Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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On another side of the art of painting, Rossetti, Millais, Hunt arose;
and they said, "We will paint men as they actually were in the past, in
the moments of their passion, and with their emotions on their faces,
and with the scenery around them as it was; and whatever background of
nature there was behind them, it shall be painted direct from the very
work of nature herself, and in her very colours. In doing this our range
will become infinite. No doubt we shall fail. We cannot grasp the whole
of nature and humanity, but we shall be _in_ their life: aspiring,
alive, and winning more and more of truth." And the world of art howled
at them, as the world of criticism howled at Wordsworth. But a new life
and joy began to move in painting. Its winter was over, its spring had
begun, its summer was imagined. Their drawing was faulty; their colour
was called crude; they seemed to know little or nothing of composition;
but the Spirit of Life was in them, and their faults were worth more
than the best successes of the school that followed Rafael; for their
faults proved that passion, aspiration and originality were again alive:

Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory
For daring so much, before they well did it.

If ever the artist should say to himself, "What I desire has been
attained: I can but imitate or follow it"; or if the people who care for
any art should think, "The best has been reached; let us be content to
rest in that perfection"; the death of art has come.

The next poem belonging to this subject is the second part of _Pippa
Passes_. What concerns us here is that Jules, the French artist, loves
Phene; and on his return from his marriage pours out his soul to her
concerning his art.

In his work, in his pursuit of beauty through his aspiration to the old
Greek ideal, he has found his full content--his heaven upon earth. But
now, living love of a woman has stolen in. How can he now, he asks,
pursue that old ideal when he has the real? how carve Tydeus, with her
about the room? He is disturbed, thrilled, uncontent A new ideal rises.
How can he now

Bid each conception stand while, trait by trait,
My hand transfers its lineaments to stone?
Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth--
The live truth, passing and repassing me,
Sitting beside me?

Before he had seen her, all the varied stuff of Nature, every material
in her workshop, tended to one form of beauty, to the human archetype.
But now she, Phene, represents the archetype; and though Browning does
not express this, we feel that if Jules continue in that opinion, his
art will die. Then, carried away by his enthusiasm for his art, he
passes, through a statement that nature suggests in all her doings man
and his life and his beauty--a statement Browning himself makes in
_Paracelsus_--to a description of the capabilities of various stuffs in
nature under the sculptor's hand, and especially of marble as having in
it the capabilities of all the other stuffs and also something more a
living spirit in itself which aids the sculptor and even does some of
his work.

This is a subtle thought peculiarly characteristic of Browning's
thinking about painting, music, poetry, or sculpture. I believe he felt,
and if he did not, it is still true, that the vehicle of any art brought
something out of itself into the work of the artist. Abt Vogler feels
this as he plays on the instrument he made. Any musician who plays on
two instruments knows that the distinct instrument does distinct work,
and loves each instrument for its own spirit; because each makes his
art, expressed in it, different from his art expressed in another. Even
the same art-creation is different in two instruments: the vehicle does
its own part of the work. Any painter will say the same, according as he
works in fresco or on canvas, in water-colour or in oil. Even a material
like charcoal makes him work the same conception in a different way. I
will quote the passage; it goes to the root of the matter; and whenever
I read it, I seem to hear a well-known sculptor as he talked one night
to me of the spiritual way in which marble, so soft and yet so firm,
answered like living material to his tool, sending flame into it, and
then seemed, as with a voice, to welcome the emotion which, flowing from
him through the chisel, passed into the stone.

But of the stuffs one can be master of,
How I divined their capabilities!
From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk
That yields your outline to the air's embrace,
Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom:
Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure
To cut its one confided thought clean out
Of all the world. But marble!--'neath my tools
More pliable than jelly--as it were
Some clear primordial creature dug from depths
In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself.
And whence all baser substance may be worked;
Refine it off to air, you may--condense it
Down to the diamond;--is not metal there,
When o'er the sudden speck my chisel trips?
--Not flesh, as flake off flake I scale, approach,
Lay bare those bluish veins of blood asleep?
Lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised
By the swift implement sent home at once,
Flushes and glowings radiate and hover
About its track?

But Jules finds that Phene, whom he has been deceived into believing an
intelligence equal to his own, does not understand one word he has said,
is nothing but an uneducated girl; and his dream of perfection in the
marriage of Art and Love vanishes away, and with the deception the aims
and hopes of his art as it has been. And Browning makes this happen of
set purpose, in order that, having lost satisfaction in his art-ideal,
and then his satisfaction in that ideal realised in a woman--having
failed in Art and Love--he may pass on into a higher aim, with a higher
conception, both of art and love, and make a new world, in the woman and
in the art. He is about to accept the failure, to take only to revenge
on his deceivers, when Pippa sings as she is passing, and the song
touches him into finer issues of thought. He sees that Phene's soul is,
like a butterfly, half-loosed from its chrysalis, and ready for flight.
The sight and song awake a truer love, for as yet he has loved Phene
only through his art. Now he is impassioned with pity for a human soul,
and his first new sculpture will be the creation of her soul.

Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff
Be Art--and further, to evoke a soul
From form be nothing? This new soul is mine!

At last, he is borne into self-forgetfulness by love, and finds a man's
salvation. And in that loss of self he drinks of the deep fountain of
art. Aprile found that out. Sordello dies as he discovers it, and Jules,
the moment he has touched its waters with his lip, sees a new realm of
art arise, and loves it with such joy that he knows he will have power
to dwell in its heart, and create from its joy.

One may do whate'er one likes
In Art; the only thing is, to make sure
That one does like it--which takes pains to know.

He breaks all his models up. They are paltry, dead things belonging to a
dead past. "I begin," he cries, "art afresh, in a fresh world,

Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas."

The ideal that fails means the birth of a new ideal. The very centre of
Browning as an artist is there:

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake!

Sordello is another example of his theory, of a different type from
Aprile, or that poet in _Pauline_ who gave Browning the sketch from
which Sordello was conceived. But Browning, who, as I have said,
repeated his theory, never repeated his examples: and Sordello is not
only clearly varied from Aprile and the person in _Pauline_, but the
variations themselves are inventively varied. The complex temperament of
Sordello incessantly alters its form, not only as he grows from youth to
manhood, but as circumstances meet him. They give him a shock, as a
slight blow does to a kaleidoscope, and the whole pattern of his mind
changes. But as with the bits of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, the
elements of Bordello's mind remain the same. It is only towards the end
of his career, on the forcible introduction into his life of new
elements from the outward world, that his character radically changes,
and his soul is born. He wins that which he has been without from the
beginning. He wins, as we should say, a heart. He not only begins to
love Palma otherwise than in his dreams, but with that love the love of
man arises--for, in characters like Sordello, personal love, once really
stirred, is sure to expand beyond itself--and then, following on the
love of man, conscience is quickened into life, and for the first time
recognises itself and its duties. In this new light of love and
conscience, directed towards humanity, he looks back on his life as an
artist, or rather, Browning means us to do so; and we understand that he
has done nothing worthy in his art; and that even his gift of
imagination has been without the fire of true passion. His aspirations,
his phantasies, his songs, done only for his own sake, have been cold,
and left the world cold.

He has aspired to a life in the realm of pure imagination, to winning by
imagination alone all knowledge and all love, and the power over men
which flows from these. He is, in this aspiration, Paracelsus and Aprile
in one. But he has neither the sincerity of Paracelsus nor the passion
of Aprile. He lives in himself alone, beyond the world of experience,
and only not conscious of those barriers which limit our life on which
Browning dwells so much, because he does not bring his aspirations or
his imaginative work to the test by shaping them outside of himself. He
fails, that is, to create anything which will please or endure; fails in
the first aim, the first duty of an artist. He comes again and again to
the verge of creating something which may give delight to men, but only
once succeeds, when by chance, in a moment of excited impulse, caused
partly by his own vanity, and partly by the waves of humanity at Palma's
_Court of Love_ beating on his soul, he breaks for a passing hour into
the song which conquers Eglamor. When, at the end, he does try to shape
himself without for the sake of men he is too late for this life. He
dies of the long struggle, of the revelation of his failure and the
reasons of it, of the supreme light which falls on his wasted life; and
yet not wasted, since even in death he has found his soul and all it
means. His imagination, formerly only intellectual, has become emotional
as well; he loves mankind, and sacrifices fame, power, and knowledge to
its welfare. He no longer thinks to avoid, by living only in himself,
the baffling limitations which inevitably trouble human life; but now
desires, working within these limits, to fix his eyes on the ineffable
Love; failing but making every failure a ladder on which to climb to
higher things. This--the true way of life--he finds out as he dies. To
have that spirit, and to work in it, is the very life of art. To pass
for ever out of and beyond one's self is to the artist the lesson of
Bordello's story.

It is hardly learnt. The self in Sordello, the self of imagination
unwarned by love of men, is driven out of the artist with strange
miseries, battles and despairs, and these Browning describes with such
inventiveness that at the last one is inclined to say, with all the
pitiful irony of Christ, "This kind goeth not forth but with prayer and
fasting."

The position in the poem is at root the same as that in Tennyson's
_Palace of Art_. These two poets found, about the same time, the same
idea, and, independently, shaped it into poems. Tennyson put it into the
form of a vision, the defect of which was that it was too far removed
from common experience. Browning put it into the story of a man's life.
Tennyson expressed it with extraordinary clearness, simplicity, and with
a wealth of lovely ornament, so rich that it somewhat overwhelmed the
main lines of his conception. Browning expressed it with extraordinary
complexity, subtlety, and obscurity of diction. But when we take the
trouble of getting to the bottom of _Sordello_, we find ourselves where
we do not find ourselves in _The Palace of Art_--we find ourselves in
close touch and friendship with a man, living with him, sympathising
with him, pitying him, blessing him, angry and delighted with him,
amazingly interested in his labyrinthine way of thinking and feeling; we
follow with keen interest his education, we see a soul in progress; we
wonder what he will do next, what strange turn we shall come to in his
mind, what new effort he will make to realise himself; and, loving him
right through from his childhood to his death, we are quite satisfied
when he dies. At the back of this, and complicating it still more--but,
when we arrive at seeing it clearly, increasing the interest of the
poem--is a great to-and-fro of humanity at a time when humanity was
alive and keen and full of attempting; when men were savagely original,
when life was lived to its last drop, and when a new world was dawning.
Of all this outside humanity there is not a trace in Tennyson, and
Browning could not have got on without it. Of course, it made his poetry
difficult. We cannot get excellences without their attendant defects. We
have a great deal to forgive in _Sordello_. But for the sake of the
vivid humanity we forgive it all.

Sordello begins as a boy, living alone in a castle near Mantua, built in
a gorge of the low hills, and the description of the scenery of the
castle, without and within, is one example of the fine ornament of which
_Sordello_ is so full. There, this rich and fertile nature lives, fit to
receive delight at every sense, fit to shape what is received into
imaginative pictures within, but not without; content with the
contemplation of his own imaginings. At first it is Nature from whom
Sordello receives impressions, and he amuses himself with the fancies he
draws from her. But he never shapes his emotion into actual song. Then
tired of Nature, he dreams himself into the skin and soul of all the
great men of whom he has read. He becomes them in himself, as Pauline's
lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality--for
he knows nothing of men--and the last projection of himself into Apollo,
the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal of them all: at which fantasy all
the woods and streams and sunshine round Goito are infinitely amused.
Thus, when he wants sympathy, he does not go down to Mantua and make
song for the crowd of men; he invents in dreams a host of sympathisers,
all of whom are but himself in other forms. Even when he aims at
perfection, and, making himself Apollo, longs for a Daphne to double his
life, his soul is still such stuff as dreams are made of, till he wakes
one morning to ask himself: "When will this dream be truth?"

This is the artist's temperament in youth when he is not possessed of
the greater qualities of genius--his imaginative visions, his
aspirations, his pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment, his
sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination, the absence from it of
the spiritual, nothing in him which as yet desires, through the sorrow
and strife of life, God's infinitude, or man's love; a natural life
indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered with happy self-love, good
to pass through and enjoy, but better to leave behind. But Sordello will
not become the actual artist till he lose his self-involvement and find
his soul, not only in love of his Daphne but in love of man. And the
first thing he will have to do is that which Sordello does not care to
do--to embody before men in order to give them pleasure or impulse, to
console or exalt them, some of the imaginations he has enjoyed within
himself. Nor can Sordello's imagination reach true passion, for it
ignores that which chiefly makes the artist; union with the passions of
mankind. Only when near to death does he outgrow the boy of Goito, and
then we find that he has ceased to be the artist. Thus, the poem is the
history of the failure of a man with an artistic temperament to be an
artist. Or rather, that is part of the story of the poem, and, as
Browning was an artist himself, a part which is of the greatest
interest.

Sordello, at the close of the first book, is wearied of dreams. Even in
his solitude, the limits of life begin to oppress him. Time fleets, fate
is tardy, life will be over before he lives. Then an accident helps
him--

Which breaking on Sordello's mixed content
Opened, like any flash that cures the blind,
The veritable business of mankind.

This accident is the theme of the second book. It belongs to the subject
of this chapter, for it contrasts two types of the artist, Eglamor and
Sordello, and it introduces Naddo, the critic, with a good knowledge of
poetry, with a great deal of common sense, with an inevitable sliding
into the opinion that what society has stamped must be good--a mixed
personage, and a sketch done with Browning's humorous and pitying skill.

The contrast between Eglamor and Sordello runs through the whole poem.
Sordello recalls Eglamor at the last, and Naddo appears again and again
to give the worldly as well as the common-sense solution of the problems
which Sordello makes for himself. Eglamor is the poet who has no genius,
whom one touch of genius burns into nothing, but who, having a charming
talent, employs it well; and who is so far the artist that what he feels
he is able to shape gracefully, and to please mankind therewith; who,
moreover loves, enjoys, and is wholly possessed with what he shapes in
song. This is good; but then he is quite satisfied with what he does; he
has no aspiration, and all the infinitude of beauty is lost to him. And
when Sordello takes up his incomplete song, finishes it, inspires,
expands what Eglamor thought perfect, he sees at last that he has only a
graceful talent, that he has lived in a vain show, like a gnome in a
cell of the rock of gold. Genius, momentarily realising itself in
Sordello, reveals itself to Eglamor with all its infinities; Heaven and
Earth and the universe open on Eglamor, and the revelation of what he
is, and of the perfection beyond, kills him. That is a fine, true, and
piteous sketch.

But Sordello, who is the man of possible genius, is not much better off.
There has been one outbreak into reality at Palma's _Court of Love_.
Every one, afterwards, urges him to sing. The critics gather round him.
He makes poems, he becomes the accepted poet of Northern Italy. But he
cannot give continuous delight to the world. His poems are not like his
song before Palma. They have no true passion, being woven like a
spider's web out of his own inside. His case then is more pitiable, his
failure more complete, than Eglamor's. Eglamor could shape something; he
had his own enjoyment, and he gave pleasure to men. Sordello, lured
incessantly towards abstract ideals, lost in their contemplation, is
smitten, like Aprile, into helplessness by the multitudinousness of the
images he sees, refuses to descend into real life and submit to its
limitations, is driven into the slothfulness of that dreaming
imagination which is powerless to embody its images in the actual song.
Sometimes he tries to express himself, longing for reality. When he
tries he fails, and instead of making failure a step to higher effort,
he falls back impatiently on himself, and is lost in himself. Moreover,
he tries always within himself, and with himself for judge. He does not
try the only thing which would help him--the submission of his work to
the sympathy and judgment of men. Out of touch with any love save love
of his own imaginings, he cannot receive those human impressions which
kindle the artist into work, nor answer the cry which comes from
mankind, with such eagerness, to genius--"Express for us in clear form
that which we vaguely feel. Make us see and admire and love." Then he
ceases even to love song, because, though he can imagine everything, he
can do nothing; and deaf to the voices of men, he despises man. Finally
he asks himself, like so many young poets who have followed his way,
What is the judgment of the world worth? Nothing at all, he answers.
With that ultimate folly, the favourite resort of minor poets, Sordello
goes altogether wrong. He pleases nobody, not even himself; spends his
time in arguing inside himself why he has not succeeded; and comes to no
conclusion, except that total failure is the necessity of the world. At
last one day, wandering from Mantua, he finds himself in his old
environment, in the mountain cup where Goito and the castle lie. And the
old dream, awakened by the old associations, that he was Apollo, Lord of
Song, rushed back upon him and enwrapped him wholly. He feels, in the
blessed silence, that he is no longer what he has been of late,

a pettish minstrel meant
To wear away his soul in discontent,
Brooding on fortune's malice,

but himself once more, freed from the world of Mantua; alone again, but
in his loneliness really more lost than he was at Mantua, as we soon
find out in the third book.

I return, in concluding this chapter, to the point which bears most
clearly on Browning as the poet of art. The only time when Sordello
realises what it is to be an artist is when, swept out of himself by the
kindled emotion of the crowd at the _Court of Love_ and inspired also by
the true emotion of Eglamor's song, which has been made because he loved
it--his imagination is impassioned enough to shape for man the thing
within him, outside of himself, and to sing for the joy of
singing--having forgotten himself in mankind, in their joy and in his
own.

But it was little good to him. When he stole home to Goito in a dream,
he sat down to think over the transport he had felt, why he felt it, how
he was better than Eglamor; and at last, having missed the whole use of
the experience (which was to draw him into the service of man within the
limits of life but to always transcend the limits in aspiration), he
falls away from humanity into his own self again; and perfectly happy
for the moment, but lost as an artist and a man, lies lazy, filleted and
robed on the turf, with a lute beside him, looking over the landscape
below the castle and fancying himself Apollo. This is to have the
capacity to be an artist, but it is not to be an artist. And we leave
Sordello lying on the grass enjoying himself, but not destined on that
account to give any joy to man.

* * * * *




CHAPTER VI

_SORDELLO_


The period in which the poem of _Sordello_ opens is at the end of the
first quarter of the thirteenth century, at the time when the Guelf
cities allied themselves against the Ghibellines in Northern Italy. They
formed the Lombard League, and took their private quarrels up into one
great quarrel--that between the partisans of the Empire and those of the
Pope. Sordello is then a young man of thirty years. He was born in 1194,
when the fierce fight in the streets of Vicenza took place which
Salinguerra describes, as he looks back on his life, in the fourth canto
of this poem. The child is saved in that battle, and brought from
Vicenza by Adelaide, the second wife of Ezzelino da Romano II.,[8] to
Goito. He is really the son of Salinguerra and Retrude, a connection of
Frederick II., but Adelaide conceals this, and brings him up as her
page, alleging that he is the son of Elcorte, an archer. Palma (or
Cunizza), Ezzelino's daughter by Agnes Este, his first wife, is also at
Goito in attendance on Adelaide. Sordello and she meet as girl and boy,
and she becomes one of the dreams with which his lonely youth at Goito
is adorned.

At Adelaide's death Palma discovers the real birth of Sordello. She has
heard him sing some time before at a Love-court, where he won the prize;
where she, admiring, began to love him; and this love of hers has been
increased by his poetic fame which has now filled North Italy. She
summons him to her side at Verona, makes him understand that she loves
him, and urges him, as Salinguerra's son, to take the side of the
Ghibellines to whose cause Salinguerra, the strongest military
adventurer in North Italy, has now devoted himself. When the poem
begins, Salinguerra has received from the Emperor the badge which gives
him the leadership of the Ghibelline party in North Italy.

Then Palma, bringing Sordello to see Salinguerra, reveals to the great
partisan that Sordello is his son, and that she loves him. Salinguerra,
seeing in the union of Palma, daughter of the Lord of Romano, with his
son, a vital source of strength to the Emperor's party, throws the
Emperor's badge on his son's neck, and offers him the leadership of the
Ghibellines. Palma urges him to accept it; but Sordello has been already
convinced that the Guelf side is the right one to take for the sake of
mankind. Rome, he thinks, is the great uniting power; only by Rome can
the cause of peace and the happiness of the people be in the end
secured. That cause--the cause of a happy people--is the one thing for
which, after many dreams centred in self, Sordello has come to care. He
is sorely tempted by the love of Palma and by the power offered him to
give up that cause or to palter with it; yet in the end his soul resists
the temptation. But the part of his life, in which he has neglected his
body, has left him without physical strength; and now the struggle of
his soul to do right in this spiritual crisis gives the last blow to his
weakened frame. His heart breaks, and he dies at the moment when he
dimly sees the true goal of life. This is a masterpiece of the irony of
the Fate-Goddess; and a faint suspicion of this irony, underlying life,
even though Browning turns it round into final good, runs in and out of
the whole poem in a winding thread of thought.

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