Men and Women

“Transcendentalism” is a criticism, placed in the mouth of a poet, of another poet, whose manner of singing is prosaic, because it seeks to transcend (or penetrate beyond) phenomena, by divesting poetic expression of those concrete embodiments which enable it to appeal to the senses and imagination.  Instead of bare abstractions being suited to the developed mind, it is the primitive mind, which, like Boehme’s, has the merely metaphysical turn, and expects to discover the unincarnate absolute essence of things.  The maturer mind craves the vitalizing method of the artist who, like the magician of Halberstadt, recreates things bodily in all their beautiful vivid wholeness.  Yet the poet who sincerely holds so fragmentary a conception of art is himself a poem to the poet who holds the larger view.  His boy-face singing to God above his ineffective harp-strings is a concrete image of this sort of poetic transcendentalism.

[It is obvious that Browning uses the Halberstadt and not the Boehme method in presenting this embodiment of his subject.  The supposition of certain commentators that Browning is here picturing his own artistic method as transcendental is a misconception of his characteristic theory of poetic art, as shown here and elsewhere.]

22.  Boehme:  Jacob, an “inspired” German shoemaker (1575-1624), who wrote “Aurora,” “The Three Principles,” etc., mystical commentaries on Biblical events.  When twenty-five years old, says Hotham in “Mysterium Magnum,” 1653, “he was surrounded by a divine Light and replenished with heavenly Knowledge . . . going abroad into the Fieldes to a Greene before Neys-Gate at Gorlitz and viewing the Herbes and Grass of the Fielde, in his inward light he saw into their Essences . . . and from that Fountain of Revelation wrote De Signatura Rerum,” on the signatures of things, the “tough book” to which Browning refers.

37.  Halberstadt:  Johann Semeca, called Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadt in Germany, who was interested in the unchurchly study of mediaeval science and reputed to be a magician, possessing the vegetable stone supposed to make plants grow at will, having the same power over organic life that the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists had over minerals, so that, like Albertus Magnus, another such mage of the Middle Ages, he could cause flowers to spring up in the midst of winter.