know the historical basis and probable accuracy of Browning's play. The
whole interest is centred in the character of Strafford; it is a
personal interest, and attaches itself to the personal character or the
hero. The leading motive is Strafford's devotion to his king, and the
note of tragic discord arises from the ingratitude and faithlessness of
Charles set over against the blind fidelity of his minister. The
antagonism of law and despotism, of Pym and Strafford, is, perhaps, less
clearly and forcibly brought out: though essential to the plot, it wears
to our sight a somewhat secondary aspect. Strafford himself appears not
so much a superb and unbending figure, a political power, as a man whose
service of Charles is due wholly to an intense personal affection, and
not at all to his national sympathies, which seem, indeed, rather on the
opposite side. He loves the man, not the king, and his love is a freak
of the affections. That it is against his better reason he recognises,
but the recognition fails to influence his heart or his conduct. This is
finely expressed in the following lines, spoken by Lady Carlisle:--
"Could you but know what 'tis to bear, my friend,
One image stamped within you, turning blank
The else imperial brilliance of your mind,--
A weakness, but most precious,--like a flaw
I' the diamond, which should shape forth some sweet face
Yet to create, and meanwhile treasured there
Lest nature lose her gracious thought for ever'"
Browning has rarely drawn a more pathetic figure. Every circumstance
that could contribute to this effect is skilfully seized and emphasised:
Charles's incredibly selfish weakness, the implacable sternness of Pym,
the _triste_ prattle of Strafford's children and their interrupted
joyous song in the final scene, all serve to heighten our feeling of
affectionate pity and regret. The imaginary former friendship between
Pym and Strafford adds still more to the pathos of the delineation, and
gives rise to some of the finest speeches, notably the last great
colloquy between these two, which so effectively rounds and ends the
play. The fatal figure of Pym is impressive and admirable throughout,
and the portrait of the Countess of Carlisle, Browning's second portrait
of a woman, is a noble and singularly original one. Her unrecognised and
undeterred devotion to Strafford is finely and tenderly pathetic; it has
the sorrowful dignity of faithful service, rewarded only in serving.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 13: See _Robert Browning: Personalia_, by Edmund Gosse
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890).]
4. SORDELLO.
[Published in 1840 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. I., pp.
47-289).]
_Sordello_ is generally spoken of as being the most obscure and the
least attractive of Browning's poems; it has even been called "the most
illegible production of any time or country." Hard, very hard, it
undoubtedly is; but undoubtedly it is far from unattractive to the
serious student of poetry, who will find in it something of the
fascination of an Alpine peak: not to be gained without an effort,
treacherous and slippery, painfully dazzling to weak eyes, but for all
that irresistibly fascinating. _Sordello_ contains enough poetic
material for a dozen considerable poems; indeed, its very fault lies in
its plethora of ideas, the breathless crowd of hurrying thoughts and
fancies, which fill and overflow it. That this is not properly to be
called "obscurity" has been triumphantly shown by Mr. Swinburne in his
essay on George Chapman. Some of his admirable statements I have already
quoted, but we may bear to be told twice that Browning is too much the
reverse of obscure, that he is only too brilliant and subtle, that he
never thinks but at full speed. But besides this characteristic, which
is common to all his work, there are one or two special reasons which
have made this particular poem more difficult than others. The
condensation of style which had marked Browning's previous work, and
which has marked his later, was here (in consequence of an unfortunate
and most unnecessary dread of verbosity, induced by a rash and foolish
criticism) accentuated not infrequently into dislocation. The very
unfamiliar historical events of the story[14] are introduced, too, in a
parenthetic and allusive way, not a little embarrassing to the reader.
But it is also evident that the difficulties of a gigantic conception
were not completely conquered by the writer's genius, not then fully
matured; that lack of entire mastery over the material has frequently
caused the two interests of the poem, the psychological and the
historical, to clash; the background to intrude on and confuse the
middle distance, if not even the foreground itself. Every one of these
faults is the outcome of a merit: altogether they betray a growing
nature of extraordinary power, largeness and richness, not as yet to be
bound or contained within any limits or in any bonds.
_Sordello_ is a psychological epic. But to call it this only would be to
do it somewhat less than justice. There is in the poem a union of
breathless eagerness with brooding suspense, which has an almost
unaccountable fascination for those who once come under its charm, and
nowhere in Browning's work are there so many pictures, so vivid in
aspect, so sharp in outline, so rich in colour. At their best they are
sudden, a flash of revelation, as in this autumnal Goito:--
"'Twas the marsh
Gone of a sudden. Mincio, in its place,
Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face,
And, where the mists broke up immense and white
I' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light,
Out of the crashing of a myriad stars."
Verona, by torchfire, seen from a window, is shown with the same quick
flare out of darkness:--
"Then arose the two
And leaned into Verona's air, dead-still.
A balcony lay black beneath until
Out, 'mid a gush of torchfire, grey-haired men
Came on it and harangued the people: then
Sea-like that people surging to and fro
Shouted."
Only Carlyle, in the most vivid moments of his _French Revolution_, has
struck such flashes out of darkness. And there are other splendours and
rarities, not only in the evocation of actual scenes and things, but in
mere similes, like this, in which the quality of imagination is of a
curiously subtle and unusual kind:--
"As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot
Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black
Enormous watercourse which guides him back
To his own tribe again, where he is king:
And laughs because he guesses, numbering
The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch
Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips
To cure his nostril with, and festered lips,
And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast)
That he has reached its boundary, at last
May breathe;--thinks o'er enchantments of the South
Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,
Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried
In fancy, puts them soberly aside
For truth, projects a cool return with friends,
The likelihood of winning mere amends
Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently,
Then, from the river's brink, his wrongs and he,
Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon
Off-striding for the Mountains of the Moon."
And, while much of the finest poetry is contained in picturesque
passages such as these, we find verse of another order, thrilling as the
trumpet's "golden cry," in the passionate invocation of Dante,
enshrining the magnificently Dantesque characterization of the three
divisions of the _Divina Commedia_.
"For he--for he,
Gate-vein of this hearts' blood of Lombardy,
(If I should falter now)--for he is thine!
Sordello, thy forerunner, Florentine!
A herald-star I know thou didst absorb
Relentless into the consummate orb
That scared it from its right to roll along
A sempiternal path with dance and song
Fulfilling its allotted period,
Serenest of the progeny of God--
Who yet resigns it not! His darling stoops
With no quenched lights, desponds with no blank troops
Of disenfranchised brilliances, for, blent
Utterly with thee, its shy element
Like thine upburneth prosperous and clear.
Still, what if I approach the august sphere
Named now with only one name, disentwine
That under-current soft and argentine
From its fierce mate in the majestic mass
Leavened as the sea whose fire was mixt with glass
In John's transcendent vision,--launch once more
That lustre? 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,
I would do this! If I should falter now!"
Browning has himself told us that his stress lay on the "incidents in
the development of a soul." The portrait of Sordello is one of the most
elaborate and complete which he has given us. It is painted with more
accessory detail and on a larger canvas than any other single figure.
Like _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, with which it has points of affinity,
the poem is a study of ambition and of egoism; of a soul "whose
ambition," as it has been rightly said, "is in extravagant disproportion
to its physical powers and means, and whose temptation is at every
crisis to seek pleasure in the picture of willing and doing rather than
in willing and doing itself." Sordello's youth is fed upon fancy: he
imagines himself Apollo, this or that hero of the time; in dreams he is
and does to the height of his aspirations. But from any actual doing he
shrinks; at the approach or the call of action, his will refuses to act.
We might sum up his character in a general sense by saying that his
imagination overpowers every other faculty; an imagination intensely
personal, a sort of intellectual egoism, which removes him equally from
action and from sympathy. He looks on men as foils to himself, or as a
background on which to shine. But the root of his failure is this, and
it is one which could never be even apprehended by a vulgar egoism: he
longs to grasp the whole of life at once, to realise his aims in their
entirety, without complying with the necessary conditions. His mind
perceives the infinite and essential so clearly that it scorns or spurns
the mere accidents. But earth being earth, and life growth, and
accidents an inevitable part of life, the rule remains that man, to
attain, must climb step by step, and not expect to fly at once to the
top of the ladder. Finding that he cannot do everything, Sordello sees
no alternative but to do nothing. Consequently his state comes to be a
virtual indolence or inactivity; though it is in reality that of the
top, spinning so fast that its motion is imperceptible. Poet and man of
action, for he contains more than the germ of both, confound and break
down one another. He meets finally with a great temptation, conquers it,
but dies of the effort. For the world his life has been a failure, for
himself not absolutely so, since, before his eyes were closed, he was
permitted to see the truth and to recognise it. But in all his aims, in
all his ambitions, he has failed; and the world has gained nothing from
them or from him but the warning of his example.
This Sordello of Browning seems to have little identity with the brief
and splendid Sordello of Dante, the figure that fronts us in the superb
sixth canto of the _Purgatoria_, "a guisa di leon quando si posa." The
records of the real Sordello are scant, fragmentary and contradictory.
No coherent outline of his personality remains, so that the character
which Browning has made for him is a creation as absolute as if it had
been wholly invented. The name indeed of Sordello, embalmed in Dante's
verse, is still fresh to our ears after the "ravage of six long sad
hundred years," and it is Dante, too, who in his _De Vulgari
Eloquentia_, has further signalised him by honourable record. Sordello,
he says, excelled in all kinds of composition, and by his experiments in
the dialects of Cremona, Brescia and Verona, cities near Mantua, helped
to form the Tuscan tongue. But besides the brief record of Dante, there
are certain accounts of Sordello's life, very confused and conflicting,
in the early Italian Chronicles and the Provençal lives of the
Troubadours. Tiraboschi sifts these legends, leaving very little of
them. According to him, Sordello was a Mantuan of noble family, born at
Goito at the close of the twelfth century. He was a poet and warrior,
though not, as some reports profess, captain-general or governor of
Mantua. He eloped with Cunizza, the wife of Count Richard of St.
Boniface; at some period of his life he went into Provence; and he died
a violent death, about the middle of the thirteenth century. The works
attributed to him are poems in Tuscan and Provençal, a didactic poem in
Latin named _Thesaurus Thesaurorum_ (now in the Ambrosiana in Milan), an
essay in Provençal on "The Progress and Power of the Kings of Aragon in
the Comté of Provence," a treatise on "The Defence of Walled Towns," and
some historial translations from Latin into the vulgar tongue. Of all
these works only the _Thesaurus_ and some thirty-four poems in
Provençal, _sirventes_ and _tensens_, survive: some of the finest of
them are satires.[15]
The statement that Sordello was specially famed for his philosophical
verses, though not confirmed by what remains of his poetry, is
interesting and significant in connection with Browning's conception of
his character. There is little however in the scanty tales we have of
the historic Sordello to suggest the "feverish poet" of the poem. The
fugitive personality of the half mythical fighting poet eludes the
grasp, and Browning has rather given the name of Sordello to an imagined
type of the poetic character than constructed a type of character to fit
the name. Still less are the dubious attributes with which the bare
facts of history or legend invest Cunizza (whom, none the less, Dante
spoke with in heaven) recognisable in the exquisite and all-golden
loveliness of Palma.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 14: "Mr. Browning prepared himself for writing _Sordello_,"
says Mrs. Orr, "by studying all the chronicles of that period of Italian
history which the British Museum contained; and we may be sure that
every event he alludes to as historical, is so in spirit, if not in the
letter; while such details as come under the head of historical
curiosities are absolutely true. He also supplemented his reading by a
visit to the places in which the scenes of the story are
laid."--_Handbook_, p. 31.]
[Footnote 15: Of all these matters, and of all else that is known of
Sordello, a good and sympathetic account will be found in Mr. Eugene
Benson's little book on _Sordello and Cunizza_ (Dent, 1903).]
5. PIPPA PASSES.
[Published in 1841 as No. I of _Bells and Pomegranates_
(_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. III., pp. 1-79).]
_Pippa Passes_ is Browning's most perfect work, and here, more perhaps
than in anything he ever wrote, he wrote to please himself. As a whole,
he has never written anything to equal it in artistic symmetry; while a
single scene, that between Ottima and Sebald, reaches the highest level
of tragic utterance which he has ever attained. The plan of the work, in
which there are elements of the play and elements of the masque, is a
wholly original one: a series of scenes, connected only by the passing
through them of a single person, who is outside their action, and whose
influence on that action is unconscious. "Mr Browning," says Mrs.
Sutherland Orr in the _Handbook_, "was walking alone in a wood near
Dulwich, when the image flashed upon him 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."[16] It is this motive that makes unity in
variety, linking together a sequence of otherwise independent scenes.
The poem is the story of Pippa's New Year's Day holiday, her one holiday
in the year. She resolves to fancy herself to be in turn the four
happiest people in Asolo, and, to realise her fancy as much as she can,
she spends her day in wandering about the town, passing, in the morning,
the shrub-house up the hillside, where Ottima and her lover Sebald have
met; at noon, the house of Jules, over Orcana; in the evening, the
turret on the hill above Asolo, where are Luigi and his mother; and at
night, the palace by the Duomo, now tenanted by Monsignor the Bishop.
These, whom she imagines to be the happiest people in the town, have
all, in reality, arrived at crises of tremendous and tragic importance
to themselves, and, in one instance, to her. Each stands at the
turning-point of a life: Ottima and Sebald, unrepentant, with a crime
behind them; Jules and Phene, two souls brought strangely face to face
by a fate which may prove their salvation or their perdition; Luigi,
irresolute, with a purpose to be performed; Monsignor, undecided, before
a great temptation. Pippa passes, singing, at the moment when these
souls' tragedies seem tending to a fatal end, at the moment when the
baser nature seems about to triumph over the better. Something in the
song, "like any flash that cures the blind," strikes them with a sudden
light; each decides, suddenly; each, according to the terms of his own
nature, is saved. And Pippa passes, unconscious of the influence she has
exerted, as they are but half-aware of the agency of what they take as
an immediate word from God. Each of these four scenes is in dialogue,
the first three in blank verse, the last in prose. Between each is an
interlude, in prose or verse, representing the "talk by the way," of
art-students, Austrian police, and poor girls, all bearing on some part
of the action. Pippa's prologue and epilogue, like her songs, are in
varied lyric verse. The blank verse throughout is the most vivid and
dignified, the most coloured and yet restrained, that Browning ever
wrote; and he never wrote anything better for singing than some of
Pippa's songs.
Of the four principal scenes, by far the greatest is the first, that
between Ottima and her paramour, the German Sebald, on the morning after
the murder of old Luca Gaddi, the woman's husband. It is difficult to
convey in words any notion of its supreme excellence of tragic truth: to
match it we must revert to almost the very finest Elizabethan work. The
representation of Ottima and Sebald, the Italian and the German, is a
singularly acute study of the Italian and German races. Sebald, in a
sudden access of brutal rage, has killed the old doting husband, but his
conscience, too feeble to stay his hand before, is awake to torture him
after the deed. But Ottima is steadfast in evil, with the Italian
conscienceless resoluteness. She can no more feel either fear or remorse
than Clytæmnestra. The scene between Jules, the French sculptor, and his
bride Phene, and that between Luigi, the light-headed Italian patriot,
and his mother, are less great indeed, less tragic and intense and
overpowering, than this crowning episode; but they are scarcely less
fine and finished in a somewhat slighter style. Both are full of colour
and music, of insight into nature and into art, and of superb lines and
passages, such as this, which is spoken by Luigi:--
"God must be glad one loves his world so much.
I can give news of earth to all the dead
Who ask me:--last year's sunsets, and great stars
That had a right to come first and see ebb
The crimson wave that drifts the sun away--
Those crescent moons with notched and burning rims
That strengthened into sharp fire, and there stood,
Impatient of the azure--and that day
In March, a double rainbow stopped the storm--
May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights--
Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"
But in neither is there any single passage of such incomparable quality
as the thunderstorm in the first scene, a storm not to be matched in
English poetry:--
"Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned through the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger through 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."
The vivid colloquial scenes in prose have much of that pungent
semi-satirical humour of which Browning had shown the first glimpse in
_Sordello_. Besides these, there is one intermediate scene in verse, the
talk of the "poor girls" on the Duomo steps, which seems to me one of
the most pathetic things ever written by the most pathetic of
contemporary poets. It is this scene that contains the exquisite song,
"You'll love me yet."
"You'll love me yet!--and I can tarry
Your love's protracted growing:
June reared that bunch of flowers you carry,
From seeds of April's sowing.
I plant a heartful now: some seed
At least is sure to strike,
And yield--what you'll not pluck indeed,
Not love, but, may be, like.
You'll look at least on love's remains,
A grave's one violet:
Your look?--that pays a thousand pains.
What's death? You'll love me yet!"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 16: _Handbook_, p. 54.]
6. KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES: A Tragedy.
[Published in 1842 as No. II. of _Bells and Pomegranates_,
although written some years earlier (_Poetical Works_, 1889,
Vol. III., pp. 81-165).]
_King Victor and King Charles_ is an historical tragedy, dealing with
the last episode in the career of Victor II., first King of Sardinia.
Browning says in his preface:
"So far as I know, this tragedy is the first artistic
consequence of what Voltaire termed 'a terrible event without
consequences;' and although it professes to be historical, I
have taken more pains to arrive at the history than most
readers would thank me for particularising: since acquainted,
as I will hope them to be, with the chief circumstances of
Victor's remarkable European career--nor quite ignorant of
the sad and surprising facts I am about to reproduce (a
tolerable account of which is to be found, for instance, in
Abbé Roman's _Récit_, or even the fifth of Lord Orrery's
_Letters from Italy_)--I cannot expect them to be versed, nor
desirous of becoming so, in all the details of the memoirs,
correspondence, and relations of the time.... When I say,
therefore, that I cannot but believe my statement (combining
as it does what appears correct in Voltaire and plausible in
Condorcet) more true to person and thing than any it has
hitherto been my fortune to meet with, no doubt my word will
be taken, and my evidence spared as readily."
The episode recorded in the play is the abdication of Victor in favour
of his son Charles, and his subsequent attempt to return to the throne.
The only point in which Browning has departed from history is that the
very effective death on the stage replaces the old king's real death in
captivity a year later. As a piece of literature, this is the least
interesting and valuable of Browning's plays, the thinnest in structure,
the dryest in substance.