Sordello is alone--face to face with his memory, with his conscience,
and, as we presently find out, with the greatest temptation he has ever
known. The moon is slowly rising; and just so the light of truth is
overflowing his past life, and laying bare its every recess. He sees no
fault in this past, except the want of a uniform purpose in which its
various moods could have coalesced, the all-embracing sense of existence
been translated into fact; but he unconsciously confesses its
selfishness, in deciding that this purpose should have been outside
him--a remote and uplifting, though sympathetic influence, such as the
moon is to the sea. Smaller lives than his have attained a higher
completeness, because they have worked for an ideal: because they have
had their moon.
"Where then is _his_ moon? What the love, the fear, the motive, in
short, that could match the strength, could sway the full tide, of a
nature like his?" He doubts its existence. And if, after all, he has
been destined to be a law to himself, must he not in some sense apply
this relative standard to the rest of life; and may not the outward
motive be at all times the embodiment of an inner want or law, which
only the stronger nature can realize as such? He has found his purpose.
That purpose is the people. "But the people is himself. The desire to
help it comes from within. Will he fulfil this the better for regarding
its suffering part as an outward motive, as something alien to himself,
and for which Self must be forsaken?" In plain words: would he not serve
it as well by serving his own interests as by forsaking them?
This sophistry is so patent that it startles even him; but it is only
silenced to reassert itself in another form. "The Guelph rule would
doubtless be the best. But what can he do to promote it? Attest his
belief by refusing the Emperor's badge? That would be something in the
end. But meanwhile, how many sympathies to be broken, how many aversions
defied, before the one ideal can be made to prevail. Is not the
proceeding too arbitrary? Would it be justified by the result? The
question is only one of ideas. If the men who supported each opposite
cause were wholly good or bad, his course would be clear. But such
divisions do not exist. All men are composite. All nature is a blending
of good and evil, in which the one is often but a different form of the
other. Evil is in fact indispensable; for it is not only the ground of
sympathy, but the active principle of life. Joy means the triumph over
obstruction. The suspended effort is death, so far as it goes.
Obstruction and effort must begin again and again. The sphere grows
larger. It can never be more complete (more satisfying to those who are
imprisoned within it). The only gain of existence is to be extracted
from its hindrances, by each individual and for himself." The last plea
for self-sacrifice is thus removed.
These arguments are often just, even profound; they might also have been
sincere in this special case; for there was something to be said in
favour of accepting the opportunities which offered themselves, and of
guiding the course of events, instead of engaging in a probably
fruitless opposition to it. But they are not sincere. Sordello is at
best deceiving himself, and Mr. Browning intends us to to see this. He
is struggling, if unconsciously, to evade the very trials which he
thinks so good for other men. His true object soon stands revealed in a
first and last effort at compromise. "The people's good is in the
future. His is in the present. Can he not speed the one, and yet enjoy
the other?" ... The present rises up, in its new-found richness, in its
undisguised temptation. The joys which lure him become gigantic; the
price of renunciation shrinks to nothing; and at last, the pent up
passion breaks forth--that passion for life, for sheer life, which
inspired his imagination as a boy, which nerved his ambition as a man;
to which his late-found humanities have given voice and shape; which now
gathers itself to a supreme utterance in the grasp of death. "The
earthly existence now: the transcendent hereafter, if Fate will. A man's
opportunities--a man's powers--a man's self-consciousness of joy and
conflict--these things he craves while he may yet possess them."
Then a sudden revulsion. "He would drink the very dregs of life! How
many have sacrificed it whilst its cup was full, because a better still
seemed behind it."
"... the death I fly, revealed
So oft a better life this life concealed,
And which sage, champion, martyr, through each path
Have hunted fearlessly--...."
(vol. i. p. 272.)
"But they had a belief which he has not. They knew what 'masters life.'
For him the paramount fact is that of his own being...."
This is the last protest of the flesh within him. Sordello is dying, and
probably feels that he is so; and he lapses into a calm contemplation,
which reveals to him the last secret of his mistaken career. He already
knew that he had ignored the bodily to the detriment of his spiritual
existence. He now feels that he has destroyed his body by forcing on it
the exigencies of the spirit. He has striven to obtain infinite
consciousness, infinite enjoyment, from finite powers. He has broken the
law of life. He has missed (so we interpret Mr. Browning's conclusion)
the ideal of that divine and human Love which would have given the
freest range to his spirit and yet accepted that law. Eglamor began with
love. Will Sordello find it, meeting that gentle spirit on his course?
We know at least that the soul in him has conquered. His stamp upon the
floor has brought Palma and Salinguerra to him in anxious haste. They
find him dead:
"Under his foot the badge: still, Palma said,
A triumph lingering in the wide eyes,
Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies
Help from above in his extreme despair,...."
(vol. i. p. 279.)
Sordello is buried at Goito Castle, in an old font-tomb in which his
mother lies, and beside whose sculptured female forms the child-poet had
dreamed his earliest dreams of life and of love. Salinguerra makes
peace with the Guelphs, marries a daughter of Eccelino the monk, and
effaces himself once for all in the Romano house, leaving its sons
Eccelino and Alberic to plague the world at their pleasure, and meet the
fate they have deserved. He himself, after varied fortunes, dwindles
into a "showy, turbulent soldier," less "astute" than people profess to
think: whose qualities even foes admire; and whose aggressions they
punish, but do not much resent. We see him for the last time at the age
of eighty, a nominal prisoner in Venice.
The drama is played out. Its actors have vanished from the stage. One
only lives on in Mr. Browning's fancy, in the pathos of his modest
hopes, and acknowledged, yet scarcely comprehended failure--more human,
and therefore more undying than Naddo himself: the poet Eglamor.
Sordello he recalls only to dismiss him with less sympathy than we
should expect: as ending the ambition for what he could not become, by
the well-meant renunciation of what he was born to be; made a hero of by
legends which credited him with doing what his conscience had forbidden
him to do; leaving the world to suffer by his self-sacrifice; a type of
failure more rare and more brilliant than that of Eglamor, yet more full
of the irony of life.
In one sense, however, he had lived for a _better thing_, and we are
bidden look back, through the feverish years, on a bare-footed rosy
child running "higher and higher" up a wintry hillside still crisp with
the morning frost,
"... singing all the while
Some unintelligible words to beat
The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet,
So worsted is he...." (vol. i. p. 288-9)
The poet in him had failed with the man, but less completely.