Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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This is the historical background of the poem, and in front of it are
represented Sordello, his life, his development as an individual soul,
and his death. I have, from one point of view, slightly analysed the
first two books of the poem, but to analyse the whole would be apart
from the purpose of this book. My object in this and the following
chapter is to mark out, with here and there a piece of explanation,
certain characteristics of the poem in relation, first, to the time in
which it is placed; secondly, to the development of Sordello in contact
with that time; and thirdly, to our own time; then to trace the
connection of the poem with the poetic evolution of Browning; and
finally, to dwell throughout the whole discussion on its poetic
qualities.

1. The time in which the poem's thought and action are placed is the
beginning of the thirteenth century in North Italy, a period in which
the religious basis of life, laid so enthusiastically in the eleventh
century, and gradually weakening through the twelfth, had all but faded
away for the mediaeval noble and burgher, and even for the clergy.
Religion, it is true, was confessed and its dogmas believed in; the
Cistercian revival had restored some of its lost influence, but it did
not any longer restrain the passions, modify the wickedness, control the
ambitions or subdue the world, in the heart of men, as it had done in
the eleventh century. There was in Italy, at least, an unbridled licence
of life, a fierce individuality, which the existence of a number of
small republics encouraged; and, in consequence, a wild confusion of
thought and act in every sphere of human life. Moreover, all through the
twelfth century there had been a reaction among the artistic and
literary men against the theory of life laid down by the monks, and
against the merely saintly aims and practice of the religious, of which
that famous passage in _Aucassin and Nicolete_ is an embodiment. Then,
too, the love poetry (a poetry which tended to throw monkish purity
aside) started in the midst of the twelfth century; then the troubadours
began to sing; and then the love-songs of Germany arose. And Italian
poetry, a poetry which tended to repel the religion of the spirit for
the religion of enjoyment, had begun in Sicily and Siena in 1172-78, and
was nurtured in the Sicilian Court of Frederick II., while Sordello was
a youth. All over Europe, poetry drifted into a secular poetry of love
and war and romance. The religious basis of life had lost its strength.
As to North Italy, where our concern lies, humanity there was weltering
like a sea, tossing up and down, with no direction in its waves. It was
not till Francis of Assisi came that a new foundation for religious
life, a new direction for it, began to be established. As to Law,
Government, Literature, and Art, all their elements were in equal
confusion. Every noble, every warrior who reached ascendency, or was
born to it, made his own laws and governed as he liked. Every little
city had its own fashions and its own aims; and was continually
fighting, driven by jealousy, envy, hatred, or emulation, with its
neighbours. War was the incessant business of life, and was carried on
not only against neighbouring cities, but by each city in its own
streets, from its own towers, where noble fought against noble, citizen
with citizen, and servant with servant. Literature was only trying to
begin, to find its form, to find its own Italian tongue, to understand
what it desired. It took more than a century after Sordello's youth to
shape itself into the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, into their prose and
the prose of Boccaccio. The _Vita Nuova_ was set forth in 1290, 93, the
_Decameron_ in 1350, 53, and Petrarch was crowned at Rome in 1341. And
the arts of sculpture and painting were in the same condition. They were
struggling towards a new utterance, but as yet they could not speak.

It is during this period of impassioned confusion and struggle towards
form, during this carnival of individuality, that Sordello, as conceived
by Browning, a modern in the midst of mediaevalism, an exceptional
character wholly unfitted for the time, is placed by Browning. And the
clash between himself and his age is too much for him. He dies of it;
dies of the striving to find an anchorage for life, and of his inability
to find it in this chartless sea. But the world of men, incessantly
recruited by new generations, does not die like the individual, and
what Sordello could not do, it did. It emerged from this confusion in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with S. Francis, Dante,
Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Pisani, Giotto, and the Commonwealth of
Florence. Religion, Poetry, Prose, Sculpture, Painting, Government and
Law found new foundations. The Renaissance began to dawn, and during its
dawn kept, among the elect of mankind, all or nearly all the noble
impulses and faith of mediaevalism.

This dawn of the Renaissance is nearly a hundred years away at the time
of this poem, yet two of its characteristics vitally moved through this
transition period; and, indeed, while they continued even to the end of
the Renaissance, were powers which brought it about. The first of these
was a boundless curiosity about life, and the second was an intense
individuality. No one can read the history of the Italian Republics in
the thirteenth century without incessantly coming into contact with both
these elements working fiercely, confusedly, without apparently either
impulse or aim, but producing a wonderful activity of life, out of
which, by command as it were of the gods, a new-created world might rise
into order. It was as if chaos were stirred, like a cauldron with a
stick, that suns and planets, moving by living law, might emerge in
beauty. Sordello lived in the first whirling of these undigested
elements, and could only dream of what might be; but it was life in
which he moved, disorderly life, it is true, but not the dread disorder
of decay. Browning paints it with delight.

This unbridled curiosity working in men of unbridled individuality
produced a tumbling confusion in life. Men, full of eagerness, each
determined to fulfil his own will, tried every kind of life, attempted
every kind of pursuit, strove to experience all the passions, indulged
their passing impulses to the full, and when they were wearied of any
experiment in living passed on to the next, not with weariness but with
fresh excitement. Cities, small republics, did the same
collectively--Ferrara, Padua, Verona, Mantua, Milan, Parma, Florence,
Pisa, Siena, Perugia. Both cities and citizens lived in a nervous storm,
and at every impulse passed into furious activity. In five minutes a
whole town was up in the market-place, the bells rang, the town banner
was displayed, and in an hour the citizens were marching out of the
gates to attack the neighbouring city. A single gibe in the streets, or
at the church door, interchanged between one noble and another of
opposite factions, and the gutters of the streets ran red with the blood
of a hundred men. This then was the time of _Sordello_, and splendidly
has Browning represented it.

2. Sordello is the image of this curiosity and individuality, but only
inwardly. In the midst of this turbulent society Browning creates him
with the temperament of a poet, living in a solitary youth, apart from
arms and the wild movement of the world. His soul is full of the
curiosity of the time. The inquisition of his whole life is, "What is
the life most worth living? How shall I attain it, in what way make it
mine?" and then, "What sort of lives are lived by other men?" and,
finally, "What is the happiest life for the whole?" The curiosity does
not drive him, like the rest of the world, into action in the world. It
expands only in thought and dreaming. But however he may dream, however
wrapt in self he may be, his curiosity about these matters never lessens
for a moment. Even in death it is his ruling passion.

Along with this he shares fully in the impassioned individuality of the
time. Browning brings that forward continually. All the dreams of his
youth centre in himself; Nature becomes the reflection of himself; all
histories of great men he represents as in himself; finally, he becomes
to himself Apollo, the incarnation of poetry. But he does not seek to
realise his individuality, any more than his curiosity, in action. When
he is drawn out of himself at Mantua and sings for a time to please men,
he finds that the public do not understand him, and flies back to his
solitude, back to his own soul. And Mantua, and love, and adventure all
die within him. "I have all humanity," he says, "within myself--why then
should I seek humanity?" This is the way the age's passion for
individuality shows itself in him. Other men put it into love, war, or
adventure. He does not; he puts it into the lonely building-up of his
own soul. Even when he is brought into the midst of the action of the
time we see that he is apart from it. As he wanders through the turmoil
of the streets of Ferrara in Book iv., he is dreaming still of his own
life, of his own soul. His curiosity, wars and adventures are within.
The various lives he is anxious to live are lived in lonely
imaginations. The individuality he realises is in thought. At this point
then he is apart from his century--an exceptional temperament set in
strong contrast to the world around him--the dreamer face to face with
a mass of men all acting with intensity. And the common result takes
place; the exceptional breaks down against the steady and terrible pull
of the ordinary. It is Hamlet over again, and when Sordello does act it
is just as Hamlet does, by a sudden impulse which lifts him from
dreaming into momentary action, out of which, almost before he has
realised he is acting, he slips back again into dreams. And his action
seems to him the dream, and his dream the activity. That saying of
Hamlet's would be easy on the lips of Sordello, if we take "bad dreams"
to mean for him what they meant for Hamlet the moment he is forced to
action in the real world--"I could be bounded in a nut-shell and think
myself king of infinite space, had I not bad dreams." When he is
surprised into action at the Court of Love at Mantua, and wins the prize
of song, he seems to slip back into a sleepy cloud. But Palma, bending
her beautiful face over him and giving him her scarf, wins him to stay
at Mantua; and for a short time he becomes the famous poet. But he is
disappointed. That which he felt himself to be (the supernal greatness
of his individuality) is not recognised, and at last he feels that to
act and fight his way through a world which appreciates his isolated
greatness so little as to dare to criticise him, is impossible. We have
seen in the last chapter how he slips back to Goito, to his
contemplation of himself in nature, to his self-communion, to the dreams
which do not contradict his opinion of himself. The momentary creator
perishes in the dreamer. He gives up life, adventure, love, war, and he
finally surrenders his art. No more poetry for him.

It is thus that a character feeble for action, but mystic in
imagination, acts in the petulance of youth when it is pushed into a
clashing, claiming world. In this mood a year passes by in vague
content. Yet a little grain of conscience makes him sour. He is vexed
that his youth is gone with all its promised glow, pleasure and action;
and the vexation is suddenly deepened by seeing a great change in the
aspect of nature. "What," he thinks, when he sees the whole valley
filled with Mincio in flood, "can Nature in this way renew her youth,
and not I? Alas! I cannot so renew myself; youth is over." But if youth
be dead, manhood remains; and the curiosity and individuality of the age
stir in him again. "I must find," he thinks, "the fitting kind of life.
I must make men feel what I am. But how; what do I want for this? I want
some outward power to draw me forth and upward, as the moon draws the
waters; to lead me to a life in which I may know mankind, in order that
I may take out of men all I need to make _myself_ into perfect form--a
full poet, able to impose my genius on mankind, and to lead them where I
will. What force can draw me out of these dreaming solitudes in which I
fail to realise my art? Why, there is none so great as love. Palma who
smiled on me, she shall be my moon." At that moment, when he is again
thrilled with curiosity concerning life, again desirous to realise his
individuality in the world of men, a message comes from Palma. "Come,
there is much for you to do--come to me at Verona." She lays a political
career before him. "Take the Kaiser's cause, you and I together; build a
new Italy under the Emperor." And Sordello is fired by the thought, not
as yet for the sake of doing good to man, but to satisfy his curiosity
in a new life, and to edify his individual soul into a perfection
unattained as yet. "I will go," he thinks, "and be the spirit in this
body of mankind, wield, animate, and shape the people of Italy, make
them the form in which I shall express myself. It is not enough to act,
in imagination, all that man is, as I have done. I will now make men act
by the force of my spirit: North Italy shall be my body, and thus I
shall realise myself"--as if one could, with that self-contemplating
motive, ever realise personality.

This, then, is the position of Sordello in the period of history I have
pictured, and it carries him to the end of the third book of the poem.
It has embodied the history of his youth--of his first contact with the
world; of his retreat from it into thought over what he has gone
through; and of his reawakening into a fresh questioning--how he shall
realise life, how manifest himself in action. "What shall I do as a
poet, and a man?"

3. The next thing to be said of _Sordello_ is its vivid realisation of
certain aspects of mediaeval life. Behind this image of the curious
dreamer lost in abstractions, and vividly contrasted with it, is the
fierce activity of mediaeval cities and men in incessant war; each city,
each man eager to make his own individuality supreme; and this is
painted by Browning at the very moment when the two great parties were
formed, and added to personal war the intensifying power of two ideals.
This was a field for imagination in which Browning was sure to revel,
like a wild creature of the woods on a summer day. He had the genius of
places, of portraiture, and of sudden flashes of action and passion;
and the time of which he wrote supplied him with full matter for these
several capacities of genius.

When we read in _Sordello_ of the fierce outbursts of war in the cities
of North Italy, we know that Browning saw them with his eyes and shared
their fury and delight. Verona is painted in the first book just as the
news arrives that her prince is captive in Ferrara. It is evening, a
still and flaming sunset, and soft sky. In dreadful contrast to this
burning silence of Nature is the wrath and hate which are seething in
the market-place. Group talked with restless group, and not a face

But wrath made livid, for among them were
Death's staunch purveyors, such as have in care
To feast him. Fear had long since taken root
In every breast, and now these crushed its fruit,
The ripe hate, like a wine; to note the way
It worked while each grew drunk! Men grave and grey
Stood, with shut eyelids, rocking to and fro,
Letting the silent luxury trickle slow
About the hollows where a heart should be;
But the young gulped with a delirious glee
Some foretaste of their first debauch in blood
At the fierce news.

Step by step the varying passions, varying with the men of the varied
cities of the League assembled at Verona, are smitten out on the anvil
of Browning's imagination. Better still is the continuation of the same
scene in the third book, when the night has come, and the raging of the
people, reaching its height, declares war. Palma and Sordello, who are
in the palace looking on the square, lean out to see and hear. On the
black balcony beneath them, in the still air, amid a gush of
torch-fire, the grey-haired counsellors harangue the people;

then
Sea-like that people surging to and fro
Shouted, "Hale forth the carroch--trumpets, ho,
A flourish! Run it in the ancient grooves!
Back from the bell! Hammer--that whom behoves
May hear the League is up!"

Then who will may read the dazzling account of the streets of Ferrara
thick with corpses; of Padua, of Bassano streaming blood; of the wells
chokeful of carrion, of him who catches in his spur, as he is kicking
his feet when he sits on the well and singing, his own mother's face by
the grey hair; of the sack of Vicenza in the fourth book; of the
procession of the envoys of the League through the streets of Ferrara,
with ensigns, war-cars and clanging bells; of the wandering of Sordello
at night through the squares blazing with fires, and the soldiers camped
around them singing and shouting; of his solitary silent thinking
contrasted with their noise and action--and he who reads will know, as
if he lived in them, the fierce Italian towns of the thirteenth century.

Nor is his power less when he describes the solitary silent places of
mediaeval castles, palaces, and their rooms; of the long, statue-haunted,
cypress-avenued gardens, a waste of flowers and wild undergrowth. We
wander, room by room, through Adelaide's castle at Goito, we see every
beam in the ceiling, every figure on the tapestry; we walk with Browning
through the dark passages into the dim-lighted chambers of the town
palace at Verona, and hang over its balconies; we know the gardens at
Goito, and the lonely woods; and we keep pace with Sordello through
those desolate paths and ilex-groves, past the fountains lost in the
wilderness of foliage, climbing from terrace to terrace where the broken
statues, swarming with wasps, gleam among the leering aloes and the
undergrowth, in the garden that Salinguerra made for his Sicilian wife
at Ferrara. The words seem as it were to flare the ancient places out
before the eyes.

Mixed up with all this painting of towns, castles and gardens there is
some natural description. Browning endeavours, it is plain, to keep that
within the mediaeval sentiment. But that he should succeed in that was
impossible. The mediaeval folk had little of our specialised sentiment
for landscape, and Browning could not get rid of it.

The modern philosophies of Nature do not, however, appear in _Sordello_
as they did in _Pauline_ or _Paracelsus_. Only once in the whole of
_Sordello_ is Nature conceived as in analogy with man, and Browning says
this in a parenthesis. "Life is in the tempest," he cries, "thought

"Clothes the keen hill-top; mid-day woods are fraught
With fervours":

but, in spite of the mediaeval environment, the modern way of seeing
Nature enters into all his descriptions. They are none the worse for it,
and do not jar too much with the mediaeval _mise-en-scene_. We expect our
modern sentiment, and Sordello himself, being in many ways a modern,
seems to license these descriptions. Most of them also occur when he is
on the canvas, and are a background to his thought. Moreover, they are
not set descriptions; they are flashed out, as it were, in a few lines,
as if they came by chance, and are not pursued into detail. Indeed, they
are not done so much for the love of Nature herself, as for passing
illustrations of Sordello's ways of thought and feeling upon matters
which are not Nature. As such, even in a mediaeval poem, they are
excusable. And vivid they are in colour, in light, in reality. Some I
have already isolated. Here are a few more, just to show his hand. This
is the castle and its scenery, described in Book i.:

In Mantua territory half is slough,
Half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks
Breed o'er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes
With sand the summer through: but 'tis morass
In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was,
Some thirty years before this evening's coil,
One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil,
Goito; just a castle built amid
A few low mountains; firs and larches hid
Their main defiles, and rings of vineyard bound
The rest. Some captured creature in a pound,
Whose artless wonder quite precludes distress,
Secure beside in its own loveliness,
So peered, with airy head, below, above
The castle at its toils, the lapwings love
To glean among at grape time.

And this is the same place from the second book:

And thus he wandered, dumb
Till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent
On a blind hill-top: down the gorge he went,
Yielding himself up as to an embrace.
The moon came out; like features of a face,
A querulous fraternity of pines,
Sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines
Also came out, made gradually up
The picture; 'twas Goito's mountain-cup
And castle.

And here, from Book iii., is Spring when Palma, dreaming of the man she
can love, cries that the waking earth is in a thrill to welcome him--

"Waits he not the waking year?
His almond-blossoms must be honey-ripe
By this; to welcome him fresh runnels stripe
The thawed ravines; because of him the wind
Walks like a herald."

This is May from Book ii.; and afterwards, in the third book, the months
from Spring to Summer--

My own month came;
'Twas a sunrise of blossoming and May.
Beneath a flowering laurel thicket lay
Sordello; each new sprinkle of white stars
That smell fainter of wine than Massic jars
Dug up at Baiae, when the south wind shed
The ripest, made him happier.

Not any strollings now at even-close
Down the field path, Sordello! by thorn-rows
Alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire
And dew, outlining the black cypress-spire
She waits you at, Elys, who heard you first
Woo her, the snow month through, but, ere she durst
Answer 'twas April. Linden-flower-time long
Her eyes were on the ground; 'tis July, strong
Now; and, because white dust-clouds overwhelm
The woodside, here, or by the village elm
That holds the moon, she meets you, somewhat pale.

And here are two pieces of the morning, one of the wide valley of
Naples; another with which the poem ends, pure modern, for it does not
belong to Sordello's time, but to our own century. This is from the
fourth book.

Broke
Morning o'er earth; he yearned for all it woke--
From the volcano's vapour-flag, winds hoist
Black o'er the spread of sea,--down to the moist
Dale's silken barley-spikes sullied with rain,
Swayed earthwards, heavily to rise again.

And this from the last book--

Lo, on a heathy brown and nameless hill
By sparkling Asolo, in mist and chill,
Morning just up, higher and higher runs
A child barefoot and rosy. See! the sun's
On the square castle's inner-court's low wall
Like the chine of some extinct animal
Half-turned to earth and flowers; and through the haze,
(Save where some slender patches of grey maize
Are to be over-leaped) that boy has crossed
The whole hill-side of dew and powder-frost
Matting the balm and mountain camomile.
Up and up goes he, singing all the while
Some unintelligible words to beat
The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet.

As alive, and even clearer in outline than these natural descriptions,
are the portraits in _Sordello_ of the people of the time. No one can
mistake them for modern folk. I do not speak of the portrait of
Sordello--that is chiefly of the soul, not of the body--but of the
personages who fill the background, the heads of noble houses, the
warriors, priests, soldiers, singers, the women, and chiefly Adelaide
and Palma. These stand before us as Tintoret or Veronese might have
painted them had they lived on into the great portrait-century. Their
dress, their attitudes, their sudden gestures, their eyes, hair, the
trick of their mouths, their armour, how they walked and talked and read
and wrote, are all done in quick touches and jets of colour. Each is
distinct from the others, each a type. A multitude of cabinet sketches
of men are made in the market-places, in castle rooms, on the roads, in
the gardens, on the bastions of the towns. Take as one example the
Pope's Legate:

With eyes, like fresh-blown thrush-eggs on a thread,
Faint-blue and loosely floating in his head,
Large tongue, moist open mouth; and this long while
That owner of the idiotic smile
Serves them!

Nor does Browning confine himself to personages of Sordello's time.
There are admirable portraits, but somewhat troubled by unnecessary
matter, of Dante, of Charlemagne, of Hildebrand. One elaborate portrait
is continued throughout the poem. It is that of Salinguerra, the man of
action as contrasted with Sordello the dreamer. Much pains are spent on
this by Browning. We see him first in the streets of Ferrara.

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