In my allusion to "Pippa Passes," towards the close of the preceding
chapter, as the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of
Browning's dramatic poems, I would not have it understood that its
pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement,
of art, merely. It seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things,
profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer
of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and
the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of
imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long
composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that _symmetria
prisca_ recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino
Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti
called fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as
the morning air. By its side, the more obviously "profound" poems,
Bishop Blougram and the rest, are mere skilled dialectics.
The art that is most profound and most touching must ever be the
simplest. Whenever Æschylus, Dante, Shakspere, Milton, are at white heat
they require no exposition, but meditation only--the meditation akin to
the sentiment of little children who listen, intent upon every syllable,
and passionately eager of soul, to hearth-side tragedies. The play of
genius is like the movement of the sea. It has its solemn rhythm: its
joy, irradiate of the sun; its melancholy, in the patient moonlight: its
surge and turbulence under passing tempests: below all, the deep oceanic
music. There are, of course, many to whom the sea is but a waste of
water, at best useful as a highway and as the nursery of the winds and
rains. For them there is no hint "of the incommunicable dream" in the
curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the
short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands
for joy and are no more. To them it is but a desert: obscure,
imponderable, a weariness. The "profundity" of Browning, so dear a claim
in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense,
only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight in Blake's
Song of Innocence, "Piping down the valleys wild," or in Wordsworth's
line, "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," or in Keats'
single verse, "There is a budding morrow in midnight," or in this
quatrain on Poetry, by a young living poet--
"She comes like the husht beauty of the night,
But sees too deep for laughter;
Her touch is a vibration and a light
From worlds before and after--"
there is more "profundity" in any of these than in libraries of "Sludge
the Medium" literature. Mere hard thinking does not involve profundity,
any more than neurotic excitation involves spiritual ecstasy. _De
profundis,_ indeed, must the poet come: there must the deep rhythm of
life have electrified his "volatile essence" to a living rhythmic joy.
In this deep sense, and this only, the poet is born, not made. He may
learn to fashion anew that which he hath seen: the depth of his insight
depends upon the depth of his spiritual heritage. If wonder dwell not in
his eyes and soul there can be no "far ken" for him. Here it seems apt
to point out that Browning was the first writer of our day to indicate
this transmutive, this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is
the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry.
Characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy
German student, the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied,
metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke: "Keep but ever
looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon
find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?--there
follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at
men?--there's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the
same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and
yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one."
This wonder is akin to that 'insanity' of the poet which is but
impassioned sanity. Plato sums the matter when he says, "He who, having
no touch of the Muse's madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks
he will get into the temple by the help of Art--he, I say, and his
poetry, are not admitted."
In that same wood beyond Dulwich to which allusion has already been
made, the germinal motive of "Pippa Passes" flashed upon the poet. No
wonder this resort was for long one of his sacred places, and that he
lamented its disappearance as fervently as Ruskin bewailed the
encroachment of the ocean of bricks and mortar upon the wooded privacies
of Denmark Hill.
Save for a couple of brief visits abroad, Browning spent the years,
between his first appearance as a dramatic writer and his marriage, in
London and the neighbourhood. Occasionally he took long walks into the
country. One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in
meadow-grasses, or under a tree, as circumstances and the mood
concurred, and there to give himself up so absolutely to the life of the
moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes
venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space
upon his recumbent body. I have heard him say that his faculty of
observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a
Seminole or an Iroquois: he saw and watched everything, the bird on the
wing, the snail dragging its shell up the pendulous woodbine, the bee
adding to his golden treasure as he swung in the bells of the campanula,
the green fly darting hither and thither like an animated seedling, the
spider weaving her gossamer from twig to twig, the woodpecker heedfully
scrutinising the lichen on the gnarled oak-hole, the passage of the wind
through leaves or across grass, the motions and shadows of the clouds,
and so forth. These were his golden holidays. Much of the rest of his
time, when not passed in his room in his father's house, where he wrote
his dramas and early poems, and studied for hours daily, was spent in
the Library of the British Museum, in an endless curiosity into the more
or less unbeaten tracks of literature. These London experiences were
varied by whole days spent at the National Gallery, and in communion
with kindred spirits. At one time he had rooms, or rather a room, in the
immediate neighbourhood of the Strand, whither he could go when he
wished to be in town continuously for a time, or when he had any social
or theatrical engagement.
Browning's life at this period was distraught by more than one episode
of the heart. It would be strange were it otherwise. He had in no
ordinary degree a rich and sensuous nature, and his responsiveness was
so quick that the barriers of prudence were apt to be as shadowy to him
as to the author of "The Witch of Atlas." But he was the earnest student
for the most part, and, above all, the poet. His other pleasure, in his
happy vagrant days, was to join company with any tramps, gipsies, or
other wayfarers, and in good fellowship gain much knowledge of life that
was useful at a later time. Rustic entertainments, particularly
peripatetic "Theatres Royal," had a singular fascination for him, as for
that matter had rustic oratory, whether of the alehouse or the pulpit.
At one period he took the keenest interest in sectaries of all kinds:
and often he incurred a gentle reproof from his mother because of his
nomad propensities in search of "_pastors_ new." There was even a time
when he seriously deliberated whether he should not combine literature
and religious ministry, as Faraday combined evangelical fervour with
scientific enthusiasm. "'Twas a girl with eyes like two dreams of night"
that saved him from himself, and defrauded the Church Independent of a
stalwart orator.
It was, as already stated, while he strolled through Dulwich Wood one
day that the thought occurred to him which was to find development and
expression in "Pippa Passes." "The image flashed upon him," writes his
intimate friend, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, "of some one walking thus alone
through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her
passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every
step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of
Asolo, Felippa or Pippa."
It has always seemed to me a radical mistake to include "Pippa Passes"
among Browning's dramas. Not only is it absolutely unactable, but
essentially undramatic in the conventional sense. True dramatic writing
concerns itself fundamentally with the apt conjunction of events, and
the more nearly it approximates to the verity of life the more likely is
it to be of immediate appeal. There is a _vraie vérité_ which only the
poet, evolving from dramatic concepts rather than attempting to
concentrate these in a quick, moving verisimilitude, can attempt. The
passing hither and thither of Pippa, like a beneficent Fate, a wandering
chorus from a higher amid the discordant medley of a lower world,
changing the circumstances and even the natures of certain more or less
heedless listeners by the wild free lilt of her happy song of innocence,
is of this _vraie vérité_. It is so obviously true, spiritually, that
it is unreal in the commonplace of ordinary life. Its very effectiveness is
too apt for the dramatist, who can ill afford to tamper further with the
indifferent banalities of actual existence. The poet, unhampered by the
exigencies of dramatic realism, can safely, and artistically, achieve an
equally exact, even a higher verisimilitude, by means which are, or
should be, beyond adoption by the dramatist proper.
But over and above any 'nice discrimination,' "Pippa Passes" is simply a
poem, a lyrical masque with interspersed dramatic episodes, and
subsidiary interludes in prose. The suggestion recently made that it
should be acted is a wholly errant one. The finest part of it is
unrepresentable. The rest would consist merely of a series of tableaux,
with conversational accompaniment.
The opening scene, "the large mean airy chamber," where Pippa, the
little silk-winder from the mills at Asolo, springs from bed, on her New
Year's Day _festa_, and soliloquises as she dresses, is as true as it
is lovely when viewed through the rainbow glow of the poetic atmosphere:
but how could it succeed on the stage? It is not merely that the
monologue is too long: it is too inapt, in its poetic richness, for its
purpose. It is the poet, not Pippa, who evokes this sweet sunrise-music,
this strain of the "long blue solemn hours serenely flowing." The
dramatic poet may occupy himself with that deeper insight, and the wider
expression of it, which is properly altogether beyond the scope of the
playwright. In a word, he may irradiate his theme with the light that
never was on sea or land, nor will he thereby sacrifice aught of
essential truth: but his comrade must see to it that he is content with
the wide liberal air of the common day. The poetic alchemist may turn a
sword into pure gold: the playwright will concern himself with the due
usage of the weapon as we know it, and attribute to it no transcendent
value, no miraculous properties. What is permissible to Blake, painting
Adam and Eve among embowering roses and lilies, while the sun, moon, and
stars simultaneously shine, is impermissible to the portrait-painter or
the landscapist, who has to idealise actuality to the point only of
artistic realism, and not to transmute it at the outset from
happily-perceived concrete facts to a glorified abstract concept.
In this opening monologue the much-admired song, "All service ranks the
same with God," is no song at all, properly, but simply a beautiful
short poem. From the dramatist's point of view, could anything be more
shaped for disaster than the second of the two stanzas?--
"Say not 'a small event!' Why 'small'?
Costs it more pain than this, ye call
A 'great event,' should come to pass,
Than that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!"
The whole of this lovely prologue is the production of a dramatic poet,
not of a poet writing a drama. On the other hand, I cannot agree with
what I read somewhere recently--that Sebald's song, at the opening of
the most superb dramatic writing in the whole range of Victorian
literature, is, in the circumstances, wholly inappropriate. It seems to
me entirely consistent with the character of Ottima's reckless lover. He
is akin to the gallant in one of Dumas' romances, who lingered atop of
the wall of the prison whence he was escaping in order to whistle the
concluding bar of a blithe chanson of freedom. What is, dramatically,
disastrous in the instance of Mertoun singing "There's a woman like a
dewdrop," when he ought to be seeking Mildred's presence in profound
stealth and silence, is, dramatically, electrically startling in the
mouth of Sebald, among the geraniums of the shuttered shrub-house, where
he has passed the night with Ottima, while her murdered husband lies
stark in the adjoining room.
It must, however, be borne in mind that this thrilling dramatic effect
is fully experienced only in retrospection, or when there is knowledge
of what is to follow.
A conclusive objection to the drama as an actable play is that three of
the four main episodes are fragmentary. We know nothing of the fate of
Luigi: we can but surmise the future of Jules and Phené: we know not how
or when Monsignor will see Pippa righted. Ottima and Sebald reach a
higher level in voluntary death than they ever could have done in life.
It is quite unnecessary, here, to dwell upon this exquisite flower of
genius in detail. Every one who knows Browning at all knows "Pippa
Passes." Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and
a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight is
such as no other poet than the author of "The Ring and the Book" and
"The Inn Album" can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb. From the
outset of the tremendous episode of Ottima and Sebald, there is a note
of tragic power which is almost overwhelming. Who has not known what
Jakob Boehme calls "the shudder of a divine excitement" when Luca's
murderer replies to his paramour,
"morning?
It seems to me a night with a sun added."
How deep a note, again, is touched when Sebald exclaims, in allusion to
his murder of Luca, that he was so "wrought upon," though here, it may
be, there is an unconscious reminiscence of the tenser and more
culminative cry of Othello, "but being wrought, perplext in the
extreme." Still more profound a touch is that where Ottima, daring her
lover to the "one thing that must be done; you know what thing: Come in
and help to carry," says, with affected lightsomeness, "This dusty pane
might serve for looking-glass," and simultaneously exclaims, as she
throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers, "Three, four--four
grey hairs!" then with an almost sublime coquetry of horror turns
abruptly to Sebald, saying with a voice striving vainly to be blithe--
"Is it so you said
A plait of hair should wave across my neck?
No--this way."
Who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as
by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers' "crowning
night"?
"_Ottima_. The day of it too, Sebald!
When heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat,
Its black-blue canopy suffered descend
Close on us both, to weigh down each to each,
And smother up all life except our life.
So lay we till the storm came.
_Sebald_. How it came!
_Ottima_. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead ----"
Surely there is nothing in all our literature more poignantly dramatic
than this first part of "Pippa Passes." The strains which Pippa sings
here and throughout are as pathetically fresh and free as a thrush's
song in the heart of a beleaguered city, and as with the same
unconsidered magic. There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling
tones, caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in
"_Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When--where----_"
No one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion, has
a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald
at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness,
behind which is the narrow twilit backward way.
"_Ottima_. Bind it thrice about my brow;
Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!
_Sebald_. I crown you
My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent..
[_From without is heard the voice of_ PIPPA _singing_--]
The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world! [PIPPA _passes_,
_Sebald_. God's in his heaven! Do you hear that?
Who spoke?"
This sweet voice of Pippa reaches the guilty lovers, reaches Luigi in
his tower, hesitating between love and patriotic duty, reaches Jules and
Phené when all the happiness of their unborn years trembles in the
balance, reaches the Prince of the Church just when his conscience is
sore beset by a seductive temptation, reaches one and all at a crucial
moment in the life of each. The ethical lesson of the whole poem is
summed up in
"All service ranks the same with God--
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first,"
and in
"God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!"
"With God there is no lust of Godhood," says Rossetti in "Hand and
Soul": _Und so ist der blaue Himmel grosser als jedes Gewölk darin, und
dauerhafter dazu_, meditates Jean Paul: "There can be nothing good, as
we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the
Omnipresent and the Omniscient," utters the Oriental mystic.
It is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were
indirectly due to the poet's solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and
"dewy eve," in the wooded districts south of Dulwich, at Hatcham, and
upon Wimbledon Common, whither he was often wont to wander and to
ramble for hours, and where he composed one day the well-known lines
upon Shelley, with many another unrecorded impulse of song. Here, too,
it was, that Carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by 'a beautiful
youth,' who introduced himself as one of the philosopher's profoundest
admirers.
It was from the Dulwich wood that, one afternoon in March, he saw a
storm glorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty; a memorable
vision, recorded in an utterance of Luigi to his mother: here too that,
in autumnal dusks, he saw many a crescent moon with "notched and burning
rim." He never forgot the bygone "sunsets and great stars" he saw in
those days of his fervid youth. Browning remarked once that the romance
of his life was in his own soul; and on another occasion I heard him
smilingly add, to some one's vague assertion that in Italy only was
there any romance left, "Ah, well, I should like to include poor old
Camberwell!" Perhaps he was thinking of his lines in "Pippa Passes," of
the days when that masterpiece came ebullient from the fount of his
genius--
"May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights--
Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"
There is all the distinction between "Pippa Passes" and "Sordello" that
there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx. The
latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry
of mere bulk is not the _symmetria prisca_ of ideal sculpture. I have
already alluded to "Sordello" as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry.
This, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning
suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped "I should do it
justice," thereby meaning that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece. It
is a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a
wrestling Titan. That the poem contains much which is beautiful is
undeniable, also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound
thoughts and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all
shape towards high thinking.
But it is monotonous as one of the enormous American inland seas to a
lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight.
The fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness, has,
coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, been Browning's
ruin here.
There is one charge even yet too frequently made against "Sordello,"
that of "obscurity." Its interest may be found remote, its treatment
verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those unaccustomed to excursions
from the familiar highways of old usage, but its motive thought is not
obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared with the "_silva oscura_" of the
"Divina Commedia."
Surely this question of Browning's obscurity was expelled to the Limbo
of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the
whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous incidental
passage in his "Essay on Chapman."
Too probably, in the dim disintegrating future which will reduce all our
o'ertoppling extremes, "Sordello" will be as little read as "The Faerie
Queene," and, similarly, only for the gleam of the quenchless lamps amid
its long deserted alleys and stately avenues. Sadly enough, for to poets
it will always be an unforgotten land--a continent with
amaranth-haunted Vales of Tempe, where, as Spenser says in one of the
Aeclogues of "The Shepherd's Calendar," they will there oftentimes
"sitten as drouned in dreme."
It has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own. I know of
no other poem in the language which is at once so wearisome and so
seductive. How can one explain paradoxes? There is a charm, or there is
none: that is what it amounts to, for each individual. _Tutti ga, i so
gusti, e mi go i mii_--"everybody follows his taste, and I follow mine,"
as the Venetian saying, quoted by Browning at the head of his Rawdon
Brown sonnet, has it.
All that need be known concerning the framework of "Sordello," and of
the real Sordello himself, will be found in the various Browning
hand-books, in Mr. Nettleship's and other dissertations, and,
particularly, in Mrs. Ball's most circumspect and able historical essay.
It is sufficient here to say that while the Sordello and Palma of the
poet are traceable in the Cunizza and the strange comet-like Sordello of
the Italian and Provençal Chronicles (who has his secure immortality, by
Dante set forth in leonine guise--_a guisa di leon quando si posa_--in
the "Purgatorio"), both these are the most shadowy of prototypes. The
Sordello of Browning is a typical poetic soul: the narrative of the
incidents in the development of this soul is adapted to the historical
setting furnished by the aforesaid Chronicles. Sordello is a far more
profound study than Aprile in "Paracelsus," in whom, however, he is
obviously foreshadowed. The radical flaw in his nature is that indicated
by Goethe of Heine, that "he had no heart." The poem is the narrative
of his transcendent aspirations, and more or less futile accomplishment.
It would be vain to attempt here any adequate excerption of lines of
singular beauty. Readers familiar with the poem will recall passage
after passage--among which there is probably none more widely known than
the grandiose sunset lines:--
"That autumn eve was stilled:
A last remains of sunset dimly burned
O'er the far forests,--like a torch-flame turned
By the wind back upon its bearer's hand
In one long flare of crimson; as a brand,
The woods beneath lay black." ...
What haunting lines there are, every here and there--such as those of
Palma, with her golden hair like spilt sunbeams, or those on Elys, with
her
"Few fine locks
Coloured like honey oozed from topmost rocks
Sun-blanched the livelong summer," ...
or these,
"Day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose----"
or, once more,
"A touch divine--
And the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod;
Visibly through his garden walketh God----"
But, though sorely tempted, I must not quote further, save only the
concluding lines of the unparalleled and impassioned address to Dante:--
"Dante, pacer of the shore
Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,
Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume,
Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope
Into a darkness quieted by hope;
Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye
In gracious twilights where his chosen lie----"
* * * * *
It is a fair land, for those who have lingered in its byways: but, alas,
a troubled tide of strange metres, of desperate rhythms, of wild
conjunctions, of panic-stricken collocations, oftentimes overwhelms it.
"Sordello" grew under the poet's fashioning till, like the magic vapour
of the Arabian wizard, it passed beyond his control, "voluminously
vast."
It is not the truest admirers of what is good in it who will refuse to
smile at the miseries of conscientious but baffled readers. Who can fail
to sympathise with Douglas Jerrold when, slowly convalescent from a
serious illness, he found among some new books sent him by a friend a
copy of "Sordello." Thomas Powell, writing in 1849, has chronicled the
episode. A few lines, he says, put Jerrold in a state of alarm. Sentence
after sentence brought no consecutive thought to his brain. At last the
idea occurred to him that in his illness his mental faculties had been
wrecked. The perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head
he sank back on the sofa, crying, "O God, I _am_ an idiot!" A little
later, adds Powell, when Jerrold's wife and sister entered, he thrust
"Sordello" into their hands, demanding what they thought of it. He
watched them intently while they read. When at last Mrs. Jerrold
remarked, "I don't understand what this man means; it is gibberish,"
her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed, "Thank God, I
am _not_ an idiot!"
Many friends of Browning will remember his recounting this incident
almost in these very words, and his enjoyment therein: though he would
never admit justification for such puzzlement.
But more illustrious personages than Douglas Jerrold were puzzled by the
poem. Lord Tennyson manfully tackled it, but he is reported to have
admitted in bitterness of spirit: "There were only two lines in it that
I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing
lines, '_Who will may hear Sordello's story told_,' and '_Who would
has heard Sordello's story told!_'" Carlyle was equally candid: "My
wife," he writes, "has read through 'Sordello' without being able to make
out whether 'Sordello' was a man, or a city, or a book."
In an article on this poem, in a French magazine, M. Odysse Barot quotes
a passage where the poet says "God gave man two faculties"--and adds, "I
wish while He was about it (_pendant qu'il était en train_) God had
supplied another--viz., the power of understanding Mr. Browning."
And who does not remember the sad experience of generous and delightful
Gilead P. Beck, in "The Golden Butterfly": how, after "Fifine at the
Fair," frightful symptoms set in, till in despair he took up "Red Cotton
Nightcap Country," and fell for hours into a dull comatose misery. "His
eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his
cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face
were twitching. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning. And
then he took all his volumes, and, disposing them carefully in the
fireplace, set light to them. 'I wish,' he said, 'that I could put the
poet there too.'" One other anecdote of the kind was often, with evident
humorous appreciation, recounted by the poet. On his introduction to the
Chinese Ambassador, as a "brother-poet," he asked that dignitary what
kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. The great man
deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as
"enigmatic." Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.
That he was himself aware of the shortcomings of "Sordello" as a work of
art is not disputable. In 1863, Mrs. Orr says, he considered the
advisability of "rewriting it in a more transparent manner, but
concluded that the labour would be disproportionate to the result, and
contented himself with summarising the contents of each 'book' in a
continuous heading, which represents the main thread of the story."
The essential manliness of Browning is evident in the famous dedication
to the French critic Milsand, who was among his early admirers. "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."
Whatever be the fate of "Sordello," one thing pertinent to it shall
survive: the memorable sentence in the dedicatory preface--"My stress
lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth
study."
The poem has disastrous faults, but is a magnificent failure. "Vast as
night," to borrow a simile from Victor Hugo, but, like night,
innumerously starred.