might have come to him, in which he, the possessor of knowledge, might
have longed to offer consolation to some suffering fellow, and have
found the helplessness of knowledge to console. Browning's imagination
as a romantic poet craved a romantic incident and a romantic
_mise-en-scène_. In the house of the Greek conjuror at Constantinople,
Paracelsus, now worn by his nine years' wanderings, with all their
stress and strain, his hair already streaked with grey, his spirit
somewhat embittered by the small success attending a vast effort, his
moral nature already somewhat deteriorated and touched with the cynicism
of experience and partial failure, shall encounter the strange figure of
Aprile, the living wraith of a poet who has also failed, who "would love
infinitely and be loved," and who in gazing upon the end has neglected
all the means of attainment; and from him, or rather by a reflex ray
from this Aprile, his own error shall be flashed on the consciousness of
the foiled seeker for knowledge. The invention of Browning is certainly
not lacking in the quality of strangeness in beauty; yet some readers
will perhaps share the feeling that it strains, without convincing, the
imagination. As we read the first speeches addressed by the moon-struck
poet to the wandering student of science, and read the moon-struck
replies, notwithstanding the singular beauty of certain dramatic and
lyrical passages, we are inclined to ask--Is this, indeed, a conjuror's
house at Constantinople, or one of Browning's "mad-house cells?" and
from what delusions are the harmless, and the apparently dangerous,
lunatic suffering? The lover here is typified in the artist; but the
artist may be as haughtily isolated from true human love as the man of
science, and the fellowship with his kind which Paracelsus needs can be
poorly learnt from such a distracted creature as Aprile. It is indeed
Aprile's example and the fate which has overtaken him rather than his
wild words which startle Paracelsus into a recognition of his own error.
But the knowledge that he has left love out of his scheme of life is no