91.
Joanna Baillie had a great admiration of Macaulay’s Roman Ballads. “But,” said some one, “do you really account them as poetry?” She replied, “They are poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!”
92.
All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase “profound cunning” has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet hate dissembling, but a “cunning mind” emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That “pleasure in deceiving and aptness to be deceived” usually go together, was one of the wise sayings of the wisest of men.
93.
It was a saying of Paracelsus, that “Those who would understand the course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in man:” meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come to this conclusion only late in life.
Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,—a poem in which there is such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth,—represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled solely by the appetite to know. He asks nothing of men, he despises them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like fashion, independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using them like instruments, cheating them like children,—all for their good; but it will not do. In Aprile, “who would love infinitely, and be beloved,” is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty, resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain.