ENLARGING HORIZONS. _SORDELLO_.
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine hält in derber Liebeslust
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.
--_Faust_.
_Paracelsus_, though only a series of quasi-dramatic scenes, suggested
considerable undeveloped capacity for drama. From a career in which the
most sensational event was a dismissal from a professorship, and the
absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had elicited a tragedy of
the scientific intellect. But it was equally obvious that the writer's
talent was not purely dramatic; and that his most splendid and original
endowments required some other medium than drama for their full
unfolding. The author of _Paracelsus_ was primarily concerned with
character, and with action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both
points substantially with the author of _Hamlet_. But while Browning's
energetic temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in
action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at
all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he
had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than
those which exhibit it. The two impulses derived from temperament and
from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for
some years the joy in the stir and stress and many-sided life of drama
competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two
contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of _Men
and Women_. In 1835 the solution was not yet found, but the five years
which followed were to carry Browning, not without crises of perplexity
and hesitation, far on his way towards it. _Paracelsus_ was no sooner
completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal
of the soul-history of Sordello,--a study in which, with the dramatic
form, almost all the dramatic excellences of its predecessors are put
aside. But the poet was outgrowing the method; the work hung fire; and
we find him, before he had gone far with the perplexed record of that
"ineffectual angel," already "eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting
it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch."[6]
[Footnote 6: Preface to the first edition of _Strafford_ (subsequently
omitted).]
The open-eyed man of the world and of affairs in Browning was plainly
clamouring for more expression than he had yet found. An invitation from
the first actor of the day to write a tragedy for him was not likely,
under these circumstances, to be declined; and during the whole winter
of 1836-37 the story of Sordello remained untold, while its author
plunged, with a security and relish which no one who knew only his
poetry could have foretold, into the pragmatic politics and diplomatic
intrigues of _Strafford_. The performance of the play on May 1, 1837
introduced further distractions. And _Sordello_ had made little further
progress, when, in the April of the following year, Browning embarked on
a sudden but memorable trip to the South of Europe. It gave him his
first glimpse of Italy and of the Mediterranean, and plenty of the rough
homely intercourse with men which he loved. He travelled, in a fashion
that suited his purse and his hardy nature, by a merchant vessel from
London to the Adriatic. The food was uneatable, the horrors of dirt and
discomfort portentous; but he bore them cheerfully for the sake of one
advantage,--"the solitariness of the _one_ passenger among all those
rough new creatures, _I_ like it much, and soon get deep into their
friendship."[7] Grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his
ken.[8] Two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with
peculiar distinctness: the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he
watched the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St Vincent,--ghostly
mementos of England,--not as Arnold's weary Titan, but as a Herakles
stretching a hand of help across the seas; the other sunset on the
Mediterranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky;[9] and, between
them, that glaring noontide on the African shore, when the "solitary
passenger," weary of shipboard and sea sickness, longed for his good
horse York in the stable at home, and scribbled his ballad of brave
horses, _How they brought the Good News_, in a blank leaf of Bartoli's
_Simboli_. The voyage ended at Trieste; and thence he passed to Venice,
brooded among her ruined palaces over Sordello, and "English Eyebright"
and all the destiny and task of the poet; and so turned homeward,
through the mountains, gathering vivid glimpses as he went of "all my
places and castles,"[10] and laying by a memory, soon to germinate, of
"delicious Asolo," "palpably fire-clothed" in the glory of his young
imagination.
[Footnote 7: _R.B._ to _E.B.B._, i. 505.]
[Footnote 8: Cf. the long letter to Miss Haworth, Orr, _Life_, p. 96.]
[Footnote 9: Cf. _Sordello_, bk. iii., end.]
[Footnote 10: Ib., p. 99.]
Thus when, in 1840, _Sordello_ was at length complete, it bore the
traces of many influences and many moods. It reflected the expanding
ideals and the critical turning-points of four years of his life. In the
earlier books the brilliant yet self-centred poet of _Paracelsus_ is
still paramount, and even the "oddish boy" who had shyly evolved
_Pauline_ is not entirely effaced. But in the later books we recognise
without difficulty the man who has mixed with the larger world, has won
some fame in letters, has immersed himself in the stirring atmosphere of
a supreme national conflict, has seen Italy, and has, in the solitude
and detachment from his _milieu_ which foreign travel brings, girded up
his loins anew for a larger and more exacting poetic task. The tangled
political dissensions of the time are set before us with the baffling
allusiveness of the expert. The Italian landscape is painted, not with
richer imagination, for nothing in Browning exceeds some passages of the
earlier books, but with more depth of colouring, more precision of
contour and expression. And he has taken the "sad disheveled form,"
Humanity, for his bride, the mate of an art which will disdain no evil
and turn away from nothing common, in the service of man. Doubtless the
result was not all gain. The intermittent composition and the shifting
points of view add an element of real ambiguity and indecision to faults
of expression which mainly spring from the swiftness and discursiveness
of a brilliant and athletic intellect. The alleged "obscurity" of the
poem is in great part a real obscurity; the profiles are at times not
merely intricate, but blurred. But he had written nothing yet, and he
was to write little after, which surpasses the finest pages of
_Sordello_ in close-packed, if somewhat elusive, splendour; the soil, as
he wrote of Italy, is full of loose fertility, and gives out
intoxicating odours at every footfall. Moreover, he can now paint the
clash and commotion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, with
superb force--a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in
_Paracelsus_. Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus
from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this
visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and
vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see,
is an even more fascinating figure.
He is however less historical, in spite of the abstruse historic
background upon which he moves. Of the story of Paracelsus Browning
merely reinterpreted the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the
greater part of the Sordello story, as told confusedly and
inconsistently by Italian and Provençal tradition. The whole later
career of the Mantuan poet as an accomplished and not unsuccessful man
of the world, as the friend of Raymond of Toulouse and Charles of Anjou,
rewarded with ample estates by the latter for substantial services,--is
either rejected as myth, or purposely ignored. To all appearance, the
actual Sordello by no means lacked ability to "fit to the finite" such
"infinity" as he possessed. And if he had the chance, as is obscurely
hinted at the close, of becoming, like Dante, the "Apollo" of the
Italian people, he hardly missed it "through disbelief that anything was
to be done." But the outward shell of his career included some
circumstances which, had they befallen a Dante, might have deeply
moulded the history of Italy. His close relations with great Guelph and
Ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a
patriot of genius, which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained
unused. Yet Dante, a patriot of genius if ever there was one, had given
Sordello a position of extraordinary honour in the _Purgatory_, had
allowed him to illuminate the darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the
great poets towards the Gate. The contrast offered an undeniable
problem. But Dante had himself hinted the solution by placing Sordello
among those dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their sojourn
in the Ante-purgatory. To a mind preoccupied, like Browning's, with the
failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed. He imagined
his Sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts,
failed by some inner enervating paralysis[11] to make his spiritual
quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start
a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition
until he met the eye and lips of Dante. It is difficult not to suspect
the influence of another great poet. _Sordello_ has no nearer parallel
in literature than Goethe's _Tasso_, a picture of the eternal antagonism
between the poet and the world, for which Bordello's failure to "fit to
the finite his infinity" might have served as an apt motto. Browning has
nowhere to our knowledge mentioned _Tasso_; but he has left on record
his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama _Iphigenie_.[12]
[Footnote 11:
"Ah but to find
A certain mood enervate such a mind," &c.
--_Works_, i. 122.]
[Footnote 12: _To E.B.B._, July 7, 1846. He is "vexed" at Landor's
disparagement of the play, and quotes with approval Landor's earlier
declaration that "nothing so Hellenic had been written these two
thousand years."]
The elaboration of this conception is, however, entirely Browning's
own, and discloses at every point the individual quality of his mind.
Like _Faust_, like the Poet in the _Palace of Art_, Sordello bears the
stamp of an age in which the ideal of intellect, art, culture, and the
ideal of humanity, of social service, have both become potent
inspirations, often in apparent conflict, and continually demanding a
solution of their differences. Faust breaks away from the narrow
pedantries of the schools in order to heap upon his breast the weal and
woe of mankind, and to draw all their life and thought into the compass
of his mind. Tennyson's "glorious devil" (by a curious irony intended
for no other than Faust's creator) sets up his lordly pleasure-house
apart from the ways of men, until at last, confuted by experience, he
renounces his folly. _Sordello_ cannot claim the mature and classical
brilliance of the one, nor the limpid melodious beauty of the other; but
it approaches _Faust_ itself in its subtle soundings of the mysteries of
the intellectual life. It is a young poet's attempt to cope with the
problem of the poet's task and the poet's function, the relation of art
to life, and of life to art. Neither Goethe nor Tennyson thought more
loftily of the possibilities of poetic art. And neither insisted more
peremptorily--or rather assumed more unquestioningly--that it only
fulfils these possibilities when the poet labours in the service of man.
He is "earth's essential king," but his kingship rests upon his carrying
out the kingliest of mottoes--"Ich dien." Browning all his life had a
hearty contempt for the foppery of "Art for Art," and he never conveyed
it with more incisive brilliance than in the sketch of Bordello's
"opposite," the Troubadour Eglamor.
"How he loved that art!
The calling marking him a man apart
From men--one not to care, take counsel for
Cold hearts, comfortless faces, ... since verse, the gift
Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift
Without it."
To Eglamor his art is a mysterious ritual, of which he is the sacrosanct
priest, and his happy rhyme the divine response vouchsafed to him in
answer. Such beauty as he produces is no effluence from a soul mating
itself, like Wordsworth's, "in love and holy passion with the universe,"
but a cunning application of the approved recipes for effective writing
current in the literary guild;--
"He, no genius rare,
Transfiguring in fire or wave or air
At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up
In some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup,
His topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few
And their arrangement finds enough to do
For his best art."[13]
[Footnote 13: Works, i. 131.]
From these mysticisms and technicalities of Troubadour and all other
poetic guilds Browning decisively detaches his poet. Sordello is not a
votary of poetry; he does not "cultivate the Muse"; he does not even
prostrate himself before the beauty and wonder of the visible universe.
Poetry is the atmosphere in which he lives; and in the beauty without he
recognises the "dream come true" of a soul which (like that of Pauline's
lover) "existence" thus "cannot satiate, cannot surprise." "Laugh thou
at envious fate," adorers cry to this inspired Platonist,
"Who, from earth's simplest combination ...
Dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife
With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last,
Equal to being all."[14]
[Footnote 14: Works, i. 122.]
And, in truth, his power of imaginative apprehension has no bounds. From
the naïve self-reflection of his boyish dreams he passes on to visions
which embrace a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls
the sublime Dantesque conception of a poetry vast and deep as humanity,
where every soul will stand forth revealed in its naked truth. But he
cannot, like Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of
intelligible speech. His uncompromising "infinity" will not comply with
finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate
genius, a Hamlet of poetry.
In the second half of the poem the Hamlet of poetry becomes likewise a
Hamlet of politics. He aspires to serve the people otherwise than by
holding up to them the mirror of an all-revealing poetry. Though by
birth associated with the aristocratic and imperial Ghibellines, his
natural affinity is clearly with the Church, which in some sort stood
for the people against the nobles, and for spirit against brute force.
We see him, now, a frail, inspired Shelleyan[15] democrat, pleading the
Guelph cause before the great Ghibelline soldier Salinguerra,--as he had
once pitted the young might of native song against the accomplished
Troubadour Eglamor. Salinguerra is the foil of the political, as Eglamor
of the literary, Sordello, and the dramatic interest of the whole poem
focusses in those two scenes. He had enough of the lonely inspiration of
genius to vanquish the craftsman, but too little of its large humanity
to cope with the astute man of the world. When Salinguerra, naturally
declining his naïve entreaty that he should put his Ghibelline sword at
the service of the Guelph, offers Sordello, on his part, the command of
the imperial forces in Italy if he will remain true to the Ghibelline
cause, he makes this finite world more alluring than it had ever been
before to the "infinite" Sordello. After a long struggle, he renounces
the offer, and--dies, exhausted with the strain of choice.
[Footnote 15: There are other Shelleyan traits in _Sordello_--e.g., the
young witch image (as in _Pauline_) at the opening of the second book.]
What was Browning's judgment upon Sordello? Does he regard him as an
idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose
"failure" implied his triumph in another, where his "broken arc" would
become the "perfect round"? Assuredly not. That might indeed be his
destiny, but Browning makes it perfectly clear that he failed, not
because his ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in which he
lived, but because he lacked the supreme gift by which the greatest of
souls may find their function and create their sphere in the least
promising _milieu_,--a controlling and guiding passion of love. With
compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his wayward child, Browning
in the closing pages of the poem lays his finger on the ailing place.
"Ah, my Sordello, I this once befriend and speak for you." It was true
enough, in the past, that Soul, as belonging to Eternity, must needs
prove incomplete for Time. But is life to be therefore only a struggle
to escape from the shackles of the body? Is freedom only won by death?
No, rejoins the poet, and the reply comes from the heart of his poetry,
though at issue with much of his explicit doctrine; a harmony of soul
and body is possible here in which both fulfil their functions:
"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay,
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray
And star for star, one richness where they mixed,"
the Soul seeing its way in Time without being either dazzled by, or
losing, its vision of Eternity, having the saving clue of Love. Dante,
for whom Love was the pervading spirit of the universe, and the
beginning and end of his inspiration, wrought his vision of eternal
truth and his experience of the passing lives of men into such a harmony
with unexampled power; and the comparison, implicit in every page of
_Sordello_, is driven home with almost scornful bitterness on the
last:--
"What he should have been,
Could be, and was not--the one step too mean
For him to take--we suffer at this day
Because of: Ecelin had pushed away
Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take
That step Sordello spurned, for the world's sake.
... A sorry farce
Such life is, after all!"
The publication of _Sordello_ in 1840 closes the first phase of
Browning's literary career. By the great majority of those who had
hailed the splendid promise of _Paracelsus_, the author of _Sordello_
was frankly given up. Surprisingly few thought it worth while to wrestle
with the difficult book. It was the day of the gentle literary public
which had a few years before recoiled from _Sartor Resartus_, and which
found in the difficulty of a book the strongest presumption against it.
A later generation, leavened by Carlyle, came near to regarding
difficulty as a presumption in its favour, and this more strenuous and
athletic attitude towards literature was among the favouring conditions
which brought Browning at length into vogue.