Robert Browning. C. H. Herford
and stress and many-sided life of drama competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of Men and Women. In 1835 the solution was not yet found, but the five years which followed were to carry Browning, not without crises of perplexity and hesitation, far on his way towards it. Paracelsus was no sooner completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal of the soul-history of Sordello—a study in which, with the dramatic form, almost all the dramatic excellences of its predecessors are put aside. But the poet was outgrowing the method; the work hung fire; and we find him, before he had gone far with the perplexed record of that "ineffectual angel," already "eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch."[6]
[6] Preface to the first edition of Strafford (subsequently omitted).
The open-eyed man of the world and of affairs in Browning was plainly clamouring for more expression than he had yet found. An invitation from the first actor of the day to write a tragedy for him was not likely, under these circumstances, to be declined; and during the whole winter of 1836–37 the story of Sordello remained untold, while its author plunged, with a security and relish which no one who knew only his poetry could have foretold, into the pragmatic politics and diplomatic intrigues of Strafford. The performance of the play on May 1, 1837 introduced further distractions. And Sordello had made little further progress, when, in the April of the following year, Browning embarked on a sudden but memorable trip to the South of Europe. It gave him his first glimpse of Italy and of the Mediterranean, and plenty of the rough homely intercourse with men which he loved. He travelled, in a fashion that suited his purse and his hardy nature, by a merchant vessel from London to the Adriatic. The food was uneatable, the horrors of dirt and discomfort portentous; but he bore them cheerfully for the sake of one advantage—"the solitariness of the one passenger among all those rough new creatures, I like it much, and soon get deep into their friendship."[7] Grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his ken.[8] Two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with peculiar distinctness: the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he watched the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St. Vincent—ghostly mementos of England—not as Arnold's weary Titan, but as a Herakles stretching a hand of help across the seas; the other sunset on the Mediterranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky;[9] and, between them, that glaring noontide on the African shore, when the "solitary passenger," weary of shipboard and sea sickness, longed for his good horse York in the stable at home, and scribbled his ballad of brave horses, How they brought the Good News, in a blank leaf of Bartoli's Simboli. The voyage ended at Trieste; and thence he passed to Venice, brooded among her ruined palaces over Sordello, and "English Eyebright" and all the destiny and task of the poet; and so turned homeward, through the mountains, gathering vivid glimpses as he went of "all my places and castles,"[10] and laying by a memory, soon to germinate, of "delicious Asolo," "palpably fire-clothed" in the glory of his young imagination.
[7] R.B. to E.B.B., i. 505. [8] Cf. the long letter to Miss Haworth, Orr, Life, p. 96. [9] Cf. Sordello, bk. iii., end. [10] Ib., p. 99.
Thus when, in 1840, Sordello was at length complete, it bore the traces of many influences and many moods. It reflected the expanding ideals and the critical turning-points of four years of his life. In the earlier books the brilliant yet self-centred poet of Paracelsus is still paramount, and even the "oddish boy" who had shyly evolved Pauline is not entirely effaced. But in the later books we recognise without difficulty the man who has mixed with the larger world, has won some fame in letters, has immersed himself in the stirring atmosphere of a supreme national conflict, has seen Italy, and has, in the solitude and detachment from his milieu which foreign travel brings, girded up his loins anew for a larger and more exacting poetic task. The tangled political dissensions of the time are set before us with the baffling allusiveness of the expert. The Italian landscape is painted, not with richer imagination, for nothing in Browning exceeds some passages of the earlier books, but with more depth of colouring, more precision of contour and expression. And he has taken the "sad disheveled form," Humanity, for his bride, the mate of an art which will disdain no evil and turn away from nothing common, in the service of man. Doubtless the result was not all gain. The intermittent composition and the shifting points of view add an element of real ambiguity and indecision to faults of expression which mainly spring from the swiftness and discursiveness of a brilliant and athletic intellect. The alleged "obscurity" of the poem is in great part a real obscurity; the profiles are at times not merely intricate, but blurred. But he had written nothing yet, and he was to write little after, which surpasses the finest pages of Sordello in close-packed, if somewhat elusive, splendour; the soil, as he wrote of Italy, is full of loose fertility, and gives out intoxicating odours at every footfall. Moreover, he can now paint the clash and commotion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, with superb force—a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in Paracelsus. Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see, is an even more fascinating figure.
He is however less historical, in spite of the abstruse historic background upon which he moves. Of the story of Paracelsus Browning merely reinterpreted the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the greater part of the Sordello story, as told confusedly and inconsistently by Italian and Provençal tradition. The whole later career of the Mantuan poet as an accomplished and not unsuccessful man of the world, as the friend of Raymond of Toulouse and Charles of Anjou, rewarded with ample estates by the latter for substantial services—is either rejected as myth, or purposely ignored. To all appearance, the actual Sordello by no means lacked ability to "fit to the finite" such "infinity" as he possessed. And if he had the chance, as is obscurely hinted at the close, of becoming, like Dante, the "Apollo" of the Italian people, he hardly missed it "through disbelief that anything was to be done." But the outward shell of his career included some circumstances which, had they befallen a Dante, might have deeply moulded the history of Italy. His close relations with great Guelph and Ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a patriot of genius, which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained unused. Yet Dante, a patriot of genius if ever there was one, had given Sordello a position of extraordinary honour in the Purgatory, had allowed him to illuminate the darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the great poets towards the Gate. The contrast offered an undeniable problem. But Dante had himself hinted the solution by placing Sordello among those dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their sojourn in the Ante-purgatory. To a mind preoccupied, like Browning's, with the failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed. He imagined his Sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts, failed by some inner enervating paralysis[11] to make his spiritual quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition until he met the eye and lips of Dante. It is difficult not to suspect the influence of another great poet. Sordello has no nearer parallel in literature than Goethe's Tasso, a picture of the eternal antagonism between the poet and the world, for which Bordello's failure to "fit to the finite his infinity" might have served as an apt motto. Browning has nowhere to our knowledge mentioned Tasso; but he has left on record his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama Iphigenie.[12]