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of Paracelsus, to discuss him in the Revues while he was still without honour in his own country.

Perhaps it was not so much his transcendental ideas, and certainly it was not so much his overloaded style, that attracted them, as it was his intensely civilised mind, his profound interest in human development, his relish for personal idiosyncrasies, his mental alertness.

M. Philarète Chasles, writing in 1840 on the English theatre, went out of his way to include Browning among the dramatists, misinterpreting his intention, which was not at that time to write for the stage; but admirably describing the impression made by this new departure in dramatic writing on the French mind, keen for revolutionary tendencies.

"Paracelsus is the more worthy of note," says M. Chasles, "in that its merit has been almost unperceived in England. Seldom has a poet buried so much thought, brilliancy, pathos, and profundity in a work without a future, but not without power. As a dramatic essay it is very nothingness. Hardly out of its shell and quickly forgotten, drowned in vaguely æsthetic dissertations and the periphrases of a prolix style, the book should, nevertheless, be recognised as a very beautiful psychological and moral analysis.

"The author has desired to bring upon the stage one of the revolutionaries of science, and to interest the reader in the vicissitudes of his thought. The

character of Paracelsus was well chosen; he represents a complete movement in civilisation. We sons of the nineteenth century are astonished at that taking place under our eyes; at the beginning of the sixteenth one much more amazing was inaugurated, of which ours is but the development, and the impulse of which we are still following.

"Then were seen at one time Cardan, author of magnificent geometric formulas; Copernicus, who, like Joshua, said to the sun, 'Stand still!' Cornelius Agrippa, who in 1510 sustained the same argument as Jean-Jacques in 1750; Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon. All the old authority was shaken by them. The revolutions of a new world were made upon a new axis. I cannot pardon Voltaire for despising Cardan and depreciating Luther. What was Voltaire, sower of doubt, beside those who boldly threw the first seed into European soil ?

"The most original of these strange characters was undoubtedly Paracelsus, who renewed medicine and created modern chemistry, the necromancer, sorcerer, alchemist, charlatan; Paracelsus, who boasted of having found the philosopher's stone and the square of the circle, and who concealed a devil in the pommel of his sword. The ardour of science, the fever of knowledge, the need of glory, carried this fiery intelligence through every form of madness, through travel in every direction, through ridicule of every sort. It is Faust made real, hearing no other Mephistopheles than his passion and self-love,

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THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILEN FOUNDATIONS

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surrounded by enemies, admirers, and envious rivals, full of scorn for this human species, so easily deceived, irritated to the point of frenzy by our inability to discover the secrets of life; an angel of light in the eyes of some, in the eyes of others a prince of darkness; in his own eyes an incomplete and impotent being; to history and the future an enigma.

"The beauty and difficulty of this analysis charmed Robert Browning's imagination. The mental drama which is enacted in all great and celebrated natures, and which takes on an aspect of frenetic beauty with such as Paracelsus, half sublime and half insane, has exercised an irresistible fascination over the young poet, whose intellect is evidently subtle and profound; he has attempted to make of it precisely the thing most opposed to the very nature of its subject and ideas-a play for the stage.

"There was never a stranger little book than his. Inheritor by direct descent from Wordsworth of the metaphysical dissection of ideas, from Goethe of plastic and external forms of poetry, and from Byron of scepticism, the author believes that of these elements, elsewhere precious, he can make a drama. There are scenes, indeed, and only one small thing is lacking to make the work dramatic, that is-drama.

"In the first act Paracelsus declares to his friends his wish to seek knowledge and glory at the peril of happiness. In the second act, having travelled far, he discovers that knowledge is not everything;

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