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BROWNING'S 
 MESSAGE TO HIS TIME 
 
 His Religion, Philosophy, and Science. 
 
 EDWARD BERDOE, 
 
 MEMBER OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS OF ENGLAND : ^ 
 LICENTIATE OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS (EDINBURGH) 
 MEMBER OF THE BRITISH MEDICAL ASSOCIATION ; 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
 "As the eyes of Lynceus were said to see through the earth, so the poet 
 turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and pro- 
 cession. For through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, 
 and sees the flowing or metamorphosis. . . . The poet alone knows astronomy, 
 chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these fact-e, but em- 
 ploys them as signs."— Emerson : The Poet. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 
 
 J 890. 
 
Butler & Tanner, 
 
 The Selwood Printing Works, 
 
 Frome, and London. 
 
 LOAN STACX 
 
 Ajuj, 0-^. /M>, MAo<]33-l 
 
# 
 
 mo 
 
 FRANCES POWER COBBE 
 
 IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION 
 
 OF HER 
 
 UNWEARYING EFFORTS 
 
 IN THE CAUSE OF THE HIGHER HUMANITY 
 
 SO CONSISTENTLY ADVOCATED 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 London, 1890. 
 
 767 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction . 
 
 Browning's Message to his Time 
 Th'e Religion of Robert Browning . 
 Browning as a Scientific Poet 
 Browning's Science . . . . , 
 Paracelsus : The Reformer of Medicine 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra 
 
 Browning and Vivisection .... 
 The Browning Society . . . 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 37 
 
 71 
 
 128 
 
 145 
 193 
 214 
 221 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 As I stood by the grave of Mr. Browning in 
 the Abbey crowded with representative men 
 and women famous in Art, in Science, and in 
 Letters, when he was honoured by the nation in 
 being voted by acclamation a place amongst our 
 immortals, and welcomed, as it seemed to most 
 of us, I think, who were present on that grand 
 and solemn occasion by his peers who seemed 
 to look down approvingly from their sculptured 
 tombs, I thought of all the hard things the 
 thoughtless world had been saying of the great 
 poet these many years, and how late in coming 
 were the recognition and honours which cul- 
 minated in the pomp and dignified ceremony 
 of that day, and I mused on the lines in his 
 Paracelsus, where the hero says so sadly, — 
 
 " 'Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels 
 Reveal themselves to you ; they sit all day 
 Beside you, and lie down at night by you 
 Who care not for their presence, muse or sleep, 
 And all at once they leave you and you know them ! 
 We are so fooled, so cheated ! " 
 R. B. B 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 We have indeed been fooled and cheated out 
 of our rights in Browning's noble verse all these 
 long years. We have permitted wretched 
 scribes, who had no sympathy either with the 
 motive, the method, or the genius of the poet, 
 to tell us, — we were too indolent to see for our- 
 selves, — that this man's work was not poetry at 
 all, — actually took a miserable creature's word, 
 who wrote of Bells and Pomegranates the 
 single critical assertion, '' rubbish ! " and let 
 him write on, nothing heeding, the bravest, 
 most bracing and virile body of literature that 
 has emanated from any English author since 
 Shakespeare. Now we are finding out our 
 mistake, and it is to be feared that our last 
 state will be worse than our first. Browning 
 will become fashionable, everybody will, read 
 him, everybody praise him ; and this will be 
 as uncritical and false as was the previous 
 neglect and contumely. 
 
 Several years ago a speaker at one of the 
 meetings of the Browning Society said that 
 " the students of Browning would find imme- 
 diate profit in his works, though those who 
 only read him for amusement would usually 
 be disappointed. He was not anxious to see 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Browning * popular ' In the vulgar sense. In 
 the nature of things he never could be popular 
 with the mere reader w^ho does not care to 
 exercise his brains. But if a student would 
 invest thought in his work, he would be a 
 thousand-fold repaid for his venture. What 
 he dreaded was an affectation of admiring 
 Browning without an effort to understand him." 
 The affectation will come soon. It will be idle 
 to maintain that Browning presents no diffi- 
 culties to his readers ; it is, however, still more 
 idle to affirm, as some do, that he is purposely 
 obscure. He does require study, but he will 
 repay it abundantly, which is a great deal more 
 than can be said of many things which occupy 
 intelligent minds. " Lofty mountains," as has 
 been well said, '* enshroud their heads with 
 clouds " ; and if Browning is often obscure, it 
 must be conceded that his subjects are usually 
 concerned with the deepest problems which 
 agitate the human mind. It is not possible to 
 follow the intricate windings of the human 
 heart in the phraseology and methods which 
 suffice for the ballad, the epic, or the drama of 
 mere action. Browning is always subjective, 
 and probably will never appeal to any great 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 extent except to the class of mind which 
 delights in the analysis of our motives. 
 
 Of course this class will gradually widen, for 
 the analysis of human nature and the search 
 after the hidden springs of conduct will grow 
 with the improvement in our methods of educa- 
 tion. The fact is, Browning is in advance of 
 his age ; but there are some to whom this will 
 be no objection. He will prove most useful to 
 the large class of thinkers who have broken 
 away from dogmatic Christianity on account 
 of supposed scientific difficulties which stand 
 in the way of their unqualified acceptance. 
 Browning is not only a Theistic poet, but he 
 is a Christian. No Church can label him and 
 pack him away in its cabinet ; but for all 
 that his works bear abundant testimony that 
 the great doctrines of the Christian faith were 
 heartily accepted by him, and accepted upon 
 grounds which seem to many to be more satis- 
 factory than those on which they are generally 
 presented by theologians. He nfever asks his 
 readers to shut their eyes and open their 
 mouths; he always says, "Open your eyes, look, 
 see why this is. How good it is that it should 
 be just this way ! " ** A scientific faith," of 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 course, as he says, *' Is absurd " ; but he gives 
 us so much reasonableness for our belief, that 
 it is in some cases stronger than would be mere 
 cold mathematical proofs, if it were possible to 
 obtain such. So catholic were the great poet's 
 sympathies, so all embracing his love for every 
 earnest endeavour after truth and righteous- 
 ness, that some narrow-minded Christians, as 
 they could not encircle him within their con- 
 tracted boundaries, have not scrupled to doubt 
 his Christianity. On the other hand, many 
 non-theists profess to find evidence in some 
 passages of his works that the real Browning 
 was not a believer himself, but only spoke 
 dramatically when uttering Christian arguments. 
 Candidly, I must say that I do not believe 
 Browning was enough of a dramatist to escape 
 from himself in any of his poems ; and as every 
 one of his characters talks Browning, It follows 
 that a good many Browning thoughts find 
 expression in his works. I have quoted in the 
 following pages passages enough to prove this 
 to all except very hardened theorists. But I 
 have even stronger proof of my contention. Mr. 
 Browning's books had been of such service to 
 my own mind, that I once wrote to acquaint 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 him with the fact, when I received the follow- 
 ing letter : — 
 
 ** 19, Warwick Crescent, W. 
 ''Jan. i2tk, '85. 
 *' Dear Dr. Berdoe, — 
 
 *' What can I hope to say in return for such 
 sympathy and generous desire to take in the 
 case of my endeavours in poetry — the will for 
 the deed ? I am rewarded over and over 
 again a hundred-fold for whatever pains I have 
 taken by — were it only one — such testimony to 
 their result as goodness like yours chooses to 
 estimate it. All I require acknowledgment for 
 is simply that I have aspired to give effect to 
 my own convictions, and would prefer success 
 in that direction to any other. For your help 
 in this respect, pray believe me, 
 *• Dear Dr. Berdoe, 
 
 '' Yours gratefully ever, 
 
 '' Robert Browning." 
 
 If the young men and women of the present 
 day who think that the old religion which 
 nurtured and sustained their parents is no 
 longer adapted to folks who have attended 
 courses of science lectures and taken degrees 
 
l9.Wapwielc Crescent. 
 
 44^i^ MnU^ J^ZC^frcY hcou/it Hi. /Jutt (>k4l 0{cif)iy ^ 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 in arts, could be induced to extend their studies 
 so far as to honour our poet, with a few months' 
 attention, I venture to think, they must ulti- 
 mately at least admit that Christianity has 
 something to say for itself after all, and even 
 that it is not absolutely inconsistent with a 
 science degree to yield obedience to its claims. 
 Our young people, I believe, have given up 
 saying,— 
 
 *' Twinkle, twinkle, little star ! 
 How I wonder what you are ! " 
 
 Since astronomy and spectroscopic chemistry 
 have become popularized, I am told they say 
 now, — 
 
 " Twinkle, twinkle, little star ! 
 I don't wonder what you are ! 
 What you are I know quite well. 
 And your component parts can tell ! " 
 
 These are the sort of persons who would be 
 vastly improved by a course of Browning ; and 
 my only feeling of complacency in the advent 
 of the Browning fashion is connected with the 
 conviction that some of these clever young 
 ladies and gentlemen will, before long, have to 
 discover how little they really know after all. 
 With the exception of one essay in this 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 volume — that on Rabbi Ben Ezra — the various 
 articles were originally read as papers before 
 the Browning Society, or delivered as lectures 
 to larger audiences. This will account for a 
 phraseology and style which in many places is 
 obviously that of the platform. 
 
 I trust I shall not be accused of presumption 
 in offering to a wider public than that for which 
 the following papers were originally intended 
 my thoughts about Mr. Browning's works ; but 
 I am impressed with the hope that they may 
 lead some troubled spirits to reconsider their 
 attitude towards the great truths of religion, 
 and to find rest for the weariness of their 
 souls in a return to the faith which is as true 
 and as necessary for the man of science as for 
 the child at its mother's knee. 
 
 In several places it will be noticed that there 
 is some slight overlapping in the various papers, 
 and a thought or quotation is now and again 
 repeated. It was not desirable to break the 
 continuity of the thought by excising such pas- 
 sages, especially as they generally present the 
 recurring idea in a slightly different form. 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 As this nineteenth century draws to Its close, 
 while the struggle between faith and scepticism 
 has passed into the acute stage ; while our 
 philosophers and men of science chant peans 
 over the downfall of creeds and superstitions, 
 and hail with shouts of joyful anticipation the 
 coming of the age of science ; while the founda- 
 tions of orthodoxy are being undermined by 
 criticism and the study of comparative religions ; 
 there are not a few anxious souls, who amid all 
 this destruction are eagerly asking : *' What is 
 to take the place of the banished faith ? What 
 are we going to write on the tabula rasa the 
 end of the century will have left us ? How are 
 we going to teach our children ? How rule 
 the people ? Is the moral law Divine, and are 
 its sanctions eternal ? or may we change our 
 ideas of what is right and wrong, as a railway 
 company varies its bye-laws ? " 
 
 A sad picture has been drawn in a recent 
 review of a possible ''faithless world," with its 
 
lo BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 " belittling of life," and its gospel of despair. 
 It has been said the picture is an impossible 
 one ; but those who have studied the question 
 most deeply seem to think it will sooner or 
 later be realized in fact. In the beautiful words 
 of Matthew Arnold, — 
 
 "The sea of faith 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled ; 
 But now I only hear 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
 Retreating, to the breath 
 Of the night wind, down the vast edge's drear 
 And naked shingles of the world." 
 
 " Go into a London club, listen to the talk of 
 men of the world on moral questions, and see 
 how little of earnest faith in any moral law is 
 left among them. Compare the talk with 
 what it was twenty-five years ago. Then it 
 was an offence to affect doubt of any funda- 
 mental principle of orthodoxy. To express 
 unbelief was to invite insult ; to assume that 
 your neighbour could be anything but an or- 
 thodox Christian was to affront him. Now-a- 
 days even conservative society rather patronizes 
 religion than believes in it, and a similar scep- 
 ticism prevails on points of morality. A man 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. ii 
 
 may to-day affirm that marriage is an ab- 
 surdity, may challenge the first principles of 
 social order, might have defended murder till 
 the assassinations committed by Land Leaguers 
 and Nihilists frightened society Into a passion 
 on that subject, — may argue against any of the 
 ten commandments, and will be answered in 
 almost equal terms." 
 
 Such is the indictment against our time 
 which a recent essayist puts into the mouth 
 of one of his characters In a controversy on 
 Negative Science and Natural Ethics (Percy 
 Greg, Without God,^. 169). 
 
 A short time since I had a letter from Berlin 
 about Mr. Brownings new book, Ferishtalis 
 Fancies, from an eminent man of letters, in 
 which the following passage occurs : " If I am 
 irresistibly impelled to hate the evil, cruelty, 
 brutality of the world, what consolation is there 
 In telling me about its Creator and Perpetuator, 
 unless It be to make me hate Him ? Browning 
 needs a limited God for dramatic purposes ; a 
 God selling Himself to Satan, but an omnipo- 
 tent God for metaphysical purposes. He can- 
 not have both. For myself, I have, as you 
 know, been compelled to leave my religion in 
 
12 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 the only certainty that is left me — the certainty 
 that justice, kindness, love, are good, and the 
 only evidences of good in the universe. But 
 as they are not so strong in the earth as in- 
 justice and inhumanity, how can I say they are 
 omnipotent in the universe ? ' They may be,' 
 but how can I build on a * perhaps ' I have not 
 been able to find ? (As if all our life we were 
 not just doing that !) When I can find a man 
 or woman who can show me a higher type of 
 God than some crucified or mendicant lover of 
 men, I shall believe in Omnipotence." 
 
 To talk like this has become the fashion of 
 the day, not only with our writers in magazines 
 and reviews, but with the students of our 
 colleges and the half-educated youth of both 
 sexes. Canon Liddon, in a sermon at St. 
 Paul's, said lately : — 
 
 '' An acknowledgment of Christ too often 
 was met with a delicate curl of the lip, a gentle 
 shrug of the shoulder, a scarcely perceptible 
 raising of the eyebrows, which were more 
 terrible to some young men than to have to 
 lead their regiment across a plain swept by 
 the enemy's cannon. These expressive atti- 
 tudes were meant to say, * You do not mean 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 13 
 
 to tell me that at this time of day you believe 
 these old fables ? ' These sneers," Canon 
 Liddon continued, '' which did their work with 
 such fatal effect, represented not superior 
 knowledge, not high moral principle, not 
 complex superiority, but were the extract or 
 essence of a certain form of class opinion, or 
 rather section or subsection of opinion, the 
 holders of which wish to establish without 
 argument the idea that Christ had had His 
 day." 
 
 The Canon then gave an account of a 
 dinner party at the West End fifty years ago, 
 where, when the ladies had retired, the con- 
 versation, under the direction of one of the 
 gentlemen, took a turn utterly derogatory to 
 Jesus Christ. A guest asked his host's per- 
 mission to ring the bell, and when the servant 
 came ordered his carriage, saying with the 
 courtesy of perfect self-command that he was 
 sorry that he was obliged to retire, but that 
 he was still a Christian. This act of simple 
 courage was that, not of a bishop or clergyman, 
 but of the great Minister of the early part of 
 Queen Victoria s reign — Sir Robert Peel. The 
 preacher pointed out that while Christians were 
 
H BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 less and less courageous, more and more fasti- 
 dious, so afraid of being too enthusiastic, and 
 so engaged in weighing or mincing their words, 
 every conceivable blasphemy, folly, and nega- 
 tion of the truth appeared in the press, and was 
 discussed in society, while error, moral and 
 intellectual, stalked everywhere, now loudly 
 advertising, now gently insinuating itself. 
 
 That some half-a-dozen eminent English 
 men of science have cast off what they are 
 pleased to term the trammels of superstition, 
 and at the same time live pure and noble lives, 
 does not for a moment prove that the great 
 mass of ignorant mankind can be decent mem- 
 bers of society, good fathers and mothers, 
 and worthy citizens, without faith in God, the 
 existence of the soul and the conscience. A few 
 philosophers may succeed in doing this, though 
 neither Voltaire nor Rousseau nor, indeed, any 
 others of whom we have complete information, 
 as far as I can gather, led lives that would for 
 a moment compare with the purity, gentleness, 
 modesty, and beauty of those led under the 
 eyes of us all by simple folk nurtured in the 
 faith we talk so lightly about parting with for 
 ever. Many prophets have come amongst us 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 15 
 
 and spoken great truths to us. The voice of 
 Carlyle has only just ceased, with that of 
 Emerson, to rebuke our shams and our low- 
 mindedness ; while that of Ruskin still cries 
 aloud for truth and reality and earnest, honest 
 heart in work and word. 
 
 But there is one prophet who has none of 
 Carlyle's bitterness and distempered views of 
 life, none of Ruskin's far-fetched theories and 
 impracticable mediaevaHsm, none of Emerson's 
 vapoury transcendentalism, so beautiful to con- 
 template, so hard to condense into anything 
 usable — Robert Browning, well described by the 
 founder of the Browning Society as ** the man- 
 liest, the strongest, the life-fullest, the deepest 
 and thoughtfullest living poet, the one poet 
 needing earnest study, and the one most worthy 
 of it." * 
 
 I once heard Mr. Russell Lowell say, 
 
 ' Browning is the poet who stays by one 
 
 longest." From the comparatively few persons 
 
 who are lovers or admirers of Browning, though 
 
 the circle is a daily widening one, it may per- 
 
 * Dr. Furnivall, in the inaugural address to the Browning 
 Society. 
 
i6 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 haps be surmised by the inconsiderate, that 
 either he is not understandable or not worth the 
 trouble of understanding. Doubtless, every one 
 has met advocates of both of these theories. 
 It is getting a little too late in the day, how- 
 ever, to be able to take refuge in the latter 
 suggestion, which even the Saturday Review 
 has had to abandon ; and the only excuse one 
 hears much of now from those who are not 
 Browning's admirers is the former, that he is 
 too obscure, too involved, too rugged, to make 
 anything of. One of our most eminent living 
 women of letters, whom I asked to write a 
 paper for the Browning Society, recently de- 
 clared to me she had tried to understand our 
 poet, but could make nothing of him, and 
 added : '' When I am tired and want my mind 
 refreshing, I like to put my head down into a 
 great big cabbage-rose like Tom Moore ; and 
 you urge me to bury my nose in a bunch of 
 thistles like Browning." Now, I have come to 
 the conclusion, that much of this talk of the ob- 
 scurity of Browning is affectation, simply a form 
 of cant. I do not use the term offensively, but 
 in the sense Webster gives : '' The phraseology 
 of a sect used without sincerity." People who 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 17 
 
 declare that In Memoriam presents no diffi- 
 culty to them at all, make wry faces at Para- 
 celsus^ La Saisiaz, or Fifiney and say It is no 
 use trying, it is all beyond them, and worse 
 than the higher mathematics. Browning has a 
 sorrowful line which we should blush to read. 
 
 " Ye British public who like me not, 
 God love you, whom I yet have laboured for." 
 
 And in one of his poems he very caustic- 
 ally compares the great poets of England, — 
 Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, — to butts of 
 precious wine, that stand in our cellars but are 
 rarely tasted. We swear by them, he says, but 
 how much have we had out of the casks ? 
 You know this Is not a very honest age, it 
 would hardly do to speak ill of Shakespeare 
 and Milton and Spenser ; but, after all, how 
 many glasses have we had out of these butts ? 
 
 I have met many who have read Browning 
 once, and did not like him. I have met some 
 who have read him twice, and said the same ; 
 while those who took the trouble to read him 
 over and over again, found their profit in the 
 labour. 
 
 Precious stones do sometimes want digging 
 R. B. ' c 
 
1 8 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 for. Diamonds and nuggets are not always to 
 be stumbled across on the footpath. Pickaxes 
 and crushing mills are not unknown in mining 
 operations ; and the treasures of kings are kept 
 in strong boxes. The bee cannot gather his 
 honey from the simplest flower without con- 
 tributing his quota to the processes of fertiliza- 
 tion ; and the stimulation of our thinking facul- 
 ties is no small part of the good which great 
 teachers have to do for us. The quartz will 
 pay for crushing, the diamond for digging. By 
 the nature of the treasure we expect a certain 
 trouble in getting it. Some one cleverly said, 
 " Browning treats obscure subjects deeply, not 
 deep subjects obscurely." When we remember 
 that he discourses on the great problems of life 
 and mind, that his songs are of soul struggles 
 and the birth-throes of great thoughts, we shall 
 not expect them to be clothed in language of a 
 love song, or the words that befit a hymn to 
 a daisy. 
 
 Carlyle somewhere complains, " How loth we 
 are to read great works ! How much more 
 willingly we cross our legs, back to candle, 
 feet to fire, with some Pickwick or lowest 
 trash of that nature ! The reason is, we are 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 19 
 
 very indolent, very wearied and forlorn, and 
 read oftenest chiefly that we may forget our- 
 selves." 
 
 One difficulty about Browning, I may mention 
 in passing, is the intensely concentrated form 
 in which all his great thoughts are cast. This, 
 it has been remarked, is the tendency of all the 
 greatest writers of the age ; they suggest rather 
 than vapour, they compress instead of being 
 diffuse, and take for granted that we can do 
 without platitude, often giving their readers 
 credit for more knowledge than they possess. 
 This latter charge, I admit, can often be fairly 
 brought against Browning. If you were 
 familiar with the Encyclopaedia as with a horn- 
 book, you would have all your work cut out to 
 keep up with him; and he seems to expect this 
 of us rather too rashly. You can t read him 
 for mere after-dinner amusement, as you take 
 up Thomson's Seasons or Cowper's Task ; 
 but if you take his Paracelsus, the Inn 
 Album, or indeed any of the earlier poems 
 except Sordello, with the attention you would 
 expect to give to an article in the Quarterly, 
 you shall rise from the study a manlier man, 
 a stronger and more earnest seeker after the 
 
20 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 true, the noble, and the good, than when you 
 first opened the page. You will be braced as 
 the traveller who leaves the hot, dry plains for 
 the mountain heights. 
 
 But we do not invite you only to snow-clad 
 altitudes, we do not want to bury you on Alpine 
 heights. 
 
 Every line of Browning is stamped with 
 his strong personality. He is nothing if not 
 virile, as becomes a man with a message for 
 a limp and gelatinous age. He is analytical 
 and subjective in a most marked degree, as 
 becomes a teacher of an age of science. 
 
 All his students say, '' How strong he is ! " 
 One feels he is safe to trust — a Mr. Greatheart 
 in a world whose leaders seem weak-kneed 
 beside him. While the religious teachers of the 
 day are lamenting the decay of faith in the first 
 principles of religion, and the very idea of a 
 divine revelation has become repugnant to so 
 many. Browning, holding no brief from any 
 of the Churches, comes forward to boldly call 
 the science and philosophy of the day back to 
 religion, declaring that Love, — God's love, — is 
 the only thing that can keep the intellect of 
 man from madness, as the brain must cease to 
 
BROIVNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME, 21 
 
 perform its work efficiently when the heart's 
 work is imperfectly done. He re-states Chris- 
 tianity on its earliest, simplest, and too forgotten 
 lines, contests the ground for an exalted Theism 
 of the noblest kind, and proclaims that the 
 great truths of Christianity rest upon philo- 
 sophical and scientific foundations, that though 
 the superstructures built on them by some 
 Churches and some theologians are too often 
 weak and rotten, the great truths of God, the 
 soul, and the future life remain amid all the 
 storm of adverse criticism unharmed by a 
 single wave that has beaten upon them. 
 
 With the truest sympathy with all the doubts 
 and difficulties of belief, he invites us to follow 
 him on a path with whose every turn he is 
 familiar. 
 
 " Rather I prize the doubt low kinds exist without, 
 Finished and finite clods untroubled by a spark." 
 
 I know no thinker on religious subjects 
 so worthy of confidence as he, because he is 
 well abreast of all the scientific thought of the 
 age. Few even of Browning's closest students 
 are aware how thoroughly imbued with science 
 he is ; and though I believe that the poet is the 
 natural king of men, — 
 
22 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 " A poet must be earth's essential king," 
 
 as he says himself, — he is so much the more 
 a king when he is master of all his subjects' 
 needs. 
 
 He feels quite sure that, although our pro- 
 cesses of thought are perhaps due to certain 
 definite molecular changes in the grey matter 
 of our brain, which abstract so much of the 
 sulphates and phosphates from its blood supply, 
 these changes are not the thought itself, as 
 the Materialist claims. 
 
 You will not easily I blind Robert Browning 
 with a handful of physiological dust, nor daze 
 him with a show of chemical formulae. He 
 knows just as much about physiology and 
 natural science in general as the Materialist and 
 Agnostic ; and he tells you that neither their 
 scalpel, their crucible, nor their microscope 
 have brought us the least step nearer to finding 
 out the mystery of being — 
 
 " To know of, think about — 
 Is all man's sum of faculty effects 
 When exercised on earth's least atom, Son ! 
 What was, what is, what may such atom be ? 
 No answer ! Still, what seems it to man's sense ? 
 An atom with some certain properties 
 Known about, thought of as occasion needs, 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 23 
 
 — Man's — but occasions of the universe ? 
 Unthinkable, unknowable to man." 
 
 Ferishtah's Fancies^ p. 131, 
 
 One of the chief characteristics of a great 
 poet, is a very high development of the faculty 
 of observation. To bring that faculty to perfec- 
 tion, there must be added an acquaintance with 
 almost the whole sum of human knowledge. 
 In writing a paper on Browning as a scientific 
 poet, I have been amazed at the vastness of 
 the field of human knowledge explored by our 
 great poet. Be sure, therefore, that if he is a 
 Christian poet, as he certainly is, he can give 
 the world very cogent reasons for the faith 
 that is in him. Such a teacher at such an 
 epoch has a message for his time of peculiar 
 force and significance. If the world, turning its 
 back on the altar and the pulpit, has steadfastly 
 faced anything now-a-days, it is the Professor's 
 Desk, of which it asks, " Who will show us any 
 good ? " I think the voice from that chair of 
 science will more and more clearly pronounce 
 in favour of Christianity. It has already done so 
 in Germany, where the highest thought is no 
 longer agnostic or sceptical ; and I see in the 
 whole scientific thought of Browning, and the 
 
24 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 way in which he is influencing the highest 
 intellect of our country, marked evidence that 
 *' the watery swell of rationalism is going 
 down " here also. Did I startle you when I 
 read that terrible indictment of my atheistic 
 correspondent from Berlin, who, because he sees 
 a very imperfect world, denies the existence of 
 a perfect Creator and Perpetuator ? I could 
 reassure you out of Browning, who in a 
 hundred noble passages tells us that the evil, 
 and cruelty, and hate, and vice, and pain in the 
 world are not purposeless, as they perhaps seem 
 to our limited knowledge. 
 
 All this dread machinery of pain and sorrow, 
 he believes, — or he would otherwise be con- 
 founded by it, — was devised to evolve the moral 
 qualities of man, and " wring from out all pain 
 all pleasure for a common heritage." As the 
 crystals branch where the salt marshes stagnate, 
 as blood dries to crimson, so in every shape is 
 evil beautified — after all, evil is a result not less 
 natural than good, it must therefore have a 
 purpose. This is a low reason, perhaps ; he 
 gives us a higher one — evil must stay for men's 
 own account, — 
 
 " For mankind springs 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 25 
 
 Salvation by each hindrance interposed, 
 They cHmb." 
 
 Living itself, properly understood, is made 
 up of good and evil. Failure may be, after all, 
 only apparent. His optimism is so far-reaching 
 that, contemplating the corpses in the Morgue, 
 he can say that he hopes — 
 
 " That what began best, can't end worst. 
 Nor what God blest once, prove accurst." 
 
 We can only see the goodness of God by means 
 of evil, only appreciate the serenity of heaven 
 through the noises of earth, only win our souls 
 by fighting the wrongs and pains of life. God's 
 love is at issue still with sin visibly when any 
 wrong is done on earth. There is a need for 
 sin and death, — happily only a transient one, — 
 there is Power sufficient for righting all the 
 wrongs of life, and through Love the power will 
 be resumed. 
 
 Amelioration is the dominant note of Nature, 
 the lily is the evolution of a grass ; the mon- 
 strous and terrible forms of giant strength that 
 wandered through the mists of the half-cooled 
 earth, ages before the advent of man, — 
 
 " When dragons in their prime 
 Tare each other in their sUme,'' — 
 
26 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 have long since given place to gentler forms, 
 and the earth is no longer held in subjection by 
 the muscle and giant bone of the megatherium, 
 but by the convolutions of the human brain. 
 What this world may yet become, may be in 
 some slight degree imagined if we in fancy 
 transport ourselves to those distant ages of the 
 past before the advent of man, and compare its 
 condition when hideous monsters roamed its 
 tangled forests with the present age of civiliza- 
 tion. May we not hope that the hateful forms 
 of vice, cruelty, disease, and sin, may, like the 
 extinct monsters of past geological periods, 
 disappear before the softening influence of 
 virtue, knowledge, and love ? Browning finds 
 reason for such a hope in a similar reflection. 
 
 " Dragons were and serpents are, 
 And blindworms will be ; ne'er emerged 
 Any new-created Python for man's 
 Plague since earth was purged." 
 
 La Saisiaz^ p. 57. 
 
 We must never forget in this relation, that a 
 very large proportion of the evil in the world 
 arises from violation of the moral law, written 
 plainly in the conscience of man. Browning 
 says, If you break the law of gravity, you must 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 27 
 
 not complain that the air does not hold you up 
 when you step over a precipice. Just so with 
 moral evil. If you will be lazy and vicious, you 
 mustn't grumble at being poor and ill. It is 
 simply a question of cause and effect. 
 
 We have liberty of doing evil, that our doing 
 good may have a grace. Nature's law is very 
 simple : such effects succeed such causes. 
 Heaven and hell depend upon man's deed on 
 earth just as certainly as you make point meet 
 point or miss it by the straightness or crooked- 
 ness of the line you draw between them. If 
 you want to live on earth, draw your breath ; if 
 you want to have eternal life, be just ! Death 
 in either case results from breach of law. 
 
 Browning's conception of God is a very 
 noble one. He sees God in the immensities, he 
 feels His love in his heart. God stands away 
 a hairbreadth off — 
 
 " To give room for the newly made to live." 
 
 Man is able to grieve, but able also to glorify 
 God, as no mere machine could do — 
 *' Made perfect as a thing of course." 
 With him evil is always the accident. 
 " This is the note of evil, for good lasts." 
 
28 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 In the darkest life he sees reason for hope. 
 In the most criminal soul he detects the poten- 
 tialities for good. 
 
 " Progress is man's distinctive mark alone, 
 Not God's, and not the beast's : God is, they are, 
 Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." 
 
 A Death in the Desert. 
 
 Is the whole world groaning under its load of 
 pain ? He says, — 
 
 " Put pain from out the world, what room were left 
 - For thanks to God, for love to Man ? Why thanks, — 
 Except for some escape, whate'er the style. 
 From pain that might be, name it as thou mayst ? " 
 
 Browning's idea of God, as might be ex- 
 pected from so subjective a poet, is largely 
 abstract. Not that he opposes the concrete 
 conception of the Divine Personality as re- 
 vealed in the Bible, but because, valuable as the 
 anthropomorphic Hebrew idea of God was, the 
 larger and wider our thought of the Supreme 
 Being becomes, the healthier and more en- 
 nobling it will be for mankind. For a world 
 emerging from fetish worship and Polytheism 
 it was a vast stride to arrive at, that on.e anthro- 
 pomorphic God ; and, notwithstanding all the 
 scoffing of anti-theistic or a-theistic opponents, 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 29 
 
 that Hebrew Javeh was a most elevated con- 
 ception, the highest the mind of the time was 
 able to bear. Is the world ready, even yet, for 
 a perfectly pure faith ? 
 
 In the character of Pompilia, in The Ring 
 and the Book, he has portrayed how the soul of 
 his heroine was made perfect through suffering, 
 and shows how a mere child, ignorant of the 
 world and all its ways, with neither advantages 
 of home, education, or any congenial surround- 
 ings, through suffering, and suffering only, 
 leaped all at once from the mere animal exist- 
 ence to all the grace, the dignity, and beauty 
 of the highest type of womanhood, as the 
 chrysalis, in one bright hour, from the dull earth 
 below, bursts into the summer air with gold 
 and glory on its wings. The poor murdered 
 creature sees how suffering has raised her — 
 
 '• One cannot both have and not have, you know, — 
 Being right now, I am happy, and colour things." 
 
 sees the good of suffering when she hears God 
 
 say — 
 
 "Bear ! not stand by, bear to see My angels bear"; 
 
 and owns that though — 
 
 " In His face is light, 
 But in His shadow healing too," 
 
30 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME, 
 
 she does not think less of God for being cruci- 
 fied or mendicant, but says : — 
 
 " I never realized God's birth before— 
 How He grew likest God in being born." 
 
 Dr. Furnivall has well described our poet as 
 the *' healthfullest " of the day. It is very true ; 
 and the man or woman who aspires to teach 
 anything to this century must first of all be 
 healthful. 
 
 I think the day has gone by when poets of 
 unsound mind have much in them to bless the 
 world with. This man has a sound mind in a 
 sound body. Hear him. Of course, being a 
 scientific poet, he is an Optimist. The Evolu- 
 tionist shows us how animal and veo^etable 
 life tend to higher and more beautiful forms, 
 especially under cultivation. He is compelled, 
 to a large extent, to be optimistic. 
 
 Schopenhauer declared life to be utterly un- 
 desirable, and painted all the operations of 
 Nature in the darkest colours of his gloomy 
 palette, yet one who records a visit to him at 
 home says he did not find the great Pessimist 
 sitting in sackcloth and ashes, contemplating 
 how best to terminate the miseries of his exist- 
 ence, but enjoying life and all its good things 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 31 
 
 in a beautiful home with artistic surroundings, 
 and under conditions generally calculated to 
 make it an enviable one. Browning lives as he 
 teaches. He is not touched with the faintest 
 trace of unhealthy pessimism. 
 
 Second to no student of Tennyson in my 
 admiration for his magnum opus, the In 
 Memoriam, and alive as I am to the un- 
 wisdom of making invidious comparisons be- 
 tween two such master-minds, I cannot forbear 
 in illustration of my subject, contrasting the 
 In Memoriam. of Tennyson for his friend 
 Hallam, with the poem on very similar lines, 
 La Saisiaz, of Browning in memory of a lady 
 friend who died in Brittany : the former a 
 threnody, almost a woman's wail over her own 
 heart sorely lacerated by death's severance ; the 
 latter a noble psalm of victory of soul over 
 matter and of hope beyond the grave. 
 
 If any one doubts Dr. Furnivall's claim, 
 that " Browning is the manliest, strongest, life- 
 fullest, deepest, thoughtfullest of our living 
 writers," let him contrast these two In Me- 
 moriams. 
 
 To thine own self be true ; he is never tired 
 of emphasizing this ! 
 
32 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 *' Weakness never needs be falseness : truth is truth in each 
 degree 
 Thunder-pealed by God to Nature, whispered by my soul 
 to me." 
 
 La Saisiaz^ p. 24. 
 
 I have In this lecture endeavoured to Indi- 
 cate some of the saHent points of Browning's 
 message. I think I have shown that his great 
 thoughts shine over the troubled seas of specu- 
 lative thought as a Pharos, whose light is strong 
 and clear enough for our greatest needs. In 
 the many extracts I have read, you will not 
 have failed to notice abundant evidence of his 
 manly, strong, life-full, thoughtful, deep per- 
 sonality. If I have adduced any reasons to 
 lead to a closer, more earnest acquaintance with 
 him on the part of any here present, I hope 
 they will not be deterred by the prevalent Idea 
 of his obscurity, but go boldly to work and 
 fetch out the precious treasures for themselves — 
 they do not lie so very far below the surface — 
 I think he answers some of the deep question- 
 ings of the soul. It is hard to have to traverse 
 the dark ways of life with no other light than 
 the Ignis fatuus of our own reason. When the 
 end comes, may we all say with his Paracelsus : 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 33 
 
 " 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 ! " 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 The following observations, taken from the trans- 
 actions of the Browning Society, on the relation of 
 Browning to the nineteenth century, were made from 
 the chair at* the meeting of the Society on Friday, 
 April 27th, 1888, when— 
 
 Miss Whitehead read a paper on Robert Brown- 
 ing as a poet of the nineteenth century, its interests 
 and influences, practical and metaphysical. 
 
 Dr. Berdoe said that he was sure he expressed 
 the feeling of the meeting in very heartily thanking 
 Miss Whitehead for her valuable paper. He had 
 listened to it with great satisfaction, partly for its 
 own inherent merits, and partly because Miss White- 
 head had shown how thoroughly she had studied 
 Browning, and had given so much of his best thought 
 in his own words. A very difficult question had been 
 dealt with, " The Relation of Browning to the Nine- 
 teenth Century." He took it that it was necessary for 
 a poet of this age to be in sympathy with its aspira- 
 tions, its work, and its need. How far Mr. Browning 
 had met these requirements had often been discussed 
 by that Society; and he hoped Miss Whitehead's 
 paper would enable them to discuss it profitably on 
 R. B. D 
 
34 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 this occasion. The principal aspiration of the age 
 was a passionate longing for truth, combined with a 
 purity of intention and a reverence of method in 
 truth-seeking, such as, he ventured to say, had never 
 been equalled in any age. It was an age of science, 
 but an age of faith in its sublimest and noblest as- 
 pect, an age of destruction if they would ; but amidst 
 the ruins of the temples of the past he thought they 
 saw already laid the foundations of the great Religion 
 of Humanity. Then the work of the age was to love 
 the weak, to counteract the, cruel law of Nature, that 
 only the strongest shall survive — not always, of course, 
 the strongest in muscle and bone — the strongest in 
 brain. An age of humanism, an age which had liter- 
 ally taken some of the sting from death, and some 
 of the terrors from the grave. Let them think for a 
 moment how great were the needs of this age, what 
 an uprising of millions asking for mental food ! The 
 liberated slaves of feudal ages, now happily passing 
 away. What a field for scattering great thoughts ! 
 What did we specially want in this age, this age of 
 rush, and turmoil, and bustle? We wanted a purer 
 faith, a worthier philosophy, a higher standard of 
 rectitude, deeper springs of conduct, more reality, 
 less sham. Browning helped us in these aims. Look 
 at the works from which quotations had been given 
 — Christmas Eve, FerishtaJi s Fa7icies^ Paracelsus , and 
 Parleyings. There never was so much desire to 
 benefit our fellow-men as at present, a feeling, it must 
 be admitted, not largely the outcome of the Christian 
 Church, but of those who had separated themselves 
 
BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 35 
 
 from her. Not that this was the fault of the Church, 
 but the fault of those who misinterpreted and mis- 
 understood its mission. Some of the noblest minds 
 worked for humanity outside the Church ; but that 
 was not the fault of the Gospel. Was there any 
 poetry to be got out of a consideration of the aspira- 
 tions and work of the present age } Walt Whitman 
 said there was ; and whatever they thought of Walt 
 Whitman as a poet — and as Browningites they must 
 not be too hard on him — he was certainly a great 
 thinker. Ruskin said we were crushing all the poetry 
 out of the earth, but he (Dr. Berdoe) did not think 
 so. With all the rush and whirl he thought there 
 was plenty of poetry ; there was poetry in the Chan- 
 nel tunnel and the St. Gothard railway. He thought 
 sometimes, when he read Christmas Eve, that that 
 mantle of Christ meant the means of locomotion at 
 the present day. As we saw more of the world, and 
 mixed with our fellow-men, we got some of our pre- 
 judices rubbed down, and our angles taken off. Mr. 
 Browning's teaching was, that we should get a little 
 more humility, and a trifle less conceit with our science. 
 The great objection to the science of the age was its 
 want of reverence and love. The great teaching of 
 Paracelsus was, that neither love without knowledge, 
 nor knowledge without love will do; and the message 
 for the age was, that with all the knowledge we had, 
 we wanted more love to everything that breathes, 
 that lives and suffers. Perhaps some there would 
 laugh at Mr. Browning's views on vivisection ; he 
 did not at all think a scientific audience would accept 
 
36 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME. 
 
 Browning's teaching on that point, but let them re- 
 member that if they called him and those who held 
 with Mr. Browning foolish and ignorant, that Balaam's 
 ass saw what the prophet riding upon it could not 
 see, and they might be right after all. Religion with 
 Mr. Browning was put upon a basis that the intelli- 
 gent thinking people of the age could accept. Mr. 
 Fotheringham said, that religion is a part of the vital 
 study of man. This paper had opened up a good 
 many questions for discussion. He called upon Dr. 
 Furnivall to continue the discussion. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 There is a beautiful dream-story in one of 
 Jean Paul Richter's Flower, Fruit, and Thorn 
 Pieces, A philosopher has been discussing 
 the existence of God, and that " with as little 
 feeling as most of us grant it." Musing on the 
 pros and cons of the question, he falls asleep, 
 and dreams that he awakes in a churchyard, 
 the graves are unclosed, and shadows stalk erect 
 in the gloom. Avalanches fall and earthquakes 
 rend the rocks. 
 
 The great church is overthrown, and round 
 its ruined altar the ghosts of the departed con- 
 gregate in silence and awe. A lofty, sable 
 form, having the expression of a never-ending 
 sorrow, sinks from above upon the altar, and all 
 the dead exclaim, *' Christ ! is there no God ? " 
 And he answered, " There is none ! " He tells 
 how he traversed the worlds, ascended into the 
 suns, and flew with the milky way through the 
 wilderness of the heavens, he gazed into the 
 immeasurable depths of the abyss and cried. 
 
 37 
 
38 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT DROWNING. 
 
 ''Father, where art Thou?" and no answer 
 came but from the eternal storm which no one 
 rules. He looked above for the Divine Eye, 
 and saw but an empty, bottomless socket, 
 Eternity lay brooding upon Chaos ! The pale 
 shadows cast themselves before the Christ ; they 
 cry in their unutterable despair, "Jesus! have 
 we no Father ? " and with streaming eyes he 
 answers, " We are all orphans, I and you ; we 
 are without a Father." Are we really all 
 orphans ? Are we in very truth without the 
 All- Father ? Scientific men say we are, and 
 they ought to know. They have great telescopes 
 and they look into the heavens ; and they have 
 powerful microscopes, and they look into the 
 dust ; and they say He is not there. And they 
 are analysts, and chemists, and physiologists, 
 and they say there is no room for God at all, 
 and they can explain everything without Him. 
 We go to the top of Mount Sinai, and find it 
 is a howling waste ; and out into the lonely 
 deserts, and we cry aloud, and the eternal 
 silences are unbroken save by the voice of the 
 thunder, and we know all about thunder now, 
 and no God answers us. God is not hidden in 
 the eternal snows nor in the clouds. The pro- 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 39 
 
 cesses of life and the worlds of being are daily 
 becoming easier to understand, and the verdict 
 of science is — We are all orphans ! So, as there 
 is no God, there can be no religion to bind us 
 to Him, and consequently every man is a law 
 unto himself, and is only answerable to society, 
 which restrains him from doing that which is 
 inconvenient to his fellow-men ; for the rest — 
 eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die ! 
 and we perish as the beasts. This is what 
 nineteenth-century thought proposes to put in 
 place of the Churches, when they are explained 
 out of existence, and for the old faiths when 
 folks have cast them off with other old-world 
 superstitions. But let us see if the case is 
 really as bad as it appears upon the surface. Is 
 everything gone because the first chapter of 
 Genesis is proved to be merely an allegorical 
 poem, because the Bible after all turns out to 
 be but a collection of sacred books like any 
 other row of ancient classics on a student's 
 shelf? Some historical, some poetical, some 
 ethical, considerably inferior to Homer, Shake- 
 speare, and the Bhagavad-gita for practical 
 purposes, as they tell us. Are we then to have 
 no religion, nothing to bind us to anything 
 
40 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 higher than self, and nothing to teach our chil- 
 dren when they ask us those awkward questions 
 they are so apt to put ? " Yes," I hear some of 
 you say. We can make a sacred anthology 
 from the philosophy, the teaching of the sages, 
 and the maxims of the wise men of all ages ; 
 these will help us to live righteously and so- 
 berly. And go back to Paganism ? which some 
 men say was, at least in Greece, brighter and 
 more beautiful than Christianity ; but which, 
 divested of fine phrases and imported senti- 
 ments, we know very well, was simply the wor- 
 ship of very coarse and very sensual and de- 
 grading ideas. No ; it is not so bad as that. 
 If we fail to find God in the mountain defiles, 
 or to hear Him in the voices of the thunder; 
 if we cannot search Him out with our telescopes 
 or see Him in the atoms, there is one place 
 where He will always be found, where He, 
 whatever He be, for none can name Him, dwells 
 eternally — in the heart of man. Oh, students of 
 religion, faithful seekers after truth, ponder this 
 when tempted to discard the Christian concep- 
 tion of God. ** The progress of reason was 
 fatal only to the false gods. The true God of 
 the universe, the one God, whom men adore 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 41 
 
 when they do a good deed, or when they seek 
 the truth, or when they advise their fellow-men 
 aright," says Renan, "• is established for all 
 eternity." 
 
 I commend to such truth-seekers the reli- 
 gion of Robert Browning, because I think 
 it is peculiarly helpful to souls in our time. 
 You know the old philosophers said, the bane 
 and the antidote grow side by side. You 
 get fever in the tropical forests of Peru ; but 
 the bark which cures it is found hard by the 
 fever spots. Now, it is always thus with spe- 
 culations and destructive criticisms in all great 
 crises of thought. It can only be the false 
 which perishes ; the good must be eternal. It 
 is good that we have lost so much of the vin- 
 dictive theology of the past. It is good that 
 the fogs are dispelled which hid so long from us 
 our Father's face ; good that we are beginning 
 to see that Brummagem theologians have only 
 lost the gods which they made in their own 
 workshops, and that the God of nature, the 
 God which dwells in the human heart, the 
 Spirit of God, the Soul of the world, is reigning 
 and ruling and loving still. In Robert Brown- 
 ing we are introduced to a religion which is not 
 
42 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 a sectarian religion, is not a professional for- 
 mula, but is just the reasonable belief of a great 
 English nineteenth-century thinker, who is in 
 sympathy with all the science and progress and 
 mental activity and inquiry of our day. We 
 have outgrown some of our false conceptions 
 about God, you know ; the crude notions about 
 the Deity formed when man first emerged from 
 a state of savagery will not do for the men of 
 to-day. Not that God alters, but our concep- 
 tions of Him must grow with the expansion 
 of our own minds. Robert Browning is an 
 aged man, but still full of life and vigour, and 
 I venture to say the greatest philosophical 
 thinker living. He has been writing poems for 
 over fifty years, and men are just beginning to 
 read and value them. It is the stupid fashion 
 to pretend that he is difficult to understand. 
 Well, perhaps if we only bring to the task the 
 amount of brain necessary to enjoy an ordinary 
 novel with, he may be unintelligible ; but as he 
 deals with deep subjects he demands true study. 
 Now he has formed certain definite convictions 
 about God, the soul, and the future state which 
 he holds very firmly, and which are good for us 
 to weigh well, because they come from a thinker, 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 43 
 
 an explorer into the dark recesses of the human 
 soul, and who Is entitled to speak to us In the 
 name of the science of our day, for he Is fully 
 conversant with It. What does he say about 
 God, a supreme Being who is over Nature and 
 pervading her throughout? Well, for one thing, 
 he thinks that — 
 
 "God dwells in all, 
 From life's minute beginnings up at last 
 To man." 
 
 All nature to Browning Is viewed, as a thought 
 of God. " God is the perfect Poet," he says, 
 "who In His Person acts His own creations." 
 So the whole universe is a crystallized thought 
 of God to him. Within the- past few years 
 philosophers have told us a great deal more 
 about the atoms and molecules than we ever 
 knew before ; and the infinitely little has now 
 become to its students the awful and incompre- 
 hensible. These atoms are *' the foundation 
 stones of the material universe, which, amid 
 the wreck of composite matter, remain unbroken 
 and unworn." Of the atoms, Professor Tyndall, 
 who knows more about them than perhaps any- 
 body else, says, " they are so small, and, when 
 grouped to molecules, are so tightly clasped to- 
 
44 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 gether, that they are capable of tremors equal 
 in rapidity to those of light and radiant heat " ; 
 ** They can vibrate to and fro millions of 
 millions of times in a second. " Knowing all 
 this, what does Browning say ? He says, — 
 
 " The small becomes the dreadful and immense." 
 
 " We find great things are made of little things ; 
 And little things go lessening, till at last 
 Comes God behind them." 
 
 Talk about understanding nature, common- 
 sense science, and all the rest of it ! Professor 
 Tyndall, whom men call an atheist, says on 
 this, " I should be inclined to ascribe the 
 creation of the world of molecules to inspiration, 
 rather than to what is known as common 
 sense." 
 
 When you want to reach the limits of the 
 understanding, do not take a telescope, and try 
 to penetrate the infinite distances of the stars. 
 Think of the eternal dance of the atoms that 
 never grow old, and which never tire. Think 
 how they may ** despise " us, as the poet says. 
 
 '* I am a materialist," said one to me the other 
 day." 
 
 ** Oh ! are you ? " I said. " Then tell me 
 all about the atoms." 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 45 
 
 '* The name," says Browning, 
 
 " comes close 
 Behind a stomach-cyst, the smallest 
 Of creations," 
 
 alluding to the fact that, with all our physi- 
 ology and our chemistry, we have not, in the 
 very least, bridged the infinite gulf which 
 separates living from not-living matter. We 
 are as far off as ever from understanding how 
 the lowest form of organic life is generated 
 from inorganic matter. 
 
 " The undevout astronomer is mad." What 
 do you say to the scoffer and the flippant in the 
 presence of the atoms ? When Mr. Browning 
 thinks of the human heart with all its noble and 
 generous impulses, of the mother s love, and 
 the martyr s heroism, he does not think of the 
 vibrations and thrills of so much matter. To 
 him, as Carlyle said of Frederick the Great, 
 " it was flatly inconceivable that intellect and 
 moral emotion could have been put into him 
 by an entity that had none of its own." 
 
 No ! He says, — 
 
 " Have I knowledge ? Confounded, it shrivels at wisdtfm 
 laid bare. 
 Have I forethought? How purblind, how blank to the 
 infinite care ! " 
 
46 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 "God is seen God 
 In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul, and the 
 
 clod. 
 And then looking within and around me, I ever renew, 
 (With that stoop of the soul which, in bending, upraises 
 
 it too). 
 The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all- 
 complete. 
 As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to His feet." 
 
 Now, as we can question about all this, and 
 get our answer, Mr. Browning says, — 
 
 " Question, answer, presuppose 
 Two points :- that the thing itself which questions, answers — 
 
 iSy it knows, 
 As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself — a force. 
 Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, 
 Unaffected by its end— that this thing likewise needs must 
 
 be. 
 Call this — God, then, call that — soul, and both — the only 
 
 facts for me. 
 Prove them facts ? That they o'erpass my power of prov- 
 ing, proves them such." 
 
 So we see that Mr. Browning may be well 
 described in two of his own lines, — 
 
 "Crowned by prose and verse, and wielding with Wit's 
 bauble, Learning's rod, 
 He at least believes in soul, and is very sure of God ! " 
 
 Oh ! but, you say, what sort of a God .^ Dr. 
 Martineau has beautifully spoken of the God in 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 47 
 
 whom he believes as ** the Mind that meditates 
 in beauty and speaks in law." Do not you think 
 it eminently reasonable that the universe should 
 have a mind ? Its order is so perfect, that if 
 there be no God, no central, guiding Spirit, we 
 are confronted by a vastly greater difficulty 
 than that presented by the orthodox concep- 
 tion of the order of the universe. But you say, 
 " When I look around me, and see all the evil, 
 cruelty, and brutality in the world, what con- 
 solation is there in telling me about its Creator, 
 unless it be to make me hate Him ? " Because, 
 if God is omnipotent. He could stop all this 
 evil at a word. I shall let Mr. Browning 
 answer you. Our poet is, I think, extremely 
 helpful with his problem of evil in the world. 
 He is evidently of that school of philosophy 
 known as the Mystics ; and it is pretty certain 
 that much of the mysticism pervading European 
 religious thought had its origin in Buddhism. 
 If we take the Bhagavad-gita, that beautiful old 
 Indian book of philosophy, and compare it with 
 Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christy we 
 cannot fail to be struck by their similarity. To 
 what extent we owe some of our best religious 
 thought to Buddhism will never be known, but 
 
48 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 it is certain that Mr. Browninof has absorbed 
 some of its teaching. Take his view of the evil 
 in the world. He says, in that wonderful poem 
 of his which I commend heartily to every lover 
 of music, the poem called Abt Vogler — 
 
 " There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live 
 as before ; 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good 
 more ; 
 On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect 
 round." 
 
 The Buddhist, the Mystic, and the Christian 
 philosophers alike agree in denying the reality 
 of evil, and affirming the reality and perma- 
 nence of good. The direct tendency of all evil 
 is to perish, of all good to become permanent. 
 Walt Whitman beautifully expresses this. He 
 says : '' Roaming in thought over the universe, 
 I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening 
 towards immortality, and the vast all that is 
 called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and 
 become lost and dead." 
 
 Mr. Browning goes much further than this, 
 however, and declares : 
 
 " In this first 
 Life, I see the good of evil, why our world began at worst : 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 49 
 
 Since time means amelioration, tardily enough displayed, 
 
 Yet a mainly onward moving, never wholly retrograde. 
 
 We know more though we know little, we grow stronger 
 
 though still weak. 
 Partly see though all too purblind, stammer though we 
 
 cannot speak." 
 
 The troubles and pains of life are held by 
 our poet to be necessary for the evolution and 
 development of bur highest nature. Says Dr. 
 Martineau : *' A world without a contingency 
 or an agony could have had no hero and no 
 saint." Let me tell you an instance of this 
 heroism. 
 
 I was called the other day to see a man 
 suffering for the fifth or sixth time from the 
 disease known as lead poisoning, consequent 
 upon working in a lead factory. As I ap- 
 proached his bed, on which he was lying in 
 great agony, I gently reproached him for 
 having returned to such dangerous work after 
 the previous illnesses of the same kind for 
 which I had treated him. 
 
 " You will certainly kill yourself," I said. 
 
 He replied, looking round on his wife and 
 four little children, " I know that, sir ! Better 
 to risk that than that these should starve ! '* 
 
 Here was heroism evolved from pain and 
 
 R. B. E 
 
50 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 disease. Do you think the luxury of the 
 Sybarites could breed that sort of thing ? 
 A Sybarite reared in luxury once visited a 
 Spartan, and had to put up with Spartan sim- 
 plicity and coarseness of food. He said he 
 thought the Spartans had been brave, but he 
 knew them now to be the greatest cowards on 
 earth, not to commit suicide rather than live 
 so severely. Mr. Browning holds that the 
 fruit of all these victories stays and makes up 
 for us the gain of life : — 
 
 " I gather heart through just such conquests of the soul, 
 Through evolution out of that which, on the whole, 
 Was rough, ungainly, partial accomplishment, at best." 
 
 To have the fruit, we must have the root 
 
 and stem and branch, and these must contend 
 
 with the elements. We must see — 
 
 ** By the means of Evil that Good is best, 
 And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's 
 serene." 
 
 He sees another use for evil, — 
 
 "Choose a joy ! 
 Bettered it was by sorrow gone before, 
 And sobered somewhat by the shadowy sense 
 Of sorrow which came after or might come. 
 Joy, sorrow, — by precedence, subsequence — 
 Either on each, make fusion, mix in Life 
 That's both and neither wholly." 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 51 
 
 You know what a tonic work Is. You know 
 what becomes of muscles we do not exercise. 
 Bind your arm to your side, you athlete, for 
 two months; It will be withered when you 
 unbind it. We get our great heroism by 
 exercise. Mr. Browning says : — 
 
 " For mankind springs 
 Salvation by each hindrance interposed, 
 They climb." 
 
 " I can believe this dread machinery 
 Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, 
 Devised, all pain, at most expenditure of pain, 
 By who devised pain, — to evolve. 
 By new machinery, in counterpart 
 The moral qualities of man — 
 To make him love and be beloved. 
 Creating and self-sacrificing too. 
 To enable man to wring, from out all pain, 
 All pleasure for a common heritage." 
 
 By these things then man is compelled to 
 strive, ''which means, in man, as good as reach 
 the goal." 
 
 So you see that Mr. Browning is what we 
 call an optimist. Another article of his religion 
 is belief in the immortality of the soul, because 
 man is not here complete. Everything else is 
 pomplete except man. Has man been developed 
 
52 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 from the lower animals ? The Poet does not 
 doubt it. Nevertheless he Is now — 
 
 For aye removed from the developed brute, 
 A god, though in the germ." 
 
 He Is not complete yet ; ** man is not Man 
 as yet." His end, he says, is not attained while 
 only here and there a star shines out to dispel 
 the darkness, a Shakespeare here, a Milton 
 there, a Socrates and a Plato In one age, and a 
 Bacon and a Dante In other ages. The time 
 will come when God will make no more giants, 
 but elevate the race at once ! Completion and 
 perfection are for star- fishes ; you will never 
 see a better star-fish than you can pick up on 
 Brighton beach to-day. 
 
 " Let the mere star-fish in his vault 
 
 Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed, 
 Rose- jacinth to the finger-tips ; 
 He, whole in body and soul, outstrips 
 Man, found with either in default. 
 
 But what's whole, can increase no more." 
 
 "Progress is man's distinctive mark alone. 
 Not God's and not the beast's. God is, they are, 
 Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." 
 
 Man has been and Is so great that he sees 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 53 
 
 no prospect of his stopping in his development, 
 and in his very greatness sees the promise of 
 greater things to come. 
 
 "I know this earth is not my sphere, 
 For I cannot so narrow me, but that 
 I still exceed it." 
 
 Remark that, in insisting upon the reason- 
 ableness of the immortality of the soul, Mr. 
 Browning does not place It on the low orthodox 
 ground which used to be held, that this life 
 was nothing but a poor, wretched pilgrimage to 
 something better. The waste, howling wilder- 
 ness, the old hymn speaks of, where the only 
 howling is made by the miserable, small-souled 
 pilgrims themselves, finds no place in Mr. 
 Brownings system. Boldly and clearly he 
 speaks out on this point in the fine lines — 
 
 '* Another world ! 
 And why this world, this common world to be 
 A make-shift, a mere foil how fair soever 
 To some fine life to come ? " 
 
 As a school, as a gymnasium, he will bate 
 nothing of the value of this life ; but a future 
 life he thinks is indicated by man's longing for 
 permanence, his manifest incompleteness here. 
 
 All through the poet's work, from first to 
 
54 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 last, the belief in personal immortality, on 
 reasonable grounds, is a main article of his 
 creed. In this tabernacle life we were made to 
 grow ; and the ** broken arcs " of life demand 
 something beyond, complementary to our poet's 
 vision of the future. In all evil there is some- 
 thing remedial, something conservative in all 
 suffering. There are worse things than having 
 to live on sixpence a day and earning it. The 
 great argument for immortality, is not for reward, 
 but because it is reasonable. This life is far too 
 short in which to do all we want. We only 
 catch a few notes of the song, and it must be 
 completed elsewhere. And this belief is not 
 unscientific. It is the fashion to call it " un- 
 scientific." Physiology has not helped in the 
 least iota to explain how it was that beef and 
 beer made Hamlet's soliloquy. The atomic 
 theory did not help us a bit ; therefore it is 
 not unscientific to hold to a future life. With 
 Browning it is a hope^ neither more nor less, 
 but still a hope. 
 
 This is a grand thing, coming from so great 
 a genius of the Anglo-Saxon race — a man 
 replete with the sciences and arts, and of pro- 
 found learning and research. When such a man 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 55 
 
 boldly said there is hope for a future life, it is a 
 thing infinitely comforting to lesser souls who 
 also looked forward with a little hope. 
 
 Now these reasonable beliefs are drawn, 
 you will perceive, not from the Bible, not from 
 the authority of the Christian or any other 
 Church, but from the indications of a calm 
 and liberal philosophy. Mr. Browning does 
 not despise any man's creed or his no-creed ; if 
 it be honest and sincere, it is so far good. He 
 has a wonderful poem termed Christinas Eve, 
 A man goes into a miserable little Metho- 
 dist chapel on Christmas Eve, and sits there 
 till he falls asleep trying to listen to a vulgar 
 sermon on the birth of Christ. As he sleeps 
 he dreams of the various forms of Christianity. 
 He fancies that he has left the chapel and gone 
 out into the stormy night. And, lo ! a great 
 wonder happens to him : he thinks he sees 
 in the splendour of the lunar rainbow the 
 form of Christ, who has been present at that 
 little chapel. The face of the Master turns 
 towards him rather reproachfully, and in a 
 moment he is caught up in His vesture and 
 carried away to St. Peter's at Rome, there to 
 behold another and a far grander form of 
 
56 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 worship on that same Christmas Eve. The 
 Master enters, for amid all the medisevalism 
 there was truth there also. There were the 
 love and faith which had made Christian lands 
 out of heathen lands, and softened the hard 
 hearts of savage men. But faith and love 
 were not all, and the Master wraps him in his 
 mantle once more, to find intellect and know- 
 ledge ; and soon they enter the lecture hall of 
 a German university, where a professor is dis- 
 coursing on the Christ-myth. 
 
 He refuses to enter here, but Christ goes 
 within. There must then be truth here also, 
 and so there is. The professor has pulverized 
 the faith very, very fine indeed ; by his severe 
 tests he has reduced the pearl of great price 
 to ashes, " and yet in his judgment left it a 
 pearl." He bids his followers treasure up the 
 precious dust, by no means throw a particle 
 away. Call it a toy if they will ; it will serve 
 a good purpose. There is something of value 
 after all in the beautiful thing he has destroyed. 
 
 And so they leave the German professor, 
 and the traveller is caught up again in the 
 folds of the vesture of Christ, and he is taken 
 back to the little chapel whence he started. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 57 
 
 Ah ! he says, he sees his error now ; he has 
 despised the poor worship for its vulgarity. 
 No longer, however, will he reject the water of 
 life for sake of the coarseness of the vessel out 
 of which he has to drink it. 
 
 I know no teaching which is more thoroughly 
 healthful and wholesome than Browning's. 
 There is none of that almost infernal, deadly 
 resignation and insensibility to pain or pleasure 
 which we see in Buddhist philosophy. He 
 takes the pleasures and the ills of life as he 
 finds them, and is cheerful and philosophical 
 under all. 
 
 The God in which some find it so hard to 
 believe is often but a caricature of God of which 
 they have somehow got hold. We all believe 
 in justice, mercy, and truth, which are the very 
 fibres of God's being. These things to Brown- 
 ing spell God. He tells us "we must correct 
 the portrait by the living face. Man's God, by 
 God's God in the mind of man " ( The Pope, 
 
 p. 81). 
 
 We cannot expect to understand God, as 
 his Bishop Blougram says : — 
 
 " Pure faith, indeed — you know not what you ask ! 
 Naked belief in God the Omnipotent, 
 
58 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much 
 The sense of conscious creatures to be borne. 
 It were the seeing Him, no flesh shall dare. 
 Some think, creation's meant to show Him forth : 
 I say, it's meant to hide Him all it can ; 
 And that's what all the blessed evil's for. 
 Its use in time is to environ us. 
 Our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough 
 Against that sight, till we can bear its stress. 
 Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain 
 And lidless eye and disimprisoned heart. 
 Less certainly would wither up at once. 
 Than mind confronted with the truth of Him. 
 But time and earth case-harden us to live ; 
 The feeblest sense is trusted most ; the child 
 Feels God a moment, ichors o'er the place, 
 Plays on, and grows to be a man like us." 
 
 He has written a very curious poem called 
 The Epistle of Karshish, supposed to be sent 
 by a doctor, who has heard the story of 
 Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. He 
 addresses his letter to his master in the science 
 of medicine, and speaks of Lazarus as doctors 
 talk to one another, calling it '' a case." He 
 thinks he explains it by calling it one of 
 epilepsy, followed by a trance from which 
 Lazarus awoke, thinks Lazarus mad, but still 
 is wonderfully puzzled by all he has told him, 
 and then breaks out into this fine appeal : — 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 59 
 
 " The very God ! think, Abib ; 
 Dost thou think ? 
 So, the All-Great, were the All- Loving too — 
 The Madman saith He said so ; it is strange." 
 
 He believes in the gospel of work ; he re- 
 cognises with true scientific perception that 
 cessation of use means degeneration, atrophy, 
 loss. The correlation between work and food 
 is so intimate, that we cannot say which Nature 
 values more highly. The apostle said,*Tf a man 
 will not work, neither shall he eat." Nature 
 seems to say. If he will not work, he shall not 
 exist at all ; certainly not without retrogression 
 to the most degraded of types. 
 
 Browning says : — 
 
 " And so I live, you see. 
 Go through the world, try, prove, reject, 
 Prefer, still struggling to effect 
 My warfare ; happy that I can 
 Be crossed and thwarted as a man. 
 Not left in God's contempt apart, 
 With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, 
 Tame in earth's paddock as her prize " 
 
 And again, — 
 
 " Learning anew the use of soldiership, 
 Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear. 
 Loyalty to the hfe's end ! Ruminate, 
 
6o THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Deserve the initiatory spasm, — once more 
 Work, be unhappy but bear Hfe, my son ! " 
 
 Ring and Book^ vol. iv., p. 53. 
 
 Be faithful, says our Mr. Greatheart : — 
 
 " Thus at first prompting of what I call God, 
 And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend, 
 Accept the obligation laid on thee 
 
 As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly, 
 
 Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant 
 
 And flower o' the field, all in a common pact 
 
 To worthily defend the trust of trusts, 
 
 Life from the Ever Living." 
 
 Ring and Book, vol. iv., p. 47. 
 
 No whining about life not being worth 
 living here, because of the inevitable trials we 
 must encounter. No ! 
 
 " For mankind springs salvation by each hindrance inter- 
 posed." 
 
 Sordello, p. 195. • 
 
 " Do something," says Carlyle, In the same 
 strain : — 
 
 ** Be no longer a chaos, but a World, or even 
 a Worldkin, Produce ! Produce ! Were it but 
 the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, 
 produce it, in God's name ! " 
 
 He does not say, with Tennyson : — 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 6i 
 
 "Oh yet we trust that somehow good 
 Will be the final goal of ill, 
 To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
 Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ; 
 
 That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
 
 That not one life shall be destroy'd. 
 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void. 
 When God hath made the pile complete." 
 
 No ; beautiful as this faith is, Browning's Is 
 stronger and his vision clearer. With him is 
 no somehow ; but he shows us just how the ill 
 tends to good, and we have not to wait till the 
 pile is completed ; but we see the Builder at 
 work, putting into His fabric the unlikely look- 
 ing *' rubbish" we too rashly thought would be 
 cast aside. 
 
 I say, with all deference to those who know 
 Mr. Browning's works better than I do, that it 
 appears to me we cannot properly understand 
 them till we clearly recognise what is the poet's 
 " Estimate of Life." I think that estimate is 
 unique, that it is eminently scientific, and that 
 It is pre-eminently good for us to recognise. I 
 should say that the theme, as musicians call it, 
 of all our poet's work is — that no factors in our 
 life (however unpromising they may appear) 
 
62 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 can be spared consistently with our development 
 and progress. 
 
 He does not complain with Dryden, that 
 *' Life is all a cheat," nor ask plaintively with 
 Gay, ** Oh, what is life with ills encompassed 
 round ? " He laments not with Shakespeare 
 that '* Life's but a walking shadow — a tale told 
 by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying 
 nothing " ; nor with that other who said, '' Life 
 is a weary interlude that leaves no epilogue 
 but death " ; nor with him who grieved, *' The 
 longer life, the greater choice of evil." He 
 calls it not *'a mist," '* a riddle," "a shadow," 
 ** a wind-swept meadow." Nothing of all this 
 in Browning ; with him, as in Fra Lippo, — 
 
 " The world and life's too big to pass for a dream." 
 As In Saul, — 
 
 " How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to em- 
 ploy 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in 
 joy!" 
 
 " I have lived, seen God's hand thro' a lifetime, and all was 
 for best ! " 
 
 As in Rabbi Ben Ezra, — 
 
 «* Perfect I call Thy plan ; 
 Thanks that I was a man ; " 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 63 
 
 As once more in Fra Lippo Lippi, — 
 
 " This world's no blot for us 
 Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good." 
 
 And as again in The Guardiait Angel, — 
 
 " O world, as God has made it ! All is beauty : 
 And knowing this is love, and love is duty." 
 
 He goes to the Morgue, and even there, 
 contemplating the corpses of the poor wretches 
 on the slabs, can exclaim with his beautiful, 
 healthy optimism, — 
 
 *' My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
 The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 
 
 That, after Last, returns the First, 
 Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 
 
 That what began best can't end worst. 
 Nor what God blessed once prove accurst." 
 
 And in that magnificent Abt Vogler poem, — 
 
 " There shall never be one lost good ! What was shall 
 live as before ; 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much 
 good more ; 
 On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect 
 round." 
 
 The In Memoriam utterances sound like 
 
64 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 the voice of Mr. Little- Faith, after listening to 
 such a defiance of evil as this. 
 
 From Pauline (Mr. Browning's first poem, 
 written, I may add, for the benefit of those who 
 may not know the order of his works, in 1832, 
 when he was but twenty), where he says : — 
 
 " Feeling God loves us, and that all that errs 
 is a strange dream which death will dissipate " — 
 
 through the splendid triumphs of his genius — 
 ParacelsiLS, Sordello, Men and Women, Fifine^ 
 down to his last work, we have the same un- 
 diminished, nay, accentuated, confidence that 
 " the soul, stung to strength through weakness, 
 strives for good through evil," because '' Law 
 deals the same with soul and body "; and I say 
 that such a long life of consistent facing the 
 ills of time, with confidence that *' God's in His 
 heaven, all's right with the world " — while the 
 limp, degenerate jelly-fish who prate about 4ife 
 not being worth living, and, because they are 
 emasculate and jaundiced, dare to tell us, with 
 their poisoned melancholy, that Hfe is a long 
 mistake — entitles Mr. Browming to a perfecdy 
 unique position among the prophets of our day : 
 and because I believe him to occupy this place 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 65 
 
 in literature, I have taken l^ave to term him a 
 scientific poet, a thesis I am still prepared to 
 maintain. And for this reason, that he recog- 
 nises the great Darwinian truth that oppo- 
 sition and struggle are the great factors in 
 development and progress ; that as with the 
 organs of animals and plants, which are the 
 outcome of their necessity, so with our souls, in 
 the Avords of Dewey : '' Human virtue is the 
 result of effort and patience in the circumstances 
 that most directly try it. All wisdom and 
 worth in the world are a struggle with igno- 
 rance, infirmity, and temptation ; there is not an 
 admirable character presented before you but it 
 has cost years and years of toil, and watching, 
 and self-government to form it." The struggles 
 of orchids to secure cross fertilization have 
 evolved their rich, beautiful forms ; and our 
 own struggle after good serves to evolve our 
 noblest faculties. 
 
 " Our business with the sea 
 Is not with air, but o' the water, watery : 
 We must endure the false, no particle of which 
 Do we acquaint us with, but up we mount a pitch 
 Above it, find our head reach truth, while hands explore 
 The false below." 
 
 Fifine at the Fair. 
 
 R. B. F 
 
66 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 He despises not the grosser element ; *' he 
 moves in it, yet resists ; is upborne on every 
 side by what he beats against " ; *' The prize is 
 in the process." 
 
 This doctrine runs through all his work as a 
 vein of gold, not merely shining here and there, 
 but running as a clue to his teaching through- 
 out ; and if this is not in the methods of 
 science, so much the worse for science. 
 
 Then again, the true scientific mind never 
 loses sight of the smallest fact which can throw 
 any light on the subject of investigation. Mr. 
 Browning is remarkable for never ignoring the 
 apparently insignificant factors in the life-history 
 of his characters. He deals with the whole of 
 these factors, not with a part only, as do so 
 many writers. He must have everything be- 
 fore he will construct his parallelogram of 
 forces. 
 
 " Oh, the little more, and how much it is ! 
 And the little less, and what worlds away ! " 
 
 By the Fireside. 
 
 Now it is a scientific truism, that it is the 
 little overlooked forces ever at work which are 
 always changing the face of our world. The 
 present age has learned to write the epic of the 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 67 
 
 worm ; we are beginning to duly estimate the 
 value of the Infinitely little. And not less true 
 is it that our mental development depends on a 
 number of circumstances which we are too apt 
 to overlook. It has recently been discovered 
 that Mr. Darwin, careful as he always seemed 
 in allowing for the fullest Importance of 
 minutest causes, made a great mistake in his 
 account of the origin of the coral reefs In the 
 Pacific ; it has been urged that he did not 
 make nearly sufficient allowance for the effects 
 of those trifling causes, and attributed the 
 origin of these coral islands to forces which it 
 has been shown have had much less to do with 
 them than he supposed — the fact being that 
 apparently the most unlikely things had far the 
 most work to do.* 
 
 So is it with our own lives and characters ; 
 it is the unceasing play of mean and paltry 
 things which mould them. Browning Is always 
 insisting on the value of these trifles. We 
 neither become angels nor devils all at once. 
 
 ■* This was written before Mr. Huxley's reply to the 
 Duke of Argyll in the Niiieteenth Century appeared. 
 Whether Darwin was right or wrong has not yet been 
 decided, but the illustration will still serve. 
 
68 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Our poet is always taking us behind the scenes 
 and showing us his characters preparing for 
 the parts they play. He points out just where 
 the paint and the padding come in. He is as 
 merciless with his heroes and heroines as the 
 valet to his master; but that is because he 
 knows them as intimately. 
 
 Now all this is healthy and pre-eminently 
 useful, as we said at the outset. It is well to 
 know that " the laughing loves " at the base of 
 the cup are not more valued in the Master's 
 eye than " the skull things in order grim " 
 about its rim. We are not to look " down but 
 up ! to uses of a cup." 
 
 *' What I aspired to be, 
 And was not, comforts me : " 
 
 " 'Tis not what man Does, but what man Would do, which 
 exalts him." 
 
 Though we cannot bring the sum right, 
 Browning always gives us credit for the work- 
 ing. He judges never by the world's standard 
 of success or failure, and is always putting 
 down the mighty from their seats and exalting 
 the humble and the meek. 
 
 Do we succeed ? It is due to **just this or 
 
THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 69 
 
 that poor impulse, which for once had play 
 unstifled." — Cristina. 
 
 Do we fail ? though we tried so hard^ 
 
 " That low man seeks a little thing to do, 
 Sees it and does it ; 
 This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 
 Dies ere he knows it. 
 
 That low man goes on adding one to one. 
 
 His hundred 's soon hit : 
 This high man, aiming at a million, 
 
 Misses an unit. 
 That, has the world here — should he need the next, 
 
 Let the world mind him ! 
 This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed 
 
 Seeking shall find him." 
 
 A GrammariarCs Funeral. 
 
 *' Better have failed in the high aim, as I, 
 Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed 
 As, God be thanked, I do not ! " 
 
 The Inn Album. 
 
 " There is Heaven, since there is Heaven's simulation — 
 Earth : 
 I sit possessed in patience : prison roof 
 Shall break one day and Heaven beam overhead." 
 
 All this sympathy with failure is so helpful 
 to the poor handicapped ones who are always 
 being pushed aside in life's race. I shall be 
 told, I suppose, that this proves Browning to 
 
70 THE RELIGION OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 be unscientific — that the survival of the fittest 
 theory does not provide for the failures. 
 
 '' A tree born to erectness of bole, 
 Palm or plane or pine, we laud if lofty, columnar — 
 Little if athwart, askew, — leave to the axe and the flame ! 
 Where is the vision may penetrate earth and beholding 
 
 acknowledge 
 Just one pebble at root ruined the straightness of stem ? 
 Whose fine vigilance follows the sapling, accounts for the 
 
 failure, — 
 Here blew wind, so it bent : there the snow lodged, so it 
 
 broke ? ^' 
 
 Ixion. 
 
 But the whole business of modern science is 
 just now devoted to getting rid of the pebbles 
 at our roots and propping up our weakly boles. 
 The failures were never so well looked after as 
 now. For though " all's Law, yet all's Love " 
 too, thank God. We have said little of Love 
 in all this argument, not because there is little 
 of it in Browning; it is the dominant note of 
 his work — 
 
 ** As some imperial chord subsists, 
 Steadily underlies the accidental mists 
 Of music springing thence, that run their mazy race 
 Around." 
 
 Fifine^ 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 The commonly accepted notion of poets and 
 poetry excludes the idea of the scientific habit 
 of thought, and still more of its expression. 
 We expect the poet to speak to us, in metrical 
 language, of the passions and interests of man, 
 and to interpret for us the voice of nature in 
 strains that are not hampered by exactitude and 
 precision. In other words, we grant him '*the 
 poet's licence." But as all this is just the 
 opposite to our demands on the man of science, 
 it seems a contradiction in terms to speak of a 
 scientific poet. It jars upon our ideas of the 
 fitness of things. But why ? Because they 
 are conventional ideas ; and our notions of poets 
 and what constitutes true poetry, are not always 
 inspired by familiarity with the greatest masters 
 of the art. The scientific method, it is true, is 
 not in favour with the minor poets ; and it is not' 
 given even to all the greater to combine with 
 the highest poetic faculty the deeper insight 
 into the hidden things of nature possessed by 
 
72 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 Robert Browning. In him, as I hope to show, 
 the poetic and scientific methods are not merely 
 found together, but are truly combined ; and 
 throughout his works are scattered abundant 
 evidence that he, with keen vision, has seen 
 far into the workings of Nature, and ennobled 
 his phrase and verse from the study of her 
 phenomena, 
 
 Milton has done this too ; and Tennyson has 
 proved that the scientific spirit can enrich his 
 verse, and that he, in turn, can invest the 
 operations of natural laws with the enchantment 
 of his art. Who could have imagined that a 
 poet would have stated the atomic theory of 
 Lucretius In the magnificent terms that he has 
 done ? — 
 
 " A void was made in Nature ; all her bonds 
 Cracked ; and I saw the flaring atom-streams 
 And torrents of her myriad universe, 
 Ruining along the illimitable inane, 
 Fly on, to clash together again, and make 
 Another and another frame of things 
 For ever." 
 
 As a specimen of Tennyson's poetry, I don't 
 think any one can say it is spoiled by being a 
 statement, and an accurate one, of the atomic 
 theory. 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 73 
 
 And if for Browning it be true that — 
 
 " Verse was a temple-worship vague and vast, 
 A ceremony that withdrew the last 
 Opposing bolt, looped back the lingering veil 
 Which hid the holy place," 
 
 {Pauline,) 
 
 what wonder If he speak of the deepest things 
 the holy place enshrines in the sacred language 
 that befits its service ? 
 
 It would probably not add to Mr. Browning's 
 popularity were the world convinced of his 
 advanced standpoint. It is not apt to love 
 overmuch to be taken out of its depth ; it likes 
 its poets to sing as caged birds are taught to 
 warble — songs piped by itself, and demands of 
 its Sordellos that they shall be bards and not 
 philosophers : 
 
 *'Why introduce crotchets like these? fine surely, but no use 
 In poetry — which still must be, to strike, 
 Based upon common sense ; there's nothing like 
 Appealing to our nature. 
 
 Would you have your songs endure ? 
 Build on the human heart." 
 
 Sordello. 
 
 Apart from the fact that we are not accus- 
 tomed to find the poetic and scientific natures 
 
74 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 co-exist, there seems a tacit understanding that 
 it is somehow an offence (even when they do) 
 if the poet trench on the other's province. In 
 a humorous letter to the Pall Mall Gazette the 
 other day, on the question whether a certain 
 flower of deHcious odour should be called 
 " tube-rose " or *' tuber-rose," the writer says 
 that he is '' deeply distressed to hear that tube- 
 rose is so called from its being a ' lumpy 
 flower.' It is not at all lumpy, and even if it 
 were, no poet should be heartless enough to 
 say so. Henceforth there really must be two 
 derivations for every word, one for the poet, 
 and one for the scientist. And in the present 
 case the poet will dwell on the tiny trumpets of 
 ivory into which the white flower breaks, and 
 leave to the man of science horrid allusions to 
 its supposed lumpiness, and indiscreet revela- 
 tions of its private life below ground. In fact, 
 tuber as a derivation is disgraceful. On the 
 roots of verbs philology may be allowed to 
 speak, but on the roots of flowers she must 
 keep silence. We cannot allow her to dig up 
 Parnassus." 
 
 Darwin's investigations into the fertilization 
 of plants, and the part which their colours and 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 75 
 
 forms play in that process,must have been felt by 
 poets of the lower school as almost an outrage ; 
 yet to a Browning these discoveries serve only 
 to awaken ideas and set up trains of thought of 
 infinitely more value, — as being in harmony with 
 the spirit of nature, — than they could have ever 
 imagined who only thought of the redness of 
 the rose and the blueness of the violet as ad- 
 juncts with the graces of their form to make the 
 fields and woods look pretty. 
 
 He is in sympathy with those who can tell us 
 what is the hidden meaning of the " objects 
 that throng our youth." ** We see and hear, 
 and do not wonder much." 
 
 " As German Boehme never cared for plants 
 Until it happed, a-walking in the fields, 
 He noticed all at once that plants could speak, 
 Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him. 
 That day the daisy had an eye indeed — 
 Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes ! " 
 
 Poems ^ vol. v., p. 208. 
 
 It is not demanded of the poet that he 
 should ignore the beauty of the rainbow till he 
 has studied Fraunhofer s lines. What we do 
 say is, that neither the scientist alone nor the 
 poet alone comprehend Nature till they borrow 
 from each other — the one the reverence and 
 
76 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 the worship, the other the learning and loving 
 study, that, united, make up the true spirit in 
 which she is to be approached. In Robert 
 Browning there is the happiest combination of 
 these requisites. 
 
 He has learned with delight how the human 
 brain enshrines its mysteries in its myriad cells, 
 where thought is born and memory treasures 
 her precious records ; of the marvellous me- 
 chanism of our limbs, with their cords and 
 pulleys, and facile play ; of the eye, that with 
 insatiable activity supplies the brain with its 
 impressions of the world around us; of the 
 musical instrument of ten thousand strings, 
 played on by the air-pulsations that arouse the 
 sense of hearing to activity every moment of our 
 waking lives. 
 
 In a very beautiful passage In Ferishtah 
 (p. 76) he makes the Creator address man 
 thus — 
 
 " Wherefore did I contrive for thee that ear 
 Hungry for music, and direct thine eye 
 To where I hold a seven-stringed instrument, 
 Unless I meant thee to beseech Me play ? " 
 
 Here, of course, the reference Is to the organ 
 of Corti In the Internal ear, with its 3,000 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 77 
 
 arches, its keys ranged like those of a piano, 
 aptly described by the poet as *' hungry for 
 music." The seven-stringed instrument, I need 
 not say, is light and the seven colours of the 
 spectrum. 
 
 It is nothing wonderful that he should know- 
 such easily-acquired facts ; it is wonderful that 
 they should be transfigured by the magic of his 
 art. Yet he imparts his secret to the attent- 
 ive reader. It is his deep love of the law and 
 harmony of nature. His process has been that 
 which Henry Taylor describes as his own : 
 " Observation of facts ; generalization from facts 
 observed ; rejection into the concrete, but with 
 improvements from the fancy, of the general 
 conclusions obtained." 
 
 The more thoroughly the lover of Nature is 
 skilled in the knowledge of her laws, the greater 
 will be the intellectual pleasure with which he 
 will contemplate them ; and the poet who can 
 follow Nature into her secret chambers, and 
 commune with her on her deepest phenomena, 
 will be the poet who has the noblest things to 
 say to the human soul. The poet who can 
 interpret for us the " great symphony of organic 
 harmony composed in the forest key," as Mr. 
 
78 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 Mivart terms it, speaking of the vegetable 
 world of the Brazils — of the recently-discovered 
 harmonious relations of the ocean and its sub- 
 merged wealth of wondrous beauty, will be the 
 poet of the future who will come into a closer 
 relationship with man than has ever been 
 reached before. So far from the fascination of 
 Nature being dispelled by our completer know- 
 ledge of her laws, it has been a hundredfold 
 increased by the revelation of glories before 
 undreamed of, which are none the less resplen- 
 dent because we know their origin. How 
 science and poetry can blend in one harmonious 
 spirit, students of Henry Thoreau need not be 
 told. 
 
 By science in this connection I do not mean 
 merely mental science, without which a poet 
 could not hope "to loop back the veil." We 
 know how versed in this was Shakespeare. 
 Coleridge speaks of " Shakespeare's deep and 
 accurate science in mental philosophy." No 
 one will deny, I presume, this characteristic to 
 Robert Browning ; but I claim something more 
 than this for him. I maintain that in his works 
 he exhibits a deep and earnest sympathy with 
 all branches of human knowledge dealing with 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 79 
 
 the causes and connections of natural pheno- 
 mena — In other words, with what we term the 
 physical sciences. Now this is essentially an 
 age pre-eminent for the investigation of such 
 causes and connections ; yet I think we may 
 say that in its atmosphere there is nothing that 
 need stunt and dwarf the spirit of poetry. I do 
 not quite see with Mr. Radford, in his remarks 
 on Mr. Bury's paper, "■ that the language of 
 poetry and science are diametrically opposed." 
 They need not use the same language of course; 
 but I can see no reason for opposition between 
 the spirit of poetry and that of science. Poetry 
 and the physical sciences flourished together in 
 the Greek intellect ; and though perhaps, as far 
 as modern times are concerned, till the advent 
 of Haller and Goethe, the scientific and the 
 poetic minds had not been blended, we have in 
 Goethe a grand example of the genus ; and in 
 Browning, as I think, we have the noble fore- 
 runner of a new, strong race of poets of the 
 first order, the interpreters of the inquiring, 
 analytical soul of the age, in which no subject 
 is too sacred to be questioned. No ; were the 
 physical sciences, like our factory chimneys, to 
 exhale a breath poisonous to the surrounding 
 
8o BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 flora of the poet's fancy, as some have thought, 
 we should be terrible losers by all our advance- 
 ment in the productive arts, and Mr. Ruskin's 
 lament over our decadence be more than 
 justified. The spirit of the age has dissolved 
 the legend of William Tell, and taken some of 
 the romance out of the Tell country ; but it has 
 given it a magnificent railway, which in a few 
 hours brings the flowers and fruits of Italy to 
 cheerless London slums. 
 
 The poet of the future will see more romance 
 in that fact than in many time-honoured legends. 
 He will have to sing to us of the modern Spirit 
 of the Alps — Professor Tyndall, in his chalet, 
 questioning the rainbow, the glacier, the ava- 
 lanche, and the mountain mist and storm. The 
 dragons are gone, and the knights that slew 
 them live only in legendary tales ; but the 
 epidemiologist, in his laboratory, doing battle 
 with the germs of cholera and typhus, is a not 
 less noble theme for the poet of the nineteenth 
 century, though an artist might not think the 
 subject would look so well on his canvas. It 
 was a poet, Lucretius, who eighteen hundred 
 years ago anticipated the atomic theory. We 
 owe him a debt of gratitude for proving in his 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 8i 
 
 own person that poetry is not incompatible 
 with science, and that it is quite possible for 
 a man to investigate the laws of nature without 
 blinding his vision to the loveliness of the ideal 
 world. He sang the reign of law in the uni- 
 verse, that our misery or our happiness was not 
 dependent on the caprice of the gods, but on 
 the nature of things. This man was the true 
 poet, the creator ; and it has taken the world 
 eighteen centuries to prove as facts what his 
 prophetic spirit foresaw. We live now in an 
 age of technical accuracy. The time of the 
 poet's licence is past ; and poetry, if not now 
 scientifically accurate, is to us of this age fool- 
 ishness. Some one has said that a poet who 
 was not mad was no poet at all. If Mr. Brown- 
 ing has any madness, it is in his method, never 
 in his matter. His is emphatically the sound 
 mind in the sound body ; he is the poet of 
 downright common sense ; his imagination 
 never runs away with him, though possibly 
 it is exhausted in his style. Scientific students 
 of Browning must often think what a scientist 
 he would have made, just as readers of Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall are always exclaiming, '* Here 
 is the poet of science ! " Hear what he himself 
 
 R. B. G 
 
82 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET 
 
 says of the experimental philosopher : ** He 
 lives a life of the senses, using his hands, eyes, 
 and ears in his experiments, but is constantly 
 being carried beyond the margin of the senses. 
 His mind must realize the subsensible world, 
 and possess a pictorial power ; if the picture 
 so formed be correct, the phenomena he is 
 investigating are accounted for. Imagination 
 with him does not sever itself from the world 
 of fact ; this is the storehouse from which all 
 its pictures are drawn ; and the magic of its art 
 consists, not in creating things anew, but in so 
 changing the magnitude, position, and other 
 relations of sensible things as to fit them for 
 the requirements of the intellect in the sub- 
 sensible world." Poets have been allowed to 
 exercise a riotous power in dealing capriciously 
 with facts. But if a well-ordered and disciplined 
 scientific method restrain this riot and caprice, 
 I don't think the result is any the less true 
 poetry. Perhaps the fact that Browning is 
 restrained by his science from playing havoc 
 with phenomena may account for the ^chyq- 
 strained riot and caprice of his words. On 
 Tyndall's theory this may really be Browning's 
 safety-valve. 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 83 
 
 Christopher North and the Ettrick Shepherd 
 in the twenty-second of the Nodes Ambrosiance 
 so exactly and admirably place the question in 
 its proper light, that I may be pardoned if I 
 quote a few sentences. 
 
 The Shepherd asks, " What think ye, sir, 
 o' the dogma, that high imagination is incom- 
 patible wi' high intellect, and that as science 
 flourishes poetry decays ? " 
 
 North replies, " The dogmata of dunces are 
 beyond the reach of redemption. A man may 
 have a high intellect with little or no imagina- 
 tion ; but he cannot have a high imagination 
 with little or no intellect. The intellect of 
 Homer, Dante, Milton, or Shakespeare, wis 
 higher than that of Aristotle, Newton, and 
 Bacon. When elevated by feeling into imagina- 
 tion, their intellect becomes transcendent, and 
 thus were they poets, the noblest name by far 
 and away that belongs to any of the children 
 of men. What is science } True knowledge 
 of mind and matter, as far as it is permitted 
 to us to know anything truly of the world 
 without and the world within us, congenial in 
 their co-existence. What is poetry ? The 
 true exhibition in musical and metrical speech 
 
84 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 of the thoughts of humanity when coloured by 
 its feehngs throughout the whole range of the 
 physical, moral, Intellectual, and spiritual regions 
 of its being. Poetry and science are identical 
 — or rather, that as imagination is the highest 
 kind of intellect, so poetry is the highest kind 
 of science. It is only in an age of science that 
 anything worthy the name of poetry can exist. 
 In a rude age there may be bursts of passion — 
 of imagination even, which, if you insist on 
 calling them poetry, I am willing so to desig- 
 nate ; in that case, almost all human language 
 is poetry. Will any antiquary or archaeologist 
 show me a bit of poetry as broad as the palm 
 of my hand worth the toss up of a tinker's 
 farthing the produce of uncivilized man ? Not 
 till man and nature and human life lie in the 
 last light of science — that is, of knowledge and 
 of truth — will poetry reach the acme of its 
 triumph. As Campbell sings, — 
 
 " ' Come, bright Improvement, on the car of Time, 
 And rule the spacious world from clime to clime,' — 
 
 and still poetry will be here below Prime 
 Minister and High Priest of Nature." 
 
 People say that when we have solved all the 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 85 
 
 mysteries of Nature, the sentiment will be all 
 gone and poetry die out, and therefore the 
 phrase ** scientific poet " is a contradiction in 
 terms. The cynical philosopher who, when his 
 wife cried for the first time in his presence 
 with the hope of softening his heart in the 
 direction of a milliner s bill, assured her that 
 tears would not move him in the least, as he 
 knew their e^act constituents, and was not 
 going to waste his money on account of an 
 exhibition of a solution of phosphate and 
 muriate of soda — though probably a good 
 chemist had not enough intellect to raise him 
 to poetry ; and there is no reason to suppose 
 that the knowledge that lightning is electricity 
 will destroy the grandeur of an Alpine storm, 
 or that cloud-forms, the play of light and colour 
 on a mountain side, or the dew-drops on a leaf, 
 will cease to be poetical because their causes 
 are well understood. The tear-drops in the 
 • eye of a beautiful woman will surely not be 
 less beautiful because we are ''familiarly ac- 
 quainted with the perfected philosophy of all 
 secretions." 
 
 Now it is because, from a careful study of 
 Mr. Browning's works, I have come to the 
 
86 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 conclusion that the poet is intimately acquainted 
 with the physical sciences, that I hold him to 
 be for this very reason so much the more a 
 great poet — the greatest living poet ; he can 
 touch us the closer because he knows more 
 about us than we know ourselves, more about- 
 our environments, more about the phenomena 
 that encircle our lives. We yield ourselves up 
 to him ; our secret thoughts are not hid from 
 him ; he knows our anatomy to the backbone. 
 It is his character of all-roundness that makes 
 him excel. He knows everything ; if we 
 can't understand him, it is because we know 
 so much less than he. He is always right. 
 Often he appears unintelligible. One ransacks 
 dictionaries and encyclopaedias ; it is they that 
 are defective, not Browning wanting. And 
 all this amazing wealth of learning sits so easily 
 on him that he wears it as if he had been born 
 in it, and, to me, at least, he never appears 
 pedantic. Are you a lawyer '^. he talks to you 
 as if he had been all his life in the long robe ; 
 a physician ? you never had a professor of 
 medicine so close at your heart as Paracelsus ; 
 a theologian ? he has all the wisdom of the 
 Schoolmen and the love of John himself; and 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 87 
 
 SO with all his students he is in closer touch 
 than any other poet since Shakespeare the 
 divine. The artist loves him as a brother of 
 the pencil, the musician claims him of his kin, 
 and the scientist, opening his works where he 
 will, sees in every line intimations that here is 
 the master of all others who can hold council 
 with him on equal terms, and finds in him a 
 brother to rejoice with him and " triumph o'er 
 each secret wrung from Nature's cold reserve." 
 This is an immense claim to make, but it can 
 be sustained ; and its very immensity serves to 
 explain the slow but steady progress our poet 
 has made past all lower niches towards the 
 highest seats where the gods are. 
 
 Carlyle demanded of a truly great man that 
 he must be all sorts of men, and had little 
 respect for " poets who could only sit on chairs 
 and compose stanzas " — Browning must have 
 gone to his heart. Not in the sense satirized 
 in "the Loves of the triangles" or "the Loves 
 of the plants " is our poet all this to us, but 
 in the fact that he has so largely imbibed and 
 assimilated the science of the time that almost 
 every page of his works is permeated by its 
 influence. Sometimes this is shown by a word 
 
S8 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 or two that passes unnoticed by a reader who 
 is not famiHar with the ideas the word calls 
 up, as, for instance, in the lines : — 
 
 " The child feels God a moment, 
 Ichors o'er the place, plays on, and grows to be a man 
 like us." 
 
 In the expression "ichors o'er the place" 
 is found a beautiful illustration from the physi- 
 ology of repair in injured skin surfaces and 
 the pathology of wounds. As the cicatrix 
 closes up the cut flesh, so does the child's mind 
 become case-hardened after the first effects of 
 the awfulness of the Infinite One's apprehended 
 presence have passed away. The time soon 
 comes when " God is not in all his thouo^hts." 
 
 In some cases we have an actual statement 
 of a scientific truth in so many words, as in 
 Sordello : — 
 
 " A soul — above his soul 
 Power to uplift his power, — this moon's control 
 Over the sea depths." P. 187. 
 
 And again : — 
 
 " Wherefore doubt 
 That love meet for such strength, some moon without 
 Would match his sea ? " 
 
 P. 189. 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 89 
 
 Sometimes he is actually technical, as in 
 some lines of Prince Hohensiiel Schwangau 
 
 (P- 45) ••— 
 
 " Try to make good do good as evil does — 
 Were just as if a chemist, wanting white, 
 And knowing black ingredients bred the dye, 
 Insisted these too should be white forsooth." 
 
 His optimism is always cropping up ; and it 
 is not surprising he should cull illustrations 
 from chemistry, which abounds in examples of 
 good and beautiful things produced from worth- 
 less and ugly substances. The lovely series of 
 aniline dyes made from coal tar, for instance, 
 might surely afford a scientific poet of an 
 optimistic turn of mind some help in this 
 direction. In the lines just quoted the idea, 
 that to get the highest good we must have 
 some evil amongst the ingredients, is not 
 elaborated ; but those who are only slightly 
 acquainted with chemical manipulations will 
 not want more than the poet's hint to see the 
 force of his theory. 
 
 He states the same truth in another form in 
 Pietro : — 
 
 " Fair and good are products — of Foul and Evil : one 
 must bring to pass the other. 
 
90 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 Just as poisons grow drugs, steal through sundry odd 
 
 ducts 
 Doctors name, and ultimately issue safe and changed. 
 You'd abolish poisons, treat disease with dainties 
 Such as suit the sound and sane ? With all such kick- 
 shaws vain you pother ! 
 Arsenic 's the stuff puts force into the faint eyes, 
 Opium sets the brain to rights — by cark and care de- 
 ranged." 
 
 In that sublime poem Easter Day (p. 191) 
 there is a very remarkable instance of Mr. 
 Browning's way of wrapping up a great 
 scientific truth in two or three words, and 
 leaving it without recurring to it, or drawing 
 attention to the force of the illustration by 
 elaboration of the idea. Browning never beats 
 his nuggets into leaf — it is rather in its very 
 concentration that his force exists. 
 
 " Thy choice was earth : thou didst attest 
 'Twas fitter spirit should subserve 
 The flesh, than flesh refine to nerve 
 Beneath the spirit's play." 
 
 How many thousands of readers have passed 
 over these most remarkable lines and missed 
 all their force and beauty, because, unlike the 
 author of them, who seems to have a perfectly 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 91 
 
 voracious appetite for facts, they did not know 
 they contained a precise statement of the origin 
 of the nervous system according to our greatest 
 physiologists. Easter Day was, I think, written 
 in Florence in 1850. I believe it was not till 
 1855 that Herbert Spencer • published his 
 Principles of Psychology, and therein speculated 
 on the evolution of the first rudiments of a 
 nervous system in Medusae and other low 
 types of animal life ; his speculations having 
 since to some extent been confirmed by the 
 investigations of Romanes and Eimer. Herbert 
 Spencer points out how an impression or stimu- 
 lus comes to habitually traverse a certain path 
 along the lines of least resistance, thus leading 
 to a differentiation of the protoplasm. Bastian, 
 in his Brain as an Organ of the Mind (p. 2 1 ), 
 says, " Wherever external impressions produce 
 molecular movements which traverse with fre- 
 quency some definite path, the transference of 
 such movements is made easier by each repeti- 
 tion, and there is a tendency to the initiation of 
 a structural change along this path. Ultimately 
 by the constant repetition of such a process we 
 should have the gradual formation of an actual 
 * Nerve fibre.' " 
 
92 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 Now I know of no writer anterior to Mr. 
 Spencer who suggested this as the process by 
 which nerves are formed ; yet Mr. Browning — 
 in a highly concentrated manner it is true, but 
 still actually — seems to have anticipated the 
 great and interesting discovery. 
 
 In Numpholeptos (p. 97) these lines occur : — 
 
 *' As flash may find 
 The inert nerve, sting awake the palsied hmb." 
 
 The reference is to the use made of electricity 
 in medical science, and the fact that by its aid 
 a paralysed muscle can be restored to its normal 
 condition. No reader of Browning can have 
 failed to remark how great an accumulator of 
 facts he is — facts of all sorts, and from every 
 conceivable and out-of-the-way place. Odd 
 scraps of lore here and there on every possible 
 subject demonstrate that nothing in the range 
 of human learning is beneath his notice or un- 
 worthy of being treasured in his storehouse ; 
 this is essentially the scientific habit of mind, 
 and this habit has largely contributed to his 
 greatness. Voltaire said, *' There can be no 
 great poetry without great wisdom," and Horace 
 had said it before him. Although it is true 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 93 
 
 enough that the poet Is born and not made, 
 it is equally true, as Carpenter says, " that 
 the imaginative faculty may be directed and 
 invigorated, cultivated and chastened by 
 volitional effort." Mr. Browning's industry it 
 is that makes him so difficult to the careless 
 reader. 
 
 If at times he is unintelligible, it is because 
 he knows so much more than we do. The 
 automatic action of our faculties is in direct 
 proportion to their exercise ; and it is because 
 Browning has travelled over so vast a range 
 of subjects, getting at the soul of all things, 
 and analysing the deepest things of man, that 
 he has become to us the seer and the sayer 
 of the abysmal things of life and their awful- 
 lest mysteries. He knew what was required 
 of him. " A poet must be earth's essential 
 king," he declares. He who aspires to the 
 poet's crown needs everything. '' Red, green, 
 and blue that whirl into a white, the vari- 
 ance now, the essential unity which makes the 
 miracle." And this reminds me that Browning 
 makes very great use throughout his work of 
 similes derived from his study of light. Here 
 are a few : — 
 
94 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 " Rather learn and love each facet flash of the revolving 
 year ! 
 Red, green, and blue that whirl into a white." 
 
 Ring a7id Book, vol. i. p. 71. 
 
 " Only the prism's obstruction shows aright 
 The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light 
 Into the jewelled bow from blankest white ; 
 So may a glory from defect arise ! " 
 
 Poems, vol. vi. p. 151. 
 
 Again — 
 
 "Light, thwarted, breaks 
 A limpid purity to rainbow flakes." 
 
 Sordello, p. 170. 
 
 Self-sacrifice he terms losing '* the varlcolour 
 in achromatic white." — Fifine, p. 65. 
 
 The singularly beautiful poem Ntimpholeptos 
 owes Its remarkable imagery to the figure of 
 light rays decomposed by gems, the perfect 
 white of the diamond sending forth prismatic 
 colours, and these again traced back to their 
 source leading to the pure cold moonbeam. 
 So the pure white silver light of the loved one 
 rays forth blood-streaks, sun warmth, sun light, 
 and salvation. 
 
 " Warms the soul, it sweetens, softens. 
 * What fairy track do I explore ? 
 What magic hall return to, like the gem, 
 Centuply angled o'er a diadem ? 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 95 
 
 You dwell there, hearted ; from your midmost home 
 Rays forth — through that fantastic world I roam 
 Ever — from centre to circumference, 
 Shaft upon coloured shaft,' this crimsons thence, 
 That purples out its prsecinct through the waste. 
 Surely I had your sanction what I faced, 
 Fared forth upon that untried yellow ray. 
 Whence I retrack my steps ? 
 
 Irradiation, late triumphant through the distance finds its fate 
 Merged in your pure blank soul, alike the source and 
 tomb of that prismatic glow." 
 
 Numpholeptos^ p. 10 1. 
 
 As a commentary on this suggestive poem, 
 consider the influence the study of the Hfe and 
 character of the Virgin Mary has had on the 
 minds of milHons of men and women. The 
 pure moonbeam of her smile has proved to 
 this a path of gold, " for gold means love," 
 to another many a daring crimson, blood-red 
 path of passionate devotion, such as filled that 
 Spanish knight of Isabella's who braved the 
 fury of the Moor, and wrote Our Lady's name 
 over the portals of the mosque at Granada. 
 To how many others a violet path of humble 
 service and devotion ! A pure ideal, once 
 dowered to the world, has never merely rested 
 in its gem-like, faceted beauty, but has brought 
 
96 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 forth bright and glorious paths of colour that 
 have filled our souls with every kind of grace 
 and loveliness. The conception of the idea 
 of Our Lady, though it were founded In no 
 historic basis of fact, has done the work of the 
 faceted gem to beautify all that came within the 
 scope of its glory. We owe this exquisite illus- 
 tration to Browning's study of decomposed 
 rays of light, and their recomposition into com- 
 plete or white light. 
 
 In Professor Tyndall's address on the Scien- 
 tific Limit of the Imagination he tells us that 
 *' two-thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail 
 to arouse in the eye the sense of vision. The 
 rays exist, but the visual organ requisite for 
 their translation Into light does not exist. And 
 so, from this region of darkness and mystery 
 which surrounds us, rays may now be darting 
 which require but the development of the 
 proper intellectual organs to translate them 
 into knowledge as far surpassing ours as ours 
 surpasses that of the wallowing reptiles which 
 once held possession of this planet." 
 
 Mr. Browning, m Jockanan Hakkadosh states 
 the same truth in other words, words that 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 97 
 
 I think we shall understand all the better after 
 those of Professor Tyndall : — 
 
 " O Thou Almighty who canst re-instate 
 Truths in their primal clarity, confused 
 By man's perception, which is man's and made 
 To suit his service, — how, once disabused 
 Of reason which sees light half shine half shade, 
 Because of flesh, the medium that adjusts 
 Purity to his visuals, both an aid 
 And hindrance,— how to eyes earth's air encrusts, 
 When purged and perfect to receive truth's beam 
 Pouring itself on the new sense it trusts 
 With all its plenitude of power, — how seem 
 Then, the intricacies of shade, of shine, 
 Oppugnant natures — Right and Wrong, we deem 
 Irreconcilable ? O eyes of mine, 
 Freed now of imperfection, ye avail 
 To see the whole sight." 
 
 Embryologlsts tell us that man, in his de- 
 velopment in the embryo, passes through the 
 various stages of fish, reptile, bird, and mam- 
 miferous quadruped, till it ultimately arrives at 
 the human stage. Hugh Miller remarks the 
 same thing of the development of the human 
 brain ; in succession we have the brain of the 
 inferior natures till the unique character of the 
 human brain is assumed. And if we carefully 
 study the origin of mind in the lower animals 
 we shall find there is scarcely an attribute pos- 
 R. B. H 
 
98 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 sessed by man, scarcely a virtue or faculty that, 
 in a more or less crude and undeveloped form, 
 is not found in the creatures beneath us. We 
 open our Browning and find he knows all 
 about it. It is not new to him that **man is 
 the sum total of all the animals." 
 
 In Paracelsus (p. 189), he says there are : — 
 
 *' Imperfect qualities throughout creation 
 Suggesting some one creature yet to make, 
 Some point where all those scattered rays should meet 
 Convergent in the faculties of man. 
 
 Hints and previsions of which faculties 
 Are strewn confusedly everywhere about 
 The inferior natures, and all lead up higher, 
 All shape out dimly the superior race, 
 The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, 
 And man appears at last." 
 
 And just as inferior brains and natures point 
 to the advent of man, so did the early brain and 
 nature of primeval man foreshadow the higher 
 and nobler man, and so do now the powers and 
 potentialities of our highest races point on, ever 
 forward, to the man that is to be — 
 
 " Progress is the law of life, man is not Man as yet." 
 " But in completed man begins anew 
 A tendency to God." " For God is glorified in man." 
 
 Paracelsus y pp. 190, 191. 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 99 
 
 If there be any who hold that " man is 
 Nature's crowning blunder," our poet is not of 
 their number. 
 
 From Browning's earliest to his latest work 
 we may gather hundreds of examples such as 
 we have quoted, to show how deeply science 
 has tinctured his thought and how heartily he 
 is imbubed with its love. In Pauline, which 
 in one sense is a prelude to Paracelsus, he 
 again and again recurs to the theme so grandly 
 elaborated in the latter work of the consecra- 
 tion of a soul to knowledge, one in whom was — 
 
 '* A principle of restlessness 
 Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all." 
 
 "This restlessness of passion meets in me 
 A craving after knowledge." 
 
 As in Paracelsus, so in Pauline, the lesson for 
 us is, knowledge must never be pursued at the 
 expense of love. 
 
 With Browning it is ever love first, all things 
 for love ; but how deep is his sympathy for the 
 knowledge cult his way of urging the lesson 
 proves clearly enough. It is in Paracelsus (the 
 work that posterity will probably estimate as 
 Browning's greatest) that we must look for the 
 strongest proof of his sympathy with man's 
 
loo BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 desire to know and bend the forces of nature to 
 his service. To some students this magnificent 
 work will appear only the string of pearls and 
 precious stones that some of us consider Sordello 
 to be. To others it is a drama illustrating the 
 contending forces of love and knowledge, others 
 again find in it only an elaborate discussion 
 on the Aristotelian and Platonic systems of 
 philosophy ; it is none of these alone ; rather, 
 if a single sentence could describe it, it is the 
 Epic of the Healer, not of the hero who stole 
 from heaven a jealously-guarded fire, but of him 
 who won from heaven what was waiting for a 
 worthy recipient to take and help us to. In so 
 far as Paracelsus came short, it was deficiency of 
 love that hindered him ; of his striving after 
 knowledge and what he won for man, the epic 
 tells in words and music that to me at least 
 have no equal in the whole range of literature. 
 At its full value does the poet appreciate the 
 God in man, the knowing Spirit which man is 
 only now beginning to dare look in the face. 
 Dreaded by theologians and hated by all the 
 Churches, from the Eden legend to the last 
 Encyclical, the story is ever the same : Know- 
 ledge is dangerous to man, and faith is all. In 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. loi 
 
 Paracelsus the thing condemned Is not know- 
 ledge without faith but knowledge without love, 
 to— 
 
 " Know, not for knowing's sake. 
 But to become a star to men for ever ; 
 Know for the gain it gets, the praise it brings, 
 The wonder it inspires." 
 
 Paracelsus has a message for our time. The 
 tragedy of knowing without loving is often 
 enacted now; arid where the intellect is dis- 
 severed from the heart the end will be hard to 
 keep from madness. 
 
 Wisdom demanded of Paracelsus — 
 
 " Wilt thou adventure for my sake and man's 
 Apart from all reward ? " 
 
 If the man of science cannot inscribe on his 
 banner " Apart from all reward," he is not fit 
 to enter the service of man. Says Tyndall : 
 " Imagine Dr. Draper spending his days in 
 blowing soap-bubbles and in studying their 
 colours ! Be it remembered it was thus that 
 minds like those of Boyle, Newton, and Hooke 
 were occupied, and that on such experiments 
 has been founded a theory the issues of which 
 are incalculable."^ — Tyndall^ ^' Light',' p. 66. 
 
I02 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 The World knows little of the work done by 
 men who long to — 
 
 " Save mankind, 
 To make some unexampled sacrifice 
 In their behalf, to wring some wondrous good 
 From heaven or earth for them, to perish, winning 
 Eternal weal in the act ; as who should dare 
 Pluck out the angry thunder from its cloud, 
 That, all its gathered flame discharged on him, 
 No storm might threaten summer's azure sleep ! " 
 
 Paracelsus^ p. 62. 
 
 Yet in a thousand laboratories and students' 
 cells this is being done at the present moment 
 by men who have ** all our varied appetites 
 for joy derived from common things." *' Men 
 whom every common pleasure of the world 
 affects as ourselves," but who ** dare aspire to 
 know — that in itself alone shall its reward be, 
 not an alien end blending therewith ! " 
 
 It is most remarkable, that long before the 
 scientific men of our time had given Paracelsus 
 credit for the noble work he did for mankind, 
 and the lasting boon many of his discoveries 
 conferred upon the race, Mr. Browning, in this 
 wonderful poem, recognised both his work and 
 its results at their true value, and raised his 
 reputation at this late hour from the infamy with 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 103 
 
 which his enemies and biographers had covered 
 it, and set him in his proper place amongst the 
 heroes and martyrs of science. We owe the 
 poet a debt of gratitude for this rehabiUtation. 
 No man could have written this transcendent 
 poem who had less than Browning's power of 
 thrusting aside the accidents and accretions of a 
 character, and getting at the naked germ from 
 which springs the life of the real man. That 
 no follower of medicine, no chemist, no disciple 
 of science, did this for Paracelsus is, in the 
 splendid light of Mr. Browning's research and 
 penetration, a remarkable instance of the fact 
 that the unjust verdicts of a time and a class 
 need to be reversed in a clearer atmosphere, 
 and in freedom from class prejudice not often 
 accorded to contemporary biographers. A 
 poet alone could never have done us this 
 service ; and a single attentive perusal of this 
 work is enough to show that the intimate 
 blending of the scientific with the poetic faculty 
 could alone have effected the restoration. How 
 lovingly the poet has taken this world's bene- 
 factor's remains from the ditch into which his 
 profession had cast them, and laid them in his 
 own beautiful sepulchre, gemmed, chiselled, and 
 
I04 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET, 
 
 arabesqued by all the lovely imagery of his 
 fancy, no reader of Browning's Paracelsus needs 
 to be told. 
 
 It might have been a Sir Charles Bell who 
 wrote the lines on the Human Hand. Brown- 
 ing must have a knowledge of its structure 
 more than skin-deep. 
 
 ** Flesh and bone and nerve that make 
 The poorest, coarsest human hand 
 An object worthy to be scanned 
 A whole Hfe long for their sole sake." 
 
 James Lee's Wife. 
 
 Of the painter who is an anatomist he says — 
 
 " To him the bones their inmost secret yield, 
 Each notch and nodule signify their use ; 
 On him the muscles turn, in triple tier, 
 And pleasantly entreat the entrusted man : 
 * Familiarize thee with our play that lifts 
 Here, and then lowers again, leg, arm, and foot !' 
 — Ensuring due correctness in the nude." 
 
 Even the mysterious technicalities of a 
 medical prescription are not hidden from our 
 poet ; he knows the principles upon which an 
 intelligent physician proceeds, when he writes 
 one — 
 
 ** Ask, now, a doctor for a remedy ! 
 There's his prescription. Bid him point you out 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 105 
 
 Which of the five or six ingredients saves 
 
 The sick man. Such the efficacity ? 
 
 ' Then why not dare and do things in one dose 
 
 Simple and pure, all virtue, no alloy 
 
 Of the idle drop and powder? ' What's his word ? 
 
 The efficacity, neat, were neutralized ; 
 
 It wants dispersing and retarding, — nay, 
 
 Is put upon its mettle, plays its part 
 
 Precisely through such hindrance everywhere : 
 
 Finds some mysterious give and take i' the case. 
 
 Some gain by opposition, he foregoes 
 
 Should he unfetter the medicament." 
 
 Prince Hohefisteil Schwaifgaii, p. 78. 
 
 I will not trouble you with explaining how 
 accurate this is, but I may say it is a precise 
 statement of the methods that guide the phar- 
 macologist, and affords the poet an admirable 
 illustration of the method of our education and 
 development in a world of contending forces 
 and a pilgrimage of dangers and difficulties 
 that, rightly met, subserve perhaps the highest 
 interests the Great All- Father had in view for 
 us when He placed us in their midst. 
 
 Brownings optimism is in complete accord 
 with the teachings of science. James Hinton, 
 in one of his pregnant sentences, says, " Every 
 evil, every failure or loss, becomes tributary to 
 a greater good." 
 
io6 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 Browning declares that — 
 
 " Evil's beautified in every shape." 
 
 " Upon men's own account must evil stay." 
 
 " For mankind springs salvation by each hindrance inter- 
 posed, they climb." 
 
 Pessimism has no place in his system of 
 philosophy. 
 
 *' Time means amelioration, tardidly enough displayed, 
 Yet a mainly onward moving, never wholly retrograde." 
 
 La Saisiaz. 
 
 As the unused muscle wastes away, the un- 
 exercised brain daily grows feebler and feebler, 
 and all the powers of man's body demand 
 exercise if they are to be retained in their in- 
 tegrity ; so, in Browning's system, evil is our 
 stimulus, whereby we evolve all the good we 
 can hope to get from this our mortal life. 
 
 The character of Count Guido, in the Ring 
 and the Book, is drawn with scientific accuracy, 
 and is elaborated with precision and great skill. 
 He has the true aspect of the ingrained villain, 
 a man who could not help being one. A jury, 
 composed of nineteenth-century Royal Acade- 
 micians and physicians would have consigned 
 him to a criminal lunatic asylum. I am sorry 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 107 
 
 we have not his skull on the table to-night. 
 You would have found the facial angle ex- 
 tremely small, and doubtless some very inter- 
 esting facts accounting for his character could 
 have been discovered. Count Guido has left 
 us his picture, painted by himself : — 
 
 "Wipe out the being of me 
 And smear my soul from off the white of things I blot ; 
 I am one huge and sheer mistake. 
 Whose fault ? Not mine, at least, 
 Who did not make myself." 
 
 Pompilia's sketch gives us his photograph : 
 
 " Guido Francesehini — old 
 And nothing like so tall as I myself, 
 Hook-nosed and yellow in a bush of beard, 
 Much like a thing I saw on a boy's wrist, 
 He called an owl and used for catching birds." 
 
 No doubt the family history of the Count 
 would give us some adequate reasons for con- 
 cluding that he was in very truth *' one huge 
 and sheer mistake." 
 
 There is nothing ** miraculous " (as has been 
 said) in the stainless purity and beauty of Pom- 
 pilia's character. The poet's abounding faith in 
 Nature, his optimism and faithful observation 
 of character, have drawn for us in Pompilia, a 
 
io8 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 lovely, but by no means an impossible picture. 
 Her character, we are told, taken in connection 
 with her surroundings and parentage, is mar- 
 vellous. As we do not read that her father was 
 an habitual drunkard, or that her mother was 
 either the subject of strumous diathesis or a 
 microcephalic idiot, the marvel is not very 
 apparent to the scientific mind. Her mother 
 followed the calling of a washerwoman, and 
 was probably a well-developed, healthy person. 
 Now, given good development and initial 
 vitality at its best. Nature is very successful in 
 continuing the species on the highest lines, 
 quite regardless of ecclesiastical ceremonies or 
 parochial registrations. Disclaiming any, the 
 least desire to undervalue the importance of 
 either, many reasons might be given why 
 Nature so often uses such material with trium- 
 phant success ; certain it is that those who have 
 the best reasons for knowing, often find Pom- 
 pilias in very unlikely surroundings. To those 
 who often become weary of trying to elevate 
 other minds to their own level, it should be a 
 source of satisfaction that It is well-nigh as 
 difficult to efface the image of the Divine in 
 man as to restore it when obscured by vicious 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 109 
 
 habits and evil tendencies, for which their 
 possessors cannot always fairly be held respon- 
 sible. After all, education and environment do 
 not effect so much either of good or evil as we 
 often suppose. Otherwise in the homes of the 
 brutal, the sensual, and the degraded, we should 
 not find so many bright, innocent, and pure 
 natures ; nor in the families of the high-born 
 and cultivated, so many degraded types. 
 
 To some temperaments it is just as difficult 
 to be evil as to others to be pure and good. 
 
 The characters of Guido and Pompilia are 
 then perfectly natural. When the soul of Pom- 
 pilia came within the path of Guido's, we find 
 the repulsion that evil ever has for good. 
 
 " And when he took my hand and made a smile — 
 Why — the uncomfortableness of it all." 
 
 Bad men are often repugnant to good dogs. 
 
 To the man who refuses to believe in God, 
 because he cannot find Him with his telescope, 
 and whose microscope reveals Him not, Robert 
 Browning declares — 
 
 " The Name comes close behind a stomach cyst, 
 The simplest of creations. . . . 
 . . . The small becomes the dreadful and immense." 
 
 Sludge, p. 203. 
 
no BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 To him who will not believe in soul because 
 his scalpel cannot detect it, he says, Show me 
 first an atom ! Immortality incredible ? Your 
 atom is a truly immortal being ! 
 
 In one of the finest passages in FerishtaJis 
 Fancies he discusses this difficulty, which the 
 materialist has to face. 
 
 *' To know of, think about — 
 Is all man's sum of faculty effects 
 When exercised on earth's least atom. Son ! 
 What was, what is, what may such atom be ? 
 No answer ! Still, what seems it to man's sense? 
 An atom with some certain properties 
 Known about, thought of as occasion needs, 
 — Man's — but occasions of the universe ? 
 Unthinkable, unknowable to man. 
 Yet, since to think and know fire through and through 
 Exceeds man, is the warmth of fire unknown, 
 Its uses — are they so unthinkable ? 
 Pass from such obvious power to powers unseen, 
 Undreamed of save in their sure consequence ! 
 Take that, we spoke of late, which draws to ground 
 The staff my hand lets fall : it draws, at least — 
 Thus much man thinks and knows, if nothing more." 
 
 Ferishtah^ p. 131. 
 
 When we reflect how infinitely little we know 
 of these atoms here spoken of, and of that mys- 
 terious force of gravitation, and the medium 
 through which it acts, referred to in the last 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. in 
 
 lines, it is not surprising we should be unable 
 to solve the greater problems of life, the soul 
 and God. 
 
 If it be contrary to received notions that in 
 Browning we have a scientific poet, is it not 
 still more remarkable that in a scientific man 
 we have faith in some at least of the great 
 doctrines of the Christian religion ? 
 
 Would not his dissecting, analysing spirit 
 prove a solvent for creeds ? If we knew him 
 less we might also predicate this of him. 
 Nothing, however, could be more contrary to 
 the fact. Again and again he warns us that 
 we must not put religion into an alembic, must 
 not resolve faith into its elements, analyse the 
 pearl of great price, pump all the air out of 
 the great Christian verities. In a word, he 
 tells us '^ a scientific faith's absurd — frustrates 
 the very end it was meant to serve " {PoemSy 
 vol. v., p. 170). 
 
 " You must mix some uncertainty with faith, 
 if you would have faith be" {Poems, vol. v., p. 
 168). 
 
 He complains of the "exhausted air-bell of 
 the critic " — that it *' leaves no air to poison " 
 {Poems, vol. v., p. 149), consequently none to 
 
112 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 breathe, " pumps out with ruthless Ingenuity 
 atom by atom, and leaves you — vacuity." 
 
 He tells us of the Gottlngen professor, who, 
 with strange inconsistency, but exactly as our 
 Comtlst and Agnostic philosophers are always 
 doing — 
 
 *' had done his best ; 
 And the pearl of price, at reason's test, 
 Lay dust and ashes levigable 
 On the Professor's lecture table. 
 When we looked for the influence and monition 
 That our faith, reduced to such condition 
 Be swept forthwith to its natural dust-hole, — 
 He bids us, when we least expect it, 
 Take back our faith, — if it be not just whole 
 Yet a pearl indeed, as his tests affect it." 
 
 Vol. v., p. 156. 
 
 Which Is exactly what our new lights are doing 
 with Christianity — grinding it to an impalpable 
 powder, and bidding us take the greatest care 
 to sweep up what they have left and religiously 
 conserve it. But fine dust is not a pearl ; and 
 carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in pint measures 
 are not exactly a loaf of bread. We cannot 
 adorn ourselves with the one, nor feed our- 
 selves with the other. Browning tells us — 
 
 "The originals of faith ... 
 The causes, were they caught and catalogued, 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET, 113 
 
 Would too distract, too desperately foil 
 Inquirer. How may analyst reduce 
 Quantities to exact their opposites 
 Value to zero, then bring zero back 
 To value of supreme preponderance ? 
 How substitute thing meant for thing expressed ? " 
 Red Cotton Night-cap Coufitry, p. 196. 
 
 Yet he has some words of stern rebuke for 
 Rehgion, that remind us of Dr. Draper framing 
 his terrible indictment against her for her con- 
 stant opposition to Science. How she sat : 
 
 " Prim in place, Religion overlooked 
 And so had done till doomsday, never a sign 
 Nor sound of interference from her mouth," — 
 
 while the rack pulled bone from bone, and the 
 followers of Science were mauled and maimed. 
 When Science became too strong for Religion 
 longer to suppress, after first looking around 
 for help not forthcoming, Religion acquiesced : 
 
 " What, broken is the rack ? Well done of thee ! 
 Did I forget to abrogate its use ? 
 Be the mistake in common with us both ! " 
 
 And the indignant poet turns upon her and cries : 
 
 " Ah but. Religion, did we wait for thee 
 To ope the book, ... 
 We should wait indeed ! 
 That is all history." 
 
 Ring and Boo k^ vol. i., p. 52. 
 
 R. B. I 
 
114 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 I saw once in Madrid, a few hundred yards 
 from the scenes of the medieval autos da f6, a 
 ballet, The Genius of Progress contending with 
 Superstition, In one scene a monk incites the 
 people to destroy the first steam-boat and its 
 inventor. That done, in the next, Progress 
 waved her wand, and a Mississippi water-palace 
 bore her thousand passengers on the wave. I 
 thought of Browning and the lines in Pietro, 
 how ''the priests came prying, broke his en- 
 gine up, and bastinadoed him beside." 
 
 But if we culled from the works of Mr. 
 Browning all the passages that prove the per- 
 meation of his mind by the scientific habit, 
 we should weary you, even if we have not 
 already done so. The passages quoted are 
 ample to show that, whatever our notions of 
 poets and poetry may be in relation to science, 
 we have in Browning a writer who is abreast 
 of the highest culture of his time, who clothes 
 hard, dry facts of science in highly poetical 
 language, and invests their conception with all 
 the glamour of his art, extracting from a soil 
 usually considered unpromising, luxuriant 
 growths of most exquisite fancy, and above 
 and beyond all this, one of whom we may say, 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 115 
 
 in his own terse and pregnant lines, that we 
 
 may — 
 
 'Confidently lay to heart, and lock in head our Hfe-long, 
 this : 
 
 He there with the brand flamboyant, broad o'er night's 
 forlorn abyss ; 
 
 Crowned by verse, and wielding, with wits' bauble, learn- 
 ing's rod. 
 
 Well ? Why, he at least believed in soul, was very sure of 
 God." 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 It has been thought advisable to append some re- 
 ferences to Mr. Browning's method of dealing with 
 scientific matters, that readers may have an oppor- 
 tunity both of seeing how wide is the poet's acquaint- 
 ance with such things, and judge for themselves what 
 is his attitude toward science in general. The list 
 of references makes no pretension to be an exhaust- 
 ive one, it could be considerably amplified by a 
 careful reperusal of the works, but it will suffice for 
 the purpose. The references are to the original 
 edition of the poems, in six volumes, and the first 
 edition of the Ring and Book. 
 
 Anatomy. — Poems, v., p. 152; vi., p. 58. Fifine, 
 
 p. 68. 
 Astronomy. — Prince H. S., p. 90. Sordello, pp. 187, 
 
 188. 
 Botany. — Poems, i., p. 104; v., pp. 193, 208, 228 
 
 312. Fifine, p. 14. Sordello, p. 20. 
 
ii6 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 CJumistry. — Poems, iii., pp. 219, 220; iv., p. 238; 
 v., pp. 155, 156. Prince H. S., pp. 44. Qi- ^^^ 
 Cotton, p. 196. Croisic, pp. 90, 92. Fifine, 
 pp. 65, 97, 130; Ferishtah, pp. 39, 40, 45, ']6. 
 Pippa P., p. 250. Sordello, p. 194. Ring and 
 Book, i., p. 2. 
 
 Electricity. — Poems, vi., pp. 183, 203. Red Cotton 
 p. 196. Fifine, p. 115. 
 
 Evolution. — Poems, i., p. 188. Prince H. S., p. ^"^^ 
 Fifine, p. 162. La Saisiaz, p. 57. 
 
 Light. — Poems, iii., p. 170. Jocoseria, p. 124. Fifine, 
 pp. 65, 29. Numpholeptos, p. loi. Ring and 
 Book, i., p. 71 ; iii., p. 170 ; iv., pp. 57, 79. 
 
 Materia Medica and Therapeutics. — Pietro of Abano, 
 p. 84. Prince H. S., p. J^. Paracelsus, p. 1 1 1. 
 
 Medicine. — Poems, iv., p. 273 ; v., p. 220 ; Dra- 
 matic Idylls, ii., preface ; Red Cotton, p. 199 ; 
 Ferishtah, pp. 27, 55, 56. Ring and Book, 
 iv., p. 12. 
 
 Pharmacy. — Poems, iii., p. 96 ; v. p. 220. 
 
 Physiology. — Poems, v., p. 191. Sordello, p. 195. 
 
 Tray. 
 Scientific Matters in General. — Poems, v., pp. 128, 
 
 302 ; vi., p. 203. Dramatic Idylls, ii., p. ^Z. 
 
 Fifine, pp. 51, Z6. La Saisiaz, pp. 69, 82. 
 
 Ferishtah, p. 131. Sordello, pp. 25, 203; Ring 
 
 and Book, iv., pp. 61, Jj^ 180. 
 
 Considerable discussion was caused amongst Brown- 
 ing students by the publication of my paper on this 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 117 
 
 subject. Amongst other communications two letters 
 from distinguished Hterary women were pubHshed in 
 the Browning Society s Notes and Transactions. I 
 here venture to republish them with my reply, as 
 the question is a very interesting one, as bearing upon 
 the idea which Mr. Browning has done so much to 
 dissipate, that poetry must necessarily be all sugar 
 and water. 
 
 Browning as a Scientific Poet. — "I don't think 
 I could do a more cruel turn to a poet than to prove 
 him to be scientific, or to have displayed his scientific 
 acquirements in his poetry ! 
 
 For why } Because — selon inoi — 
 
 1st. The scientific way of viewing all things is pre- 
 cisely the converse of the poetic. The scientific is 
 analytic— the poetic synthetic ; the man of science is 
 busy finding out distinctions and tracing causes — the 
 poet ought to be engrossed in the aspect of resem- 
 blances, comparisons, appearances. Think of any 
 poem super-eminently poetic — e.g., The Sensitive 
 Plant. Imagine that treated scientifically. Describe 
 the plants as cryptogams and phenogams, monan- 
 dria and polyandria. Cut out all such unscientific 
 folly as describing the Lily of the Vale made pale by 
 passion, or the Hyacinth ringing sweet peals from its 
 bells, and the Narcissus admiring itself in the water. 
 The difference between your botanic garden and 
 Shelley's garden will be exactly the difference, I 
 think, between scientific poetry and true poetry. 
 
 2nd. I believe that the emotions — which it is the 
 business of all Art, but chiefiy of the greatest Art, 
 
ii8 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 poetry, to stir and elevate — are in their nature com- 
 plementary to the intellect, which is the realm of 
 science ; and that in proportion as the one part of 
 our nature is being excited, the other is temporarily 
 quiescent. The alternations may be rapid, and we 
 may slip from a high peak of intellectual climbing 
 on to an Alpine rose-bed of rich emotion ; but this 
 is an exceptional chance, and the rule, I apprehend, 
 is that busy thought is cold feeling, and vice versa. 
 
 Are we, therefore, to lay it down that poetry ought 
 not to deal with subjects intellectually difficult or 
 abstruse ? 
 
 It seems very hard to draw the line, and I cannot 
 profess to say I could formulate a rule to my own 
 satisfaction, much less for that of others. But I 
 think the principle must be, that there should never 
 be required of the reader (assuming him to be a fairly 
 cultivated man) to stop in mid-career of a burst of 
 poetry to say, * What the deuce does this poet mean t 
 What is this substance — this plant — this disease — 
 this author — this battle — of which he is talking } ' 
 Recourse to a lexicon or a cyclopaedia is the very 
 last thing which a poet should even suggest to his 
 readers. Thus, I should say that when a fact of 
 science {eg., that the earth goes round the sun) has 
 become familiarly known, it is open to every poet 
 to speak of the earth's motion accordingly. But 
 it would not have been proper to do so in Shake- 
 speare's days, and it would not now be well to intro- 
 duce the Precession of the Equinoxes into an ode. 
 In like manner, as everybody now knows something 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 119 
 
 about the saurians, Tennyson was quite right to talk 
 of 
 
 * Dragons of the prime 
 Which tare each other in their sHme.' 
 
 But if he had gone on to speak of the dental for- 
 mula of the Labyrinthodon, it would have been the 
 reverse of poetic. 
 
 I must say I think it is too audacious coolly laying 
 it down, that ' only in an age of science can anything 
 worthy of the name of poetry exist/ Shades of 
 Isaiah, Homer, ^schylus, Dante ! He does well to 
 make the most of Lucretius — the only poet of the 
 past who (so far as I know) can be described as scien- 
 tific at all, and whom it is the fashion in these days 
 to laud to the skies, both because he is scientific and 
 because he is atheistic. 
 
 Is there not a rule which applies to Art of every 
 kind, and, of course, to Poetry par excellence, that it 
 ought, as its supreme end, to excite the emotion of 
 the Beautiful ? According to my idea, the concern 
 of Literature is with the True — of Art with the Beau- 
 tiful, and, of course, with all emotions which may be 
 associated with the sense of Beauty — Pity, Terror, 
 Admiration, Awe, etc. When anythmg is introduced 
 into Art which calls forth the opposite emotions — the 
 sense of disgust, of mesquinerie, pettiness, and ugli- 
 ness — it is the antithesis of Art, and, so far as it goes, a 
 direct subtraction from it — e.g., when Rubens repre- 
 sents a dog lapping the blood in the brazen pan in 
 his ' Crucifixion.' 
 
120 DROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 Now I maintain that several of the examples given 
 of Scientific Poetry involve this direct offence against 
 the fundamental principle of Art. The epidemi- 
 ologist hunting up cholera bacilli may (or may not) 
 be morally great, but he is aesthetically beastly ! 
 When Browning talks of the child "ichoring" over 
 the place where he had felt God (as if God left a 
 scab !) it makes one think of a nasty little itchy child, 
 and to shiver ! I could not feel poetry for three pages 
 after such a metaphor." 
 
 Z. 
 
 Browning as a Scientific Poet.—" Dr. Berdoe 
 undeniably uttered a paradox when he said that 
 Browning, as poet, was gifted with the scientific habit, 
 and pursued the scientific method, of thought ; and 
 * Z.' has delivered himself of as obvious a truism, in 
 declaring that the poetic and the scientific method are 
 incompatible. But this is little more than a question 
 of words. What Dr. Berdoe meant must be sought 
 in the general drift of his assertions, and tested by 
 the works to which they refer; and the smallest effort 
 in this direction will reveal two facts : that when Dr. 
 Berdoe speaks of scientific thougJit^ he is thinking of 
 scientific imagination : of ' the deeper insight into 
 the hidden things of nature,' which is not always 
 combined with the 'highest poetic faculty,' but 
 seems a natural complement to it; and that in calling 
 attention to the scientific element in Mr. Browning's 
 imagination, he reaffirms that profound truth to 
 nature which is the secret of Mr. Browning's poetic 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 121 
 
 power. It is a mistake to think, as * Z.' apparently 
 does, that Science and Poetry are opposed to each 
 other. Their received antithesis Hes, not in the things 
 themselves, but in the minds which pursue them : in 
 the habit of mind, which, in its lower stages, the 
 pursuit of science involves. The higher scientific 
 truths belong to the imagination ; they are elicited 
 by it ; they exist in and for it. Their province is 
 therefore that of the poet ; they have their natural 
 analogies in poetry. Mr. Browning's employment of 
 scientific facts is always inspired by these analogies, 
 whatever the special quality of the facts may be ; 
 and Dr. Berdoe shows, by both quotation and com- 
 ment, that it is so. The lines given by him from 
 James Lee's Wife display a knowledge of anatomy 
 reducible to the lower planes of science ; but they 
 form part of an almost impassioned tribute to the 
 wonders of the human frame — its embodied gospel 
 of Work — its embodied lesson of reverence, patience, 
 and self-effacement. Deaf and Dumb and Ntimpho- 
 leptos are each a parable of the laws of light. Neither 
 could have been written before the prism was known. 
 But the one contains in its few lines a spiritual philo- 
 sophy of life. The suggestiveness and the glamour 
 of true poetry reach their climax in the other. The 
 word 'ichor,' to which *Z.' so much objects, signifies 
 in the present case the ethereal fluid which was sup- 
 posed to supply the place of blood in the veins of the 
 gods. It belongs to the purest poetry of waste and 
 repair ; and any reference which * Z.' may see in it 
 to the condition of an itching or scabby child must 
 
122 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 be charged to his own mind. That the discoveries of 
 science are the property of the poet's imagination is 
 further proved by this, that it can on occasion fore- 
 stall them. The quoted passage from Paracelsus 
 is a poetic statement of the doctrine of Evolution 
 made long before its scientific basis had been laid 
 down ; at a time when it was still blasphemy to speak 
 of Creation as otherwise than accomplished in the 
 course of six days and out of nothing. 
 
 ' Z.' employs a poem of Shelley's, The Sensitive 
 Plant, to illustrate the anomaly of carrying the 
 ideas of science into poetry. * Imagine,' he says, 
 ^ that treated scientifically. Describe the plants as 
 cryptogams and phenogams, monandria and polyan- 
 dria. Cut out all such unscientific folly as describing 
 the Lily of the Vale made pale by passion, or the 
 Hyacinth ringing sweet peals from its bells, and the 
 Narcissus admiring itself in the water. The differ- 
 ence between your botanic garden and Shelley's garden 
 will be exactly the difference, I think, between scien- 
 tific poetry and true poetry.' I venture to reply that 
 if the plants were only described as 'Z.' 'imagines,' 
 by their botanical terms, the result would be a scien- 
 tific report, and not a poem at all ; but that if they 
 were described, as Browning might describe them, 
 in the activities which these terms denote : in the 
 romance, and the mystery, and the humanity of their 
 reproductive existence, we should have a poem at 
 least as genuine as one which invests them with fan- 
 ciful attributes, dealt out as the mood of the poet or 
 the swing of the verse suggests. 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 123 
 
 ' . . . the Naid-like lily of the vale, 
 Whom youth makes so fair, and passion so pale,' 
 
 sounds charming so long as we do not stop to ask 
 ourselves why the lily should resemble a nymph, and 
 yet be always pale with passion ; or whether it is 
 nice for such a young person to be so ; but the idea 
 is feeble at best when compared with that of Brown- 
 ing's sunflower, in Rtidel to the Lady of Tripoli, of 
 which the vivid and pathetic human imagery con- 
 veys a natural fact. I have no wish to disparage 
 Shelley, who has written finer things than The 
 Sensitive Plant, and given us even here finer, because 
 truer, images than two out of three of those which 
 * Z.' quotes. Nor would I speak disrespectfully of 
 the great poets of a less scientific age ; though I 
 fancy that if we approached their works in the same 
 spirit in which we read those of our own time, a 
 little of them would sometimes go a long way. I 
 agree with *Z.' that Christopher North overstates 
 his case when he asserts that, ' Only in an age of 
 science can anything worthy of the name of poetry 
 exist' But I entirely feel with Dr. Berdoe, that that 
 poet must be the greatest whose genius reflects in 
 fullest union the passions which are of all time, and 
 the mental experiences which characterize his own ; 
 and that the poet of the scientific age is, other things 
 being equal, by so much greater than his prede- 
 cessors, that he inherits the longest past, and therefore 
 the richest present, and reproduces it. 
 
 It would, however, be sophistry to deny that other 
 things seldom are equal. If the scientific age creates 
 
124 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 the best materials for poetry, it also creates the worst 
 atmosphere for it ; were it only that it produces a 
 large class of readers who refuse themselves to the 
 faintest effort of imagination.. * Z.' is of opinion 
 ' that there should never be required of the reader 
 (assuming him to be a fairly cultivated man) to stop 
 in mid-career of a burst of poetry to say, " What the 
 deuce does this poet mean ? What is this substance 
 — this plant — this disease — this author — this battle — 
 of which he is talking ? " Recourse to a lexicon or a 
 cyclopaedia is the very last thing which a poet should 
 even suggest to his readers. . . .' So am I. But 
 what compels the reader of Browning, in three cases 
 out of four, to have recourse to the cyclopaedia, 
 except his own belief, that the things and facts in 
 question mean nothing unless they are to be found 
 there : his inability to admit that, whether real or 
 imaginary, their relation to the main idea, i.e.^ their 
 illustrative value, is the same } Mr. Browning is to 
 blame for this in some of his works, because their 
 illustrations are often too remote to convey the in^ 
 tended idea ; but even where his poetic intention is 
 transparent, the same demand for chapter and verse 
 is made upon him. * Imagine ' The Sensitive Plant 
 read in the same manner as those poems of his 
 to which the last issue of the Browning Society's 
 Queries refers, and the kind of speculations con- 
 cerning it which a Shelley Society would bring to 
 light. ' Was the garden suggested by any particular 
 garden } * * Was the lady suggested by any par- 
 ticular lady ? ' ' Where did Shelley probably locate 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 125 
 
 the garden ? ' * Is a garden possible which contains 
 plants and flowers requiring such different soils and 
 atmospheres ? ' 'Of what species of sensitive plant 
 is the one described ? ' . . . to say nothing of all 
 the questions involving just criticism which are raised 
 by the often arbitrary images or imperfectly marked 
 ideas of the poem." 
 
 O. 
 
 The criticism of " Z." in the last number of Notes 
 and Queries is so able that I should not have found 
 anything to object to in it had I felt sure it was 
 directed against what I did say in my paper on 
 Browning as a scientific poet, instead of being an 
 elaborate argument against what I did not say. In 
 the first place, I did not maintain that Browning 
 treats poetic subjects scientifically, but scientific 
 matters poetically — quite another thing. Neither is 
 there any question of " display " in his method. The 
 scientific habit is as natural to him as his poetry. 
 One does not " display " a pair of beautiful eyes — I 
 thought I had made this clear. " Z.'s " argument, if 
 it proves anything, proves too much — it proves that 
 Browning is not a poet at all ! We are told, " the 
 scientific way is analytic," "the man of science is 
 busy finding out distinctions and tracing causes." Is 
 not the Ring and the Book analytic } Does not the 
 poet there busy himself " finding out distinctions 
 and tracing causes " .? There is plenty of analysis in 
 that poem — and plenty of poetry too. This is just 
 what Browning students always claim for him, that 
 
126 BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 
 
 he does " find out distinctions and trace causes," and 
 some of them think all this enhances his claim as a 
 poet. I apprehend there is a great difference between 
 the scientific method and its terminology. I pur- 
 posely excluded " the cryptogams and phenogams, 
 monandria and polyandria," when I said, " Not in 
 the sense satirized in the Loves of the Plants^ but 
 in the fact that he has so largely imbibed and assimi- 
 lated the science of ,the time." To me the latest 
 revelations of botanical science are infinitely more 
 suggestive of poetry than the fables of Ovid about 
 the origin of trees and flowers. Is that only poetic 
 which deals with the unreal and absurd } I am 
 unable to say what is the temperature of people who 
 " slip from a high peak of intellectual climbing on to 
 an Alpine rose-bed of rich emotion." Unhappily, 
 we sometimes are called to poor men who slip from 
 housetops on to iron railings ; in these cases the 
 " cold feeling " is undoubted. " Z." lays down a 
 canon that poetry does not become such till people 
 are able to understand it without lexicons and cyclo- 
 paedias. So there is hope for Mr. Browning yet ! 
 When the Board Schools have done a little more 
 for us, we shall discover our poet. But to be logical, 
 " Z." should at least admit him to be a poet to those 
 who do understand him now. If that is not true 
 poetry which cannot be properly understood without 
 cyclopaedias and dictionaries, how about Dante ? 
 What proportion of his readers could understand 
 him without some such notes as Carey's } And is 
 there not a Shakespeare Society that affords very* 
 
19. Warwick Crescent. 
 
 
 / 
 
 HU- erf ^ 11^44/ nt/^^(^U<^ ^ ^ fcipuU'l^^ 
 
 ^juii^HiiO .-^)VUj (fUM^ItLcIc ^ Mii^rM^ 
 
BROWNING AS A SCIENTIFIC POET. 127 
 
 considerable help to his students ? Isaiah, Homer, 
 and ^schylus want explanation, too ! It was not 
 I, but Christopher North, who said, " Only in an age 
 of science can anything worthy of the name of 
 poetry exist." He goes on, in my quotation, to say 
 that uncivilized man has not produced any poetry 
 worth "a tinker's farthing." Commenting on this 
 passage " Z." exclaims, " Shades of Isaiah, Homer, 
 ^schylus, and Dante ! " Neither I nor North 
 claimed the present as the only age of science; still 
 further from our thoughts would it be to designate 
 those poets as " uncivilized " men. " Z." says " Lu- 
 cretius was the only poet of the past who can be 
 described as scientific at all." What about Michael 
 Angelo and Goethe .-* 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci very successfully combined his 
 science with art, too, even if he did not write poetry, 
 as Raffael did — indifferently. 
 
 " Z.'s " essay on poetry is very clever and very 
 interesting, but it is not a criticism of my paper, as 
 it is directed against a line of argument not advanced 
 therein. 
 
 E. Berdoe. 
 
 The letter on the opposite page was written by 
 Mr. Browning after the publication of my paper on 
 his scientific allusions. 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 A GREAT poet, fully conversant with the science 
 of his time, In sympathy not only with the as- 
 pirations of his age, but with its intellectual 
 progress, must necessarily exercise an influence 
 upon the educated and thoughtful far beyond 
 that possessed by poets, however great, whose 
 only object is to express artistically the emo- 
 tions of the human mind in rhythmical lan- 
 guage. Many eminent writers have maintained 
 that science and poetry are opposed to each 
 other, and that as the one flourishes so must 
 the other decay. The poet, they say, deals 
 with resemblances, comparisons, appearances ; 
 in a word, with the beautiful and its relations 
 to the emotions of pity, terror, admiration, awe, 
 etc. The scientist, on the other hand, occupies 
 himself with finding out distinctions and tracing 
 causes; in a word, with facts. According to 
 these, it is little less than libellous to write of a 
 poet that he is scientific, or of a man of science 
 that he is poetic ; it is in either case to detract 
 
 128 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 129 
 
 from the honour attaching to his proper work. 
 If the ornithologist were to intrude himself 
 upon us while we were enjoying The Ode to 
 the Nightingale, or the poem of The Sky- 
 lark, we should resent it as a personal affront. 
 Who cares for meteorology when revelling in 
 The Cloudy or for botany when delighting in 
 The Sensitive Plant f Nothing is easier than 
 to ridicule the idea of introducing genera 
 and species, cryptogams and phenogams, into 
 such associations as those of Shelley's Garden. 
 This sort of thing has been done to perfec- 
 tion in The Botanic Garden and The Loves of 
 the Triangles. Nevertheless, we maintain 
 that, other things being equal, the poet who 
 knows his natural history, his botany, and his 
 physical science will write better poetry than 
 he who knows nothing of these things. He 
 will not, of course, worry us with his classifica- 
 tions and analysis, but his deeper penetration 
 into the mysteries of Nature will enable him to 
 impress us more entirely with a sense of his 
 truth to Nature, of his nearness to and harmony 
 with Nature in all her varying moods and 
 phenomena. I may be pardoned for this intro- 
 duction to what I have to say on Browning's 
 
 R. B. K 
 
130 BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 science, because I have for some years past 
 occupied myself with pointing out to Browning 
 students in England how much Browning's 
 scientific imagination and learning enhance the 
 value of his poetic work and his claims to re- 
 cognition as a great teacher of the nineteenth 
 century. Browning's work is as distinctly the 
 product of the age of science as Petrarch's of 
 the revival of learning. 
 
 No prophet can speak to the heart of his age 
 who is out of sympathy with its work and 
 hopes. Would he lead the minds of his time, 
 he must know their thoughts and speak them 
 better than they can themselves. He must 
 invest himself in their mental dress and dignify 
 it by his mode of wearing it ; must take their 
 crude longings and intimations and transmute 
 them with the philosopher's stone of his genius 
 into the gold of burning, shining thought, which 
 shall dower the ages with a heritage for ever. 
 He must not set himself to scold and scorn 
 his age nor denounce the ** down-grade" ten- 
 dencies of its earnest, passionate thought ; out 
 of harmony with it, he can effect no good. To 
 lead, he must love ; to love, he must know. 
 That Robert Browning is a great poet, it is 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 131 
 
 happily now too late to deny. It concerns me 
 at present to indicate some of the reasons for 
 estimating his work as part of the worthiest 
 literary product of our time. Macaulay says 
 that '' the merit of poetry, in its wildest form, 
 still consists in its truth." It is obvious that, 
 to be true, a poet cannot know too much. 
 Now there is not a mood of the human mind, 
 from the mental agitation of a Pope debating 
 high matters of Church and State to the squirm- 
 ing of a Sludge detected in his contemptible 
 fraud, which is beyond the power of Robert 
 Browning to analyze and explain. He is not 
 only the heroes' poet or the singer of rounde- 
 lays and the idyllist of empty days. It is the 
 ** poet's trade to feign," says Churchill ; but 
 Browning's work is rather to divine the hidden 
 things of the human soul for us and open to us 
 the hieroglyphics of nature. Analysis with 
 him becomes inventive ; he is *' the maker '* 
 because he is so great an analyst. He unwraps 
 and dissects so skilfully that the power of 
 synthesis has come to him from the perfection 
 of his knowledge of the materials in which he 
 works. Take, for instance, his Paracelsus ; so 
 perfectly did he take to pieces the old myths 
 
132 BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 and legends about this reformer of medicine, 
 that he has been able to reconstruct for us 
 what is acknowledged by men of science to-day 
 as the truest history of the man. See what he 
 did with the meagre scraps of history of Count 
 Guido Franceschini. He pulled that faded, 
 worn, old book to bits, put it into the alembic 
 of his brain, and distilled for us The Ring 
 and the Book, which is doubtless much truer 
 for us than would have been the actual facts 
 and words seen by coarser eyes and heard by 
 duller ears. Thus does analysis lead with 
 genius such as his to synthesis ; and for this I 
 call him a scientific poet. 
 
 This is a consolatory fact, because it shows 
 us that the progress of science need not be 
 fatal to poetry. We shall understand our 
 materials so much better, that we shall make 
 more out of them. The chemist is the great 
 manufacturer precisely because he is the great 
 separater and resolver. Campbell said : — 
 
 " When science from Creation's face 
 Enchantment's veil withdraws, 
 What lovely visions yield their place 
 To cold pnaterial laws ! " 
 
 But is it so ? Tennyson speaks in one of his 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 133 
 
 poems of the " white star of snow " ; before 
 Mr. Glaishers observations on snow-crystals 
 he would have had to call it a '* flake." There 
 are many instances in the Laureate's works 
 of the influence which modern scientific dis- 
 coveries have exercised upon his genius. 
 Browning's poems, however, teem with them, 
 and this possibly is one element in their 
 obscurity. It cannot be denied that one wants 
 educating up to Browning ; but the process will 
 undoubtedly pay. In Ferishtah!s Fancies 
 he speaks of the human ear as *' hungry for 
 music." We shall miss the poet's meaning 
 unless we know something of the organ of 
 Corti, with its three thousand rods, the beauti- 
 ful arrangement of which has been compared 
 to that of the keys of a piano. In the next 
 line he speaks of the *' seven-stringed instru- 
 ment " before the eye ; here the reference to 
 light and the seven colours of the spectrum is 
 more obvious. In Hohenstiel-Schwangau we 
 have the lines : — 
 
 " Try to make good do good as evil does — 
 Were just as if a chemist, wanting white, 
 And knowing black ingredients bred the dye 
 Insisted these too should be white, forsooth ! " 
 
134 BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 Those experimenters with chemicals, who have 
 made the beautiful white and blue fires out of 
 black antimony and sulphur, will know what 
 the poet means. In Easter Day there is a 
 very remarkable illustration of Plato's maxim, 
 that " poets utter great and wise things which 
 they do not themselves understand." He 
 says : — 
 
 " Thy choice was earth : thou didst attest 
 'Twas fitter spirit should subserve 
 The flesh, than flesh refine to nerve 
 Beneath the spirit's play." 
 
 This poem was written five years before 
 Herbert Spencer gave the first hints as to the 
 origin of the nervous system in medusae. He 
 points out how an impression or stimulus 
 comes to habitually traverse a certain path 
 along the lines of least resistance, thus leading 
 to a differentiation of the protoplasm. Mr. 
 Bastian has shown how the constant repetition 
 of such a process has gradually produced the 
 " nerve fibre." How did the poet anticipate 
 this great scientific discovery ? Those students 
 of the poet who are interested in the study of 
 the science of optics will have remarked the 
 important place which his light metaphors hold 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE, 135 
 
 in his poems. ** Red, green, and blue that 
 whirl into a white." . . . ** The prism's 
 obstruction shows aright the secret of the sun- 
 beam." . . . ** Light thwarted, breaks a 
 limpid purity of rainbow flakes." In Fifine he 
 speaks of losing ** the varicolor in achromatic 
 white." Numpholeptos is quite unintelligible 
 without some acquaintance with optics. 
 
 How wonderfully he anticipated recent dis- 
 coveries in evolution and embryology in his 
 Paj^acelsus I have lately had occasion to 
 explain. Though holding no brief for any of 
 the Churches, it cannot be doubted that Mr. 
 Browning is a Christian poet. His theology is 
 so eminently reasonable that it commends itself 
 to a large class of minds which have forsaken 
 the Churches because modern criticism has laid 
 rude hands on the dogmas, creeds, and docu- 
 ments upon which they are grounded. The 
 study of comparative religions, the sciences of 
 folk-lore, anthropology, and psychology have 
 dissipated much of the supernatural which forms 
 so large a portion of the older religious teaching. 
 The great want of the age is a faith which is 
 adequate to and consistent with its intellectual 
 culture. I venture to think that such a system 
 
136 BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 of reasonable religious belief is to be found in 
 the works of this great writer. I hail it with 
 joy, not so much for its own completeness 
 and perfection as for its indication of the 
 direction in which we must look for the reli- 
 gion of the future. It is vain to deny that we 
 live in a transition period as far as our faith is 
 concerned. Many of the Churches resemble 
 those wooden buildings in India which have 
 been the prey of the white ant — they retain all 
 their outward form and appearance of strength, 
 but they will not resist the next high wind, for 
 they are eaten through and through by the 
 destroying insect. Churches and religious sys- 
 tems and societies, however, may collapse ; but 
 the ''indestructible religious need" of the hu- 
 man race will: be satisfied by a commensurate 
 theology when even their very names are for- 
 gotten. In the beautiful words of Lotze, the 
 great German philosopher, ''The totality of all 
 that has value — all that is perfect, fair, and good 
 — cannot possibly be homeless in the world or 
 in the realm of actuality, but has the very best 
 claim to be regarded by us as imperishable 
 reality." Man has often found that he has out- 
 grown his gods ; he will never outgrow such a 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 137 
 
 — V ■ 
 
 conception of God as that ! He may part with 
 his anthropomorphic conceptions of the Su- 
 preme Being ; but " the mind which meditates 
 in Beauty and speaks in Law " will ever be 
 adored by thinking men. And we can worship 
 Browning's God without loss of our self-respect. 
 To do this he tells us we must — 
 
 " Correct the portrait by the hving face, 
 Man's God by God's God in the mind of man." 
 
 The Ring and the Book. — The Pope. 
 
 To Browning " God is the perfect Poet, who in 
 His person acts His oWn creations," . . . 
 '' tastes an infinite joy in infinite ways," and 
 '' dwells in all, from life's minute beginnings up 
 at last to man." In God is life for evermore, 
 yet existence in its lowest form includes Him, 
 as he tells us in the noble passage in Para- 
 celsus, from which I quote. No one can read 
 this without looking upon nature with *' larger, 
 other eyes." Matter is no longer the dead 
 thing of the laboratory ; it is " a crystallized 
 thought of God." He cannot conceive that the 
 All-powerful and All-wise could fail to — • 
 
 " prove as infinitely good : 
 Would never, with power to work all love desires, 
 Bestow e'en less than man requires." 
 
 Christmas Eve. 
 
138 BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 It Is not incomprehensible, therefore, to him 
 that— 
 
 "This one earth, out of all the multitude 
 Of peopled worlds, as stars are now supposed, — 
 Was chosen, and is sun-star of the swarm. 
 For stage and scene of Thy transcendent acts, 
 Beside which even creation fades 
 Into a puny exercise of power." 
 
 The Ring aiid the Book. — The Pope. 
 
 He can believe that "the very God," "■ the All- 
 great," may be " the All-loving too," — 
 
 " For the loving worm within its clod 
 Were diviner than a loveless god 
 Amid his worlds." 
 
 But why does God never speak ? He stands 
 by, and, seeing all the evil and misery In the 
 world, does nothing to stay it ! How reason- 
 able is Browning's answer. He says that 
 God— 
 
 " stands away 
 As it were a handbreadth off, to give 
 Room for the newly-made to live, 
 And look at him from a place apart, 
 And use his gifts of brain and heart." 
 
 The process of man's education could go on In 
 no other conceivable manner. Man, otherwise, 
 would not be man, — he would be a mere 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 139 
 
 machine, '* Made perfect as a thing of course," 
 but " his Hberty of doing evil gave his doing 
 good a grace." *' I see no sign of God," says 
 the scientist ; *' I can explain everything with- 
 out Him ! " Browning does not take him to 
 the stars above, he bids him look through the 
 microscope at — 
 
 "the simplest of creatures, just a sac 
 That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives 
 And feels, and could do neither, we conclude, 
 If simplified still further in degree." 
 
 And what then ? Why, " The Name comes 
 close behind a stomach cyst," which is the 
 designation the biologist gives that simplest of 
 all living things which the poet has described ; 
 and this arrest of knowledge exactly indicates 
 the high-water mark of the science of the day. 
 The Name — God — is immediately behind that 
 stomach cyst! — behind that veil we cannot peer, 
 and the latest scientific word is, that there is not 
 the least probability that we shall ever bridge 
 the gulf between the not-living and the living. 
 There stands science confounded — "■ thus far 
 shalt thou come, and no farther." But if we 
 boast that, though we cannot solve the mystery 
 of life, we have mastered matter, *' No ! " cries 
 
I40 BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 the poet, *' the mere atoms despise " you ! the 
 awful, eternal atoms which no man hath seen 
 nor can see, of whose ceaseless dance Tyndall 
 has told us, of their linking and breaking away 
 and w^hirling on unceasingly in their infinite 
 combinations, ever changing yet never being 
 lost. Of all this must we think ere we can 
 sound the depth of the meaning, — " the atoms 
 despise " us. 
 
 Conversing recently with one of our greatest 
 English divines, he said to me, the words, "The 
 Name comes close behind a stomach cyst," con- 
 veyed no Idea whatever to his mind ; and he 
 adduced that as one of his reasons for thinking 
 Browning obscure. This gave me the oppor- 
 tunity of pointing out to him that If he had 
 spent a small fraction of the time he had de- 
 voted to Greek particles to learning the ele- 
 ments of biology, he would not have so unjustly 
 condemned the poet. This Is a good Illustra- 
 tion of the mental preparation which Is de- 
 manded In a Browning student. Is the fault 
 with the poet ? By no means. A good 
 preacher has a right to good listeners. Pro- 
 fessor Max Muller recently said, that neither 
 Tennyson nor Browning could be understood 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 141 
 
 without an acquaintance with the Greek and 
 Roman classics ; this is presupposed in our idea 
 of an educated person. In Browning's case a 
 knowledge of the physical sciences is also de- 
 manded of us ; but this only shows that Brown- 
 ing is in advance of his time, as a leader of men 
 should be. The age cannot be very distant when 
 an acquaintance with science will be as common 
 as a knowledge of the ancient classics : then 
 we shall hear less of Browning's obscurity. 
 Browning's theory of life is eminently in accord 
 with the teachings of evolution and develop- 
 ment. At first the savage merely lives the 
 animal life ; in time he comes to learn how he 
 lives, — 
 
 " and the more he gets to know 
 Of his own life's adaptabilities 
 The more joy-giving will his life become." 
 
 The very failures of our life prove it to be an 
 advance from a lower form, as the poet shows 
 in Cleon. '* The moral sense grows but by 
 exercise," and if it be true that " an honest man 
 is the noblest work of God," it is impossible to 
 imagine how he could have attained his nobility 
 by any other means than the " training and 
 passage" of this life. Browning's theory of 
 
142 BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 life is scientific because he goes into its purpose ; 
 and what to the pessimist is infinite mystery is 
 replete with law and order to him. Poor 
 atheist Thompson, who wrote The City of 
 Dreadful Night, exclaimed, — 
 
 " I find no hint throughout the universe 
 Of good or ill, of blessings or of curse ; 
 - I find alone necessity supreme. 
 
 *' The world rolls round for ever like a mill ; 
 It grinds out death and life, and good and ill ; 
 It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will." 
 
 It was natural that such pessimism should lead 
 to the Lethe of opium and alcohol, and the 
 melancholy end in the wards of the hospital. 
 To the healthy mind of Browning — 
 
 " This world's no blot — 
 Nor blank : it means intensely and means good." 
 
 The evolutionist has taught us many things 
 
 as to the origin and development of bodily 
 
 organs. It is not more certain that necessity 
 
 has gradually produced and improved these 
 
 than that — 
 
 "As with body so deals law with soul, 
 That, stung to strength through weakness, strives for good 
 Through evil." 
 
 The pessimist who fails to see all this is like 
 
BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 143 
 
 a colour-blind person who cannot find the 
 beauty of the rainbow. It is not the bow in 
 the clouds which wants colour, it is his de- 
 ficiency of the colour-sense which is to blame. 
 Looking back at the history of our race, we can 
 find no noble deed, no heroic effort, which 
 could ever have sprung from the pessimist's 
 gloomy creed. Mental health means optimism. 
 This is the oxygen of the soul, and there never 
 was a brave and valiant effort made without it. 
 The fatal choke-damp of the poets of the 
 Leopardi and Schopenhauer school finds no 
 place in the robust pages of Browning. It 
 vitiates much of the work of Shelley, Byron, 
 and Heine, but probably no poetic atmosphere 
 so nearly approaches mountain air as his. If 
 anything, it is too strong for most of us in the 
 old world. The newer blood and stronger 
 lungs of the new world breathe it with greater 
 pleasure. 
 
 Contemplating the lower forms of life, the 
 poet sees that they have arrived at perfection ; 
 the star-fish is complete, — no better star-fish 
 seems required, — but he sees — 
 
 " Man, for aye removed 
 From the developed brute ; a god though in the germ." 
 
144 BROWNING'S SCIENCE. 
 
 On this he grounds his belief in the im- 
 mortality of the soul : — 
 
 " Life is probation, and the earth no goal 
 But starting-point of man ; compel him strive, 
 Which means, in man, as good as reach the goal." 
 
 God, the soul, the future life ; earth, the school- 
 time ; love, the one great lesson to learn ; 
 character to be evolved from the contest with 
 evil ; the substratum of good in every soul 
 which leaves always some possibility of resto- 
 ration ; the imperishable nature of all good and 
 the ever-diminishing sum of evil, — these are 
 the high themes of the poet's work, and there 
 is nothing grander in the intellectual condition 
 of our time than to see this noble, robust, old 
 Anglo-Saxon standing amidst the wrecks of 
 the creeds and the crumbling ruins of the 
 Churches to proclaim that all which is best 
 and most instinct with life and power in our 
 religion is based on eternal fact, and nowise 
 to be shaken by criticism or disturbed by the 
 progress of the ages. This man speaks to us 
 with authority, " Crowned by prose and verse 
 and wielding with wit*s bauble, Learning's 
 rod, . . . he at least believes in soul 
 and is very sure of God ! " 
 
PARACELSUS : 
 THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 
 
 Let us go back In thought to the middle of the 
 fourteenth century, which saw the birth of the 
 period known as the Renaissance or Revival 
 of Learning, and which preceded the dawn 
 of the Reformation. The early part of the 
 century was the glacial period of European 
 thought ; all real intellect was enchained in 
 ''thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice." The 
 religious condition of Europe at this time is 
 familiar to every student of history. It is with 
 science we have now to deal. For nearly 
 two thousand years the philosophy of Aris- 
 totle had reigned supreme over all Europe. 
 Hallam tells us that " what the doctors of the 
 Middle Ages had been in theology, that was 
 Aristotle in all physical and speculative science, 
 and the Church admitted him into an alliance 
 of dependency for her own service." From 
 the domination of this system, which kept the 
 human mind in bondage, there seemed no 
 
 R. B. ^^5 L 
 
146 PARACELSUS: 
 
 escape, Men had grown to love their thral- 
 dom. But this philosophical deity was not 
 the real Aristotle, but Aristotle converted to 
 Christianity and dressed in a monk's frock. 
 The world had worshipped the sage as a 
 Hebrew, then as a Moslem, now as a Christian 
 and a pedant. Knowledge in the schools 
 "revolved like a squirrel in a cage;" hence- 
 forth, after two thousand years of turning about 
 upon itself, it was to progress. 
 
 If religious thought was restricted and con- 
 trolled, science was bound hand and foot and 
 hidden in darkest dungeon. Pietro of Abano, 
 the greatest philosopher and physician of the 
 preceding century, was so successful in curing 
 diseases, so skilful a builder and astronomer, 
 that he was held to be a wizard, and con- 
 demned . to be burnt alive. This was the 
 common reward of any who ventured to take 
 a single step forward on the path of human 
 progress. 
 
 Less known than the martyrs of religion, the 
 noble army of the martyrs of science have 
 perhaps a greater and more lasting claim upon 
 our gratitude. The former found in their faith 
 itself its own supreme reward ; they were 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 147 
 
 Upheld by its transcendent support and were 
 sustained by supernatural consolations. The 
 martyrs of science had nothing to cheer them 
 but the sad smile of truth and the conscious- 
 ness that their vindication was ultimately 
 secure. The Reformation was but a portion, 
 and that by no means the most important part, 
 of the great Renaissance ; it was a natural out- 
 growth of the Revival of Learning. This may 
 be said to have commenced in 1453, when 
 Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turk. 
 '' The new learning now began to awaken free 
 thought," says Mr. Symonds ; ''it encouraged 
 curiosity, and prepared the best minds of 
 Europe for speculative audacities from which 
 the Schoolmen would have shrunk, and which 
 soon expressed themselves in acts of cosmo- 
 politan importance." The great melting 
 period of the glaciers was from 1492 to 1500. 
 Columbus discovered America, and the passage 
 to India was found. Printing was growing 
 into vigour, and the art of war being revolu- 
 tionized by the invention of gunpowder, and 
 the discoveries of Copernicus had effected no 
 less a revolution in the science of cosmology. 
 Luther was born in 1483. Ten years later 
 
148 PARACELSUS: 
 
 Paracelsus, "the Luther of medicine and of 
 chemical science, was born at Einsiedeln, near 
 Zurich. It is not hard to recall these Re- 
 formation scenes as one stands on the Rhine 
 bridge at Basle, watching the tumultuous flow 
 of the river, itself formed by the melting of the 
 ice and snow of the Alps above. We naturally 
 think, as we stand there, of another breaking up 
 of ice, and the source and progress of another 
 river taking its rise in these lands. Close by 
 the Rhine we see the cathedral in which are 
 the tombs of Erasmus and QEcolampadius and 
 other pioneers of modern thought ; but the 
 Browning student's reflections will be centred 
 on the University buildings close by the bridge. 
 At this University Paracelsus — the first teacher, 
 be it remembered, who ever held a chair of 
 physical science — worked and taught in 1526; 
 here he was nicknamed "Luther Alter "^ — the 
 other Luther. Up to the time when, in 1835, 
 Mr. Browning wrote his poem Paracelsus, 
 the world had nothing but a distorted image of 
 the hero, which was, in fact, little better than a 
 caricature drawn by his bitter enemies. Mr. 
 Browning's vast research amongst contem- 
 porary records has enabled him to put together 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 149 
 
 — like Professor Owen with his prehistoric 
 bones — a consistent and faithful figure of the 
 real man. When Mr. Browning says, in the 
 notes appended to the poem, that the liberties 
 he has taken with his subject are very trifling, 
 we now know this to be the fact, because we 
 have access to the documents which confirm 
 his estimate of the hero's life. In all history 
 it would be difficult to find another character 
 which has been so slandered and misrepre- 
 sented as that of Paracelsus. He was the 
 son of a physician, William Bombast von 
 Hohenheim, who taught him the rudiments 
 of alchemy, surgery, and medicine ; he studied 
 philosophy under several learned masters, chief 
 of whom was Trithemius of Spanheim, Abbot 
 of Wurzburg, a great adept in magic, alchemy, 
 and astrology. Under this teacher he ac- 
 quired a taste for occult studies, and formed 
 a determination to use them for the welfare 
 of mankind. He could hardly have studied 
 under a better man in those dark days. 
 Tritheim himself was well in advance of most 
 of the teachers of his time. As it is impossible 
 to place ourselves in full sympathy with Mr. 
 Brownings hero unless we have some idea 
 
ISO PARACELSUS: 
 
 of the perplexing and much misunderstood 
 subject of alchemy, I may be pardoned if I 
 make a short quotation from a book of this 
 same Johannes Trithemius, printed at Passau 
 in 1506. He says : '* The art of divine magic 
 consists in the ability to perceive the essence 
 of things in the light of Nature, and by using 
 the soul-powers of the spirit to produce 
 material things from the unseen universe 
 (A'kasa), and in such operations the Above 
 (Macrocosm) and the Below (the Microcosm) 
 must be brought together, and made to act 
 harmoniously. The spirit of Nature is a unity, 
 creating and forming everything, and by acting 
 through the instrumentality of man it may 
 produce wonderful things. Such processes 
 take place according to law. You will learn 
 the law by which these things are accomplished 
 if you learn to know yourself. You will know 
 it by the power of the spirit that is in yourself, 
 and accomplish it by mixing your spirit with 
 the essence that comes out of yourself." By 
 this we see that Tritheim was of the theo- 
 sophists or mystics, for they are of the same 
 class, and probably, in their German form, 
 derived their origin from the labours of Tauler 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 151 
 
 of Strasburg, who afterwards, with *' the 
 Friends of God," made their headquarters at 
 Basle. The mysticism which is so dear to Mr. 
 Browning, and which finds its highest expres- 
 sion, perhaps, in the poem which we are con- 
 sidering, is not therefore out of place. 
 
 The poem opens with a touching scene, 
 where the hero is parting from his beloved 
 friends, Festus and Michal, on the eve of his 
 departure from home, to wander, as was the 
 custom, from University to University as a poor 
 scholar " aspiring to know." 
 
 His self-will, his dissatisfaction with his 
 teachers, his mysterious promptings to gain 
 knowledge in some original way, lead his 
 friends, who represent the conservative type 
 of mind, to implore him to stay at home. 
 
 "Stay with us ! Cast those hopes away 
 And stay with us ! 
 
 Man should be humble : you are very proud : 
 And God, dethroned, has dreadful plagues for such ! " 
 
 But Paracelsus, though protesting that he is no 
 misanthropist, declares that his **vast longings" 
 urge him forward. Sorcery and magic do not 
 content him as the means of penetrating the 
 
152 PARACELSUS : 
 
 secrets of Nature; he will leave the schools 
 and henceforth be taught of God, — 
 
 ** Who summons me to be His organ." 
 
 And so, leaving " the region of abstractions, 
 fictions, visions, spectral hopes and fears. In 
 the midst of which the Intellect," as Mr. 
 Symonds says, ''somnambulistically moved 
 upon an unknown way," he goes forth from 
 the little town of Einsiedeln, following the star- 
 gleam of truth, and hearing what he thinks to 
 be the voice of God — because having heard it, 
 go he must : — 
 
 " Be sure they sleep not whom God needs," 
 
 he says. 
 
 " Why not stay here and learn ? " they 
 ask ; "• converse with the mighty dead, fill out 
 their unfulfilled careers, take up their unsolved 
 problems. Snatch the torch from the tired 
 runners and bear it onward ! You will have 
 no books In the desert, you will find no foot- 
 prints In the caves where you will be the first 
 visitor! In the ruined cities where wisdom 
 would not stay, In the ravaged towns which 
 renounced her," — 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 157 
 
 "Rejecting past example, practice, precept, 
 Aidless 'mid these he thinks to stand alone ! " 
 
 Yes ! he accepts all that : he says, — 
 
 " I seemed to long 
 At once to trample on, yet save mankind, 
 To make some unexampled sacrifice 
 In their behalf, to wring some wondrous good 
 From heaven or earth for them, to perish winning 
 Eternal weal in the act ; as who should dare 
 Pluck out the angry thunder from its cloud, 
 That, all its gathered flame discharged on him, 
 No storm might threaten summer's azure sleep." 
 
 In these prelusive notes we have Mr. Brown- 
 ing's overture to the drama of '* Paracelsus: 
 Hero and Martyr of Science." We shall find 
 all these recur again and again in the harmony 
 to follow. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin somewhere divides mankind 
 Into three orders of beings : " The lowest, 
 sordid and selfish, which neither sees nor 
 feels ; the second, noble and sympathetic, but 
 which sees and feels without concluding or 
 acting ; the third and highest, which loses 
 sight in resolution and feeling in work." To 
 this latter class did Paracelsus belong. '' I go 
 to prove my soul ! " ** I shall arrive ! " he cries. 
 When a man of this sort comes to feel that 
 
154 PARACELSUS: 
 
 way, go forward he must. As Carlyle says : 
 '' Some arrive ; a glorious few ; many must be 
 lost, go down upon the floating wreck which 
 they took for land. Nay — Courage ! These 
 also, so far as there was any heroism in them, 
 have bequeathed their life as a contribution to 
 us, have valiantly laid their bodies in the chasm 
 for us ; of these also there Is no ray of heroism 
 lost, and on the whole, what else of them could 
 or should be 'saved ' at any time ? Courage, 
 and ever forward ! " 
 
 We next see Paracelsus In the house of 
 a Greek conjuror at Constantinople. Here 
 Paracelsus attains. It is nine years since he 
 took the diver's plunge for the pearl. Has 
 he secured it '^, solved the mystery of being, 
 reached the grand secret of life ? He had 
 not even found its elixir, nor the philosopher's 
 stone, nor the universal solvent. He had 
 discovered modern medicine and the science 
 of chemistry ; but though It cannot be said he 
 was unaware of the great consequences which 
 must follow these discoveries, it is certain that 
 he underrated them in comparison with what he 
 had hoped to have achieved. When he left his 
 home, he went to study in the mines of the 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 155 
 
 Tyrol. That was seeing his way without much 
 circuit first ; there he was in the region of fact ; 
 if he extracted metals, it must be with pick and 
 shovel instead of cabalistic formulae. No coax- 
 ing and wheedling Nature there, but a fight 
 and a struggle for her treasures. We are told 
 that he learned mining and geology and the 
 use of metals in the practice of medicine. *' I 
 see," he says, " the true use of chemistry is not 
 to make gold, but to prepare medicines." 
 
 In his sermon on the world's unknown bene- 
 factors. Cardinal Newman asks, " Who gave us 
 the use of the valuable medicines for the heal- 
 ing of disease ? " and he implies that the 
 inventors are mostly unknown. We shall see 
 what Paracelsus did in this direction. He 
 is rightly termed ''the father of modern 
 chemistry." He discovered the metals zinc 
 and bismuth and hydrogen gas, and the medical 
 uses of many minerals, the most important of 
 which were mercury and antimony. He gave 
 to medicine the greatest weapon in her 
 armoury — opium. His celebrated azoth some 
 say was magnetized electricity, and others that 
 his magnum opus was the science of fire. He 
 acted as army surgeon to several princes in 
 
156 PARACELSUS : 
 
 Italy, Belgium, and Denmark. He travelled 
 in Portugal and Sweden, and came to England; 
 going thence to Transylvania, he was carried 
 prisoner to Tartary, visiting the famous colleges 
 of Samarcand, and went thence with the son of 
 the Khan on an embassy to Constantinople. 
 All this time he had no books. His only book 
 was Nature ; he interrogated her at first-hand. 
 He mixed with the common people, and drank 
 with boors, shepherds, Jews, gipsies, and 
 tramps, so gaining scraps of knowledge wher- 
 ever he could, and giving colourable excusa' 
 to his enemies to say he was nothing but a 
 drunken vagabond, fond of low company. He 
 would rather learn medicine and surgery from 
 an old country nurse than from a University 
 lecturer, and was denounced accordingly and — 
 naturally. If there was one thing he detested 
 more than another, it was the principle of 
 authority. He bent his head to no man. 
 Surely never was there a man with such a 
 wolf-hunger for facts of his own acquisition. 
 And now, estimating all his labours at so low 
 a value, he can go on no longer, and we find 
 him in the magician's house in Constantinople,, 
 in search of the universal panacea, if you please.- 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 157 
 
 He is in despair, thinks he has done nothing. 
 The process is too slow for him, though we 
 know he had already done so much. He will 
 learn now by supernatural means, diabolical 
 perhaps, because the process is quicker. He 
 must have rest, too, for his throbbing pulses 
 and gnawing heart. Life and strength are 
 going ; he has atrophied his once human heart 
 by purging it of love, and has subdued his 
 whole life to the one purpose to know. Has 
 he been fighting sleep for death's sake per- 
 haps ? Is he losing his reason ? 
 
 " 'God, thou art mind ! he cries ; 
 Crush not my mind, dear God.'" 
 
 He learns the secret ; he is told that he has 
 missed his life's end by refusing Love, as 
 another lost one has missed his by refusing 
 Knowledge ; they two are ** halves of one dis- 
 severed world." 
 
 Love saves others, and self-sacrifice is the 
 surest way of saving one's self. ''He alone," 
 says a mystical writer, "who loves, has and 
 is Christ, having in virtue of his love the 
 'Dissolvent' and the secret of 'Transmuta- 
 tion' in respect of the whole man. Krishna 
 has his Arjun, Buddha his Ananda, Jesus his 
 
158 PARACELSUS: 
 
 John — terms denoting the feminine and tender 
 moiety of the Divine nature." He has learned 
 that true knowledge does not consist In accumu- 
 lating It for Its own sake, but In distributing Its 
 fruits in loving work for men. Henceforth the 
 ideal must give place to the actual service as 
 the first condition of the highest internal illumi- 
 nation. To what extent are we to consider 
 this scene at Constantinople historical ? The 
 poet's purpose is easy enough to trace. The 
 reformer, the truth- seeker, the cold speculative 
 philosopher has somehow to be brought into 
 sympathetic relations with his fellow-men ; he 
 has burned up his human affections in his 
 furnaces, and has cast away as dross his human 
 heart-promptings. As love cannot reach him 
 otherwise, a direct revelation must be vouch- 
 safed to him. Mr. Browning has to convert 
 his ascetic scientist (who has only given up 
 gold making and the search for the philosopher's 
 stone because he sees that a wider and simpler 
 chemistry promises better results) into the 
 successful healer, the blessed physician of the 
 poor and the giver of health to princes ; and he 
 does not see a better way of converting him 
 than by revealing the Gospel of Love to him 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 159 
 
 in a magician's house. There does not appear 
 to be any historical basis for this scene between 
 Aprile and Paracelsus. The real Paracelsus, 
 as we find him in his works, was full of love 
 for humanity ; and it is much more probable 
 that he learned his lesson while travelling, and 
 mixing among the poor and wretched, and 
 while a prisoner in Tartary, where he doubtless 
 imbibed much Buddhist and occult lore from the 
 philosophers of Samarcand, than that anything 
 like the Constantinople drama was enacted^ 
 Be this as it may, we have abundant evi- 
 dence in the many extant works of Paracel- 
 sus that he was thoroughly imbued with the 
 Spirit and doctrines of the Eastern occultism, 
 and was full of love for humanity. A quo- 
 tation from his De Fundament Sapientice 
 must suffice : "• He who foolishly believes is 
 foolish ; without knowledge there can be no 
 faith. God does not desire that we should 
 remain in darkness and ignorance. We should 
 be all recipients of the Divine wisdom. We 
 can learn to know God only by becoming wise. 
 To become like God we must become attracted 
 to God, and the power that attracts us is love. 
 Love to God will be kindled in our hearts by 
 
l6o PARACELSUS: 
 
 an ardent love for humanity; and a love for 
 humanity will be caused by a love to God." 
 It would not have been so dramatic, but I 
 would rather, I confess, have seen Paracelsus 
 slowly working this out for himself amongst 
 his peasants and miners and fellow-soldiers and 
 prisoners, than having It revealed to him as to 
 Saul at Damascus by miracle. I am not quite 
 sure though that this is all that Mr. Browning 
 means us to learn by this scene. May it not 
 be that the great Reformation of the sixteenth 
 century is composed of the art-loving, sensuous, 
 Aprlle-like Renaissance, or revival of polite 
 learning, and the scientific awakening which 
 took place in Germany after Luther's Reforma- 
 tion ? Lorenzo de Medici might in this con- 
 nection be the Aprlle, and Paracelsus the 
 representative of the scientific spirit. I merely 
 throw this out as subject for discussion. 
 Lorenzo seems very well indicated by the 
 speech of Aprlle beginning : *' I would love 
 infinitely and be loved." 
 
 In the year 1525 Paracelsus went to Basle, 
 where he was fortunate in curing Froben the 
 great printer by his laudanum when he had 
 the gout. Froben was the friend of Erasmus, 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. i6i 
 
 who was associated with GEcolampadius ; and 
 soon after, upon the recommendation of GEco- 
 lampadius, he was appointed by the city mag- 
 nates a professor of physics, medicine, and 
 surgery, with a considerable salary ; at the 
 same time they made him city physician, to 
 the duties of which office he requested might 
 be added inspector of drug-shops. This ex- 
 amination made the druggists his bitterest 
 enemies, as he detected their fraudulent prac- 
 tices ; they combined to set the other doctors 
 of the city against him ; and as these were 
 exceedingly jealous of his skill and success, 
 poor Paracelsus found himself in a hornets* 
 nest. We find him then at Basle University 
 in 1526, the earliest teacher of science on 
 record. He has become famous as a physician, 
 the medicines which he has discovered he has 
 successfully used in his practice ; he was now, 
 in the eyes of his patients at least, — 
 
 " The wondrous Paracelsus, life's dispenser. 
 Fate's commissary, idol of the schools and courts." 
 
 In the poem he is once more conversing with 
 his friend Festus, who is congratulating him. 
 But he declares that he has not been successful, 
 
 R. B. M 
 
l62 PARACELSUS : 
 
 and really is at heart most miserable ; his very 
 popularity galls him, he feels he is but a zany 
 in a show ; public flattery he despises ; the 
 incense of the ignorant mob he has never 
 sought ; he knows that all this is lowering his 
 mentaj tone, he is being converted into a quack 
 against his will. Festus reminds him that 
 death retires before his presence, that his skill 
 has often availed to raise '' the shattered frame 
 to pristine stateliness," that pain-racked men 
 by his blessed opiate may swoon into a sea 
 of bliss, that he is ordained to free the flesh 
 from fell disease as Luther frees the soul. 
 Men say it is done by magic and such folly ; 
 it is however done ! Arrogant ? Yes, he ad- 
 mits that men may say that of him. He did 
 begin his lectures at Basle by lighting some 
 sulphur in a chafing dish and burning the 
 books of his great predecessors in the medical 
 art, Avicenna, Galen, and others, saying : " Sic 
 vos ardebitis in gehennd." He boasted that 
 he had read no books for ten years, though 
 he protested that his shoe-buckles were more 
 learned than the authors whose works he had 
 burned. Yet notwithstanding these sentiments 
 he is not inclined to see anything but defeat, 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 163 
 
 when, after aiming at comprehending God Him- 
 self, His works, and all His intercourse with 
 the human mind, he finds himself with life 
 passing away and strength failing, a mere lec- 
 turer to " beardless boys, and bearded dotards 
 worse." 
 
 It must have been a wonderful spectacle 
 when this new teacher took his place before 
 his pupils. The benches, occupied hitherto by 
 a dozen or two of students, were crowded with 
 an eager audience anxious for the new learn- 
 ing. Literature had been exhumed many years 
 before, and now it was the turn of science ! 
 Fancy it, students in the nineteenth century, 
 what honour to have been seated on one of 
 these groaning benches assisting at the dis- 
 entombment of physical science ! Leaving the 
 morbid seclusion of the cloisters, men had 
 given up dreaming for inquiry, and baseless 
 visions for the acquisition of facts. This was 
 the childhood of our science, and its days were 
 bright with the poetry of youth. '* You Italy, 
 you Dalmatia, you Sarmatia, Athens, Greece, 
 Arabia, and Israel ! Follow me — come out of 
 the night of the mind ! " he cries. It is a sight 
 to arouse our enthusiasm, to see in the early 
 
i64 PARACELSUS: 
 
 dawn of our modern science this man standing 
 up alone to pit himself against the whole 
 scientific authority of his day. He rises from 
 the crucibles and fires where his predecessors 
 had been vainly seeking for gold and silver, 
 ever and again pretending to have found them 
 and always going empty-handed to a deluded 
 world; henceforth, he says, his alchemy shall 
 serve a nobler purpose than gold-seeking, it 
 shall aid in the healing of disease. He casts 
 aside the sacred books of medicine which have 
 been handed down the ages by his predeces- 
 sors ; destroying them, he declares, with an 
 earnestness which is less tinged by arrogance 
 than by conviction, that these men had been 
 blind guides, that he alone has the clue of the 
 maze; and he forsakes all to follow truth, 
 though she lead him to death. In his gener- 
 ous impulse to serve mankind he has spoken 
 harshly of his opponents. They would not 
 have helped him any way. He was above 
 them, they could not understand him, so they 
 hated him, and he scorned them. As too often 
 happens to such heroes, he forgot the love of 
 his neighbour in his love for mankind. 
 
 And here we cannot help pausing to ask 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE, 165 
 
 how it was that the art of medicine had failed 
 to make any progress whatever from the 
 earHest Christian times ? Paracelsus found his 
 pupils holding fast by the teachings of the 
 School of Salerno, founded by the Arabs ; and 
 there seems no ground for supposing that the 
 healing art had made the slightest progress in 
 Europe from the foundation of that school in 
 1 1 50, except in that branch known as phar- 
 macy. For this stagnation the Catholic Church 
 was chiefly to blame. She enjoined the care 
 of the sick no doubt, but she did nothing to 
 further the progress of medical science ; the 
 principal remedies were prayers and relics. 
 Not that there was any scarcity of doctors ; 
 there were plenty of Greek, Arabic, and Jewish 
 physicians ; but none but rich and powerful 
 persons dare call in their services for fear of 
 excommunication. Benedict IX. and Urban 
 II. in the eleventh century ordered that clerical 
 physicians should only practise within the walls 
 of their monasteries. Neither prelates nor any 
 of the superior clergy were permitted to prac- 
 tise in any branch of medicine. The ignorant 
 and often sensual lower clergy were allowed 
 to act as physicians ; but even they ^vere for- 
 
i66 PARACELSUS: 
 
 bidden to engage in surgery, for the expressed 
 reason that the Church abhorred the shedding 
 of blood. Teeth-drawing and bleeding were 
 relegated to the lay brethren who were the 
 servants and the barbers of the community ; 
 and no doubt from this circumstance we derive 
 the title of barber-surgeons, the extremely 
 interesting history of which body has just been 
 published in the '' Life of Vicary," where the 
 story of the foundation of Bartholomew's Hos- 
 pital is told by our President, Dr. Furnivall,* 
 and his talented son, Mr. Percy Furnivall, who 
 is a distinguished pupil of that school of 
 medicine ; these gentlemen have done a great 
 service to the history of medicine in England 
 by their labours in that w^ork. Why did 
 the Church oppose the study of medicine .•* 
 The answer is simple. In those days every- 
 thing which tended to withdraw the veil of 
 mystery from the secrets of life was considered 
 to have a tendency to destroy religion. The 
 Church seemed unwilling to have the secrets 
 of life explained. Everything which tended 
 to account for the processes of being and the 
 
 * This paper was read before the Browning Society. 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 167 
 
 causes of health and disease was so much with- 
 drawn from the privileges of the Church. 
 Paracelsus had burst his bonds, had in some 
 marvellous manner come to see that a clean 
 sweep must be made of all this Arabian, Kab- 
 alistic, Scholastic rubbish before he could begin 
 to teach anything. On the day that he stood 
 up before that audience at Basle University he 
 was to write the first lines of the principles of 
 rational medicine. Do you grudge him a clean 
 slate '^ Away then with "^tius, Oribasius, 
 Galen, Rhasis, Serapion, Avicenna, Averroes," 
 and the other blocks. To the influence of 
 relics, theological conjuration, and all the 
 ridiculous and often disgusting remedies of his 
 professional brethren he had opposed his 
 scientific common-sense method of dealing with 
 disease. He had saved the life of a prince 
 who was at first grateful ; but when the monks 
 had pointed out that a want of respect had 
 been shown to the Sudarium of our Lady, and 
 the abbey where it was kept had been de- 
 frauded of its dues by this indecently hasty 
 cure, the convalescent prince had to prove his 
 orthodoxy by burning a dozen heretics straight 
 away in the public square ; and he would doubt- 
 
i68 PARACELSUS 
 
 less have burned Paracelsus too for sorcery 
 had he not escaped from his power. They 
 had sent him diplomas, he tells his friend 
 Festus, and presents from Germany, France, 
 and Italy, and what he valued more than 
 these : he had received a letter from Erasmus, 
 whose friend Frobenius, he says, he had raised 
 from the dead. But all these things are a 
 poor solace at best ; and he confesses that a 
 host of petty, vile delights now supply the 
 place of his dead aims, '* as sickly fungi spring 
 from the roots where tall trees used to flourish." 
 Then his first desire infinitely to know comes 
 back in all its force, and he declares — 
 
 '* Would God translate me to His throne, believe 
 That I should only listen to His word 
 To further my own aim ! " 
 
 He has fallen low, but though he cannot soar 
 
 he will not crawl ; he knows that he precedes 
 
 his age, he has bartered sleep in vain. 
 
 They tell him there is another world to 
 
 remedy the ills of this ; but he bursts out : — 
 
 " Another world ! 
 And why this world, this common world, to be 
 A makeshift, a mere foil, how fair soever 
 To some fine life to come ? 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 169 
 
 No, no ; 
 Love, hope, fear, faith — these make humanity ! " 
 
 In 1528 we find him at Colmar in Alsatia. 
 He has been driven by priests and doctors from 
 Basle ; he says woefully : — 
 
 " Poor Paracelsus is 'exposed 
 At last \ a most egregious qaack he proves." 
 
 He had been called to the bedside of some 
 rich cleric who was ill ; he cured him, but so 
 speedily that his fee was refused. Though not 
 at all a mercenary man (for he always gave 
 the poor his services gratuitously), he sued the 
 priest; but the judge refused to interfere, and 
 Paracelsus used strong language to him, and 
 had to fly to escape punishment. We must 
 not be too hard upon the canon. Disease was 
 treated with profound respect in those days, 
 and great patients liked to be cured with de- 
 liberation and some ceremonial. Heart-broken 
 and indignant at the world's ingratitude, Para- 
 celsus now declares he will moderate his aims, 
 abandon his vast ambitions, live the common 
 life, cast out his lovely fancies, and earn his 
 grave, for mind is only disease and natural 
 health is ignorance. He is desperate — he 
 
I70 PARACELSUS : 
 
 chants the song of the men who '' clung to 
 their first fault and withered in their pride." 
 
 The closing scene of the drama is laid in a 
 cell in the hospital of Salzburg. It is the year 
 1 541, his age but forty-eight; and the divine 
 martyr of science lies dying. Recent investiga- 
 tions in contemporary records have proved that 
 he had been attacked by the servants of certain 
 physicians who were his jealous enemies, and 
 that in consequence of a fall he sustained a 
 fracture of the skull, which proved fatal in a 
 few days. There is nothing in the whole range 
 of our literature grander or more beautiful than 
 this death-scene, as painted by Robert Brown- 
 ing. His faithful Festus, watching the weary 
 night long by the sinking champion of the 
 truth, prays for his recovery, for his salvation. 
 
 " Save him, dear God ; it will be like Thee : bathe him 
 In light and life ! Thou art not made like us ; " 
 
 He declares that, — 
 
 " Come weal or woe 
 His portion shall be mine. He has done well. 
 I would have sinned, had I been strong enough, 
 As he has sinned. - Reward him, or I waive 
 Reward ! If Thou canst find no place for him, 
 He shall be king elsewhere, and I will be 
 His slave for ever. There are two of us." 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE, 171 
 
 Turning to the dying hero he says, — 
 " God shall take thee to His breast, dear spirit 
 
 And here on earth 
 Shall splendour sit upon thy name for ever — 
 
 Thee — the master mind, 
 The thinker, the explorer, the creator ! " 
 
 The dying man sits up, must speak, must 
 sing his death song. Once more he must wear 
 his scarlet fur-Hned robe, with his chain about 
 his neck, and his trusty sword Azoth in his 
 grasp. He reviews his Hfe, owns his sins and 
 his failure, owns too his pride and his unspeak- 
 able despair, laments that he had misunderstood 
 his place and mission. Still he protests that 
 he never fashioned out a fancied good distinct 
 from man's. 
 
 " God is glorified in man, 
 And to man's glory vowed I soul and Hmb ; 
 Afterwards they will know me." 
 
 Such is Mr. Browning's study of the Real 
 Paracelsus, the Medical Ishmael. He was 
 buried in the churchyard of St. Sebastian at 
 Salzburg; but in 1752 his bones were removed 
 to the porch of the church, and a monument 
 
172' PARACELSUS: 
 
 was erected to his memory by the archbishop. 
 When his body was exhumed it was discovered 
 that his skull had been fractured during life. 
 How different the story is from the previous 
 caricatures in our biographical dictionaries a 
 very little research will show. '* Charlatan/' 
 *' drunken empiric," " conjuror," '' sorcerer," 
 *' quack," '' extravagant impostor." This is 
 how he was described before Mr. Browning 
 wrote. He could read between the lines of his 
 history, and was the first in our time who re- 
 fused to accept the common story as true. If 
 you refer to the article " Alchemy " in the last 
 edition of the Encyclopcedia B7'itannica, you will 
 find that men of science now recognise Mr. 
 Browning's great poem as a far truer estimate 
 of the man's work than any we had previously. 
 He had errors, but they were mainly the fault 
 of his time ; his virtues were his own. Was he 
 a charlatan ? Men have said so while appro- 
 priating his discoveries and passing them off as 
 their own. Charlatans are not often great dis- 
 coverers or inventors. A drunken empiric ? 
 because he frequented the society of common 
 people, instead of watching his alembic in a 
 lonely tower. His profession did not at all 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 173 
 
 approve of his delivering his lectures in the 
 vulgar tongue, in place of the Latin language ; 
 but this was part of his noble plan, and was 
 the beginning of free thought in science ; he 
 laboured for humanity, not for a profession. 
 He cured poor people without taking his fees ; 
 this was bitterly resented by his brethren. 
 Medical men did not then do as much work for 
 charity as they happily do now. He is gravely 
 charged with being an empiric, as if medicine 
 even at the present day were not largely em- 
 piricism. Sir Morell Mackenzie says as much. 
 But Paracelsus did more for scientific medicine 
 than perhaps any of its students. True, he 
 rejected anatomy ; but then he made the grand 
 discovery that Nature was sufficient for the 
 cure of most diseases. He was a Neo-Pla- 
 tonist, and considered the mind had more to do 
 with disease than the body. There was much 
 truth in that. '' Imagination is the cause of 
 many diseases ; faith is the cure for all," he 
 says. Just this doctrine is being taught now 
 largely in America with some success, under 
 the name of *' Christian science healing." 
 
 Mr. Browning seems too readily to admit 
 the charge of drunkenness so persistently 
 
174 PARACELSUS: 
 
 brought against his hero. In the 4th Scene 
 he makes him accuse himself in the strongest 
 terms. He speaks of his " heart, which God 
 cursed long ago," as now a pet nest for devils. 
 He speaks of his *' degradation," of being *' half 
 stupid and half mad." We saw how, in the 
 previous scene, he spoke of the host of petty, 
 vile' delights which like fungi had usurped the 
 place of his dead aims. This is dramatic, and 
 it has some historical colour no doubt. Mr. 
 Browning even gives us a note to the effect 
 that '' his defenders allow the drunkenness." 
 But we ask, Is it reasonable ? We know how 
 this man's character has been misrepresented 
 in so many ways — we can see that much of his 
 so-called arrogance was inspiration, and inspira- 
 tion so far beyond the conception of the narrow, 
 bigoted, grossly ignorant monkish minds about 
 him that the inspiration of genius was probably 
 mistaken ofttimes for that of wine. We know 
 how many charges his secretary Oporinus 
 trumped up against him. May he not have 
 largely exaggerated this account of his lecturing 
 in a state of intoxication day after day ? Is it 
 reasonable ? Consider the work the man did. 
 Here we have some 106 treatises on Medicine, 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 175 
 
 Alchemy, Natural History and Philosophy, 
 Magic, and other subjects, written within a 
 period of time covering fifteen years. He had 
 a great practice and crowds of pupils, was a 
 constant and persistent persecutor of Nature 
 for the purpose of extracting her secrets ; how 
 could he have accomplished a work the value 
 of which we are now only just beginning to 
 appreciate, if he lived in that state of constant 
 intoxication which Mr. Browning says his de- 
 fenders admit ? We may guess how much of 
 all this is true by remembering what certain 
 historians have said of Luther, and indeed of 
 all the Reformers. He was called an " ignorant 
 vagabond." In truth he was no lover of books, 
 and despised mere University learning. '* The 
 book of Nature," he affirmed, *' was that which 
 the physician should read, and to do so he must 
 walk over its leaves." We pore over books 
 now till our faculties of observation become 
 atrophied. Paracelsus' library, we are told, 
 consisted of a Bible, St. Jerome on the Gospels, 
 a volume on Medicine, and seven manuscripts. 
 So, as he travelled so much and read so little, 
 what could the musty old pedants who spent 
 their lives amidst the disputations of the School- 
 
176 PARACELSUS: 
 
 men consider him but an " ignorant vagabond?" 
 What are we to say about his magic and 
 astrology ? There are two kinds of magic — 
 black and white. The former is devil worship, 
 the latter is synonymous with occult science, or 
 divine science, as it was sometimes called. Mr. 
 Browning makes his hero abjure the '' black 
 arts " and the aid of "sullen fiends " and " fallen 
 spirits " in the outset of his career ; and though 
 we find him soon after inquiring in the con- 
 juror's house, it does not appear that the poet 
 has sent him thither to learn anything from the 
 devil, that would certainly be at variance with 
 anything we can discover in his authentic 
 w^orks.* By magic in his writings we are to 
 understand, he says, *' the highest power of the 
 human spirit to control all lower influences for 
 the purpose of good." He talks a great deal 
 of superstitious nonsense in this connection, but 
 
 * He seems to have had a very poor idea of the devil's 
 power. In his book entitled Philosophia Occulta^ he says, 
 "The devil has not enough power to mend old broken 
 pots, much less to enrich a man." He goes on to say, '' That 
 which is unexpected will in future prove to be true, and 
 that which is looked upon as superstitious in one century, 
 will be the basis for the approved science of the next." 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE, 177 
 
 there is no evidence of his dealing with the 
 powers of darkness, as was of course charged 
 upon him by the Church on account of his 
 remarkable success. He was an alchemist, and 
 alchemy stands in the same relation to modern 
 chemistry that astrology does to astronomy. 
 We should treat neither with contempt ; they 
 have too great a claim upon us for what they 
 gave birth to. And here I must be permitted 
 to touch briefly on the subject of the cosmology 
 of Paracelsus. I dare say some of us have 
 thought, when reading that wonderful death 
 song which the poet puts into the mouth of his 
 hero, that there was in it a great deal more of 
 Mr. Browning than of Paracelsus. I confess I 
 have often thought that myself; but a more 
 careful study of the works and opinions of this 
 thinker and explorer has convinced me that 
 these lovely lines are quite in accord with what 
 we may expect the real Paracelsus to have said. 
 To fully understand the purport of the lines 
 where the poet speaks of man as — 
 
 "The consummation of this scheme 
 Of being, the completion of this sphere 
 Of Ufe ; whose attributes had here and there 
 Been scattered o'er the visible world before, 
 R. B. N 
 
178 PARACELSUS : 
 
 Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant 
 
 To be united in some wondrous whole, 
 
 Imperfect qualities throughout creation, 
 
 Suggesting some one creature yet to make, 
 
 Some point where all these scattered rays should meet 
 
 Convergent in the faculties of man," — 
 
 and to see the reasonableness of thus making 
 Paracelsus talk evolution, we must know a 
 little of his cosmology and of his curious teach- 
 ing about the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. 
 We know that his eagerness to understand the 
 relation of man to the universe led him to the 
 study of the Kabala, where this relationship is 
 attempted to be explained. Much of his vision- 
 ary cosmology has been evidently derived from 
 this curious Jewish work. The Kabala teaches 
 that the whole universe was incomplete, and 
 did not receive its finishing touch till man was 
 formed, who is the acme of the creation and 
 the Microcosm. In the Zohar, iii. 48, we 
 read : " As soon as man was created every- 
 thing was complete, including the upper and 
 nether worlds, for everything is comprised in 
 man. He unites in himself all forms." By 
 the Macrocosm then we are to understand the 
 universe, including the visible and invisible 
 things ; by the Microcosm we mean the little 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 179 
 
 world, a term usually applied to man. It was 
 held not only that there was a relationship 
 between man and the forms of life below him, 
 but also between his spiritual body and the 
 planets, and on this Wiegel says : '* The exter- 
 nal heaven, with its continued revolution, hath 
 a most convenient correspondency with the in- 
 ward heaven in the Microcosm, and this with 
 that" This was fully believed by Paracelsus ] 
 and though to modern science it seems very 
 absurd, the belief had a definite and useful 
 influence. It is not quite so absurd perhaps 
 as we may think. He says : " The human 
 body is composed of primeval stuff," what we 
 now term cosmic matter. Now the spectro- 
 scope has proved that the same chemical ele- 
 ments of which the earth and sun are composed 
 are found in all the stars. In Haeckel's His- 
 tory of Evolution there is a series of plates 
 illustrating the various consecutive aspects of 
 the human embryon. These make up a perfect 
 picture of the microcosmic development. If 
 we were to place them side by side with Mr. 
 Browning's lines, they would form their best 
 commentary. (I wish the Browning Society 
 would publish them.) This poem, we must 
 
i8o PARACELSUS: 
 
 bear In mind, was written In 1835, twenty-three 
 years before Darwin and Wallace familiarized 
 the world with the doctrine of evolution. 
 *' Nature," says the poet, *' is nothing but a 
 thought of God reflected in the life of man." * 
 
 " God is the perfect poet, 
 Who in His person acts His own creations." 
 
 This Is just the Idea of the Kaballsts and 
 Paracelslsts ; they say, ** The material universe 
 is a thought of the Eternal Mind thrown Into 
 objectivity by its will, and crystallized into 
 matter by Its power"; to them ''all stars and 
 mountain peaks are thoughts of the Eternal 
 Mind." t '' The visible body of the Invisible 
 God," says Paracelsus. Matter to him was not 
 dead. He says: *' Matter Is, so to say, coagu- 
 lated vapour, and Is connected with spirit by 
 an intermediate principle which it receives from 
 the spirit." 
 
 We cannot understand Paracelsus and the 
 science of his time without a little inquiry as 
 to what was meant by the search for the phllo- 
 
 * So Balzac: *' Dieu est le poete," and Petronius: "Mundus 
 totus exercit histrionem." 
 
 t Dr. Hartmann's Paracelsus, 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. i8i 
 
 sopher's stone, the elixir of life, and the universal 
 medicine. It is very difficult to discern what 
 was really intended by these phrases. Dr. 
 Anna Kingsford, who paid considerable atten- 
 tion to the hermetic philosophy, says : '' These 
 are but terms to denote pure spirit and its 
 essential correlative, a will absolutely firm and 
 inaccessible alike to weakness from within and 
 assault from without." Another writer in- 
 geniously tries to explain the universal solvent 
 as really nothing but pure water, which has the 
 property of more or less dissolving all the 
 elements. His alcahest — as he termed it — as 
 far as I can make out, was nothing more than 
 a preparation of lime ; but writers of this school 
 only desired to be understood by the initiated, 
 and probably the words actually used meant 
 something quite different. There was a reason 
 for using an incomprehensible style, for fear 
 -of the persecutions of the Church ; and these 
 books, like the rolls in Ezekiel, were '' written 
 within and without." Many great truths, we 
 know, were enshrouded in symbolic names and 
 fanciful metaphors. 
 
 It is certain that Paracelsus, like his pre- 
 decessors, sought to possess the elixir of life. 
 
i82 PARACELSUS : 
 
 It does not appear from his writings that he 
 thought it possible to render the physical body 
 immortal ; but he held it to be the duty — as 
 the medical profession holds it still — of the 
 physician to preserve life as long as possible. 
 A great deal of matter attributed to Paracelsus 
 on this subject is spurious ; but there are some 
 of his authentic writings which are very curious 
 and entertaining. He describes the process 
 of making the Primum Ens Mellssae, which 
 after all turns out to be nothing but an alkaline 
 tincture of the leaves of the common British 
 plant known as the Balm, or Melissa Officinalis. 
 Some very amusing stories are told of the 
 virtues of this concoction by Lesebure, a 
 physician to Louis XIV., and which speak 
 volumes for the credulity of the doctors of 
 those times. 
 
 Mr. Browning makes his hero say to his 
 friend Festus, when he tells him that his wife 
 Michal is dead, — 
 
 " I have no julep, as men think, 
 To cheat the grave ; " 
 
 and this little point is typical of the historical 
 accuracy of the poet's work. 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 183 
 
 Another of his great secrets was his Primum 
 Ens Sanguinis. This is extremely simple, 
 being nothing more than the venous injection 
 of blood from the arm of "a healthy young 
 person." In this we see that he anticipated 
 our modern operation of transfusion. 
 
 His doctrine of signatures was very curious 
 and most absurd. He thought that ''each 
 plant was in a sympathetic relation with the 
 Macrocosm, and consequently with the Micro- 
 cosm." " This signature," he says, " is often 
 expressed even in the exterior forms of things." 
 So he prescribed the plant we call Euphrasy 
 or '' Eye-bright " for complaints of the eyes, 
 because of the likeness to an eye in the flower ; 
 small-pox was treated with mulberries, because 
 their colour showed that they were proper for 
 diseases of the blood. 
 
 This sort of thing still lingers in country 
 domestic medicine. Pulmonaria officinalis , or 
 Lungwort, so called from its spotted leaves, 
 looking like diseased lungs, has long been used 
 for chest complaints. Michael Drayton, in 
 his Polyolbion, describes one of the herbalists, 
 and tells us how he went to work with his 
 simples : — 
 
l84 PARACELSUS: 
 
 " For them that are with newts, or snakes, or adders stung, 
 He seeketh out a herb, that is called adder's tongue 
 As Nature it ordain'd its own like hurt to cure, 
 And sportive did herself to niceties inure." 
 
 As Emerson says : — 
 
 " The old men studied magic in the flowers. 
 And human fortunes in astronomy, 
 And an omnipotence in chemistry, 
 Preferring things to names, for these were men. 
 Were unitarians of the united world. 
 And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell, 
 They caught the footsteps of the Same." 
 
 Of course we see nothing of all this ; the plants 
 have nothing to tell us, since — 
 
 " We ask their pottage, not their love." 
 
 Now-a-days this all seems very silly ; but 
 we must not despise the ways we came by 
 our knowledge of things. Mr. Tyler says : 
 *' Analogy has always been the forerunner of 
 scientific thought ; " and we know that even 
 magic had its uses in the beginnings of science. 
 
 What was the *' cross-grained devil in my 
 sword" of which he tells Festus in the third 
 scene ? Mr. Browning says it was azoth, or 
 simply ''laudanum suum." If so, why "cross- 
 grained devil .-^ " Writers on magic, of whom 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 185 
 
 Dr. Hartmann is one, describe azoth as being 
 '* the creative principle in Nature ; the universal 
 panacea or spiritual life-giving air — in its 
 lowest aspects, ozone, oxygen, etc." Much 
 ridicule has been cast upon Paracelsus for his 
 belief in the possibility of generating homunculi, 
 but after all he may only mean that chemistry 
 will succeed in bridging the gulf between the 
 living and the not-living by the production of 
 organic bodies from inorganic substances. This 
 may perhaps ultimately be done, though we 
 know it has not hitherto been effected. 
 
 We must be to some extent familiar with 
 the philosophy of Paracelsus. That Mr. 
 Browning is a mystic I presume no one will 
 deny ; hence his sympathy with this mystical 
 theosophist. Take, for example, the beautiful 
 lines in the first part of the poem beginning — 
 
 " Truth is within ourselves. 
 
 There is an inmost centre in us all 
 
 Where truth abides in fulness ; and around, 
 
 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in." 
 
 Before we can clearly see the idea expressed 
 in these lines, we must know that Paracelsus 
 held that the constitution of man consists of 
 
i86 PARACELSUS : 
 
 seven principles : (i) The elementary body. 
 (2) The archaeus (vital force). (3) The sidereal 
 body. (4) The animal soul. (5) The rational 
 soul. (6) The spiritual soul. (7) The man 
 of the new Olympus (the personal God). 
 Those who are familiar with Indian philosophy 
 will recognise this anthropology as identical 
 with its own. Paracelsus, in his De Natura 
 Rerum, says : *' The external man is not the 
 real man, but the real man is the soul in con- 
 nection with the Divine Spirit." We under- 
 stand now what Mr. Browning means when 
 he says that knowing is opening the way to 
 let the imprisoned splendour escape. 
 
 He was called a quack and impostor because 
 he cured sick folk by unaccustomed methods. 
 We have baptized these methods now, and 
 given them orthodox names. Thus does the 
 quackery of to-day, like its heresy, become the 
 orthodoxy of to-morrow. We may forgive this 
 man his wrathful arrogance and boastfulness 
 ** for the sake of the indomitable hardihood 
 with which he did lifelong battle, single- 
 handed, against enthroned prescription," says 
 a recent writer. Into the tangled undergrowth 
 of theosophy, mysticism, magic, and theology, 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 187 
 
 he burst with the pioneer's hatchet of chemical 
 experiment and clinical observation, and cleared 
 a path for physical science. The path was 
 narrow it is true, it led through many a 
 dangerous place ; but it is the same road which 
 greater engineers have improved for our use to- 
 day. Here is your true Pathfinder and Ponti- 
 fex Maximus ! He belonged to the highest 
 order of men, that of the initiators who are the 
 guides of mankind, who, bearing aloft the torch 
 of intellect, plunge into the regions of the un- 
 known, and call on us to follow them. New 
 ideas to men of his type are as the oxygen we 
 breathe — they cannot help doing great things. 
 I said that some of his apparently absurd no- 
 tions had a basis of truth. Let me give an 
 instance of this : his idea that all Nature was 
 living, and that there is nothing which has not 
 a soul hidden in it — a hidden principle of life — 
 led him to the conclusion that in place of the 
 filthy concoctions and hideous messes that were 
 in vogue with the doctors of his time, it was 
 possible to give tinctures and quintessences ot 
 drugs, such as we now call active principles — 
 in a word, that it is more reasonable and 
 pleasant to take a grain or two of quinine than 
 
i88 PARACELSUS : 
 
 a tablespoonful of timber. He set himself to 
 study the causes and the symptoms of disease, 
 and sought a remedy in common-sense methods. 
 Mr. Browning is right when he makes him say 
 he had ** a wolfish hunger after knowledge ; " 
 and surely there never lived a man whose aim 
 was to devote its fruits to the service of 
 humanity more than his. After this brief 
 study of his life and character, how faithful 
 seems the estimate of the poet to the life- 
 passion of the hero ! 
 
 What wondrous good has he brought, Pro- 
 metheus-like, from heaven ? Let me tell you 
 just one. A child was burned the other day 
 from head to foot ; in terrible agony it was 
 taken to the hospital, in an hour it was calmly 
 sleeping. A man at work upon the front of a 
 house lost his footing, fell, was impaled upon' 
 the railings ; he too was taken to the hospital, 
 in a short time he also was asleep. Both had 
 the blessed tincture of opium invented by. 
 Paracelsus ; and in Browning's words : — 
 
 " Men in racking pains may purchase dreams 
 Of what delights them most, swooning at once 
 Into a sea of bhss." 
 
 When you think of pain, remember and bless 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE, 189 
 
 the memories of Paracelsus, and of Simpson, 
 the discoverer of chloroform. " I precede my 
 age," he says in the poem. There are many 
 hints in his works that he knew a great deal 
 more than he cared to make known. Take 
 this example. He said : '' Every peasant has 
 seen that a magnet will attract iron. I have 
 discovered that the magnet, besides this visible 
 power, has another and a concealed power." 
 Again : '' A magnet may be prepared out of 
 some vital substance that will attract vitality." 
 Mesmer, who lived nearly 300 years after him, 
 reaped the glory of a discovery made, as 
 Lessing says, by the martyred fire-philosopher 
 who died in Salzburg hospital. 
 
 From this study of a soul Mr. Browning 
 evidently desires us to learn at least one great 
 lesson — that neither the intellect without the 
 heart nor the heart without the intellect will 
 avail for the highest service of man by his 
 brother. We are just beginning to learn that 
 the Gospel of the Carpenter's Son is a life to be 
 lived, not a mere creed to be believed. I am 
 not quite sure that Mr. Browning did well to 
 point this moral from the life of his hero. He 
 was only unloving and unlovable when com- 
 
190 PARACELSUS: 
 
 bating the gross stupidity and bigoted igno- 
 rance of his brother doctors. He seems to 
 have been in Hfe and death the loving friend 
 of the poor, to whom when he died he left all 
 his goods. But the lesson of the union of 
 heart and head is good to learn from any 
 parable. Think of this. Just about the time 
 of Paracelsus, a company of heretics, about to 
 be burned at the stake, were compelled to 
 listen to a sermon from this text : ''If I give 
 my body to be burned, and have not charity, 
 it profiteth me nothing ; " and probably the 
 preacher really believed he was preaching the 
 doctrines of Christ. Why has the Gospel of 
 Love survived this perverted systematic theo- 
 logy ? Because, after all, the human heart is 
 stronger than the human head. 
 
 There is a large and beautiful church in the 
 Roman Campagna built on such a pestilential 
 soil, so deadly in its effects on the atmosphere, 
 that it can no longer be used for worship. 
 Its marble pillars are entwined with luxuriant 
 creepers, its cracked and crumbling monuments 
 are garlanded with lovely southern flowers, 
 lilies and roses grow out of its tombs, and the 
 choir stalls, carved with quaint figures of de- 
 
THE REFORMER OF MEDICINE. 191 
 
 mons and satyrs, are beds from which spring 
 
 deHcate mosses and fair ferns ; the birds build 
 
 their nests in the traceries of the beautiful 
 
 storied windows, and the lizard sports on its 
 
 marble walls, the bats haunt its dark recesses. 
 
 A solitary monk, as a penance for past sins, 
 
 says the daily mass before its moss-grown altar, 
 
 at which no worshipper but himself dares to 
 
 kneel. Yet the flowers breathe the pestilential 
 
 atmosphere uninjured, and beautify the ruins 
 
 on which they grow. " Only gradually," says 
 
 Professor Graetz, *' does religion become 
 
 humanized." Had not human love, like these 
 
 fair flowers, softened and adorned the grim and 
 
 crumbling creations of a pseudo-scientific and 
 
 dogmatic theology, religion would have long 
 
 since lost its hold on modern man. To live to 
 
 know alone, is to miss life's end ; to live to love, 
 
 for art and beauty and pleasantness alone, is to 
 
 miss it just as surely as Paracelsus missed it. 
 
 '' And why ? " he asks :— 
 
 " In my own heart love had not been made wise 
 To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, 
 To know even hate is but a mask of love's, 
 To see a good in evil, and a hope 
 In ill-success ; to sympathise, be proud 
 Of their half reasons, faint aspirings, dim 
 
192 PARACELSUS: 
 
 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 although weak, 
 Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 
 But dream of him, and guess where he may be, 
 And do their best to climb and get to him. 
 All this I knew not, and I failed." 
 
 And this was Paracelsus ! 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 Five years ago a dozen ladies and gendemen, 
 living in one of the suburbs of London, ar- 
 ranged to meet together at stated intervals for 
 the purpose of diligently studying the works of 
 Robert Browning. They were moved to this 
 by the fact that a short series of lectures had 
 just been delivered in their neighbourhood by 
 some well-known Browning scholars, notably 
 Dr. Furnivall and Miss Hickey. The plan 
 adopted was simply to take one of the poems 
 in the first series of the Selections,* and go 
 steadily through it, line by line, taking care 
 not to let any thought pass till it was clearly 
 understood by every member of the company. 
 Although, with perhaps two exceptions, the 
 friends were all strangers to the works of the 
 great poet, it was remarked that, in the care- 
 ful perusal of the poem, which was urged pre- 
 
 * Selections from the Works of Robert Brow?iing. 
 London : Smith, Elder & Co. 
 
 R. B. '93 Q 
 
194 RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 paratory for each meeting, almost every member 
 was able to contribute something towards the 
 elucidation and illustration of even the obscurer 
 lines of the evening's study ; and now, looking 
 back at those pleasant meetings, the majority 
 of the little company would, I think, be able to 
 say that their time and attention had been well 
 bestowed in the efforts to master the pregnant 
 and vigorous teaching of Mr. Browning. We 
 began with Rabbi Ben Ezra, a well-known and 
 favourite poem, which is popularly considered 
 perhaps as one of the easiest to understand. 
 As it is certainly a work which is very typical 
 of Mr. Brownings philosophy, it may be ques- 
 tioned whether its apparent simplicity will 
 not disappear before the serious attempt to 
 suck each verse dry of its wonderful teaching. 
 The fact is, as the little class soon discovered, 
 the poem is a test of the mental attitude and 
 capacity required to make the Browning stu- 
 dent. If, after several perusals, a reader makes 
 up his mind that the author of Rabbi Ben Ezra 
 has something to say to him that no other 
 writer has said so well before, let him go on 
 with his study, in Browning he will find the 
 teacher he has been seeking ; but if, on the con- 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 195 
 
 trary, the poem finds in that reader's soul no 
 responsive sentiments starting into Hfe, and 
 harmonizing with its teaching, it is pretty safe 
 to say he will never make a Browningite. It 
 is undoubtedly one of the noblest religious 
 poetical utterances in the language, and will 
 repay all the thoughtful attention we may 
 devote to it ; but it is probable this may not 
 strike the reader at the first or even the 
 second perusal. It may be objected that we 
 do not read poetry for the sake of solving 
 riddles, nor for the purpose of mental gym- 
 nastics, but for the pleasures of imagination. 
 These are not, however, valid objections to 
 such a poem as Rabbi Ben Ezra. There is 
 abundant imagination in it of the most pleasur- 
 able sort ; but as it deals with the philosophy 
 of life, it must of necessity deal with matters 
 appertaining to the great problems of our 
 earthly pilgrimage. Life is a riddle, after all, 
 and there can be no greater pleasure to the 
 thinking man than the exercise of his mental 
 powers on the great questions of " the whence, 
 the how, and the why." The old Rabbi, to- 
 wards the close of a long and honourable life, 
 is looking back on the way he has travelled, 
 
196 RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 and forwards towards its goal ; and as he stands 
 resting, as it were, to sum up the loss and gain 
 of life, we feel that here, at least, is no mere 
 dramatic utterance^ but Robert Browning him- 
 self reflecting on the chief end of man, and ex- 
 pressing in profound philosophy what the child 
 says simply in the Catechism, that the chief 
 end of man is to know, love, and serve God in 
 this life, and to be happy with Him for ever in 
 the next. Rabbi Ben Ezra sings in thirty-two 
 stanzas what the child repeats in those few 
 simple words. The poem opens with a plea 
 for a completely developed life ; and this claim 
 is made throughout the whole of the poet's 
 teaching. God says, — 
 
 " A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half." 
 
 And so old age is not the mere subsidence and 
 decay of powers that were once high and noble, 
 which are falling into ruin, but the completion, 
 the perfection, of the life ordained by God — 
 
 " The last of life, for which the first was made ; " 
 
 and which, rightly understood, is actually the 
 best. In the admirable antithesis of this first 
 stanza we have the poet's eulogium on growing 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 197 
 
 old, if happily we grow old with the noble 
 Rabbi— 
 
 " Grow old along with me ! " 
 
 in the faith and high purpose which sustained 
 him from the outset, as his Bishop Blougram 
 says, — 
 
 " Belief or unbelief 
 Bears upon life, determines its whole course, 
 Begins at its beginning." 
 
 So his — 
 
 " Great aim, like a guiding star, above — 
 Tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift 
 His manhood to the height that takes the prize." 
 
 And SO the stateliness, the wisdom, and the 
 strength, arrived at due completion, will — 
 
 " Lead him at his grandest to the grave." 
 
 Again and again, like a musician reverting to 
 his great theme, we find, in the poet's works, 
 this praise of a good man's old age, as in the 
 Inn Album — 
 
 " My life's remainder, which, say what fools will. 
 Is, or should be, the best of life ; its fruit 
 All tends to root and stem, and leaf and flower." 
 
 In the third verse we have another eminent 
 
198 RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 characteristic of his teaching — the purpose of 
 doubt in the development of soul. With 
 Browning everything must have its purpose. 
 Doubt must be good somehow or other, or we 
 should not find it " rapping and knocking at 
 and entering our souls." The point is — 
 
 " How can we guard our unbelief? 
 Make it bear fruit to us ? " 
 
 And so the Rabbi says, — 
 
 " Rather I prize the doubt 
 Low kinds exist without, 
 Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark " 
 
 As the purgatory of the thinker, he finds it 
 almost indispensable to the formation of the 
 highest intellects. He has not much opinion 
 of those who '* solely seek and find and feast." 
 
 " Irks care the crop-full bird ? 
 Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast ? " 
 
 With maw-crammed, crop-full folk. Browning 
 has little to do ; his office is with the man 
 who has taken the key of knowledge and fear- 
 lessly descended with him to unlock the dark 
 vaults wherein are laid the foundations of our 
 beliefs and the arches on which rests the 
 superstructure of our faith. He need not fear 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 199 
 
 to grope his way amid their dark recesses 
 with Robert Browning for guide. With such 
 a Great-heart he shall — 
 
 " Face the spectres of the mind, and lay them." 
 
 In the sixth verse we come upon another 
 great article of the poet's system of philosophy 
 — the uses of earth's roughnesses, stings, pains, 
 and rebuffs ; not the smoothness, but the rough- 
 ness of life ; not the ease, but the sting that 
 bids us go ; not the all-pleasant things, but the 
 joys that are three parts pain. These are the 
 stimulants of soul growth, the mind bracers, 
 the steps by which we mount. 
 
 Mr. Browning's healthy optimism is well ex- 
 hibited in the touching lines in the seventh 
 verse — 
 
 *' What I aspired to be, 
 And was not, comforts me." 
 
 There are lives which succeed, though to 
 outward seeming they may be miserable 
 failures. It is the aspiration which makes the 
 man, as he tells us over and over again, no- 
 where more grandly than in Said. 
 
 " Saul, the mistake, 
 Saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now — and bid him 
 awake 
 
200 RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 From the dream, the probation, the prekide, to find himself 
 
 set 
 Clear and safe in new light and new life — a new harmony 
 
 yet. 
 
 'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man 
 Would do!" 
 
 Our proper sphere is ever indicated by the 
 direction and intensity of our aspirations and 
 soul strivings. As plants in mines, that never 
 see the sun, tend upwards towards the light, so 
 the inner aim shows the true man. 
 
 ** Better have failed in the high aim as I, 
 Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed," 
 
 he says in the Inn Album, The same truth 
 is emphasized in Fifine at the Fair : — 
 
 " I gather heart through just such conquests of the soul. 
 Through evolution out of that which, on the whole. 
 Was rough, ungainly, partial accomplishment, at best." 
 
 The world is very hard upon the failures, 
 and seldom gives credit even for the working, 
 however good, of the sum which does not come 
 out right. But happily God does not judge 
 after this manner. 
 
 " All men strive, and who succeed ? " 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 201 
 
 " What hand and brain rest ever paired ? 
 What heart alike conceived and dared ? 
 What act proved all its thought had been ? 
 What will but felt the fleshly screen ? " 
 
 The Last Hide Together. 
 
 We have the same idea in another form, 
 in the conckiding lines of A Grammarian s 
 Funeral : — • 
 
 " That low man goes on adding one to one, 
 His hundred's soon hit : 
 The high man, aiming at a million, 
 Misses an unit." 
 
 The tower at Pisa, not falling, but vainly 
 trying to lift its head, is nobler, with all its im- 
 perfection, than our Monument, which at least 
 is perpendicular, though, as Pope said, — 
 
 " Like a tall bully, it lifts the head and lies." 
 
 The noblest commentary on the eighth verse 
 is Lord Tennyson's, By an Evolutionist, which 
 commences with the daring line, — 
 
 " The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man." 
 
 Browning asks, — 
 
 " What is he but a brute 
 Whose flesh hath soul to suit ? " 
 
202 RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 And his teaching is, that the brute's office is 
 first to help soul. 
 
 " In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul 
 it bears fruit." 
 
 *' The angel in man is not to do homage 
 to the brute in man," as Dewey finely says ; 
 yet Browning scruples not to defend the body 
 from the macerations of the ascetic ; and man, 
 — the whole man, — has a right to the " body at 
 its best." Tennyson says, — 
 
 *'Hold the sceptre, human soul, and rule thy promise of the 
 brute." 
 
 Yes, rule — not destroy ! Neither pamper nor 
 crush. " All good things are ours." 
 
 What wonder the purpose fails, the will is 
 so weak in a large proportion of our habitual 
 criminal and pauper classes ! Go over one 
 of our great convict prisons with an artist 
 and an anthropologist, measure the heads of 
 the criminals, take stock of their brain capacity, 
 study the facial angles, the formation of the 
 head, hear the artist compare the shape and 
 aspect of the prisoners' frame with those of his 
 models, ask the anatomist to point you out the 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 203 
 
 deficiencies which he finds in their development, 
 and you will say that, in the greater proportion 
 by far, the inhabitants of the dismal abodes of 
 crime were so heavily handicapped by nature 
 that they never could have had a fair start in 
 life. The first necessity of a man's soul is a 
 *' body at its best." When statesmen and tax- 
 payers get to know all that is meant by this 
 line of the poet's, a modified form at least of 
 Christian Socialism will not be far off. 
 
 " How good to live and learn ! " 
 " Earth being so good, would heaven seem best ? " 
 
 The Last Ride Together. 
 
 " O world, as God has made it ! All is beauty, 
 And knowing this is love, and love is duty." 
 
 The Gua?'dian Afigel. 
 
 " How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to 
 employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy." 
 
 Saul. 
 
 This is how Browning all through his works, 
 the healthiest of modern poets, speaks of life. 
 In the whole of his books there is not a single 
 whine ; even dramatically, he could not have 
 made his most despicable character utter 
 such a question as, *' Is life worth living ? " 
 
204 RABBI BEN EZRA, 
 
 When It comes to talking like that, there must 
 be a screw loose somewhere. We expect a 
 nineteenth-century poet to be sane. Very fair 
 poetry has, we believe, been scribbled by 
 patients on the walls of a lunatic asylum. Mad 
 poetry may be written, but the day has gone 
 by when it will be read. None but a mentally 
 rickety man or woman ever asked, " Is life 
 worth living?" with any expectation of getting 
 a negative answer ; but Browning's mind pre- 
 supposes Browning's body, and that was ''body 
 at its best." To him who longs morbidly for 
 death, Browning sternly says, " Hast thou ever 
 truly lived ? " He thanks God that he was a 
 man when he sees the whole design, but it is 
 the complete manhood for which he is thank- 
 ful. He demands that each element in human 
 nature shall be allowed fair play ; it is unfair 
 predominance which spoils the man. Control, 
 restraint, no waste of any faculty. 
 
 " Since require Thou wilt 
 At my hand its price, we say ! 
 What the price is, who can say ? " 
 
 To understand the full teaching of verse 
 eleven, we should read Fra Lippo Lippi, the 
 yearning for rest is so natural, the flesh is so 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 205 
 
 pleasant ; but we want patience, not rest, 
 stimulating to go on — not ''by-path-meadows" 
 and *' rose-meshes." We are not to expect to 
 make headway by despising the flesh, neither 
 are we to renounce it as a thing accursed ; we 
 must accept life on its own terms, as he says 
 in Sordello, — 
 
 " To no mad wings transmute 
 These limbs of mine/' 
 
 Life's cup must be quaffed to its extreme dull 
 dregs, and as Fra Lippo Lippi says, — 
 
 " This world's no blot for us, 
 Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good. 
 To find its meaning is my meat and drink." 
 
 Life may err as gravely by being over-spiritual 
 as over- worldly; Browning's mind is too 
 healthy to run into either extreme. The best 
 commentary on the thirteenth verse is that 
 wonderful death-song of Paracelsus in the fifth 
 Act, where the martyr of science, dying in Salz- 
 burg hospital, tells of the origin of man from 
 lower forms, and prophesies of the time when, — 
 
 " In completed man begins anew 
 A tendency to God." 
 
 " Man is not Man as yet," — 
 
2o6 RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 But he is for ever removed from the brute, — 
 " A god, though in the germ." 
 
 Fachig death, " fearless and unperplexed," he 
 stood waiting for the last fight, as we see him in 
 Prospice, in Rabbi Ben Ezra, and notably in 
 the epilogues of his later volumes. In the last 
 page of Ferishtah! s Fancies, dated December 
 ist, 1883, we find the noble old man waiting 
 God's " Come ! " as a soldier, forward face, no 
 sneak lagging behind, battling it like a man, 
 not boy-like sulking or whining; and so through 
 all his works, till we read the last line his 
 manly pen has traced for us, published to the 
 world on his very death day, still the same, — 
 " one who never turned his back, but marched 
 breast forward," crying, '* Speed, — fight on ! 
 Strive and thrive ! " 
 
 The unity of Browning's teaching, and its 
 consistency from first to last, is one of the 
 secrets of his great power. As the soul is 
 held by Browning to be eternal, this life is 
 considered as but the preparatory school-time, 
 the first lessons in warfare are given here ; 
 but Browning s Future Life is no Mohammed's 
 Paradise; in the There, as in the here, 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 207 
 
 he tells us, in his last line of his last poem, 
 we — 
 
 " Fight on, fare ever There as here ! " 
 
 So, in the fourteenth verse of Rabbi Ben Ezra, 
 he tells us we shall not be perplexed in our 
 next " brave adventure," — 
 
 "What weapons to select, what armour to indue." 
 
 Those of us who saw him laid to rest in the 
 old abbey pictured him going out *' from the 
 great deep to the great deep," passing '' to 
 be king among the dead," not with grievous 
 wound as Arthur, but full armed, sword in hand, 
 face forward, fighting to the last, unscathed 
 through all. " There is nothing," says Seneca, 
 ** more disgraceful than that an old man should 
 have nothing to produce as a proof that he has 
 lived long except his years." The Rabbi having 
 proved the Past, faces the Future judicially. 
 He has accumulated great store of experience, 
 and he estimates the various points of the life- 
 struggle of the past at their true value. Herein 
 he finds no cause for shame ; there were errors 
 enough, but they were merely the uncouth acts 
 of the pupil learning his business ; the proof 
 that he has really lived is found, not in an 
 
2o8 RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 addition sum, but in the real work done ; the 
 Man evolved, the God in the germ. 
 
 The lesson enforced in the nineteenth verse 
 is the Gospel of Work. *' In God's name pro- 
 duce something," said Carlyle. We come 
 nearest to God the Creator when we engage 
 in true work, which is ever sacred and eternal. 
 *' Strive towards making," says Browning. 
 '' Man is purposed to grow, and forced to try 
 and make, else fail to grow." If impossible 
 always to grasp and gain the good beyond, in 
 this is no failure. The mere attempt is growth. 
 He sets all this out in a wonderful passage 
 in the Ring and the Book, vol. i. lines 710 
 to 760. Man repeats God's process in his due 
 degree ; if he cannot create, he may at least 
 resuscitate ; he may complete the incomplete, 
 breathe on and relume the half-quenched 
 wicks of the lamp. This is the true purpose 
 of youth — its uncouth attempts at making, pre- 
 pare for an old age exempt from strife, blessed 
 with the privilege of knowledge. Then may 
 he wait the end, and not be afraid. Strive to 
 the end ; yes, not blindly, but assured of 
 victory. Almost the last words uttered by 
 the late Lord Shaftesbury were these : ** De- 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 209 
 
 pend on It, we shall beat the devil yet, if we 
 only keep on to the end, and never despair." 
 Youth strives for mere necessity of exercise ; 
 that is better than repose. The strife of the 
 Rabbi's age was the strife of " Prospice " for 
 the victory all but assured, the prize all but 
 grasped. Then comes the judgment on the 
 life's work. The vulgar mass men call "work" 
 will often make a very poor figure beside the 
 immature instincts and the unsure purposes 
 which then for the first time will be accurately 
 weighed and measured. '* The vulgar mass " 
 took the eye, and had its price ; rode in its 
 gilded car, and wore its crown ; had its monu- 
 ment, and stands on our roll of fame ; had 
 all its reward, and enjoyed all its good things ; 
 and the world's coarse thumb and finger 
 plumbed its value, estimated it all without a 
 pause. So much to its mind was it, there was 
 no room for hesitation ; its price to the last 
 farthing was paid. But the great thoughts 
 which could never be crystallized Into a single 
 poor act the world could ever be brought to 
 notice, the ethereal fancies, the noble aspira- 
 tions, the longing after God — 
 
 R. B. p 
 
210 RABBI BEN EZRA, 
 
 " All I could never be, 
 All men ignored in me ; 
 This I was worth to God." 
 
 And God's measure is not coarse, and His 
 balance weighs the evanescent fancy, and His 
 rod measures the depth of the feeHng that never 
 struggled upwards into one poor act, and it is 
 all there, and the record which cannot err puts 
 down the mighty from his seat, and exalts the 
 humble and the meek. 
 
 *' Was I, the world arraigned, right ? " Very 
 likely. " Were they, my soul disdained, 
 right ? " Perhaps. Truth and peace shall 
 come at last. Some one once said — I remember 
 not where I saw it — " When the British public 
 feels elevated and sublime, it comes to West- 
 minster Abbey to look at the tombstones, 
 and it says, ' Here are my great men ; they 
 -worked for me. I bought them ; I paid for 
 them.' " The British public fully appreciates 
 no work till a handsome tombstone assures it 
 that it is safe in doing so ; then it takes the eye, 
 then its price is paid. It will flatter itself before 
 long that it has even bought and paid for its 
 Browning ! The great lesson of the true esti- 
 mate of that for which the world's balance is 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 211 
 
 too coarse an instrument, is that which bids 
 us remember that our aspirations, our ways of 
 life and manner of thought, our seeking after 
 love, and our efforts for good, are all so much 
 real gain for our individual souls, and have an 
 eternal value quite beyond the passing delight 
 and the internal satisfaction they bring, or even 
 the good contributed to the world without. 
 
 " There shall never be one lost good! 
 What was, shall live as before." 
 " All we have lived or hoped for or dreamed of good shall 
 exist : 
 Not its semblance, but itself." 
 
 "All I could never be," is the epitaph on 
 many a noble man and woman perished in the 
 cruel east wind of the blighting, hard world. 
 This demands immortality, or life is a poor 
 cheat. 
 
 The concluding verses of the poem are 
 occupied with the elaboration of the beautiful 
 metaphor of the potter's wheel — Time phe- 
 nomenal, God eternal ; changing earth, God 
 and soul alone standing sure. That which 
 really is lasts ever. 
 
 " Time's wheel runs back or stops : potter and clay en- 
 dure." 
 
212 RABBI BEN EZRA. 
 
 But the change is good for us. It Is well 
 that the wheel does turn ; by that we are 
 shaped ; by that movement " we draw beauty 
 into our heart's core." 
 
 " Rejoice that man is hurled 
 From change to change unceasingly, 
 His soul's wings never furled ! " 
 
 So all the plastic circumstance of this life's 
 dance is just that in which the potter has 
 fixed us to give our souls their bent. God 
 planted us just where we grow, and blossom 
 and fruit must be drawn, not from the meadow 
 on the other side of the road, or from the 
 mountain beyond the valley, but from the soil 
 now about our roots, and the air and rain and 
 sun above us playing on our leaves and 
 branches. Yet, fixed as we are, the clrcum^ 
 stance is neither iron nor adamant, but plastic 
 for us, for we are not vegetables, but men. 
 The potter's wheel is intended to mould men 
 into cups for the Master's lips. Not In the 
 bowl, not In the stem, with all their quaint 
 device and laughing loves, are found the proper 
 uses of a cup ; not the uncouth beginnings of 
 life, not the ornament, but the perfected cup, to 
 slake the Master's thirst. These are the uses 
 
RABBI BEN EZRA. 213 
 
 of a cup, flawed, strained, warped, alas ! But 
 take, use, and amend Thy work — Thou, not I, 
 the potter ! Quaint old Francis Quarles, in one 
 of his emblems, has a prayer which I think 
 must have been in Mr. Browning's mind when 
 he wrote these powerful verses : — 
 
 " Eternal Potter, whose blest hands did lay 
 My coarse foundation from a sod of clay, 
 Thou know'st my slender vessel's apt to leak : 
 Thou know'st my brittle temper's prone to break : 
 Are my limbs brazil, or my flesh of oak ? 
 Oh, mend what Thou hast made, what I have broke : 
 Look, look with gentle eyes, and in Thy day 
 Of vengeance, Lord, remember I am clay." 
 
BROWNING AND VIVISECTION. 
 
 As we have seen, Mr. Browning's sympathy 
 with the science of his time was both wide and 
 well-informed He was not its slave, was 
 neither blind to its necessary defects as an 
 efficient substitute for religious faith, nor will- 
 ing to concede all that is demanded in its 
 name. He was early associated with Miss 
 Frances Power Cobbe in her noble and self- 
 sacrificing efforts to expose scientific cruelty in 
 that form especially which is known as Vivi- 
 section, or the Gutting into live animals for 
 physiological and pathological investigation. 
 Mr. Browning was to the last a Vice-President 
 of the Victoria Street Society for the Protec- 
 tion of Animals, and he always expressed the 
 utmost abhorrence of the practices which it 
 opposes. 
 
 The following letter was written by Mr. 
 Browning on the occasion of the presentation 
 of the memorial to the R.S.P.C.A. in 1875 : — 
 
BROWNING AND VIVISECTION. 215 
 
 19, Warwick Crescent, W. 
 Dec, 2%th, 1874. 
 Dear Miss Cobbe, — 
 
 I return the petition unsigned, for the one 
 good reason — that I have just signed its fellow 
 forwarded to me by Mrs. Leslie Stephen.* 
 You have heard, " I take an equal interest with 
 yourself in the effort to suppress vivisection." 
 I dare not so honour my mere wishes and 
 prayers as to put them for a moment beside 
 your noble acts ; but this I know, I would 
 rather submit to the worst of the deaths, so far 
 as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat 
 tortured on the pretence of sparing me a twinge 
 or two. I return the paper, because I shall be 
 probably shut up- here for the next week or 
 more, and prevented from seeing my friends. 
 Whoever would refuse to sign would certainly 
 not be of the number. 
 
 Ever truly and gratefully yours, 
 
 Robert Browning. 
 
 In his poem Tray, the poet describes an 
 
 * This lady was Mr. Stephen's first wife, the daughter of 
 Thackeray, and sister of Mrs. Richmond Ritchie. 
 
2i6 BROWNING AND VIVISECTION. 
 
 instance of animal courage and devotion which 
 was witnessed by one of his friends In Paris. 
 
 A Httle girl fell into the river. None of the 
 spectators went to her rescue ; but a dog 
 plunged Into the water and saved the child ; 
 then, to the astonishment of the bystanders, 
 dived again, and after battling with the stream, 
 appeared with the child's doll in his mouth, 
 brought that to land also, and then trotted off 
 as if he had done nothing worthy of praise. 
 
 " * Up he comes with the child, see, tight 
 In mouth, alive too, clutched from quite 
 
 A depth of ten feet — twelve, I bet ! 
 
 Good dog ! What, off again ! There's yet 
 Another child to save ? All right ! 
 
 * How strange we saw no other fall ! 
 It's instinct in the animal. 
 
 Good dog ! But he's a long while under : 
 If he's got drowned I should not wonder — 
 Strong current, that against the wall ! 
 
 * Here he comes, holds in his mouth this time 
 — What may the thing be ? Well, that's prime ! 
 
 Now, did you ever ? Reason reigns 
 In man alone, since all Tray's pains 
 Have fished -the child's doll from the shme ! '• 
 
 And so, amid the laughter gay. 
 Trotted my hero off, — old Tray, — 
 Till somebody, prerogatived 
 
BROWNING AND VIVISECTION. 21- 
 
 With reason, reasoned : ' Why he dived, 
 His brain would show us, I should say. 
 
 'John, go and catch — or, if needs be, 
 Purchase that animal for me ! 
 
 By vivisection, at expense 
 
 Of half-an-hour and eighteenpence, 
 How brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see ! ' " 
 
 Here the poet ridicules the idea that the 
 seat of the soul can be discovered by a more 
 Intimate knowledge of the brain, and bitterly 
 satirizes the heardessness and base ingratitude 
 of our physiologists who use the dog, notwith- 
 standing his Intimate relationship to and friend- 
 ship for man, as the material for their cruel ex- 
 periments in the physiological laboratory. Not 
 only did Mr. Browning think this to be useless 
 and wicked, but he denounced It as cowardly 
 even If It could be proved to be useful. In his 
 last volume, published on the day of his death, 
 there Is a poem called Arcades Ambo, which is 
 a delicate satire on the cowardice of those who 
 advocate vivisection on the ground of Its utility 
 in medicine. The poet says that the man who 
 would have animals tortured for the relief of 
 his own pain is as great a poltroon as the 
 soldier who runs away in battle when the balls 
 
2i8 BROWNING AND VIVISECTJO.V. 
 
 fly about. Both shun death, and both are 
 cowards to be scorned. 
 
 The advocate of vivisection says : — 
 
 " — Shun death at all risks ? Well, at some ! 
 
 True, I myself, sir, though I scold 
 The cowardly, by no means come 
 
 Under reproof, as overbold 
 — I, who would have no end of brutes 
 Cut up alive to guess what suits 
 My case and save my toe from shoots." 
 
 When recently I asked Mr. Browning to be- 
 come a patron of the new hospital to be called 
 the Shaftesbury, and which is to be started for 
 the treatment of patients on principles which 
 exclude vivisection, I received from him the 
 following letter : — 
 
 29, De Vere Gardens, W. 
 August 2'jtk, 1889. 
 My dear Dr. Berdoe, — 
 
 I shall be delighted if the association of my 
 name with those of the patrons of the proposed 
 scheme for an Anti-Vivisectionist Hospital be 
 of the least service in so holy a cause. 
 
 Do permit me to take the opportunity of 
 saying how grateful I arn to you on other 
 grounds. 
 
 Ever truly yours, 
 
 Robert Browning. 
 
29,DE VERE GARDENS. 
 
 ^ ^ Cum ^ ^ ^v^^ph^ aatH X%^ /I 
 ^n^ ^(vfi^tJi^ of M^ J^n^Lru^d- /%^/^^ 
 
 %Mn^ /m^ ^^^"Trff 
 
BROWNING AND VIVISECTION. 219 
 
 Some persons affect to see in this attitude of 
 the great poet proof that he was not imbued 
 with the scientific spirit, that his early reHgious 
 training and connections had made him afraid 
 of science ; but surely a man is no more ex- 
 pected to follow science blindfold than to adopt 
 the same behaviour towards all the claims made 
 for blind adhesion in the name of religion. It 
 would appear though that Science can be quite 
 as exactinor as relis^ion in her claims for the 
 entire allegiance of her followers. Mr. Brown- 
 ing resented the arrogance of both. His anti- 
 vivisection sympathies were no mere philan- 
 thropic " fads," no mere amiable fancy 
 adopted by chance, or arising simply from 
 kindness of heart. They were demanded by 
 his ethical system, and were the direct outcome 
 of his Philosophy of Life. Love is the one 
 word which sums up his moral teaching ; love 
 to God reflected in the Service of Man. To 
 have excluded anything which lives and suffers 
 from the influence of this Love, would have 
 offered violence to the principles which ani- 
 mated every line of his works, from Pauline to 
 Asolando. Paracelsus and Sordello both failed 
 from want of love, the former especially, by 
 
220 BROWNING AND VIVISECTION. 
 
 elevating knowledge to the royal throne of 
 Love, which should dominate the human heart. 
 
 " I seemed to long 
 At once to trample on, yet save mankind." 
 
 But mankind can never be saved by its tramp- 
 lers ! Love alone, the sole good of life on 
 earth, can be the Saviour of Mankind ; and he 
 who violates this principle in any degree, just 
 by so much tramples on mankind. The torture 
 of living animals could never therefore be to 
 Browning the royal road to the Art of Healing. 
 To harden a human heart till the vivisector 
 was fully equipped, was to destroy the very 
 principle which alone, according to his theory, 
 could make a true servant of man. To inflict 
 pain on an innocent animal, that " some fan- 
 cied good to man " might accrue, was to work 
 with the devil's tools, and to heap up gold 
 that would turn out at last to be but withered 
 leaves. 
 
THE BROWNING SOCIETY. 
 
 I CANNOT conclude this little work without 
 some reference to the Browning Society, in 
 which I have taken an active Interest almost 
 from Its foundation In 1 88 1. " For eight years 
 and a half It has challenged — and In a certain 
 sense compelled — attention to the great merits 
 of the works of the late poet ; " and It would 
 be Impossible to deny that ** It has had some 
 share In effecting the marked change in opinion 
 concerning them." Ten years ago, Browning 
 was ridiculed by every scribbler, and con- 
 temned by all the press ; now he lies in Poet's 
 Corner in Westminster Abbey. Immediately 
 after the Browning Society was started by Dr. 
 Furnivall and Miss E. H. HIckey, the sale 
 of the poet's works was immensely stimulated, 
 and the volumes that were lying neglected on 
 the publishers' shelves speedily got Into circu- 
 lation; and little wonder. When Mr. Nettleship, 
 Professor Westcott, Archdeacon Farrar, the 
 Revs. Llewellyn Davles, Professor Johnson, 
 Dr. Hiram Corson, Mr. Barnett Smith, Mr. 
 Moncure Conway, the Hon. Roden Noel, Dr. 
 Peter Bayne, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Mr. Cotter 
 Morrison, Rev. H. R. Haweis, Mr. Holman 
 Hunt, and a host of other men and women 
 famous In Literature and Art lent their valuable 
 aid to the Society, and told the public why 
 the study of Browning was peculiarly good 
 for the men and women of the present day, 
 people began to see that the cheap scribblers 
 of the press had probably misled them, and 
 
222 THE BROWNING SOCIETY. 
 
 were induced to read for themseh^es. Then 
 the Browning Society in its turn was attacked. 
 It was said that a number of infatuated no- 
 bodies met together to adulate the poet, and 
 cover him with their uncritical praise. As a 
 matter of fact, the members of the Browning 
 Society simply met to study the poet's works, 
 as a class might meet to study Thucydides or 
 Homer at College. No one was pledged to in- 
 discriminate admiration of Browning, any more 
 than a student at Cambridge is pledged to 
 admiration of the Greek author he reads in 
 class. We met to learn, feeling sure that the 
 poet was profound and interesting enough to 
 repay the trouble we were put to in the pro- 
 cess ; and we are doing the same now. We 
 meet once a month from October to June 
 (except in December) on the 4th Friday of 
 every month at 8 p.m., at University College, 
 Gower Street, W.C., for the hearing and 
 discussion of a Paper or Address on some 
 of Browning's poenis, or his characteristics. 
 The best Papers, and reports of the discussions, 
 are printed and sent to all the members. The 
 subscription is 2\s. a year. Our President is 
 Dr. F. J. Furnivall, 3, St. George's Square, 
 Primrose Hill, London, N.W., and names of 
 those who are willing to join the Society should 
 be sent to him. For my own part, I shall be 
 happy to answer any questions, and to give 
 any information about the Society, if inquirers 
 will address me at Tynemouth House, Victoria 
 Park Gate, London, N.E. 
 
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