_BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE_
_PAULINE AND PARACELSUS_
To isolate Browning's view of Nature, and to leave it behind us, seemed
advisable before speaking of his work as a poet of mankind. We can now
enter freely on that which is most distinctive, most excellent in his
work--his human poetry; and the first thing that meets us and in his
very first poems, is his special view of human nature, and of human
life, and of the relation of both to God. It marks his originality that
this view was entirely his own. Ancient thoughts of course are to be
found in it, but his combination of them is original amongst the English
poets. It marks his genius that he wrought out this conception while he
was yet so young. It is partly shaped in _Pauline_; it is fully set
forth in _Paracelsus_. And it marks his consistency of mind that he
never changed it. I do not think he ever added to it or developed it. It
satisfied him when he was a youth, and when he was an old man. We have
already seen it clearly expressed in the _Prologue_ to _Asolando_.
That theory needs to be outlined, for till it is understood Browning's
poetry cannot be understood or loved as fully as we should desire to
love it. It exists in _Pauline_, but all its elements are in solution;
uncombined, but waiting the electric flash which will mix them, in due
proportions, into a composite substance, having a lucid form, and
capable of being used. That flash was sent through the confused elements
of _Pauline_, and the result was _Paracelsus_.
I will state the theory first, and then, lightly passing through
_Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, re-tell it. It is fitting to apologise for
the repetition which this method of treatment will naturally cause; but,
considering that the theory underlies every drama and poem that he wrote
during sixty years, such repetition does not seem unnecessary. There are
many who do not easily grasp it, or do not grasp it at all, and they may
be grateful. As to those who do understand it, they will be happy in
their anger with any explanation of what they know so well.
He asks what is the secret of the world: "of man and man's true purpose,
path and fate." He proposes to understand "God-and his works and all
God's intercourse with the human soul."
We are here, he thinks, to grow enough to be able to take our part in
another life or lives. But we are surrounded by limitations which baffle
and retard our growth. That is miserable, but not so much as we think;
for the failures these limitations cause prevent us--and this is a main
point in Browning's view--from being content with our condition on the
earth. There is that within us which is always endeavouring to transcend
those limitations, and which believes in their final dispersal. This
aspiration rises to something higher than any possible actual on earth.
It is never worn out; it is the divine in us; and when it seems to
decay, God renews it by spiritual influences from without and within,
coming to us from nature as seen by us, from humanity as felt by us, and
from himself who dwells in us.
But then, unless we find out and submit to those limitations, and work
within them, life is useless, so far as any life is useless. But while
we work within them, we see beyond them an illimitable land, and thirst
for it. This battle between the dire necessity of working in chains and
longing for freedom, between the infinite destiny of the soul and the
baffling of its effort to realise its infinitude on earth, makes the
storm and misery of life. We may try to escape that tempest and sorrow
by determining to think, feel, and act only within our limitations, to
be content with them as Goethe said; but if we do, we are worse off than
before. We have thrown away our divine destiny. If we take this world
and are satisfied with it, cease to aspire, beyond our limits, to full
perfection in God; if our soul should ever say, "I want no more; what I
have here--the pleasure, fame, knowledge, beauty or love of this
world--is all I need or care for," then we are indeed lost. That is the
last damnation. The worst failure, the deepest misery, is better than
contentment with the success of earth; and seen in this light, the
failures and misery of earth are actually good things, the cause of a
chastened joy. They open to us the larger light. They suggest, and in
Browning's belief they proved, that this life is but the threshold of an
infinite life, that our true life is beyond, that there is an infinite
of happiness, of knowledge, of love, of beauty which we shall attain.
Our failures are prophecies of eternal successes. To choose the finite
life is to miss the infinite Life! O fool, to claim the little cup of
water earth's knowledge offers to thy thirst, or the beauty or love of
earth, when the immeasurable waters of the Knowledge, Beauty and Love of
the Eternal Paradise are thine beyond the earth.
Two things are then clear: (1) The attainment of our desires for
perfection, the satisfaction of our passion for the infinite, is
forbidden to us on earth by the limitations of life. We are made
imperfect; we are kept imperfect here; and we must do all our work
within the limits this natural imperfection makes. (2) We must,
nevertheless, not cease to strive towards the perfection unattainable on
earth, but which shall be attained hereafter. Our destiny, the God
within us, demands that. And we lose it, if we are content with our
earthly life, even with its highest things, with knowledge, beauty, or
with love.
Hence, the foundation of Browning's theory is a kind of Original Sin in
us, a natural defectiveness deliberately imposed on us by God, which
prevents us attaining any absolute success on earth. And this
defectiveness of nature is met by the truth, which, while we aspire, we
know--that God will fulfil all noble desire in a life to come.
We must aspire then, but at the same time all aspiring is to be
conterminous with steady work within our limits. Aspiration to the
perfect is not to make us idle, indifferent to the present, but to drive
us on. Its passion teaches us, as it urges into action all our powers,
what we can and what we cannot do. That is, it teaches us, through the
action it engenders, what our limits are; and when we know them, the
main duties of life rise clear. The first of these is, to work patiently
within our limits; and the second is the apparent contradiction of the
first, never to be satisfied with our limits, or with the results we
attain within them. Then, having worked within them, but always looked
beyond them, we, as life closes, learn the secret. The failures of earth
prove the victory beyond: "For--
what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonised?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear.
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and the woe:
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason, and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."
_Abt Vogler_.
Finally, the root and flower of this patient but uncontented work is
Love for man because of his being in God, because of his high and
immortal destiny. All that we do, whether failure or not, builds up the
perfect humanity to come, and flows into the perfection of God in whom
is the perfection of man. This love, grounded on this faith, brings joy
into life; and, in this joy of love, we enter into the eternal temple of
the Life to come. Love opens Heaven while Earth closes us round. At last
limitations cease to trouble us. They are lost in the vision, they
bring no more sorrow, doubt or baffling. Therefore, in this confused
chaotic time on earth--
Earn the means first. God surely will contrive
Use for our earning.
Others mistrust, and say: "But time escapes;
Live now or never!"
He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever."
_A Grammarian's Funeral_.
This is a sketch of his explanation of life. The expression of it began
in _Pauline_. Had that poem been as imitative, as poor as the first
efforts of poets usually are, we might leave it aside. But though, as he
said, "good draughtsmanship and right handling were far beyond the
artist at that time," though "with repugnance and purely of necessity"
he republished it, he did republish it; and he was right. It was crude
and confused, but the stuff in it was original and poetic; wonderful
stuff for a young man.
The first design of it was huge. _Pauline_ is but a fragment of a poem
which was to represent, not one but various types of human life. It
became only the presentation of the type of the poet, the first sketch
of the youth of Sordello. The other types conceived were worked up into
other poems.
The hero in _Pauline_ hides in his love for Pauline from a past he
longed to forget. He had aspired to the absolute beauty and goodness,
and the end was vanity and vexation. The shame of this failure beset him
from the past, and the failure was caused because he had not been true
to the aspirations which took him beyond himself. When he returned to
self, the glory departed. And a fine simile of his soul as a young witch
whose blue eyes,
As she stood naked by the river springs,
Drew down a God,
who, as he sat in the sunshine on her knees singing of heaven, saw the
mockery in her eyes and vanished, tells of how the early ravishment
departed, slain by self-scorn that followed on self-worship. But one
love and reverence remained--that for Shelley, the Sun-treader, and kept
him from being "wholly lost." To strengthen this one self-forgetful
element, the love of Pauline enters in, and the new impulse brings back
something of the ancient joy. "Let me take it," he cries, "and sing on
again
fast as fancies come;
Rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints,"--
a line which tells us how Browning wished his metrical movement to be
judged. This is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of
life--the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the
necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse to love arising out of
the despair; failure making fresh growth, fresh uncontentment. God has
sent a new impulse from without; let me begin again.
Then, in the new light, he strips his mind bare. What am I? What have I
done? Where am I going?
The first element in his soul, he thinks, is a living personality,
linked to a principle of restlessness,
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.
And this would plunge him into the depths of self were it not for that
Imagination in him whose power never fails to bear him beyond himself;
and is finally in him a need, a trust, a yearning after God; whom, even
when he is most lost, he feels is always acting on him, and at every
point of life transcending him.
And Imagination began to create, and made him at one with all men and
women of whom he had read (the same motive is repeated in _Sordello_),
but especially at one with those out of the Greek world he loved--"a God
wandering after Beauty"--a high-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.
Never was anything more clear than these lives he lived beyond himself;
and the lines in which he records the vision have all the sharpness and
beauty of his after-work--
I had not seen a work of lofty art.
Nor woman's beauty nor sweet Nature's face,
Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim-clustered isles in the blue sea,
The deep groves and white temples and wet caves:
And nothing ever will surprise me now--
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair.
Yet, having this infinite world of beauty, he aimed low; lost in
immediate wants, striving only for the mortal and the possible, while
all the time there lived in him, breathing with keen desire, powers
which, developed, would make him at one with the infinite Life of God.
But having thus been untrue to his early aspiration, he fell into the
sensual life, like Paracelsus, and then, remorseful, sought peace in
self-restraint; but no rest, no contentment was gained that way. It is
one of Browning's root-ideas that peace is not won by repression of the
noble passions, but by letting them loose in full freedom to pursue
after their highest aims. Not in restraint, but in the conscious
impetuosity of the soul towards the divine realities, is the wisdom of
life. Many poems are consecrated to this idea.
So, cleansing his soul by ennobling desire, he sought to realise his
dreams in the arts, in the creation and expression of pure Beauty. And
he followed Poetry and Music and Painting, and chiefly explored passion
and mind in the great poets. Fed at these deep springs, his soul rose
into keen life; his powers burst forth, and gazing on all systems and
schemes of philosophy and government, he heard ineffable things
unguessed by man. All Plato entered into him; he vowed himself to
liberty and the new world where "men were to be as gods and earth us
heaven." Thus, yet here on earth, not only beyond the earth, he would
attain the Perfect. Man also shall attain it; and so thinking, he
turned, like Sordello, to look at and learn mankind, pondering "how best
life's end might be attained--an end comprising every joy."
And even as he believed, the glory vanished; everything he had hoped for
broke to pieces:
First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,
Next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self
And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends
And aims and loves, and human love went last.
And then, with the loss of all these things of the soul which bear a
man's desires into the invisible and unreachable, he gained the world,
and success in it. All the powers of the mere Intellect, that
grey-haired deceiver whose name is Archimago, were his;--wit, mockery,
analytic force, keen reasoning on the visible, the Understanding's
absolute belief in itself; its close grasp on what it called facts, and
its clear application of knowledge for clear ends. God, too, had
vanished in this intellectual satisfaction; and in the temple of his
soul, where He had been worshipped, troops of shadows now knelt to the
man whose intellect, having grasped all knowledge, was content; and
hailed him as king.
The position he describes is like that Wordsworth states in the
_Prelude_ to have been his, when, after the vanishing of his aspirations
for man which followed the imperialistic fiasco of the French
Revolution, he found himself without love or hope, but with full power
to make an intellectual analysis of nature and of human nature, and was
destroyed thereby. It is the same position which Paracelsus attains and
which is followed by the same ruin. It is also, so far as its results
are concerned, the position of the Soul described by Tennyson in _The
Palace of Art_.
Love, emotion, God are shut out. Intellect and knowledge of the world's
work take their place. And the result is the slow corrosion of the soul
by pride. "I have nursed up energies," says Browning, "they will prey on
me." He feels this and breaks away from its death. "My heart must
worship," he cries. The "shadows" know this feeling is against them, and
they shout in answer:
"Thyself, thou art our king!"
But the end of that is misery. Therefore he begins to aspire again, but
still, not for the infinite of perfection beyond, but for a finite
perfection on, the earth.
"I will make every joy here my own," he cries, "and then I will die." "I
will have one rapture to fill all the soul." "All knowledge shall be
mine." It is the aspiration of Paracelsus. "I will live in the whole of
Beauty, and here it shall be mine." It is the aspiration of Aprile.
"Then, having this perfect human soul, master of all powers, I shall
break forth, at some great crisis in history, and lead the world." It is
the very aspiration of Sordello.
But when he tries for this, he finds failure at every point. Everywhere
he is limited; his soul demands what his body refuses to fulfil; he is
always baffled, falling short, chained down and maddened by
restrictions; unable to use what he conceives, to grasp as a tool what
he can reach in Thought; hating himself; imagining what might be, and
driven back from it in despair.
Even in his love for Pauline, in which he has skirted the infinite and
known that his soul cannot accept finality--he finds that in him which
is still unsatisfied.
What does this puzzle mean? "It means," he answers, "that this earth's
life is not my only sphere,
Can I so narrow sense but that in life
Soul still exceeds it?"
Yet, he will try again. He has lived in all human life, and his craving
is still athirst. He has not yet tried Nature herself. She seems to
have undying beauty, and his feeling for her is now, of course, doubled
by his love for Pauline. "Come with me," he cries to her, "come out of
the world into natural beauty"; and there follows a noble description of
a lovely country into which he passes from a mountain glen--morning,
noon, afternoon and evening all described--and the emotion of the whole
rises till it reaches the topmost height of eagerness and joy, when,
suddenly, the whole fire is extinguished--
I am concentrated--I feel;
But my soul saddens when it looks beyond:
I cannot be immortal, taste all joy.
O God, where do they tend--these struggling aims?
What would I have? What is this "sleep" which seems
To bound all? Can there be a "waking" point
Of crowning life?
* * *
And what is that I hunger for but God?
So, having worked towards perfection, having realised that he cannot
have it here, he sees at last that the failures of earth are a prophecy
of a perfection to come. He claims the infinite beyond. "I believe," he
cries, "in God and truth and love. Know my last state is happy, free
from doubt or touch of fear."
That is Browning all over. These are the motives of a crowd of poems,
varied through a crowd of examples; never better shaped than in the
trenchant and magnificent end of _Easter-Day_, where the questions and
answers are like the flashing and clashing of sharp scimitars. Out of
the same quarry from which _Pauline_ was hewn the rest were hewn. They
are polished, richly sculptured, hammered into fair form, but the stone
is the same. Few have been so consistent as Browning, few so true to
their early inspiration. He is among those happy warriors
Who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, have wrought
Upon the plan that pleased their boyish thought.
This, then, is _Pauline_; I pass on to _Paracelsus_. _Paracelsus_, in
order to give the poem a little local colour, opens at Würzburg in a
garden, and in the year 1512. But it is not a poem which has to do with
any place or any time. It belongs only to the country of the human soul.
The young student Paracelsus is sitting with his friends Festus and
Michal, on the eve of his departure to conquer the whole world by
knowledge. They make a last effort to retain him, but even as he listens
to their arguments his eyes are far away--
As if where'er he gazed there stood a star,
so strong, so deep is desire to attain his aim.
For Paracelsus aims to know the whole of knowledge. Quiet and its
charms, this homelike garden of still work, make their appeal in vain.
"God has called me," he cries; "these burning desires to know all are
his voice in me; and if I stay and plod on here, I reject his call who
has marked me from mankind. I must reach pure knowledge. That is my only
aim, my only reward."
Then Festus replies: "In this solitariness of aim, all other interests
of humanity are left out. Will knowledge, alone, give you enough for
life? You, a man!" And again: "You discern your purpose clearly; have
you any security of attaining it? Is it not more than mortal power is
capable of winning?" Or again: "Have you any knowledge of the path to
knowledge?" Or, once more, "Is anything in your mind so clear as this,
your own desire to be singly famous?"
"All this is nothing," Paracelsus answers; "the restless force within me
will overcome all difficulties. God does not give that fierce energy
without giving also that which it desires. And, I am chosen out of all
the world to win this glory."
"Why not then," says Festus, "make use of knowledge already gained? Work
here; what knowledge will you gain in deserts?"
"I have tried all the knowledge of the past," Paracelsus replies, "and
found it a contemptible failure. Others were content with the scraps
they won. Not I! I want the whole; the source and sum of divine and
human knowledge, and though I craze as even one truth expands its
infinitude before me, I go forth alone, rejecting all that others have
done, to prove my own soul. I shall arrive at last. And as to mankind,
in winning perfect knowledge I shall serve them; but then, all
intercourse ends between them and me. I will not be served by those I
serve."
"Oh," answers Festus, "is that cause safe which produces carelessness of
human love? You have thrown aside all the helps of human knowledge; now
you reject all sympathy. No man can thrive who dares to claim to serve
the race, while he is bound by no single tie to the race. You would be a
being knowing not what Love is--a monstrous spectacle!"
"That may be true," Paracelsus replies, "but for the time I will have
nothing to do with feeling. My affections shall remain at rest, and
then, _when_ I have attained my single aim, when knowledge is all mine,
my affections will awaken purified and chastened by my knowledge. Let
me, unhampered by sympathy, win my victory. And I go forth certain of
victory."
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!
FESTUS. We wait you when you rise.
So ends the first part, and the second opens ten years afterwards in a
Greek Conjurer's house in Constantinople, with Paracelsus writing down
the result of his work. And the result is this:
"I have made a few discoveries, but I could not stay to use them. Nought
remains but a ceaseless, hungry pressing forward, a vision now and then
of truth; and I--I am old before my hour: the adage is true--
Time fleets, youth fades, life is an empty dream;
and now I would give a world to rest, even in failure!
"This is all my gain. Was it for this," he cries, "I subdued my life,
lost my youth, rooted out love; for the sake of this wolfish thirst of
knowledge?" No dog, said Faust, in Goethe's poem, driven to the same
point by the weariness of knowledge, no dog would longer live this life.
My tyrant aim has brought me into a desert; worse still, the purity of
my aim is lost. Can I truly say that I have worked for man alone? Sadder
still, if I had found that which I sought, should I have had power to
use it? O God, Thou who art pure mind, spare my mind. Thus far, I have
been a man. Let me conclude, a man! Give me back one hour of my young
energy, that I may use and finish what I know.
"And God is good: I started sure of that; and he may still renew my
heart.
True, I am worn;
But who clothes summer, who is life itself?
God, that created all things, can renew!"
At this moment the voice of Aprile is heard singing the song of the
poets, who, having great gifts, refused to use them, or abused them, or
were too weak; and who therefore live apart from God, mourning for ever;
who gaze on life, but live no more. He breaks in on Paracelsus, and, in
a long passage of overlapping thoughts, Aprile--who would love
infinitely and be loved, aspiring to realise every form of love, as
Paracelsus has aspired to realise the whole of knowledge--makes
Paracelsus feel that love is what he wants. And then, when Paracelsus
realises this, Aprile in turn realises that he wants knowledge. Each
recognises that he is the complement of the other, that knowledge is
worthless without love, and love incapable of realising its aspirations
without knowledge--as if love did not contain the sum of knowledge
necessary for fine being. Both have failed; and it seems, at first, that
they failed because they did not combine their aims. But the chief
reason of their failure--and this is, indeed, Browning's main point--is
that each of them tried to do more than our limits on earth permit.
Paracelsus would have the whole sum of knowledge, Aprile nothing less
than the whole of love, and, in this world. It is impossible; yet, were
it possible, could they have attained the sum of knowledge and of love
on earth and been satisfied therewith, they would have shut out the
infinite of knowledge and love beyond them in the divine land, and been,
in their satisfaction, more hopelessly lost than they are in their
present wretchedness. Failure that leaves an unreached ideal before the
soul is in reality a greater boon than success which thinks perfect
satisfaction has been reached. Their aim at perfection is right: what is
wrong is their view that failure is ruin, and not a prophecy of a
greater glory to come. Could they have thought perfection were attained
on earth--were they satisfied with anything this world can give, no
longer stung with hunger for the infinite--all Paradise, with the
illimitable glories, were closed to them!
Few passages are more beautiful in English poetry than that in which
Aprile narrates his youthful aspiration: how, loving all things
infinitely, he wished to throw them into absolute beauty of form by
means of all the arts, for the love of men, and receive from men love
for having revealed beauty, and merge at last in God, the Eternal Love.
This was his huge aim, his full desire.
Few passages are more pathetic than that in which he tells his failure
and its cause. "Time is short; the means of life are limited; we have
no means answering to our desires. Now I am wrecked; for the
multitudinous images of beauty which filled my mind forbade my seizing
upon one which I could have shaped. I often wished to give one to the
world, but the others came round and baffled me; and, moreover, I could
not leave the multitude of beauty for the sake of one beauty. Unless I
could embody all I would embody none.
"And, afterwards, when a cry came from man, 'Give one ray even of your
hoarded light to us,' and I tried for man's sake to select one, why,
then, mists came--old memories of a thousand sweetnesses, a storm of
images--till it was impossible to choose; and so I failed, and life is
ended.
"But could I live I would do otherwise. I would give a trifle out of
beauty, as an example by which men could guess the rest and love it all;
one strain from an angel's song; one flower from the distant land, that
men might know that such things were. Then, too, I would put common life
into loveliness, so that the lowest hind would find me beside him to put
his weakest hope and fear into noble language. And as I thus lived with
men, and for them, I should win from them thoughts fitted for their
progress, the very commonest of which would come forth in beauty, for
they would have been born in a soul filled full of love. This should now
be my aim: no longer that desire to embrace the whole of beauty which
isolates a man from his fellows; but to realise enough of loveliness to
give pleasure to men who desire to love. Therefore, I should live, still
aspiring to the whole, still uncontent, but waiting for another life to
gain the whole; but at the same time content, for man's sake, to work
within the limitations of life; not grieving either for failure, because
love given and received makes failure pleasure. In truth, the failure to
grasp all on earth makes, if we love, the certainty of a success beyond
the earth."
And Paracelsus listening and applying what Aprile says to his old desire
to grasp, apart from men, the whole of knowledge as Aprile had desired
to grasp the whole of love, learns the truth at last, and confesses it:
Love me henceforth, Aprile, while I learn
To love; and, merciful God, forgive us both!
We wake at length from weary dreams; but both
Have slept in fairy-land: though dark and drear
Appears the world before us, we no less
Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still.
I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE--
Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge.
We are halves of a dissevered world, and we must never part till the
Knower love, and thou, the Lover, know, and both are saved.
"No, no; that is not all," Aprile answers, and dies. "Our perfection is
not in ourselves but in God. Not our strength, but our weakness is our
glory. Not in union with me, with earthly love alone, will you find the
perfect life. I am not that you seek. It is God the King of Love, his
world beyond, and the infinite creations Love makes in it."
But Paracelsus does not grasp that last conclusion. He only understands
that he has left out love in his aim, and therefore failed. He does not
give up the notion of attainment upon earth. He cannot lose the first
imprint of his idea of himself--his lonely grasp of the whole of
Knowledge.
The next two parts of the poem do not strengthen much the main
thoughts. Paracelsus tries to work out the lesson learnt from Aprile--to
add love to knowledge, to aspire to that fulness in God. But he does not
love enough. He despises those who follow him for the sake of his
miracles, yet he desires their worship. Moreover, the pride of knowledge
still clings to him; he cannot help thinking it higher than love; and
the two together drive him into the thought that this world must give
him satisfaction. So, he puts aside the ideal aim. But here also he is
baffled. Those who follow him as the great teacher ask of him signs. He
gives these; and he finds at Basel that he has sunk into the desire of
vulgar fame, and prostituted his knowledge; and, sick of this, beaten
back from his noble ambitions, he determines to have something at least
out of earth, and chooses at Colmar the life of sensual pleasure. "I
still aspire," he cries. "I will give the night to study, but I will
keep the day for the enjoyment of the senses. Thus, intellect and sense
woven together, I shall at least have attained something. If I do not
gain knowledge I shall have gained sensual pleasure. Man I despise and
hate, and God has deceived me. I take the world." But, even while he
says this, his ancient aspiration lives so much in him that he scorns
himself for his fall as much as he scorns the crowd.
Then comes the last scene, when, at Salzburg, he returns to find his
friend Festus, and to die. In the hour of his death he reviews his whole
life, his aims, their failure and the reason of it, and yet dies
triumphant for he has found the truth.
I pass over the pathetic delirium in which Paracelsus thinks that
Aprile is present, and cries for his hand and sympathy while Festus is
watching by the couch. At last he wakes, and knows his friend, and that
he is dying. "I am happy," he cries; "my foot is on the threshold of
boundless life; I see the whole whirl and hurricane of life behind me;
all my life passes by, and I know its purpose, to what end it has
brought me, and whither I am going. I will tell you all the meaning of
life. Festus, my friend, tell it to the world.
"There was a time when I was happy; the secret of life was in that
happiness." "When, when was that?" answers Festus, "all I hope that
answer will decide."
PAR. When, but the time I vowed myself to man?
FEST. Great God, thy judgments are inscrutable!
Then he explains. "There are men, so majestical is our nature, who,
hungry for joy and truth, win more and more of both, and know that life
is infinite progress in God. This they win by long and slow battle. But
there are those, of whom I was one"--and here Browning draws the man of
genius--"who are born at the very point to which these others, the men
of talent, have painfully attained. By intuition genius knows, and I
knew at once, what God is, what we are, what life is. Alas! I could not
use the knowledge aright. There is an answer to the passionate longings
of the heart for fulness, and I knew it. And the answer is this: Live in
all things outside of yourself by love and you will have joy. That is
the life of God; it ought to be our life. In him it is accomplished and
perfect; but in all created things it is a lesson learned slowly
against difficulty.
"Thus I knew the truth, but I was led away from it. I broke down from
thinking of myself, my fame, and of this world. I had not love enough,
and I lost the truth for a time. But whatever my failures were, I never
lost sight of it altogether. I never was content with myself or with the
earth. Out of my misery I cried for the joy God has in living outside of
himself in love of all things."
Then, thrilled with this thought, he breaks forth into a most noble
description--new in English poetry, new in feeling and in thought,
enough of itself to lift Browning on to his lofty peak--first of the joy
of God in the Universe he makes incessantly by pouring out of himself
his life, and, secondly, of the joy of all things in God. "Where dwells
enjoyment there is He." But every realised enjoyment looks forward, even
in God, to a new and higher sphere of distant glory, and when that is
reached, to another sphere beyond--
thus climbs
Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever.
Creation is God's joyous self-giving. The building of the frame of earth
was God's first joy in Earth. That made him conceive a greater joy--the
joy of clothing the earth, of making life therein--of the love which in
animals, and last in man, multiplies life for ever.
So there is progress of all things to man, and all created things before
his coming have--in beauty, in power, in knowledge, in dim shapes of
love and trust in the animals--had prophecies of him which man has
realised, hints and previsions, dimly picturing the higher race, till
man appeared at last, and one stage of being was complete. But the law
of progress does not cease now man has come. None of his faculties are
perfect. They also by their imperfection suggest a further life, in
which as all that was unfinished in the animals suggested man, so also
that which is unfinished in us suggests ourselves in higher place and
form. Man's self is not yet Man.
We learn this not only from our own boundless desires for higher life,
and from our sense of imperfection. We learn it also when we look back
on the whole of nature that was before we were. We illustrate and
illuminate all that has been. Nature is humanised, spiritualised by us.
We have imprinted ourselves on all things; and this, as we realise it,
as we give thought and passion to lifeless nature, makes us understand
how great we are, and how much greater we are bound to be. We are the
end of nature but not the end of ourselves. We learn the same truth when
among us the few men of genius appear; stars in the darkness. We do not
say--These stand alone; we never can become as they. On the contrary, we
cry: All are to be what these are, and more. They longed for more, and
we and they shall have it. All shall be perfected; and then, and not
till then, begins the new age and the new life, new progress and new
joy. This is the ultimate truth.
"And as in inferior creatures there were prognostics of man--and here
Browning repeats himself--so in man there are prognostics of the future
and loftier humanity.
August anticipations, symbols, types
Of a dim splendour ever on before
In that eternal cycle life pursues.
For men begin to pass their nature's bound--
ceaselessly outgrowing themselves in history, and in the individual
life--and some, passionately aspiring, run ahead of even the general
tendency, and conceive the very highest, and live to reveal it, and in
revealing it lift and save those who do not conceive it.
"I, Paracelsus," he cries--and now Browning repeats the whole argument
of the poem--"was one of these. To do this I vowed myself, soul and
limb.
"But I mistook my means, I took the wrong path, led away by pride. I
gazed on power alone, and on power won by knowledge alone. This I
thought was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be won, at once
and in the present, without any care for all that man had already done.
I rejected all the past. I despised it as a record of weakness and
disgrace. Man should be all-sufficient now; a single day should bring
him to maturity. He has power to reach the whole of knowledge at one
leap.
"In that, I mistook the conditions of life. I did not see our barriers;
nor that progress is slow; nor that every step of the past is necessary
to know and to remember; nor that, in the shade of the past, the present
stands forth bright; nor that the future is not to be all at once, but
to dawn on us, in zone after zone of quiet progress. I strove to laugh
down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest things broke me
down--me, who tried to realise the impossible on earth. At last I knew
that the power I sought was only God's, and then I prayed to die. All my
life was failure.
"At this crisis I met Aprile, and learned my deep mistake. I had left
love out; and love and knowledge, and power through knowledge, must go
together. And Aprile had also failed, for he had sought love and
rejected knowledge. Life can only move when both are hand in hand:
love preceding
Power, and with much power, always much more love:
Love still too straitened in its present means,
And earnest for new power to set love free.
I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned.
"But to learn it, and to fulfil it, are two different things. I taught
the simple truth, but men would not have it. They sought the complex,
the sensational, the knowledge which amazed them. And for this knowledge
they praised me. I loathed and despised their praise; and when I would
not give them more of the signs and wonders I first gave them, they
avenged themselves by casting shame on my real knowledge. Then I was
tempted, and became the charlatan; and yet despised myself for seeking
man's praise for that which was most contemptible in me. Then I sought
for wild pleasure in the senses, and I hated myself still more. And
hating myself I came to hate men; and then all that Aprile taught to me
was lost.
"But now I know that I did not love enough to trace beneath the hate of
men their love. I did not love enough to see in their follies the grain
of divine wisdom.
To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill-success; to sympathise, be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts;
All with a touch of nobleness, despite
Their error, upward tending all though weak.
"I did not see this, I did not love enough to see this, and I failed.
"Therefore let men regard me, who rashly longed to know all for power's
sake; and regard Aprile, the poet, who rashly longed for the whole of
love for beauty's sake--and regarding both, shape forth a third and
better-tempered spirit, in whom beauty and knowledge, love and power,
shall mingle into one, and lead Man up to God, in whom all these four
are One. In God alone is the goal.
"Meanwhile I die in peace, secure of attainment. What I have failed in
here I shall attain there. I have never, in my basest hours, ceased to
aspire; God will fulfil my aspiration:
If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud.
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.
You understand me? I have said enough?
Aprile! Hand in hand with you, Aprile!"
And so he dies.
* * * * *