A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 2

"R. B."

I.

INTRODUCTORY GROUP.

"PAULINE," "PARACELSUS," "SORDELLO."

These three poems are Mr. Browning's first, and they are also, as I have said, the one partial exception to the unity and continuousness of his work; they have, at least, one common characteristic which detaches them from the remainder of it. Each is in its different way the study of a human spirit, too ambitious to submit to the limits of human existence, and which learns humility in its unsuccessful conflict with them. This ambition is of its nature poetic, and seems so much in harmony with Mr.

Browning's mind--young and untutored by experience as it then was, full of the consciousness of its own powers as it must have been--that it is difficult not to recognize in it a phase of his own intellectual life.

But if it was so, it is one which he had already outgrown, or lived much more in fancy than in fact. His sympathy with the ambition of Paracelsus and Sordello is steadily counteracted by his judgment of it; and we are only justified in a.s.serting what is beyond dispute: that these poems represent an introductory phase of the author's imagination, one which begins and ends in them. The mind of his men and women will be exercised on many things, but never again so much upon itself. The vivid sense of their personality will be less in their minds than in his own.

"PAULINE." (1832.)

This poem is, as its t.i.tle declares, a fragment of a confession. The speaker is a man, probably still young; and Pauline, the name of the lady who receives the confession, and is supposed to edit it. It is not, however, "fragmentary" in the sense of revealing only a small part of the speaker's life, or of only recording isolated acts, from which the life may be built up. Its fragmentary character lies in this: that, while very explicit as a record of feeling and motive, it is entirely vague in respect to acts. It is an elaborate retrospect of successive mental states, big with the sense of corresponding misdeeds; and pointing among these to some glaring infidelities to Pauline, the man's constant love and friend; but on the whole conveying nothing beyond an impression of youthful excesses, and of an extreme and fantastic self-consciousness which has inspired these excesses, and which now magnifies and distorts them.

An ultra-consciousness of self is in fact the key-note of the whole mental situation. Pauline's lover has been a prey to the spiritual ambition so distinctly ill.u.s.trated in these three first poems; and, unlike Paracelsus and Sordello, he has given it no outlet in unselfish aims. His life has not been wholly misspent; he is a poet and a student; he has had dreams of human good; he has reverenced great men: and never quite lost the faith in G.o.d, and the sense of nearness to Him; and he alleges some of these facts in deprecation of his too harsh verdict upon himself. But his ultimate object has been always the gratification of Self--the ministering to its pleasures and to its powers; and this egotism has become narrower and more consuming, till the thirst for even momentary enjoyment has banished the very belief in higher things. The belief returns, and we leave him at the close of his confession exhausted by the mental fever, but released from it--new-born to a better life; though how and why this has happened is again part of the mystery of the case. "Pauline" is _the_ one of Mr. Browning's longer poems of which no intelligible abstract is possible: a circ.u.mstance the more striking that it is perfectly transparent, as well as truly poetical, so far as its language is concerned.

The defects and difficulties of "Pauline" are plainly admitted in an editor's note, written in French, and signed by this name; and which, proceeding as it does from the author himself, supplies a valuable comment on the work.

"I much fear that my poor friend will not be always perfectly understood in what remains to be read of this strange fragment, but it is less calculated than any other part to explain what of its nature can never be anything but dream and confusion. I do not know moreover whether in striving at a better connection of certain parts, one would not run the risk of detracting from the only merit to which so singular a production can pretend: that of giving a tolerably precise idea of the manner (_genre_) which it can merely indicate. This unpretending opening, this stir of pa.s.sion, which first increases, and then gradually subsides, these transports of the soul, this sudden return upon himself, and above all, my friend's quite peculiar turn of mind, have made alterations almost impossible. The reasons which he elsewhere a.s.serts, and others still more cogent have secured my indulgence for this paper, which otherwise I should have advised him to throw into the fire. I believe none the less in the great principle of all composition--in that principle of Shakespeare, of Raphael, and of Beethoven, according to which concentration of ideas is due much more to their conception than to their execution; I have every reason to fear that the first of these qualities is still foreign to my friend, and I much doubt whether redoubled labour would enable him to acquire the second. It would be best to burn this; but what can I do?"

We might infer from this, as from his subsequent introduction, that Mr.

Browning disclaimed all that is extravagant in the poem, and laid it simply to the charge of the imaginary person it is intended to depict: but that he has also prefaced it with a curious Latin quotation which identifies that person with himself.[8]

"Pauline" did not take its place among the author's collected works till 1868, when the uniform edition of them appeared; and he then introduced it by a preface (to which I have just alluded) in which he declared his unwillingness to publish such a boyish production, and gave the reasons which induced him to do so. The poem is boyish, or at all events youthful, in point of conception; and we need not wonder that this intellectual crudeness should have outweighed its finished poetic beauties in its author's mind. It contains however one piece of mental portraiture which, with slight modifications, might have stood for Mr.

Browning when he re-edited the work, as it clearly did when he wrote it.

It begins thus (vol. i. page 14):

"I am made up of an intensest life,"

The tribute at page 14[9] to the saving power of imagination is also characteristic of his maturer mind, though expressed in an ambiguous manner. It is interesting to know that in the line (page 26),

"the king Treading the purple calmly to his death,"

he was thinking of Agamemnon: as this shows how early his love of cla.s.sic literature began. The allusion to Plato, at pages 19, 20, and 21, largely confirms this impression. The feeling for music a.s.serts itself also at page 18, though in a less spiritual form than it a.s.sumes in his later works. But the most striking piece of true biography which "Pauline" contains, is its evidence of the young writer's affectionate reverence for Sh.e.l.ley, whom he idealizes under the name of Sun-treader.

An invocation to his memory occupies three pages, beginning with the ninth; it is renewed at the end of the poem, and there can be no doubt that the pathetic language in which it is couched came straight from the young poet's own heart. We even fancy that Sh.e.l.ley's influence is visible in the poem itself, which contains a profusion of natural imagery, and some touches of naturalistic emotion, not at all in keeping with Mr. Browning's picturesque, but habitually human genius. The influence, if it existed, pa.s.sed away with his earliest youth; not so the admiration and sympathy which it implied; and this, considering the wide difference which separated the two minds, is an interesting fact.[10]

"PARACELSUS." (1835.)

"Paracelsus" is a summary of the life, as Mr. Browning conceives it, of this well-known physicist of the sixteenth century; and is divided into five scenes, or groups of scenes, each representing a critical moment in his experience, and reviewing in his own words the circ.u.mstances by which it has been prepared. The personages whom it includes are, besides the princ.i.p.al one, Festus and Michal, early friends of Paracelsus, and now man and wife; and the Italian poet Aprile. Michal appears only in the first scene; Aprile in the second or third; but Festus accompanies Paracelsus throughout the drama, in the constant character of judicious, if not profound, adviser, and of tender friend. His personality is sufficiently marked to claim the importance of a type; and as such he stands forth, as contrasted with both Paracelsus and Aprile, and yet a bond of union between them. It is more probable however that he was created for the mere dramatic purpose of giving shape to the confession of Paracelsus, and preserving it from monotony. The story is princ.i.p.ally told in a dialogue between them.

The first scene is ent.i.tled "Paracelsus aspires;" and takes place at Wurzburg between himself, Festus, and Michal, on the eve of his departure from their common home. Both friends begin by opposing his aspirations, and thus lead him to expound and defend them. The aim and spirit of these is the distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of the poem. Paracelsus aspires to knowledge: such knowledge as will benefit his fellow-men. He will seek it in the properties of nature, and, as history tells us, he will succeed. But his _aspirations_ pa.s.s over these isolated discoveries, which he has no idea of connecting into scientific truths: and tend ever towards some final revelation of the secret of life, to flash forth from his own brain when the flesh shall have been subdued, and the imprisoned light of intellect set free. And here Mr. Browning's metaphysical fancy is somewhat at issue with his facts. Paracelsus employed nature in the quest of the supernatural or magical; this is shown by the poem, though in it he begins by repudiating, with all other external aids, the help of the black art. He therefore relied on other kinds of knowledge than that which springs direct from the human mind.

The inconsistency however disappears in Mr. Browning's conception of the case, and the metaphysical language which he imputes to Paracelsus in the earlier stages of his career, is not felt to be untrue.

Paracelsus not only aspires to know: he believes it his mission to acquire knowledge; and he believes also that it is only to be acquired through untried methods, through untaught men: most of all through solitary communion with nature, and at the sacrifice of all human joys.

Festus regards this as a delusion, and combats it, in this first scene, with the arguments of common sense; overshooting the mark just enough to leave his friend the victory. Paracelsus has declared that he appreciates all he is renouncing, but that he has no choice. He knows that the way on which he is about to enter is "trackless;" but so is the bird's: G.o.d will guide him as He guides the bird. And Festus replies that the road to knowledge is _not_ trackless. "Mighty marchers" have left their footprints upon it. Nature has not written her secrets in desert places, but in the souls of great men: the "Stagirite,"[11] and the sages who form a glory round him. He urges Paracelsus to learn what they can teach, and then take the torch of wisdom from the exhausted runner's hand, and let his fresh strength continue the race. He warns him against the personal ambition which alloys his unselfish thirst for knowledge; against the presumption which impels him to serve G.o.d (and man).

"... apart from such Appointed channel as he wills shall gather Imperfect tributes, for that sole obedience Valued perchance...." (vol. ii. p. 17.)

against the dangers of a course which cuts him adrift from human love.

But Paracelsus has his answer ready. "The wisdom of the past has done nothing for mankind. Men have laboured and grown famous: and the evils of life are unabated: the earth still groans in the blind and endless struggle with them. Truth comes from within the human intellect. To KNOW is to have opened a way for its escape--not a way for its admission. It has often refused itself to a life of study. It has been born of loitering idleness. The force which inspires him proves his mission to be authentic. His own will could not create such promptings. He dares not set them aside."

The depth of his conviction carries the day, and the scene ends with these expressive words:--

"_Par._ ...

Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal.

Two points in the adventure of the diver, One--when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge, One--when, a prince, he rises with his pearl?

Festus, I plunge!

_Fest._ We wait you when you rise!"

(vol. ii. p. 38.)

The next two, or indeed three scenes are united under the t.i.tle "Paracelsus attains;" but the attainment is not at first visible. We find him at Constantinople, in the house of the Greek conjuror, nine years after his departure from home. He has not discovered the magical secret which he came to seek; and his tone, as he reviews his position, is full of a bitter and almost despairing sense of failure. His desultory course has borne scanty and confused results. His powers have been at once overstrained and frittered away. He is beset by the dread of madness; and by the fear, scarcely less intolerable, of a moral s.h.i.+pwreck in which even the purity of his motives will disappear. His thoughts revert sadly to his youth, and its lost possibilities of love and joy. At this juncture the poet Aprile appears, and unconsciously reveals to him the secret of his unsuccess. He has sought knowledge at the sacrifice of love; in so doing he has violated a natural law and is suffering for it. Knowledge is inseparable from love in the scheme of life. Aprile too has sinned, but in the opposite manner; he has refused to _know_. He has loved blindly and immoderately, and retribution has overtaken him also: for he is dying. If the one existence has lacked sustaining warmth, the other has burned itself away. Aprile's "Love" is not however restricted to the personal sense of the word; it means the pa.s.sion for beauty, the impulse to possess and to create it; everything which belongs to the life of art. He represents the aesthetic or emotional in life, as Paracelsus represents the intellectual. We see this in the sorrowful confession of Paracelsus:--

"I cannot feed on beauty for the sake Of beauty only, nor can drink in balm From lovely objects for their loveliness;" (vol. ii. p. 95.)

and, in the words already addressed to Aprile (page 65):--

"Are we not halves of one dissevered world,"

Aprile acknowledges his own mistake, in a pa.s.sage which fully completes the moral of the story, and begins thus (page 59):--

"Knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great, Our time so brief,...."

Paracelsus never sees him again, and will speak of him on a subsequent occasion as a madman; but he evidently accepts him as a messenger of the truth; and the message sinks into his soul.

In what is called the third scene, five years more have elapsed; and Paracelsus is at Bale, again opening his heart to his old friend. He is professor at the University. His fame extends far beyond it. Outwardly he has "attained." But the sense of a wasted life, and above all, of moral deterioration, is stronger on him than ever, and the tone in which he expresses it is only calmer than in the previous soliloquy, because it is more hopeless. He has failed in his highest aims--and failed doubly: because he has learned to content himself with low ones. He believes that he is teaching useful, although fragmentary truths; that these may lead to more; that those who follow him may stand on his shoulders and be considered great. But the crowning TRUTH is as far from him as ever; and the ma.s.s of those who crowd his lecture-room do not even come for what they can learn, but for the vulgar pleasure of seeing old beliefs subverted, and old methods exposed. He is humiliated at having declined on to what seems to him a lower range of knowledge; still more by the kind of men with whom it has brought him into contact; and he sees himself sinking into a lower depth, in which such praise as they can give will repay him. His contempt for himself and them is making him reckless of consequences, and preparing the way for his disgrace.

In spite however of his failure Paracelsus has done so much, that Festus is converted; and ready to justify both his early belief in his own mission, and the abnormal means by which he has chosen to carry it out.

Their positions are reversed, and he combats his friend's self-abas.e.m.e.nt as he once combated his too great confidence in himself. He grieves over what seems to him the depression of an over-wrought mind, and what he will not regard as due to any deeper cause. But Paracelsus will take no comfort; and when, finally, he denounces the folly of intellectual pretensions, and ends with the pathetic words--in part the echo of Festus' own:--

"... No, no: Love, hope, fear, faith--these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.

And these I have lost!..." (vol. ii. p. 109.)

Festus has no answer to give. He parts from Paracelsus perplexed and saddened rather than convinced, but with a dawning consciousness of depths in life, to which his strong but simple soul has no key.

In the fourth scene these depths are more fully and more perplexingly revealed. Two years more have elapsed. Paracelsus has escaped from Bale, and is at Colmar, once more confessing himself to Festus, and once more said to "aspire." But his aspirations are less easy to understand than formerly, because their aim is less single. The sense of wasted life, Aprile's warnings, some natural rebound against the continued intellectual strain have determined him to strive for a fuller existence, and neglect no opportunity of usefulness or enjoyment. A serious and commendable change would seem to be denoted by the words, "I have tried each way singly: now for both!" (page 121); and again at page 126, where a new-born softness a.s.serts itself. His language has, however, a vein of bitterness, sometimes even of cynicism, which belies the idea of any sustained impulse to good. He is worn in body, weary in mind, fitful and wayward in mood, and just in the condition in which men half impose on others, and half on themselves. He alludes to the habit of drinking as one which he has now contracted; and he is clearly entering on the period of his greatest excesses, perhaps also of his most strenuous exertions in the cause of knowledge. But his energy is reckless and irregular, and the spirit of the gambler rather than that of the student is in it. He works all night to forget himself by day, gathering up his diminished strength for, a lavish expenditure; and a new misgiving as to the wisdom of his "aspirations" pierces through the a.s.sertion that even sickness may lend an aid; since

"... mind is nothing but disease, And natural health is ignorance." (vol. ii. p. 122.)