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 satisfaction of society.  But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediaeval magician.  It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked—­it calls it uncivilised.  We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us barbarians.  The mediaeval state, like China, was a foreign civilisation, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it cared for the things of the mind for their own sake.  To complain of the researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his roses were not as digestible as our cabbages.  It is not only true that the mediaeval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is quite equally true that they never tried.  The Eden of the Middle Ages was really a garden, where each of God’s flowers—­truth and beauty and reason—­flourished for its own sake, and with its own name.  The Eden of modern progress is a kitchen garden.

It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus.  Modern life accuses the mediaeval tradition of crushing the intellect; Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of over-glorifying it.  There is, however, another and even more important deduction to be made from the moral of Paracelsus.  The usual accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the element of poetry and sentiment.  To people who imagine Browning to have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one answer necessary or sufficient.  It is the fact that he wrote a play designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the age of twenty-three.