the attainment of such love as impossible as Paracelsus has found the attainment of knowledge. Both have desired to help men, but Paracelsus has desired to help them rather through the perfecting, even immortalizing, of their physical being; Aprile, through giving man, as he is, infinite sympathy and through creating forms of beauty which would show him his own thoughts and hopes glorified by the all-seeing touch of the artist.

Paracelsus recognizes his deficient sympathy for mankind, and tries to make up for it in his own way by giving out of the fulness of his knowledge to men. The scornful and proud reformer has not, however, truly learned the lesson of love, and verily has his reward when he is turned against by those whom he would teach. Then the old ideal seizes upon him again, and still under the influence of Aprile he seeks in human experience the loves and passions of mankind which he learns through Aprile he had neglected for the ever-illusive secret, but neither does success attend him here, and only on his deathbed does his vision clear up, and he is made to indulge in a prophetic utterance quite beyond the reach of the original Paracelsus.

In this passage is to be found Browning’s first contribution to a solution of the great problem. That it is instinct with the idea of evolution has become a commonplace of Browning criticism, a fact which was at least independently or, as far as I know, first pointed out by myself in an early essay upon Browning. At the time, I was reading both Browning and Spencer, and could not but be impressed by the parallelisms in thought between the two, especially those in this seer-like passage and “The Data of Ethics.”

Writers whose appreciation of a poet is in direct ratio to the number of exact historical facts to be found in a poem like to emphasize this fact that the doctrine of evolution can be found in the works of Paracelsus. Why not? Since, as we have seen it had been floating about in philosophical thought in one form or another for some thousands of years.

Indeed, it has been stated upon good authority that the idea of a gradual evolution according to law and of a God from whom all being emanates, from whom all power proceeds, is an inherent necessity of the Aryan mind as opposed to the Semitic idea of an outdwelling God and of supernaturalism. Thus, all down the ages the Aryan mind has revolted from time to time against the religious ideas superimposed upon it by the Semitic mind. This accounts for the numerous heresies within the bosom of the Church as well as for the scientific advance against the superstitions of the Church.