R671000A. Poetical Works (1863).
Fraser’s Magazine, October 1867, pp. 518–530.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 392–398 .
Much has been recently written upon the poems of Mr. Browning, but no serious attempt has been made to give an account of his largest work. It was on all hands briefly dismissed as unintelligible. Here is a singular fact: Mr. Browning is declared by his contemporaries to be a distinguished poet, a true artist, a profound and original thinker; and when we ask, “What of his most laborious undertaking?” the answer is (the answer of his ablest critic), “We do not at all doubt that Mr. Browning understands his own drift clearly enough,” but “probably no man or woman except the author ever yet understood it;” and “We suspect that if it be true, as his dedication appears to indicate, that there is really one mortal who to his own satisfaction has understood Mr. Browning in Sordello, it would be found on cross-examination of that one, that (like Hegel’s sole philosophical confidant) even he has misunderstood him.” So wrote an admirable critic in the National Review. And what says Mr. Browning himself? That the poem is one which the many may not like, but which the few must; that he imagined it with so clear a power of vision, and so faithfully declared what he saw, that no material change can be made in it without injury; and that though the faults of expression are numerous, they are such as “with care for a man or book” may be surmounted.* The truth on the critic’s side—not a very productive truth—has perhaps received adequate consideration in the last twenty-seven years; we may now perhaps with a good conscience try to see the truth on the author’s side, which may happen to be more productive.
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*“My own faults of expression were many: but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since; for I lately gave time and pains to turn my work into what the many might, instead of what the few must like; but after all I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave it as I find it.”—Dedication of Sordello to J. Milsand of Dijon. M. Milsand’s article on Mr. Browning’s poetry which appeared many years ago in the Revue des deux Mondes, may still be read with advantage.
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One word on the obscurity of Sordello. It arises not so much from peculiarities of style, and the involved structure of occasional sentences (too much has been said on this; as a rule the style of Sordello is vigorously straightforward), as from the unrelaxing demand which is made throughout upon the intellectual and imaginative energy and alertness of the reader. This constant demand exhausts the power of attention in a short time, and the mind is unable to sustain its watchfulness and sureness of action, so that if we read much at a sitting we often find the first few pages clear and admirable, while the last three or four over which the eye passes before we close the book leave us bewildered and jaded; and we say, “Sordello is so dreadfully obscure.” The truth is, Mr. Browning has given too much in his couple of hundred pages; there is not a line of the poem which is not as full of matter as a line can be; so that if the ten syllables sometimes seem to start and give way under the strain, we need not wonder. We come to no places in Sordello where we can rest and dream or look up at the sky. Ideas, emotions, images, analyses, description, still come crowding on. There is too much of everything; we can- [p. 519→] not see the wood for the trees. Towards the end of the third book Mr. Browning interrupts the story that he may “pause and breathe.” That is an apt expression, but Mr. Browning seems unable to slacken the motion of his mind, and during this breathing-space heart and brain, perceptive and reflective powers, are almost more busily at work than ever.
Before proceeding to trace in detail the story of Sordello, including what the author has called “the incidents in the development of a soul,” it will be right to indicate the place of Sordello amongst the poems of Mr. Browning, and to make clear its purport as a whole. Sordello is a companion piece of Paracelsus (five years after the publication of which it appeared), and no one can possess himself of the ideas of Mr. Browning without a study of the two. “Je sens en moi l’infini,” exclaimed Napoleon one day, with his hand upon his breast. “Je sens en moi l’infini’ is the germ-idea of these poems. An account of Mr. Browning as a thinker would be an insufficient account of his genius, for he is also an artist. But more than almost any other poet he is an intellectual artist, and especially in Paracelsus and Sordello he worked—worked too much, perhaps—under the guidance of ideas, abstract views of character, or the translation into intellectual theorems of the instincts of the heart (an “analyst” Mr. Browning called himself in Sordello), too little perhaps although a pure sympathy with life in some of its individual, concrete forms. If any artist may be said to embody in his work a clearly defined system of thought, this may be said of Mr. Browning; a system however, which is not manufactured by logic, but the vital growth of his whole nature in an intellectual direction. Man here on earth, according to the central and controlling thought of Mr. Browning, man here in a state of preparation for other lives, and surrounded by wondrous spiritual influences, is too great for the sphere that contains him, while at the same time he can exist only by submitting for the present to the conditions it imposes; never without fatal loss becoming content with such submission, or regarding those conditions as final. Our nature here is unfinished, imperfect; but its glory, its peculiarity—that which makes us men, not God and not brutes—lies in this very character of imperfection, giving scope as it does for indefinite growth and progress. This progress is at the present time commonly thought of as progress of the race; Mr. Browning does not forget this (witness the concluding pages of Paracelsus), but he dwells chiefly upon the progress of the individual. Now a man may commit either of two irretrievable errors: he may renounce (through temptations of sense and other causes, but most frequently through supineness of heart, or brain, or hand, or else through prudential motives) his future, his spiritual, his infinite life and its concerns. That is one error. Or he may try to force those concerns, and corresponding states of thought, feeling, and endeavour into the present material life, the life of limitation and of inadequate and imperfect resources. That is the other. He may deny his higher nature, which is ever yearning upward to God through all high forms of human thought, emotion, and action (Mr. Browning loves to insist on this point); he may weary of failure, which is his glory (as generating a higher tendency), and fall back upon a limited and improgressive perfection; or else he may spurn at the conditions of existence, and endeavour to realise in this life what is work for eternity. To deny heaven and the infinite life—that is one extreme; to deny earth and the finite life—that is the other. If we [p. 520→] are content with the limited and perishable joys, and gifts and faculties of the world, we see not God and never shall see him. If, on the contrary, we aim at accomplishing under all the restrictions of this life the work of eternity—if we desire absolute knowledge or none at all, infinite love or no love, a boundless exercise of our will, the manifestation of our total power, or no exercise of our will—then we shall either destroy ourselves, dash ourselves to pieces against the walls of time and space, or else, seeing that our objects are unattainable, sink into a state of hopeless enervation. But between these two extremes lies a middle course, and in it will be found the true life of man. He must not rest content with earth and the gifts of earth; he must not aim at “thrusting in time eternity’s concern;” but he must perpetually grasp at things which are just within, or almost without his reach, and, having attained them, find that they are unsatisfying; so that by an endless series of aspirations and endeavours, which generate new aspirations and new endeavours, he may be sent on to God and Christ in heaven.
These ideas lead us to the central point, from which we can perceive the peculiarity and origin of Mr. Browning’s feeling with regard to nature, art, religion, love, beauty, knowledge. Around them we observe, as we read through his works, one poem after another falling into position, each bringing in addition something of its own.
Is it of external nature that Mr. Browning speaks? The preciousness of external nature lies in its being but the manifest power and love of God to which our heart springs as fire. In that Easter Dream of the last judgment what is the doom of God upon the condemned soul? It is to take all that the soul desires; and since the soul of the lost man loved the world, the world with its beauty, and wonder, and delight, but never yearned upward to God, who dwelt in them, the decree is pronounced:
Thou art shut
Out of the heaven of spirit: glut
Thy sense upon the world.
And no condemnation could have been more awful; for nature has betrayed and ruined us if we rest in it,—betrayed and ruined us unless it sends us onward unsatisfied to God.
And what are Mr. Browning’s chief doctrines on the subject of art? No one has so profoundly exposed the worldliness of the connoisseur or virtuoso, who, feeling none of the unsatisfied aspirations of the artist, rests in the visible products of art, and looks for nothing beyond them. “The Bishop orders his tomb at St. Praxed’s” will recur to the mind of the reader. The true glory of art is that in its creation there arise desires and aspirations which can never be satisfied on earth; but which generate new aspirations and new desires, by which the spirit mounts to God himself. The artist who can realise his ideal has missed the true gain of art. In Pippa Passes the regeneration of Jules the sculptor’s art turns on his foreseeing in the very perfection he had attained to an ultimate failure. And Andrea de Sarto being weighed is found wanting, precisely because he is “the faultless painter:”
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art—the worse!
But Andrea with a copy of one of Raphael’s paintings before him can imagine his contemporary
Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art—for it gives way;
That arm is wrongly put—and these again—
A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines.
The true artist is ever sent through and beyond his art to God. Tears start into the eyes of Abt [p. 521→] Vogler, who has been extemporising on his musical instrument, because now in the silence he feels the beauty of that palace of music which he reared, and which is gone never to be recalled. There is in the silence a sense of loss, vacancy, and failure. But the failure generates a higher aspiration, and the musician reaches upward to God:
Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands.
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?
Honour to the early Christian painters who rejected a limited perfection such as that of Greek art, the subject of which was finite, and which taught men to submit, and who dared to be faulty; faulty, because the subject of their art was full of infinite hopes and fears, and because they would lead men to aspire. [1] Is it love of which Mr. Browning speaks? No passion so much as love can
Make time break,
And let us pent-up creatures through
Into eternity our due. [2]
But the means which love can command on earth are always incommensurate to its nature and its desires. Yet in apparent failure there may be gain, not loss. Let the reader turn to those companion poems—poems of subtle meaning—Love in a Life, and Life in a Love. In each poem love is represented as pursuing its object without ever attaining it. This is a real failure, says Mr. Browning, when love is dependent on a life, and controlled by a life’s limitations. But in its own nature, love is infinite: and if we could but live in love, life would partake of the infinity and eternity of the passion or essence with which it would be consubstantial; the object of desire could never be attained, but it would be for ever pursued, and apparent failure would but urge on to the real success, to everlasting aspiration and endeavour. Once more: does Mr. Browning speak of knowledge? Its gleams were meant to “sting with hunger for full light.” Its goal is God himself. Its most precious part is that which is least positive; those momentary intuitions of things which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard—“fallings from us, vanishings.” [3] Even the revelation of God in Christianity left room for doubts and guesses; because growth is the law of man’s nature, and perfect knowledge would have stayed his growth; [4] while, at the same time, its assurances of a boundless life beyond the grave saved Christianity from the failure of heathenism, which could not extinguish man’s longings for a higher than material or worldly perfection, but was unable to utilise them, or suggest how they could be changed from restlessness and self-conflict to a sustaining hope. [5] The reader may complete the impression now produced by a thoughtful reading of a poem in which these ideas of Mr. Browning find perhaps their noblest expression,—“Rabbi ben Ezra.”
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So far Mr. Browning’s system of thought has been illustrated chiefly by his shorter poems. But to the same central ideas belong Paracelsus (published 1835), Sordello (1840), and Easter Day (1850). In each we read “a soul’s tragedy.” Paracelsus aspires to absolute knowledge, and to power based on such knowledge, the attainment of which is forbidden by the conditions of our existence. In the same poem, a second phase of the same error—that of refusing for the present to submit to the terms of life—is re-[p. 522→] presented in Aprile, who would “love infinitely and be loved;” the boundlessness of his desires produces a disdain of such attainments and accomplishments as are possible on this earth; his ideal being beyond possibility of realisation, he rejects all the means of life since they are proved inadequate to his aspirations, and rejects the results of life because they are limited and imperfect; he cannot stoop from his sublime isolation in a world of dreams to task himself for the good of his fellows, and he sinks into a state of hopeless enervation. Paracelsus is the victim of the temptations of an aspiring intellect; Aprile, of the temptations of a yearning, passionate heart. Mr. Browning decided to complete our view of this side of the subject by showing the failure of an attempt to manifest the infinite scope, and realise the infinite energy of will, the inability of a great nature to deploy all its magnificent resources, and by compelling men in some way or other to acknowledge that nature as their master, to gain a full sense of its existence. With this purpose he wrote Sordello.
But the same subject has another side, and this also Mr. Browning felt himself bound to present. It was the error of Paracelsus, and Aprile, and Sordello to endeavour to overleap the limitations of life, or to force within those limits an infinity of knowledge, emotion, or volition, which they are unable to contain. It is no less an error to content one’s self with the present conditions of our existence, to cease straining beyond them towards the highest objects of thought, love, and desire—in a word, to God. And here is the side of the subject which is regarded in Easter Day. Why is the condemnation of the soul by God in that dream inevitable? Because the speaker failed in his dream in the probation of life, accepted the finite joys and aims of earth (each with some taint in it) as sufficient and final, and never grasped at or yearned towards the heavenly influences and joys, that flitted faint and rare above the earthly, but which were taintless, and therefore best.
We have seized the subject of Sordello as it appears in the ultimate analysis. Let us now go briefly over the story, and recount “the incidents in the development of a soul.”
Scene: First Mantua and its neighbourhood; afterwards, Verona and Ferrara. Time: about 1225, or forty years before the birth of Dante. Dramatis personæ: Azzo, Lord of Este and Count Richard of St. Boniface, Prince of Verona—Guelphs: Ecelin Romano, Vicar of the Emperor in Italy, and his supporter Taurello Salinguerra—Ghibellins; and others, men and women, of whom we shall hear.
Not many miles from Mantua, having traversed a pine forest, you drop suddenly into a little vale, Goito by name, surrounded by a few low mountains, and bright with vines, through which you may wind to a castle in the midst. Here more than twenty years before the date which has been given, might be seen wandering beneath the vines, or on the hill-tops, or standing on one of the breezy parapets of the castle, a slender boy in the dress of a page, with a noble and finely chiselled face—our hero, Sordello. Here he lives, cared for only by some old women-servants who used to wait on the mistress of the castle, Adelaide, the second wife of Ecelin, and on the maiden Palma, Ecelin’s daughter by his former wife, Agnes Este.
Who is Sordello? All his life, as far back as the boy can remember, was spent within the circle of these hills. But he was not always here. He has heard how in a night tumult at Vicenza, when the Ghibellin quarters were attacked and [p. 523→] set on fire by Guelphs, Adelaide with her infant son was rescued from the flames by Sordello’s father, a poor archer, who himself perished, but left this child whom Adelaide, in gratitude to her preserver, took charge of and brought up in her castle of Goito. On that same night of the Guelph attack perished also the wife and newborn son of the Ghibellin chieftain, Taurello, ever since which event he fell voluntarily into a subordinate position, became the instrument of Ecelin, ceased to scheme on his own account, and took life unambitiously and pleasantly however it came to him: now in the form of havoc and sudden bloodshed when Guelphs were in the way, now in that of festal ceremonies, bull-baits, dances of jongleurs, and songs of troubadours—a portly, easy-natured soldier.
Before we proceed with the story let us pause to say a word about Sordello’s nature, physical and spiritual, forgetting that he is still but a child. His physical organisation is of that fine susceptible kind which a poet might possess.
His face
—— Look, now he turns away! Yourselves shall trace
(The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine,
A sharp and restless lip, so well combine
With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive
Delight at every sense; you can believe
Sordello foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from her mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames
Some happy lands that have luxurious names.
For loose fertility; a footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half-germinating spices; mere decay
Produces richer life; and day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows;
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.
You recognise at once the finer dress
Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness
At eye and ear, while round the rest is furled
(As though she [Nature] would not trust them with her world)
A veil that shows a sky not near so blue,
And lets but half the sun look fervid through.
By two very different classes of spiritual natures this physical organisation, which fits a man for the perception and feeling of beauty, may be possessed. There are those lovers of beauty who are born to be worshippers of something outside themselves, whether it be the subduing loveliness of earth and sky, or of some heroic character, or of some noble cause, or of God himself. They are born to be worshippers, and to lose themselves in what they worship, endowing the object of their homage with all high gifts of their own souls, and bowing down before it, as if it possessed by an inherent right those qualities which are of their own bestowal. The second class consists of those who recognise in their own natures a power superior to all that exists outside of themselves, and who with each new revealment of beauty, or goodness, or strength, or wisdom, make discovery of some new quality of their own souls heretofore undeveloped or unperceived. These are not the worshipping spirits; they are characterised not by a predominance of love but of will; they would subdue all things to themselves; their claims on life are boundless, and they compel life (unless failure overtake them) to yield up to their sublime self-assertion untried forms of beauty, goodness, knowledge, power; and thus they vindicate the rights of humanity, thus they raise the standard of the general demands on life and the gifts of life, so that we all, to the meanest of us, may in the end follow them with our more bounded wills.
Now what is the special need of a nature belonging to this second class? Is it not some means of self-display,—self-display, not through any motive of vanity, but because human will gains perception of itself by its effects? What I have done, however slight, declares to me that I have willed; the torn petals [p. 524→] of a rose which I have plucked to pieces assure me of the presence of my living will; much ampler is the assurance which the impression of my will upon the men and women who surround me may afford. The lover heart-whole in his worship is never troubled by doubts of his own truth; but sudden failings of spirit come to him whose faith is in himself and his own will; he looks out tremblingly to ascertain that others do not consider he has urged false claims; he requires to see himself mirrored in external men and things; he must always live before a crowd.
Such is the special requirement of a nature belonging to this second class—of which Sordello is a member. And now what are its peculiar dangers and temptations? They are two, leading in precisely opposite directions. Such a man as Sordello may perceive that the world is too narrow a place to admit of a perfect manifestation of himself, that human life with its thousand limitations is too small to contain the workings of the powers of his soul, and that the means of life are too feeble to be their instruments. This perception may result in a mood of fatal enervation. He may decline the duty of toiling for the good of men, because the conditions imposed on human existence forbid the full realisation of his aims; he may despise the poor successes which are possible; he may perform no other achievements than the transcendent but easy triumphs of a dream. Or, again, he may err in an opposite way. He may be possessed with a desire to put forth all his powers in this sphere of human life which is too narrow to contain them, a desire to display completely here the resources of a nature which can find scope for its full development only hereafter,
Thrusting in time eternity’s concern,
and so bring ruin upon himself, and scatter ruin on all around him. “Je sens en moi l’infini,” exclaimed Napoleon.
Now let the reader place Sordello in the second class described above, and bear in mind the special requirement and the peculiar temptations of that class; he will then be at the right point for understanding the narrative, and studying “the incidents in the development of a soul.”
We return to Goito and the boy who wanders about its castle. And, first, his time passes in the healthy, unconscious life of a child, each day’s new sights and sounds sufficing for the day, with natural enjoyment of sun, air, and sleep. After the manner of imaginative children living in solitude (indeed of all children except some little born realists), he makes companionship of whatever objects he finds around him—flowers, trees, birds, insects,—animating and giving them personality according to the caprices of his individual fancy, with no guidance from the catholic feeling which has found expression in our nursery anthology. Everything becomes vassal to his fancy, and by the most incalculable passages of mind and freaks of association he connects one thing with another till an entire imaginary world surrounds him.
Conceive! the orpine-patch
Blossoming earliest on the log-house thatch
The day those archers wound along the vines—
Related to the chief that left their lines
To climb with clinking step the northern stair
Up to the solitary chambers where
Sordello never came. Thus thrall reached thrall;
He o’er-festooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, making light
Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height.
From barbican to battlement; so flung
Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
Our architect,—the breezy morning fresh
Above, and merry,—all his waving mesh
Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged. [p. 525→]
Thus his days glide away sunnily, while he grows up selfish enough, (since what was there to tell the boy that others desired a portion of his happiness?) and without the feeblest moral sense.
Time at length puts an end to this period of waking dreams. The objects around him become perhaps too familiar to accept of new transformations, surprises, and disguises from the child’s fancy, and they settle down into their every-day shapes. The poppy appears to him, after all, a poppy and nothing more; bird and beast are no longer friends or enemies whom he may watch with wondering awe, and love, and admiration, and hope, and fear; they have sunk into mere bird and beast. And Sordello perceives that it was his own creative faculty which had endowed them with the peculiar attributes. Now the time is come when the boy cannot be satisfied without doing and being something himself. And he needs some companions more competent to allow his claims, and admire his performances than were the flowers and birds. Finding no such companions really at hand he is compelled to create them once again, and he returns to the world of dreams.
But now the crowd with which he surrounds himself is one of men and women, for such witnesses of his exploits he at present requires. All persons whom he has seen,—his mistress, Adelaide, the golden-haired maiden Palma, the aged foreign women servants who wait upon them, the archers who one day wound through the vine-paths to the castle,—all persons of whom he has heard,—Ecelin, Este, the Pope, the Emperor,—now press before him, a stream of life-like figures. Each is conspicuous by some special attribute or power, conspicuous by the embodiment or possession of beauty, or wisdom, or strength, or goodness; each is played off against the others, and made to pronounce an estimate of the worth of the others’ several qualities; and thus Sordello is feeling his way through much inexperience to that ideal of perfect human faculties and attainments which he would in his own person exhibit, and the possession of which he would assure himself of by the recognition which, as manifested in himself, it would obtain from others. Now when the boy bends his slight bow it is as a crusader against imaginary enemies of the faith; when he climbs the steep above the vines it is the Trentine pass through which he marches as vicar of the emperor; all is still a dream he knows; but a day may come when he shall find means of action corresponding to his will, a body fitted to his soul.
Testing the powers and qualities of men in this way the pageant of his dream thins, and instead of each figure remaining the possessor of one distinguishing attribute, beauty and strength and wisdom now unite themselves in a single person, so that all the abilities and graces of men are summed up in two or three ideals of manhood. At last from these emerges one transcendent form in which the perfection of human nature is embodied,—that form which is to be exhibited in Sordello himself. What name shall we give to this ideal? Can we say better than that as the antique world had discovered before him, so now Sordello has discovered Apollo? This ideal of manhood, this Apollo, as we may call it, Sordello will be, and no other. It was as Apollo he ascended the bed of the mountain stream in the depth of June, and looked down upon the forests and fields of vines which his fancy magnified and ennobled into an external world of dimensions suited to his new ideal self, and when hours afterwards
Aloft would hang
White summer lightnings; as it sank and sprang [p. 526→]
To measure, that whole palpitating breast
Of heaven, ’twas Apollo, nature prest
At eve to worship.
And for his Daphne who so fit and fair as Palma?
Conspicuous in his world
Of dreams sat Palma. How the tresses curled
Into a sumptuous swell of gold and wound
About her like a glory! even the ground
Was bright as with spilt sunbeams; breathe not, breathe
Not!—poised, see, one leg doubled underneath,
Its small foot buried in the dimpling snow,
Rests, but the other, listlessly below,
O’er the couch-side swings feeling for cool air,
The vein streaks swoln a richer violet where
The languid blood lies heavily; yet calm
On her slight prop, each flat and outspread palm,
As but suspended in the act to rise
By consciousness of beauty, whence her eyes
Turn with so frank a triumph, for she meets
Apollo’s gaze in the pine glooms.
But time is stealing away. Sordello is no longer a boy; he is in the prime of youth, and nothing is as yet really done:
Lean he grows and pale
Though restlessly at rest.
At last an accident happens which breaks up Sordello’s “mixed content,” and leads him towards the true business of men. Adelaide and Palma have left Goito for the neighbouring Mantua, where amongst other amusements and festivities they are to preside at a Court of Love which Richard of St. Boniface (a suitor for Palma’s hand) is to hold, and which is to conclude with a lay sung by the illustrious troubadour Eglamor. With the bubble of his fancy grown great and bright, Sordello wanders through the woods towards Mantua, picturing to himself a scene in which he himself gains Palma, and receives confession of her love with crowds to witness his triumph, and in the presence of Richard, the rejected suitor. The bubble, when greatest and brightest, bursts. Emerging beyond a screen of pine-trees, he beholds a crowd of real men and women, gay and noisy, round a pavilion. Real men and women, and Sordello is offered no homage; he, born to be adored, suddenly discovers that he is weak, scarcely a match for any one he sees. And yet there abides within him a consciousness of untried powers, and he would not exchange this potential supremacy of his for the best of their actual endowments. We shall see whether something after all may not be realised.
Palma and Adelaide appear, but not Richard. Richard’s troubadour, however, the famous Eglamor, is ready with his lute to sing. “Elys” (El lys, the lily) is the ideal subject and the name of Eglamor’s poem; and he images in verse according to his ability this his type of perfection. While he is singing Sordello’s brain swims, for he recognises in the subject of the poem the tale of Apollo. And his own ideal of human graces and abilities embodied in a person is nobler than that of the minstrel. Eglamor, one of the worshipping spirits, one born for self-forgetful devotion to some object outside himself, one to whom poetry is “a temple-worship vague and vast,” who is proud of his service, humble as it is, to ideal beauty, and has his life and joy in it alone, is in all this the opposite of Sordello; and the latter (whose self-possessed genius bears to Eglamor’s some such relation as Goethe’s might be said to bear to Keats’s) sees how in the poem which he listens to he could supply
Each foolish gap and chasm
The minstrel left in his enthusiasm.
Accordingly Eglamor has no sooner ceased than Sordello takes the lute, advances, and adopting the names and time and place that appeared in Eglamor’s poem, begins and hastens through the “true lay with the true end,” substituting his own type of perfection for that of the poet on whom the people’s applause has [p. 527→] just been showered. By the time his song is ended, a real victory has been achieved by him at last:
The cries,
The crowding round, and proffering the prize!
(For he had gained some prize)—He seemed to shrink
Into a sleepy cloud, just at whose brink
One sight withheld him. There sat Adelaide,
Silent; but at her knees the very maid
Of the North Chamber,* her red lips as rich,
The same pure fleecy hair; one weft of which,
Golden and great, quite touched his cheek as o’er
She leant, speaking some six words and no more.
He answered something, anything; and she
Unbound a scarf and laid it heavily
Upon him, her neck’s warmth and all. Again
Moved the arrested magic; in his brain
Noises grew, and a light that turned to glare,
And greater glare, until the intense flare
Engulphed him, shut the whole scene from his sense.
And when he woke, ’twas many a furlong thence,
At home; the sun shining his ruddy wont;
The customary birds’-chirp; but his front
Was crowned—was crowned! Her scented scarf around
His neck!
A week is passed by Sordello—the quiet of Goito around him—in sucking the sweet out of every circumstance of the achievement. As he wanders out one morning, he hears the sound of chanting approaching through the woods, and soon appears a company of jongleurs and trouvères bearing to burial the body of Eglamor. The shock of his own discomfiture and of Sordello’s sudden triumph had been too much for the simple and fervid heart of the poet. He had lost all—his purpose, his rank, his very life.
Yet envy sank
Within him, as he heard Sordello out.
And, for the first time, shouted—tried to shout
Like others, not from any zeal to show
Pleasure that way; the common sort did so,
And what was Eglamor? who, bending down
The same, placed his beneath Sordello’s crown,
Printed a kiss on his successor’s hand,
Left one great tear on it, then joined his band.
There was no envy in Eglamor’s heart, but no one recognised the fact that he was defeated so clearly as himself. That night he slept, and never woke again. And now, chanting a funeral song, the trouvères bear on the beaten man to his last abode. The victor Sordello meets this procession, and invoking all blessings of the woodlands on the resting-place of Eglamor, and bidding his fame continue, he takes the crown from his own brow and lays it on the dead poet’s breast:
Nor the prayer quite fruitless fell.
A plant they have yielding a three-leaved bell
Which whitens at the heart ere noon, and ails
Till evening; evening gives it to her gales
To clear away with such forgotten things
As are an eyesore to the morn: this brings
Him [Eglamor] to their mind, and bears his very name.
________
*Palma, whom Sordello had seen in the north chamber of the castle.
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Sordello now receives an invitation to Mantua, where he is assured the public long for his arrival, and are eager for some more of the wonderful Goito poetry. And now it seems to him that his vocation is clear. By this gift of song he is as far exalted above ordinary men and women as he formerly found himself exalted above his companions the birds and flowers. He now seems to have found a means of giving his own nature expression, and of compelling men to recognise him as their superior. For while others—kings, warriors, priests, statesmen, lovers—had each some real function of his own, and was confined to it, Sordello as an artist (having himself no function) comprehends the natures and lives and interests of all, and can declare their secrets in his verse. Will they not acknowledge his greatness? Shall he not obtain evidence of that greatness in [p. 528→] this homage of theirs? With such thoughts he comes to Mantua.
But the city life agrees ill with Sordello’s inner nature. After all, it was not poetry he cared for, but the self-display, the recognition by others, and the consequent recognition by himself, of the powers of his nature, which he had obtained by means of poetry. He finds the labour of writing verse troublesome, and is even content to plagiarise the rhymes of Eglamor. The men and women of his first poems are simple embodiments of virtue or vice, of manly strength or womanly tenderness and grace; slight studies of character, as Sordello himself cannot but be aware. Yet they please the public; he is courted, complimented, and fêted as the last distinguished poet, and soon he finds himself shamefully hankering for praise, and enjoying the petty pleasures of real life, in violation of that design according to which he was to have comprehended the pleasures and pains of all kinds of men, but have himself not yielded to the restricting influence of any. He rouses himself to attempt some poetical work of a higher order than he has yet accomplished. But the difficulties which arise from an unformed language (and the inadequacy of any language to present in the analysis of words what should be perceived whole and unbroken) throw him back, and he returns to the old style of writing, and is content with the old praise, and the consciousness of a greatness in him which is not yet recognised.
But when he investigates the nature of the applause which he obtained as poet, is the result gratifying? He had supposed that when he represented king, warrior, statesman, priest, lover, in his verses it would be believed that the poet was superior to them all, because he comprehended in imagination their several characters and functions. He finds that the real wonder with the Mantuans is how “a mere singer,” ugly, stunted, weak (as Sordello appears to them), could have these great people—such as Montfort, whose deeds he sang of—completely, so to speak, at his fingers” ends; while the full tide of praise swept past him to those who were the subjects of his poems. Upon this discovery his heart turns angrily on his Mantuan critics. Why care what such as they thought of him? Had he not been fooling himself when he imagined they were competent hearers of his poems, just as he had fooled himself when he made companions out of flowers and trees? Was it not his own fancy which made them wise and brilliant and witty and judicious? Let them praise or blame, as they choose. Only with this conclusion came the consequence that he must needs fail to gain by means of them the self-display he needed.
And now the nature of Sordello is sundered in two, and at war with itself, so that his true personality vanishes. There remains Sordello the man, hungry for every paltry pleasure of the moment, and unwilling that one moment’s toil should lose its immediate reward, its quick return of praise or gratification; and there is Sordello the poet, despising the man and thwarting him and postponing all present delight in prospect of a time when his infinite demands on life should be satisfied. “But the complete Sordello, man and bard, … was gone.” While questioning with himself whether he should devote himself utterly to his art, denying himself every present pleasure, or wholly renounce his art, and mix as a man with men, the Mantuans—people of distinction—would break in upon him: what could he do but fall in with the dull conventions of the day, expected from a poet such as he? His very talk becomes a sorrow to the heart; insincere because talk is required of him, and [p. 529→] he must speak in a language not his own. Were he in solitude he could give to any question which arose a meditative answer, such as became a thinker and a poet:
but alas!
One of God’s large ones [i.e. answers] tardy to condense
Itself into a period.
While the Mantuan talkers have opinions of the pattern-kind cut and dry and ready for show, and expect a give-and-take conversation from Sordello:
The end was, he retailed
Some ready-made opinion, put to use
This quip, that maxim, ventured [to] reproduce
Gestures and tones, at any folly caught
Serving to finish with; . . .
. . . . . His soul,
Unequal to the compassing a whole,
Saw in the tenth part less and less to strive
About.
So fares the man Sordello. As a poet he falls from his ideal because his hearers are incapable of being interested in the poetry—philosophical studies of character—which his artistic tendency urges him to produce. His daily work now is only not to sink under any rivals. And working merely for momentary applause, any of the small critics or genius-haunters of Mantua can twist him round his thumb; whom yet Sordello despises, and with whose views he is ready to fall in, partly for the sake of getting rid of the intruder. Yet his conformity with these petty views is seldom perfect:
He would miss
Some point, brought into contact with them ere
Assured in what small segment of the sphere
Of his existence they attended him;
Whence blunders—falsehoods rectify—a grim
List, slur it over!
Meanwhile Adelaide dies at Goito; and Ecelin succeeds in procuring the betrothal of the sister of Azzo and the sister of Count Richard to his own two sons; and promises Palma to the Count himself. Weary of the world, sick and old, he thus hopes to conclude the strife of Ghibellin and Guelph, and retires to end his days in a monastery. His comrade, Taurello Salinguerra, is thunderstruck by the intelligence of Adelaide’s death and of these doings of Ecelin, and rides with hot haste from Naples to Vicenza, to expostulate with the chieftain. But expostulation is useless. Ecelin is tired with the struggle for power, and would close his life at peace with the Holy Father; and he buys off any further remonstrances of Taurello by offering him Palma, who is still at Goito, as a lure, by which to obtain influences over Richard.
Taurello is about to visit Mantua to recover breath. His arrival is to be celebrated by games and songs and dances. Sordello is called upon to prepare an ode. Caring not whether verses come or keep away, he wanders into the country:
Dumb
Till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent,
On a blind hill-top: down the gorge he went,
Yielding himself up as to an embrace.
The moon came out; like features of a face
A querulous fraternity of pines,
Sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines
Also came out, made gradually up
The picture; ’twas Goito’s mountain-cup
And castle. He had dropped through one defile
He never dared explore, the Chief ere while
Had vanished by. Back rushed the dream, enwrapped
Him wholly. ’Twas Apollo now they lapped,
Those mountains, not a pettish minstrel meant
To wear away his soul in discontent,
Brooding on fortune’s malice. Heart and brain
Swelled; he expanded to himself again.
. . . . . . . .
. . Come home Sordello! Soon
Was he low muttering, beneath the moon,
Of sorrow saved, of quiet evermore,——
Since from the purpose, he maintained before,
Only resulted wailing and hot tears. [p. 530→]
He explores the castle, torch in hand, and finds that Palma had left it that very day. He wanders through the well known chambers, and rests at last beneath a marble font supported by the figures of marble girls, beside whom he used to rest when a boy. He muses; the instruments at his command for acting out his will had been proved unfit; the men and women, through whose recognition of his power he hoped to obtain a sense of its existence, have been proved by his Mantuan experience no fitter. Was the will itself in fault?
His forehead pressed the moonlit shelf
Beside the youngest marble maid awhile!
Then, raising it, he thought, with a long smile,
“I shall be King again!” as he withdrew
The envied scarf; into the font he threw
His crown.
Next day no poet! “Wherefore?” asked
Taurello, when the dance of jongleurs masked
As devils ended; “Don’t a song come next?”
The master of the pageant looked perplext,
Till Naddo’s whisper came to his relief.
“His Highness knew what poets were: in brief,
Had not the tetchy race prescriptive right
To peevishness, caprice? or call it spite,
One must receive their nature in its length
And breadth, expect the weakness with the strength!”
——So phrasing it, till, his stock of phrases spent,
The easy-natured soldier smiled assent,
Settled his portly person, smoothed his chin,
And nodded that the bull-bait should begin.*
Edward Dowden.
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*It has been observed that Sordello is a companion poem of Paracelsus. Sordello’s Mantuan experiences have their counterpart in Paracelsus’s life at Basil. How fully this is the case will be perceived only by the reader who has care enough for Mr. Browning and his books to compare these poems in their details.
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Reviewed:
Poetical Works (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
1. Old Pictures in Florence.
2. Dîs Aliter Visum, or Le Byron de nos jours.
3. Easter Day, xxvii, xxviii.
4. A Death in the Desert.
5. Cleon.
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