Chemistry Reference
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litical and religious ideas. Inasmuch as Godwin's hero owes a lot to
Paracelsus, and the legends spun around this historical figure, we find a
similar plot a few decades later in Robert Browning's huge pseudo-
biographical poem
Paracelsus
(1835).
18
Let us now consider two other
nineteenth-century elixir of life stories. In Honoré de Balzac's
L'Elixir
de longue vie
(1830),
19
Don Juan's father successfully gained an elixir
that needed to be applied only after death, but his son refused to do so
because of selfishness and avarice. The successful but dying alchemist in
Richard Garnett's short story
The Elixir of Life
(1881) does not even try
to use his invention, and nor is he willing to give the elixir to anybody
else, except a monkey, because he “forbore to perpetuate human afflic-
tion, and bestowed a fatal boon where alone it could be innoxious”.
20
Of course, the making of gold, elixirs and such things has always
been a metaphor for striving for material goods, against which writers
have been using their skills at any time and with various literary means,
including the alchemical figures. However, the medieval alchemist un-
derwent an extraordinary literary revival at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, after nearly two centuries of virtual absence. It seems
that, in the view of many writers, the emerging chemistry was the scien-
tifically professionalized form of striving for material goods, and thus
became their new target. The old alchemical motifs, originally giving a
general message against avarice and stupidity, were now directly related
to chemistry. Clichés as they were, they worked well to transport the lit-
erary ideas without bothering much about details of contemporary chem-
istry. Those who did bother carefully searched for further links between
the new chemistry and the old alchemical ambitions - or invented them,
as did Poe with his reference to gold-making in a “Diary of Sir Hum-
phrey Davy”. Some writers even familiarized themselves with details of
the new chemistry, in order to elaborate a modern, state-of-the-art variant
of the medieval alchemist - the chemist as diamond-maker.
18
First published London: Effingham, 1935.
19
First published in
Revue de Paris
, vol. 19 (24 October 1830): 181-210.
20
First published in
Our Times
(July 1881): no. 1; repr. in R. Garnett,
The Twilight of
the Gods and Other Tales
(New York: A. A. Knopf, 1888; 2nd ed. 1926). Garnett
was a distinguished scholar of literature history before he became a writer.
