Sordello buries himself once more in the contemplation of nature; but
finds in it only a short-lived peace. The marshy country about Mantua is
suddenly converted into water; and with the shock of this catastrophe
comes also the feeling: Nature can do and undo; her opportunities are
endless. With man
"...youth once gone is gone:
Deeds let escape are never to be done." (vol. i. p. 135.)
He has dreamed of love, of revel, and of adventure; but he has let pass
the time when such dreams could be realized; and worst of all, the
sacrifice has been useless. He has sacrificed the man in him to the
poet; and his poetic existence has been impoverished by the act. He has
rejected experience that he might _be_ his fullest self before living
it; and only _living_, in other words, experience, could have made that
self complete. His later years have been paving the way for this
discovery; it bursts on him all at once. He has been under a long
strain. The reaction at length has come. He yearns helplessly for the
"blisses strong and soft" which he has known he was passing by, but of
which the full meaning never reached him until now. He must live yet.
The question is, "in what way." And this is unexpectedly answered. Palma
sends for him to Verona: tells him of her step-mother's death--of
strange secrets revealed to herself--of the secret influence Sordello
has exercised over her life--of a great future awaiting his own, and
connecting it with the Emperor's cause. She summons him to accompany her
to Ferrara, and hear from Salinguerra's lips what that future is to be.
Sordello has entered on a new phase of existence. He feels that
henceforward he is not to _act men_, but to _make them act_;
this is how his being is to be fulfilled. It is a first step in the
direction of unselfishness, but not yet into it. The soul is not yet
awake.
At this point of his narrative Mr. Browning makes a halt, and carries us
off to Venice, where he muses on the various questions involved in
Sordello's story. The very act of digression leads back to the
comparison between Eglamor and Sordello: between the artist who is one
with his work, and him who is outside and beyond it--between the
completeness of execution which comes of a limited ideal, and the true
greatness of those performances which "can never be more than dreamed."
And the case of the true poet is farther illustrated by that of the
weather-bound sailor, who seems to have settled down for life with the
fruits of his adventures, but waits only the faintest sign of a
favourable wind to cut his moorings and be off.
Then comes a vision of humanity, also in harmony with the purpose of the
poem. It takes the form of some frail and suffering woman, and is
addressed by the author with a tenderness in which we recognize one of
his constant ideals of love: the impulse not to worship or to enjoy, but
to comfort and to protect. He next considers the problem of human sorrow
and sin, and deprecates the absolute condemnation of the sinner, in
language which anticipates that of "Fifine at the Fair." "Every life has
its own law. The 'losel,' the moral outcast, keeps his own conceit of
truth though through a maze of lies. Good labours to exist through evil,
by means of the very ignorance which sets each man to tackle it for
himself, believing that he alone can."[16] Mr. Browning rejects at least
the _show_ of knowledge which gives you a name for what you die of;
and that deepening of ignorance which comes of the perpetual insisting
that fountains of knowledge spring everywhere for those who choose to
dispense it. "What science teaches is made useless by the shortness of
human existence; it absorbs all our energy in building up a machine
which we shall have no time to work. All direct truth comes to us from
the poet: whether he be of the smaller kind who only see, or the
greater, who can tell what they have seen, or the greatest who can make
others see it." Corresponding instances follow.[17]
Mr. Browning is aware that one is a poet at his own risk; and that the
poetic chaplet may also prove a sacrificial one. He will still wear it,
however, because in his case it means the suffrage of a "patron
friend"[18]
"Whose great verse blares unintermittent on
Like your own trumpeter at Marathon,--" (vol. i. p. 169.)
He recalls his readers to the "business" of the poem:
"the fate of such
As find our common nature--overmuch
Despised because restricted and unfit
To bear the burthen they impose on it--
Cling when they would discard it; craving strength
To leap from the allotted world, at length
They do leap,--flounder on without a term,
Each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ
In unexpanded infancy, unless...." (pp. 170, 171.)
admits that the story sounds dull; but suggests the possibility of its
containing an agreeable surprise. An amusing anecdote to this effect
concludes the chapter.[19]