_BROWNING AND SORDELLO_
There are certain analogies between Browning as a poet and the Sordello
of the poem; between his relation to the world of his time and that of
Sordello to his time; and finally, between Browning's language in this
poem and the change in the Italian language which he imputes to the work
of Sordello. This chapter will discuss these analogies, and close with
an appreciation of Browning's position between the classic and romantic
schools of poetry.
The analogies of which I write may be denied, but I do not think they
can be disproved. Browning is, no doubt, separate from Sordello in his
own mind, but underneath the young poet he is creating, he is
continually asking himself the same question which Sordello asks--What
shall I do as an artist? To what conclusion shall I come with regard to
my life as a poet? It is no small proof of this underlying personal
element in the first three books of the poem that at the end of the
third book Browning flings himself suddenly out of the mediæval world
and the men he has created, and waking into 1835-40 at Venice, asks
himself--What am I writing, and why? What is my aim in being a poet? Is
it worth my while to go on with Sordello's story, and why is it worth
the telling? In fact, he allows us to think that he has been describing
in Sordello's story a transitory phase of his own career. And then,
having done this, he tells how he got out of confusion into clearer
light.
The analogy between Browning's and Sordello's time is not a weak one.
The spirit of the world, between 1830 and 1840 in England, resembled in
many ways the spirit abroad at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
The country had awakened out of a long sleep, and was extraordinarily
curious not only with regard to life and the best way to live it, but
also with regard to government, law, the condition of the people, the
best kind of religion and how best to live it, the true aims of poetry
and how it was to be written, what subjects it should work on, what was
to be the mother-motive of it, that is, what was the mother-motive of
all the arts. And this curiosity deepened from year to year for fifty
years. But even stronger than the curiosity was the eager individualism
of this time, which extended into every sphere of human thought and
action, and only began about 1866 to be balanced by an equally strong
tendency towards collectivism.
These two elements in the time-spirit did not produce, in a settled
state like England, the outward war and confusion they produced in the
thirteenth century, though they developed after 1840, in '48, into a
European storm--but they did produce a confused welter of mingled
thoughts concerning the sources and ends of human life, the action it
should take, and why it should take it. The poetry of Arnold and Clough
represents with great clearness the further development in the soul of
man of this confusion. I think that Browning has represented in the
first three books of _Sordello_ his passage through this tossing sea of
thought.
He had put into _Paracelsus_ all that he had worked out with clearness
during his youth; his theory of life is stated with lucidity in that
poem. But when it was finished, and he had entered, like Sordello from
Goito into Mantua, into the crowd and clash of the world; when, having
published _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, he had, like Sordello, met
criticism and misunderstanding, his Paracelsian theory did not seem to
explain humanity as clearly as he imagined. It was only a theory; Would
it stand the test of life among mankind, be a saving and healing
prophecy? Life lay before him, now that the silent philosophising of
poetic youth was over, in all its inexplicable, hurried, tormented,
involved, and multitudinously varied movement. He had built up a
transcendental building[9] in _Paracelsus_. Was it all to fall in ruin?
No answer came when he looked forth on humanity over whose landscape the
irony of the gods, a bitter mist, seemed to brood. At what then shall he
aim as a poet? What shall be his subject-matter? How is life to be
lived?
Then he thought that he would, as a poet, describe his own time and his
own soul under the character of Sordello, and place Sordello in a time
more stormy than his own. And he would make Sordello of an exceptional
temper like himself, and to clash with _his_ time as he was then
clashing with his own. With these thoughts he wrote the first books of
_Sordello_, and Naddo, the critic of Sordello's verses, represents the
critics of Paracelsus and the early poems. I have experienced, he says
of himself in _Sordello_, something of the spite of fate.
Then, having done this, he leaves Sordello at the end of the third book,
and turns, beset with a thousand questions, to himself and his art in a
personal digression. Reclining on a ruined palace-step at Venice, he
thinks of Eglamor who made a flawless song, the type of those who reach
their own perfection here; and then of Sordello who made a song which
stirred the world far more than Eglamor's, which yet was not flawless,
not perfect; but because of its imperfection looked forward uncontented
to a higher song. Shall he, Browning the poet, choose Eglamor or
Sordello; even though Sordello perish without any achievement? And he
chooses to sail for ever towards the infinite, chooses the imperfection
which looks forward. A sailor who loves voyaging may say, when
weather-bound, "Here rest, unlade the ship, sleep on this grassy bank."
'Tis but a moment on his path; let the wind change, and he is away
again, whether triumph or shipwreck await him, for ever
The tempter of the everlasting steppe.
That much is then settled for life and for poetry. And in that choice of
endless aspiration Browning confirms all that he thought, with regard to
half of his theory of life, in _Paracelsus_. This is his first thought
for life, and it is embodied in the whole of Sordello's career.
Sordello is never content with earth, either when he is young, or when
he passes into the world, or when he dies not having attained or been
already perfect--a thought which is as much at the root of romanticism
as of Christianity. Then comes the further question: To whom shall I
dedicate the service of my art? Who shall be my motive, the Queen whom I
shall love and write of; and he thinks of Sordello who asks that
question and who, for the time, answers "Palma," that is, the passion of
love.
"But now, shall I, Browning, take as my Queen"--and he symbolises his
thought in the girls he sees in the boats from his palace steps--"that
girl from Bassano, or from Asolo, or her from Padua; that is, shall I
write of youth's love, of its tragic or its comedy, of its darkness, joy
and beauty only? No, he answers, not of that stuff shall I make my work,
but of that sad dishevelled ghost of a girl, half in rags, with eyes
inveterately full of tears; of wild, worn, care-bitten, ravishing,
piteous, and pitiful Humanity, who begs of me and offers me her faded
love in the street corners. She shall be my Queen, the subject of my
song, the motive of my poetry. She may be guilty, warped awry from her
birth, and now a tired harlotry; but she shall rest on my shoulder and I
shall comfort her. She is false, mistaken, degraded, ignorant, but she
moves blindly from evil to good, and from lies to truth, and from
ignorance to knowledge, and from all to love; and all her errors prove
that she has another world in which, the errors being worked through,
she will develop into perfectness. Slowly she moves, step by step; but
not a millionth part is here done of what she will do at last. That is
the matter of my poetry, which, in its infinite change and hopes, I
shall express in my work. I shall see it, say what I have seen, and it
may be
Impart the gift of seeing to the rest.
Therefore I have made Sordello, thus far, with all his weakness and
wrong--
moulded, made anew
A Man, and give him to be turned and tried,
Be angry with or pleased at."
And then Browning severs himself from Sordello. After this retirement of
thought into himself, described as taking place in Venice during an
hour, but I dare say ranging over half a year in reality, he tells the
rest of Sordello's story from the outside, as a spectator and describer.
Browning has now resolved to dedicate his art, which is his life, to
love of Humanity, of that pale dishevelled girl, unlovely and lovely,
evil and good; and to tell the story of individual men and women, and of
as many as possible; to paint the good which is always mixed with their
evil; to show that their failures and sins point to a success and
goodness beyond, because they emerged from aspiration and aspiration
from the divinity at the root of human nature. But to do this, a poet
must not live like Sordello, in abstractions, nor shrink from the shock
of men and circumstance, nor refuse to take men and life as they
are--but throw himself into the vital present, with its difficulties,
baffling elements and limitations; take its failures for his own; go
through them while he looks beyond them, and, because he looks beyond
them, never lose hope, or retreat from life, or cease to fight his way
onward. And, to support him in this, there is but one thing--infinite
love, pity, and sympathy for mankind, increased, not lessened by
knowledge of the sins and weakness, the failure and despairs of men.
This is Browning's second thought for life. But this is the very thing
Sordello, as conceived by Browning, did not and could not do. He lived
in abstractions and in himself; he tried to discard his human nature, or
to make it bear more than it could bear. He threw overboard the natural
physical life of the body because it limited, he thought, the outgoings
of the imaginative soul, and only found that in weakening the body he
enfeebled the soul. At every point he resented the limits of human life
and fought against them. Neither would he live in the world allotted to
him, nor among the men of his time, nor in its turmoil; but only in
imagination of his own inner world, among men whom he created for
himself, of which world he was to be sole king. He had no love for men;
they wearied, jarred, and disturbed his ideal world. All he wanted was
their applause or their silence, not their criticism, not their
affection. And of course human love and sympathy for men and insight
into them, departed from him, and with them his art departed. He never
became a true poet.
It is this failure, passing through several phases of life in which
action is demanded of Sordello, that Browning desired to record in the
last three books of the poem. And he thinks it worth doing because it is
human, and the record of what is human is always of worth to man. He
paints Sordello's passage through phase after phase of thought and act
in the outside world, in all of which he seems for the moment to succeed
or to touch the verge of success, but in which his neglect of the needs
of the body and the uncontentment of his soul produce failure. At last,
at the very moment of death he knows why he failed, and sees, as through
a glass darkly, the failure making the success of the world to come. The
revelation bursts his heart.
And now what is the end, what is the result for man of this long
striving of Sordello? Nothing! Nothing has been done. Yet no, there is
one result. The imperfect song he made when he was young at Goito, in
the flush of happiness, when he forgot himself in love of nature and of
the young folk who wandered rejoicing through the loveliness of
nature--that song is still alive, not in the great world among the noble
women and warriors of the time, but on the lips of the peasant girls of
Asolo who sing it on dewy mornings when they climb the castle hill. This
is the outcome of Sordello's life, and it sounds like irony on
Browning's lips. It is not so; the irony is elsewhere in the poem, and
is of another kind. Here, the conclusion is,--that the poem, or any work
of art, made in joy, in sympathy with human life, moved by the love of
loveliness in man or in nature, lives and lasts in beauty, heals and
makes happy the world. And it has its divine origin in the artist's loss
of himself in humanity, and his finding of himself, through union with
humanity, in union with God the eternal poet. In this is hidden the life
of an artist's greatness. And here the little song, which gives joy to
a child, and fits in with and enhances its joy, is greater in the eyes
of the immortal judges than all the glory of the world which Sordello
sought so long for himself alone. It is a truth Browning never failed to
record, the greatness and power of the things of love; for, indeed, love
being infinite and omnipotent, gives to its smallest expression the
glory of all its qualities.
The second of these analogies between Browning and Sordello relates to
Browning's treatment of the English language in the poem of _Sordello_
and what he pictures Sordello as doing for the Italian language in the
poem. The passage to which I refer is about half-way in the second book.
As there is no real ground for representing Sordello as working any
serious change in the Italian tongue of literature except a slight
phrase in a treatise of Dante's, the representation is manifestly an
invention of Browning's added to the character of Sordello as conceived
by himself. As such it probably comes out of, and belongs to, his own
experience. The Sordello who acts thus with language represents the
action of Browning himself at the time he was writing the poem. If so,
the passage is full of interest.
All we know about Sordello as a poet is that he wrote some Italian
poems. Those by which he was famous were in Provençal. In Dante's
treatise on the use of his native tongue, he suggests that Sordello was
one of the pioneers of literary Italian. So, at least, Browning seems to
infer from the passage, for he makes it the motive of his little
"excursus" on Sordello's presumed effort to strike out a new form and
method in poetic language. Nothing was more needed than such an effort
if any fine literature were to arise in Italy. In this unformed but
slowly forming thirteenth century the language was in as great a
confusion--and, I may say, as individual (for each poet wrote in his own
dialect) as the life of the century.
What does Browning make Sordello do? He has brought him to Mantua as the
accepted master of song; and Sordello burns to be fully recognised as
the absolute poet. He has felt for some time that while he cannot act
well he can imagine action well. And he sings his imaginations. But
there is at the root of his singing a love of the applause of the people
more than a love of song for itself. And he fails to please. So Sordello
changes his subject and sings no longer of himself in the action of the
heroes he imagines, but of abstract ideas, philosophic dreams and
problems. The very critics cried that he had left human nature behind
him. Vexed at his failure, and still longing to catch the praise of men,
that he may confirm his belief that he is the loftiest of poets, he
makes another effort to amaze the world. "I'll write no more of
imaginary things," he cries; "I will catch the crowd by reorganising the
language of poetry, by new arrangements of metre and words, by elaborate
phraseology, especially by careful concentration of thought into the
briefest possible frame of words. I will take the stuff of thought--that
is, the common language--beat it on the anvil into new shapes, break
down the easy flow of the popular poetry, and scarcely allow a tithe of
the original words I have written to see the light,
welding words into the crude
Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude
Armour was hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it."
That is, he dissolved the Roman dialect to beat out of it an Italian
tongue. And in this new armour of language he clothed his thoughts. But
the language broke away from his thoughts: neither expressed them nor
made them clear. The people failed to understand his thought, and at the
new ways of using language the critics sneered. "Do get back," they
said, "to the simple human heart, and tell its tales in the simple
language of the people."
I do not think that the analogy can be missed. Browning is really
describing--with, perhaps, a half-scornful reference to his own desire
for public appreciation--what he tried to do in _Sordello_ for the
language in which his poetry was to be written. I have said that when he
came to write _Sordello_ his mind had fallen back from the clear theory
of life laid down in _Paracelsus_ into a tumbled sea of troubled
thoughts; and _Sordello_ is a welter of thoughts tossing up and down,
now appearing, then disappearing, and then appearing again in
conjunction with new matter, like objects in a sea above which a cyclone
is blowing. Or we may say that his mind, before and during the writing
of _Sordello_, was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in
vital disturbance towards an unknown goal. That partly accounts for the
confused recklessness of the language of the poem. But a great many of
the tricks Browning now played with his poetic language were
deliberately done. He had tried--like Sordello at the Court of Love--a
love-poem in _Pauline_. It had not succeeded. He had tried in
_Paracelsus_ to expose an abstract theory of life, as Sordello had tried
writing on abstract imaginings. That also had failed. Now he
determined--as he represents Sordello doing--to alter his whole way of
writing. "I will concentrate now," he thought, "since they say I am too
loose and too diffuse; cut away nine-tenths of all I write, and leave
out every word I can possibly omit. I will not express completely what I
think; I shall only suggest it by an illustration. And if anything occur
to me likely to illuminate it, I shall not add it afterwards but insert
it in a parenthesis. I will make a new tongue for my poetry." And the
result was the style and the strange manner in which _Sordello_ was
written. This partly excuses its obscurity, if deliberation can be an
excuse for a bad manner in literature. Malice prepense does not excuse a
murder, though it makes it more interesting. Finally, the manner in
which _Sordello_ was written did not please him. He left it behind him,
and _Pippa Passes_, which followed _Sordello_, is as clear and simple as
its predecessor is obscure in style.
Thirdly, the language of _Sordello_, and, in a lesser degree, that of
all Browning's poetry, proves--if his whole way of thought and passion
did not also prove it--that Browning was not a classic, that he
deliberately put aside the classic traditions in poetry. In this he
presents a strong contrast to Tennyson. Tennyson was possessed by those
traditions. His masters were Homer, Vergil, Milton and the rest of those
who wrote with measure, purity, and temperance; and from whose poetry
proceeded a spirit of order, of tranquillity, of clearness, of
simplicity; who were reticent in ornament, in illustration, and stern in
rejection of unnecessary material. None of these classic excellences
belong to Browning, nor did he ever try to gain them, and that was,
perhaps, a pity. But, after all, it would have been of no use had he
tried for them. We cannot impose from without on ourselves that which we
have not within; and Browning was, in spirit, a pure romantic, not a
classic. Tennyson never allowed what romanticism he possessed to have
its full swing. It always wore the classic dress, submitted itself to
the classic traditions, used the classic forms. In the _Idylls of the
King_ he took a romantic story; but nothing could be more unromantic
than many of the inventions and the characters; than the temper, the
morality, and the conduct of the poem. The Arthurian poets, Malory
himself, would have jumped out their skin with amazement, even with
indignation, had they read it. And a great deal of this oddity, this
unfitness of the matter to the manner, arose from the romantic story
being expressed in poetry written in accordance with classic traditions.
Of course, there were other sources for these inharmonies in the poem,
but that was one, and not the least of them.
Browning had none of these classic traditions. He had his own matter,
quite new stuff it was; and he made his own manner. He did not go back
to the old stories, but, being filled with the romantic spirit, embodied
it in new forms, and drenched with it his subjects, whether he took
them from ancient, mediæval, Renaissance, or modern life. He felt, and
truly, that it is of the essence of romanticism to be always arising
into new shapes, assimilating itself, century by century, to the needs,
the thought and the passions of growing mankind; progressive, a lover of
change; in steady opposition to that dull conservatism the tendency to
which besets the classic literature.
Browning had the natural faults of the romantic poet; and these are most
remarkable when such a poet is young. The faults are the opposites of
the classic poet's excellences: want of measure, want of proportion,
want of clearness and simplicity, want of temperance, want of that
selective power which knows what to leave out or when to stop. And these
frequently become positive and end in actual disorder of composition,
huddling of the matters treated of into ill-digested masses, violence in
effects and phrase, bewildering obscurity, sought-out even desperate
strangeness of subject and expression, uncompromising individuality,
crude ornament, and fierce colour. Many examples of these faults are to
be found in _Sordello_ and throughout the work of Browning. They are the
extremes into which the Romantic is frequently hurried.
But, then, Browning has the natural gifts and excellences of the
romantic poet, and these elements make him dearer than the mere Classic
to a multitude of imaginative persons. One of them is endless and
impassioned curiosity, for ever unsatisfied, always finding new worlds
of thought and feeling into which to make dangerous and thrilling
voyages of discovery--voyages that are filled from end to end with
incessantly changing adventure, or delight in that adventure. This
enchants the world. And it is not only in his subjects that the romantic
poet shows his curiosity. He is just as curious of new methods of
tragedy, of lyric work, of every mode of poetry; of new ways of
expressing old thoughts; new ways of treating old metres; of the
invention of new metres and new ways of phrasing; of strange and
startling word-combinations, to clothe fittingly the strange and
startling things discovered in human nature, in one's own soul, or in
the souls of others. In ancient days such a temper produced the many
tales of invention which filled the romantic cycles.
Again and again, from century to century, this romantic spirit has done
its re-creating work in the development of poetry in France, Germany,
Italy, Spain, and England. And in 1840, and for many years afterwards,
it produced in Browning, and for our pleasure, his dramatic lyrics as he
called them; his psychological studies, which I may well call
excursions, adventures, battles, pursuits, retreats, discoveries of the
soul; for in the soul of man lay, for Browning, the forest of
Broceliande, the wild country of Morgan le Fay, the cliffs and moors of
Lyonnesse. It was there, over that unfooted country, that Childe Roland
rode to the Dark Tower. Nor can anything be more in the temper of old
spiritual romance--though with a strangely modern _mise-en-scène_--than
the great adventure on the dark common with Christ in _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_.
Another root of the romantic spirit was the sense of, and naturally the
belief in, a world not to be felt of the senses or analysed by the
understanding; which was within the apparent world as its substance or
soul, or beyond it as the power by which it existed; and this mystic
belief took, among poets, philosophers, theologians, warriors and the
common people, a thousand forms, ranging from full-schemed philosophies
to the wildest superstitions. It tended, in its extremes, to make this
world a shadow, a dream; and our life only a real life when it
habitually dwelt in the mystic region mortal eye could not see, whose
voices mortal ear could not receive. Out of this root, which shot its
first fibres into the soul of humanity in the days of the earliest
savage and separated him by an unfathomable gulf from the brute, arose
all the myths and legends and mystic stories which fill romance. Out of
it developed the unquenchable thirst of those of the romantic temper for
communion with the spiritual beings of this mystic world; a thirst
which, however repressed for a time, always arises again; and is even
now arising among the poets of to-day.
In Browning's view of the natural world some traces of this element of
the romantic spirit may be distinguished, but in his poetry of Man it
scarcely appears. Nor, indeed, is he ever the true mystic. He had too
much of the sense which handles daily life; he saw the facts of life too
clearly, to fall into the vaguer regions of mysticism. But one part of
its region, and of the romantic spirit, so incessantly recurs in
Browning that it may be said to underlie the whole of his work. It is
that into which the thoughts and passions of the romantic poets in all
ages ran up, as into a goal--the conception of a perfect world, beyond
this visible, in which the noble hopes, loves and work of
humanity--baffled, limited, and ruined here--should be fulfilled and
satisfied. The Greeks did not frame this conception as a people, though
Plato outreached towards it; the Romans had it not, though Vergil seems
to have touched it in hours of inspiration. The Teutonic folk did not
possess it till Christianity invaded them. Of course, it was alive like
a beating heart in Christianity, that most romantic of all religions.
But the Celtic peoples did conceive it before Christianity and with a
surprising fulness, and wherever they went through Europe they pushed it
into the thought, passions and action of human life. And out of this
conception, which among the Irish took form as the Land of Eternal
Youth, love and joy, where human trouble ceased, grew that element in
romance which is perhaps the strongest in it--the hunger for eternity,
for infinite perfection of being, and, naturally, for unremitting
pursuit of it; and among Christian folk for a life here which should fit
them for perfect life to come. Christian romance threw itself with
fervour into that ideal, and the pursuit, for example, of the Holy Grail
is only one of the forms of this hunger for eternity and perfection.
Browning possessed this element of romance with remarkable fulness, and
expressed it with undiminished ardour for sixty years of poetic work.
From _Pauline_ to _Asolando_ it reigns supreme. It is the
fountain-source of _Sordello_--by the pervasiveness of which the poem
consists. Immortal life in God's perfection! Into that cry the
Romantic's hunger for eternity had developed in the soul of Browning.
His heroes, in drama and lyric, in _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_, pass
into the infinite, there to be completed.
And if I may here introduce a kind of note, it is at this moment that we
ought to take up the _Purgatorio_, and see Sordello as Dante saw him in
that flowery valley of the Ante-Purgatory when he talked with Dante and
Vergil. He is there a very different person from the wavering creature
Browning drew. He is on the way to that perfect fulfilment in God which
Browning desired for him and all mankind.
Nevertheless, in order to complete this statement, Browning, in his full
idea of life, was not altogether a romantic. He saw there was a great
danger that the romantic mysticism might lead its pursuers to neglect
the duties of life, or lessen their interest in the drama of mankind.
Therefore he added to his cry for eternity and perfection, his other
cry: "Recognise your limitations, and work within them, while you must
never be content with them. Give yourself in love and patience to the
present labour of mankind; but never imagine for a moment that it ends
on earth." He thus combined with the thirst of the romantic for eternity
the full ethical theory of life, as well as the classic poet's
determination to represent the complete aspect of human life on earth.
At this point, but with many fantastic deviations due to his prevailing
romanticism, he was partly of the classic temper. The poem of _Sordello_
is not without an image of this temper, set vigorously in contrast with
Sordello himself. This is Salinguerra, who takes the world as it is, and
is only anxious to do what lies before him day by day. His long
soliloquy, in which for the moment he indulges in dreams, ends in the
simple resolution to fight on, hour by hour, as circumstances call on
him.
Browning's position, then, is a combination of the romantic and
classical, of the Christian and ethical, of the imaginative and
scientific views of human life; of the temper which says, "Here only is
our life, here only our concern," and that which says, "Not here, but
hereafter is our life." "Here, and hereafter," answered Browning. "Live
within earth's limits with all your force; never give in, fight on; but
always transcend your fullest action in aspiration, faith and love."
It amuses me sometimes the way he is taken by his readers. The romantic
and the Christian folk often claim him as the despiser of this world, as
one who bids us live wholly for the future, or in the mystic ranges of
thought and passion. The scientific, humanitarian, and ethical folk
accept that side of him which agrees with their views of human
life--views which exclude God, immortality, and a world beyond--that
is, they take as the whole of Browning the lesser part of his theory of
life. This is not creditable to their understanding, though it is
natural enough. We may accept it as an innocent example of the power of
a strong bias in human nature. But it is well to remember that the
romantic, Christian, mystic elements of human life are more important in
Browning's eyes than the ethical or scientific; that the latter are
nothing to him without the former; that the best efforts of the latter
for humanity are in his belief not only hopeless, but the stuff that
dreams are made of, without the former. In the combination of both is
Browning's message to mankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] He makes a simile of this in _Sordello_. See Book iii. before his
waking up in Venice, the lines beginning
"Rather say
My transcendental platan!"
* * * * *