An Introduction to the Study of Browning. Symons Arthur
the infinite and essential so clearly that it scorns or spurns the mere accidents. But earth being earth, and life growth, and accidents an inevitable part of life, the rule remains that man, to attain, must climb step by step, and not expect to fly at once to the top of the ladder. Finding that he cannot do everything, Sordello sees no alternative but to do nothing. Consequently his state comes to be a virtual indolence or inactivity; though it is in reality that of the top, spinning so fast that its motion is imperceptible. Poet and man of action, for he contains more than the germ of both, confound and break down one another. He meets finally with a great temptation, conquers it, but dies of the effort. For the world his life has been a failure, for himself not absolutely so, since, before his eyes were closed, he was permitted to see the truth and to recognise it. But in all his aims, in all his ambitions, he has failed; and the world has gained nothing from them or from him but the warning of his example.
This Sordello of Browning seems to have little identity with the brief and splendid Sordello of Dante, the figure that fronts us in the superb sixth canto of the Purgatoria, "a guisa di leon quando si posa." The records of the real Sordello are scant, fragmentary and contradictory. No coherent outline of his personality remains, so that the character which Browning has made for him is a creation as absolute as if it had been wholly invented. The name indeed of Sordello, embalmed in Dante's verse, is still fresh to our ears after the "ravage of six long sad hundred years," and it is Dante, too, who in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, has further signalised him by honourable record. Sordello, he says, excelled in all kinds of composition, and by his experiments in the dialects of Cremona, Brescia and Verona, cities near Mantua, helped to form the Tuscan tongue. But besides the brief record of Dante, there are certain accounts of Sordello's life, very confused and conflicting, in the early Italian Chronicles and the Provençal lives of the Troubadours. Tiraboschi sifts these legends, leaving very little of them. According to him, Sordello was a Mantuan of noble family, born at Goito at the close of the twelfth century. He was a poet and warrior, though not, as some reports profess, captain-general or governor of Mantua. He eloped with Cunizza, the wife of Count Richard of St. Boniface; at some period of his life he went into Provence; and he died a violent death, about the middle of the thirteenth century. The works attributed to him are poems in Tuscan and Provençal, a didactic poem in Latin named Thesaurus Thesaurorum (now in the Ambrosiana in Milan), an essay in Provençal on "The Progress and Power of the Kings of Aragon in the Comté of Provence," a treatise on "The Defence of Walled Towns," and some historial translations from Latin into the vulgar tongue. Of all these works only the Thesaurus and some thirty-four poems in Provençal, sirventes and tensens, survive: some of the finest of them are satires.[15]
The statement that Sordello was specially famed for his philosophical verses, though not confirmed by what remains of his poetry, is interesting and significant in connection with Browning's conception of his character. There is little however in the scanty tales we have of the historic Sordello to suggest the "feverish poet" of the poem. The fugitive personality of the half mythical fighting poet eludes the grasp, and Browning has rather given the name of Sordello to an imagined type of the poetic character than constructed a type of character to fit the name. Still less are the dubious attributes with which the bare facts of history or legend invest Cunizza (whom, none the less, Dante spoke with in heaven) recognisable in the exquisite and all-golden loveliness of Palma.
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