The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 12

The next poem belonging to this subject is the second part of _Pippa Pa.s.ses_. 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, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing 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 pa.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sage; 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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing, and the song touches him into finer issues of thought. He sees that Phene's soul is, like a b.u.t.terfly, 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 impa.s.sioned 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 circ.u.mstances 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s 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, G.o.d's infinitude, or man's love; a natural life indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered with happy self-love, good to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, for it ignores that which chiefly makes the artist; union with the pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sion, 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 mult.i.tudinousness 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 n.o.body, 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 a.s.sociations, 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 impa.s.sioned 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 gra.s.s 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-G.o.ddess; 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.

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 a.n.a.lysed the first two books of the poem, but to a.n.a.lyse 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sions, 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 pa.s.sage in _Auca.s.sin 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 a.s.sisi 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 n.o.ble, 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 n.o.ble fought against n.o.ble, 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 impa.s.sioned 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.ds, 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.