Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects
that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he
wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some
extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of
Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme
of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not
put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of
mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of
Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his
that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the
disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select
any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose
investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world.
He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire
and pity, the _a priori_ scientist of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the
academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to
imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the
ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild
investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown
and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful
misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who
understands the true spirit of mediaeval science can see that he was
right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the
spirit of mediaeval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character
of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and
disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the
intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a
perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in
the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even
painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had
chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the
critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon
the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he
had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been
possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with
truth, but partly with the solid and material sat