The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 13

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 pa.s.sions, indulged their pa.s.sing impulses to the full, and when they were wearied of any experiment in living pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sion.

Along with this he shares fully in the impa.s.sioned 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 pa.s.sion 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 ma.s.s 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-sh.e.l.l and think myself king of infinite s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.sion; 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 pa.s.sions, varying with the men of the varied cities of the League a.s.sembled 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 Ba.s.sano 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 pa.s.sages 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 a.n.a.logy 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 pa.s.sing ill.u.s.trations 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 mora.s.s 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 Ma.s.sic 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, G.o.d'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 n.o.ble 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 att.i.tudes, 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 mult.i.tude 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.

Men understood Living was pleasant to him as he wore His careless surcoat, glanced some missive o'er, Propped on his truncheon in the public way.

Then at the games at Mantua, when he is told Sordello will not come to sing a welcome to him. What cares he for poet's whims?

The easy-natured soldier smiled a.s.sent, Settled his portly person, smoothed his chin, And nodded that the bull-bait might begin.

Then mad with fighting frenzy in the sacking of Vicenza, then in his palace nursing his scheme to make the Emperor predominant, then pacing like a lion, hot with hope of mastering all Italy, when he finds out that Sordello is his son: "hands clenched, head erect, pursuing his discourse--crimson ear, eyeb.a.l.l.s suffused, temples full fraught."

Then in the fourth book there is a long portrait of him which I quote as a full specimen of the power with which Browning could paint a partisan of the thirteenth century. Though sixty years old, Salinguerra looked like a youth--

So agile, quick And graceful turned the head on the broad chest Encased in pliant steel, his constant vest, Whence split the sun off in a spray of fire Across the room; and, loosened of its tire Of steel, that head let breathe the comely brown Large ma.s.sive locks discoloured as if a crown Encircled them, so frayed the basnet where A sharp white line divided clean the hair; Glossy above, glossy below, it swept Curling and fine about a brow thus kept Calm, laid coat upon coat, marble and sound: This was the mystic mark the Tuscan found, Mused of, turned over books about. Square-faced, No lion more; two vivid eyes, enchased In hollows filled with many a shade and streak Settling from the bold nose and bearded cheek.

Nor might the half-smile reach them that deformed A lip supremely perfect else--unwarmed, Unwidened, less or more; indifferent Whether on trees or men his thoughts were bent, Thoughts rarely, after all, in trim and train As now a period was fulfilled again: Of such, a series made his life, compressed In each, one story serving for the rest.

This is one example of a gallery of vivid portraiture in all Browning's work, such as Carlyle only in the nineteenth century has approached in England. It is not a national, but an international gallery of portraits. The greater number of the portraits are Italian, and they range over all cla.s.ses of society from the Pope to the peasant. Even Bishop Blougram has the Italian subtlety, and, like the Monsignore in _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, something of the politic morality of Machiavelli. But Israel, Greece, France, Spain, Germany, and the days before the world was brought together, furnish him with men drawn as alive. He has painted their souls, but others have done this kind of painting as well, if not so minutely. But no others have painted so livingly the outside of men--their features one by one, their carriage, their gestures, their clothing, their walk, their body. All the colours of their dress and eyes and lips are given. We see them live and move and have their being.

It is the same with his women, but I keep these for further treatment.

4. The next thing I have to say about _Sordello_ concerns what I call its ill.u.s.trative episodes. Browning, wishing to illuminate his subject, sometimes darts off from it into an elaborate simile as Homer does. But in Homer the simile is carefully set, and explained to be a comparison.

It is not mixed up with the text. It is short, rarely reaching more than ten lines. In Browning, it is glided into without any preparation, and at first seems part of the story. Nor are we always given any intimation of its end. And Browning is led away by his imaginative pleasure in its invention to work it up with advent.i.tious ornament of colour and scenery; having, in his excitement of invention, lost all power of rejecting any additional touch which occurs to him, so that the ill.u.s.tration, swelling out into a preposterous length, might well be severed from the book and made into a separate poem. Moreover, these long ill.u.s.trations are often but faintly connected with the subject they are used to illumine; and they delay the movement of the poem while they confuse the reader. The worst of these, worst as an ill.u.s.tration, but in itself an excellent fragment to isolate as a picture-poem, is the ill.u.s.tration of the flying slave who seeks his tribe beyond the Mountains of the Moon. It is only to throw light on a moment of Salinguerra's discursive thought, and is far too big for that. It is more like an episode than an ill.u.s.tration. I quote it not only to show what I mean, but also for its power. It is in Bk. iv.

"As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black Enormous watercourse which guides him back To his own tribe again, where he is king; And laughs because he guesses, numbering The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch Of the first lizard wrested from its couch Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips To cure his nostril with, and festered lips, And eyeb.a.l.l.s bloodshot through the desert-blast) That he has reached its boundary, at last May breathe;--thinks o'er enchantments of the South Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth, Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried In fancy, puts them soberly aside For truth, projects a cool return with friends, The likelihood of winning mere amends Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently, Then, from the river's brink, his wrongs and he, Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon Off-striding for the Mountains of the Moon."

The best of these is where he ill.u.s.trates the restless desire of a poet for the renewal of energy, for finding new worlds to sing. The poet often seems to stop his work, to be satisfied. "Here I will rest," he says, "and do no more." But he only waits for a fresh impulse.

'Tis but a sailor's promise, weather-bound: "Strike sail, slip cable, here the bark be moored For once, the awning stretched, the poles a.s.sured!

Noontide above; except the wave's crisp dash, Or buzz of colibri, or tortoise' splash, The margin's silent: out with every spoil Made in our tracking, coil by mighty coil, This serpent of a river to his head I' the midst! Admire each treasure, as we spread The bank, to help us tell our history Aright; give ear, endeavour to descry The groves of giant rushes, how they grew Like demons' endlong tresses we sailed through, What mountains yawned, forests to give us vent Opened, each doleful side, yet on we went Till ... may that beetle (shake your cap) attest The springing of a land-wind from the West!"

--Wherefore? Ah yes, you frolic it to-day!