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A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) by Mrs. Sutherland Orr

M >> Mrs. Sutherland Orr >> A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.)




"Pauline" did not take its place among the author's collected works till
1868, when the uniform edition of them appeared; and he then introduced
it by a preface (to which I have just alluded) in which he declared his
unwillingness to publish such a boyish production, and gave the reasons
which induced him to do so. The poem is boyish, or at all events
youthful, in point of conception; and we need not wonder that this
intellectual crudeness should have outweighed its finished poetic
beauties in its author's mind. It contains however one piece of mental
portraiture which, with slight modifications, might have stood for Mr.
Browning when he re-edited the work, as it clearly did when he wrote it.
It begins thus (vol. i. page 14):

"I am made up of an intensest life,"

The tribute at page 14[9] to the saving power of imagination is also
characteristic of his maturer mind, though expressed in an ambiguous
manner. It is interesting to know that in the line (page 26),

"the king
Treading the purple calmly to his death,"

he was thinking of Agamemnon: as this shows how early his love of
classic literature began. The allusion to Plato, at pages 19, 20, and
21, largely confirms this impression. The feeling for music asserts
itself also at page 18, though in a less spiritual form than it assumes
in his later works. But the most striking piece of true biography which
"Pauline" contains, is its evidence of the young writer's affectionate
reverence for Shelley, whom he idealizes under the name of Sun-treader.
An invocation to his memory occupies three pages, beginning with the
ninth; it is renewed at the end of the poem, and there can be no doubt
that the pathetic language in which it is couched came straight from the
young poet's own heart. We even fancy that Shelley's influence is
visible in the poem itself, which contains a profusion of natural
imagery, and some touches of naturalistic emotion, not at all in keeping
with Mr. Browning's picturesque, but habitually human genius. The
influence, if it existed, passed away with his earliest youth; not so
the admiration and sympathy which it implied; and this, considering the
wide difference which separated the two minds, is an interesting
fact.[10]


"PARACELSUS." (1835.)

"Paracelsus" is a summary of the life, as Mr. Browning conceives it, of
this well-known physicist of the sixteenth century; and is divided into
five scenes, or groups of scenes, each representing a critical moment in
his experience, and reviewing in his own words the circumstances by
which it has been prepared. The personages whom it includes are, besides
the principal one, Festus and Michal, early friends of Paracelsus, and
now man and wife; and the Italian poet Aprile. Michal appears only in
the first scene; Aprile in the second or third; but Festus accompanies
Paracelsus throughout the drama, in the constant character of judicious,
if not profound, adviser, and of tender friend. His personality is
sufficiently marked to claim the importance of a type; and as such he
stands forth, as contrasted with both Paracelsus and Aprile, and yet a
bond of union between them. It is more probable however that he was
created for the mere dramatic purpose of giving shape to the confession
of Paracelsus, and preserving it from monotony. The story is principally
told in a dialogue between them.

The first scene is entitled "Paracelsus aspires;" and takes place at
Wuerzburg between himself, Festus, and Michal, on the eve of his
departure from their common home. Both friends begin by opposing his
aspirations, and thus lead him to expound and defend them. The aim and
spirit of these is the distinguishing feature of the poem. Paracelsus
aspires to knowledge: such knowledge as will benefit his fellow-men. He
will seek it in the properties of nature, and, as history tells us, he
will succeed. But his _aspirations_ pass over these isolated
discoveries, which he has no idea of connecting into scientific truths:
and tend ever towards some final revelation of the secret of life, to
flash forth from his own brain when the flesh shall have been subdued,
and the imprisoned light of intellect set free. And here Mr. Browning's
metaphysical fancy is somewhat at issue with his facts. Paracelsus
employed nature in the quest of the supernatural or magical; this is
shown by the poem, though in it he begins by repudiating, with all other
external aids, the help of the black art. He therefore relied on other
kinds of knowledge than that which springs direct from the human mind.
The inconsistency however disappears in Mr. Browning's conception of the
case, and the metaphysical language which he imputes to Paracelsus in
the earlier stages of his career, is not felt to be untrue.

Paracelsus not only aspires to know: he believes it his mission to
acquire knowledge; and he believes also that it is only to be acquired
through untried methods, through untaught men: most of all through
solitary communion with nature, and at the sacrifice of all human joys.
Festus regards this as a delusion, and combats it, in this first scene,
with the arguments of common sense; overshooting the mark just enough to
leave his friend the victory. Paracelsus has declared that he
appreciates all he is renouncing, but that he has no choice. He knows
that the way on which he is about to enter is "trackless;" but so is the
bird's: God will guide him as He guides the bird. And Festus replies
that the road to knowledge is _not_ trackless. "Mighty marchers" have
left their footprints upon it. Nature has not written her secrets in
desert places, but in the souls of great men: the "Stagirite,"[11] and
the sages who form a glory round him. He urges Paracelsus to learn what
they can teach, and then take the torch of wisdom from the exhausted
runner's hand, and let his fresh strength continue the race. He warns
him against the personal ambition which alloys his unselfish thirst for
knowledge; against the presumption which impels him to serve God (and
man).

"... apart from such
Appointed channel as he wills shall gather
Imperfect tributes, for that sole obedience
Valued perchance...." (vol. ii. p. 17.)

against the dangers of a course which cuts him adrift from human love.
But Paracelsus has his answer ready. "The wisdom of the past has done
nothing for mankind. Men have laboured and grown famous: and the evils
of life are unabated: the earth still groans in the blind and endless
struggle with them. Truth comes from within the human intellect. To KNOW
is to have opened a way for its escape--not a way for its admission. It
has often refused itself to a life of study. It has been born of
loitering idleness. The force which inspires him proves his mission to
be authentic. His own will could not create such promptings. He dares
not set them aside."

The depth of his conviction carries the day, and the scene ends with
these expressive words:--

"_Par._ ...
Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal.
Two points in the adventure of the diver,
One--when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge,
One--when, a prince, he rises with his pearl?
Festus, I plunge!
_Fest._ We wait you when you rise!"
(vol. ii. p. 38.)

The next two, or indeed three scenes are united under the title
"Paracelsus attains;" but the attainment is not at first visible. We
find him at Constantinople, in the house of the Greek conjuror, nine
years after his departure from home. He has not discovered the magical
secret which he came to seek; and his tone, as he reviews his position,
is full of a bitter and almost despairing sense of failure. His
desultory course has borne scanty and confused results. His powers have
been at once overstrained and frittered away. He is beset by the dread
of madness; and by the fear, scarcely less intolerable, of a moral
shipwreck in which even the purity of his motives will disappear. His
thoughts revert sadly to his youth, and its lost possibilities of love
and joy. At this juncture the poet Aprile appears, and unconsciously
reveals to him the secret of his unsuccess. He has sought knowledge at
the sacrifice of love; in so doing he has violated a natural law and is
suffering for it. Knowledge is inseparable from love in the scheme of
life. Aprile too has sinned, but in the opposite manner; he has refused
to _know_. He has loved blindly and immoderately, and retribution has
overtaken him also: for he is dying. If the one existence has lacked
sustaining warmth, the other has burned itself away. Aprile's "Love" is
not however restricted to the personal sense of the word; it means the
passion for beauty, the impulse to possess and to create it; everything
which belongs to the life of art. He represents the aesthetic or
emotional in life, as Paracelsus represents the intellectual. We see
this in the sorrowful confession of Paracelsus:--

"I cannot feed on beauty for the sake
Of beauty only, nor can drink in balm
From lovely objects for their loveliness;" (vol. ii. p. 95.)

and, in the words already addressed to Aprile (page 65):--

"Are we not halves of one dissevered world,"

Aprile acknowledges his own mistake, in a passage which fully completes
the moral of the story, and begins thus (page 59):--

"Knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great,
Our time so brief,...."

Paracelsus never sees him again, and will speak of him on a subsequent
occasion as a madman; but he evidently accepts him as a messenger of the
truth; and the message sinks into his soul.

In what is called the third scene, five years more have elapsed; and
Paracelsus is at Bale, again opening his heart to his old friend. He is
professor at the University. His fame extends far beyond it. Outwardly
he has "attained." But the sense of a wasted life, and above all, of
moral deterioration, is stronger on him than ever, and the tone in which
he expresses it is only calmer than in the previous soliloquy, because
it is more hopeless. He has failed in his highest aims--and failed
doubly: because he has learned to content himself with low ones. He
believes that he is teaching useful, although fragmentary truths; that
these may lead to more; that those who follow him may stand on his
shoulders and be considered great. But the crowning TRUTH is as far from
him as ever; and the mass of those who crowd his lecture-room do not
even come for what they can learn, but for the vulgar pleasure of seeing
old beliefs subverted, and old methods exposed. He is humiliated at
having declined on to what seems to him a lower range of knowledge;
still more by the kind of men with whom it has brought him into contact;
and he sees himself sinking into a lower depth, in which such praise as
they can give will repay him. His contempt for himself and them is
making him reckless of consequences, and preparing the way for his
disgrace.

In spite however of his failure Paracelsus has done so much, that Festus
is converted; and ready to justify both his early belief in his own
mission, and the abnormal means by which he has chosen to carry it out.
Their positions are reversed, and he combats his friend's self-abasement
as he once combated his too great confidence in himself. He grieves over
what seems to him the depression of an over-wrought mind, and what he
will not regard as due to any deeper cause. But Paracelsus will take no
comfort; and when, finally, he denounces the folly of intellectual
pretensions, and ends with the pathetic words--in part the echo of
Festus' own:--

"... No, no:
Love, hope, fear, faith--these make humanity;
These are its sign and note and character.
And these I have lost!..." (vol. ii. p. 109.)


Festus has no answer to give. He parts from Paracelsus perplexed and
saddened rather than convinced, but with a dawning consciousness of
depths in life, to which his strong but simple soul has no key.

In the fourth scene these depths are more fully and more perplexingly
revealed. Two years more have elapsed. Paracelsus has escaped from Bale,
and is at Colmar, once more confessing himself to Festus, and once more
said to "aspire." But his aspirations are less easy to understand than
formerly, because their aim is less single. The sense of wasted life,
Aprile's warnings, some natural rebound against the continued
intellectual strain have determined him to strive for a fuller
existence, and neglect no opportunity of usefulness or enjoyment. A
serious and commendable change would seem to be denoted by the words, "I
have tried each way singly: now for both!" (page 121); and again at page
126, where a new-born softness asserts itself. His language has,
however, a vein of bitterness, sometimes even of cynicism, which belies
the idea of any sustained impulse to good. He is worn in body, weary in
mind, fitful and wayward in mood, and just in the condition in which men
half impose on others, and half on themselves. He alludes to the habit
of drinking as one which he has now contracted; and he is clearly
entering on the period of his greatest excesses, perhaps also of his
most strenuous exertions in the cause of knowledge. But his energy is
reckless and irregular, and the spirit of the gambler rather than that
of the student is in it. He works all night to forget himself by day,
gathering up his diminished strength for, a lavish expenditure; and a
new misgiving as to the wisdom of his "aspirations" pierces through the
assertion that even sickness may lend an aid; since

"... mind is nothing but disease,
And natural health is ignorance." (vol. ii. p. 122.)

We feel that henceforward his path will be all downhill.

In the fifth and closing scene, thirteen years later, Paracelsus
"attains" again, and for the last time. He is dying. Festus watches by
him in his hospital cell with a very touching tenderness; and as
Paracelsus awakes from a period of lethargy to a delirious remembrance
of his past life, he soothes and guides him to an inspired calm in which
its true meaning is revealed to him. The half prophetic death-bed vision
includes everything which experience had taught him; and a great deal
which we cannot help thinking only a more modern experience could have
taught. It disclaims all striving after absolute knowledge, and asserts
the value of limitation in every energy of life. The passage in which he
describes the faculties of man, and which begins

"Power--neither put forth blindly, nor controlled
Calmly by perfect knowledge;" (vol. ii. p. 168.)

contains the natural lesson of the speaker's career, supposing him in a
condition to receive it. But it also reflects Mr. Browning's constant
ideal of a fruitful and progressive existence; and the very beautiful
monologue of which it forms part is, so far as it goes, his actual
confession of faith. The scientific idea of evolution is here distinctly
foreshadowed: though it begins and ends, in Mr. Browning's mind, in the
large Theism which was and is the basis of his religious belief.

The poem is followed by an historical appendix, which enables the reader
to verify its facts, and judge Mr. Browning's interpretation of them.


"SORDELLO." (1840.)

"Sordello" is, like "Paracelsus," the imaginary reconstruction of a real
life, in connection with contemporary facts; but its six "books" present
a much more complicated structure. The historical part of "Paracelsus"
is all contained in the one life. In "Sordello" it forms a large and
moving background, which often disputes our attention with the central
figure, and sometimes even absorbs it: projecting itself as it were in
an artistic middle distance, in which fact and fancy are blended; while
the mental world through which the hero moves, is in its way, as
restless and as crowded as the material. It may save time and trouble to
readers of the poem to know something of its historical foundation and
poetic motive, before making any great effort to disentangle its various
threads; but it will always be best to read it once without this key:
since the story, involved as it is, has a sustained dramatic interest
which is destroyed by anticipating its course.

The historical personages who take part in it directly and indirectly,
are

Ghibellines. Guelphs.

ECCELINO DA ROMANO II., AZZO, LORD OF ESTE
Surnamed the Monk: (father and son).
married, first to Agnes
Este; secondly to Adelaide, RICHARD, COUNT OF SAN
a Tuscan. BONIFACIO (father and
son).
TAURELLO SALINGUERRA,
a soldier, married, first to
Retrude, of the family of
the German Emperor
Frederick the Second;
and secondly, in advanced
life, to Sofia, fifth
daughter of Eccelino the
Monk.

ADELAIDE, second wife of
Eccelino da Romano.

PALMA (properly Cunizza),
Eccelino's daughter by
Agnes Este.

The poet SORDELLO.


_Historical basis of the Story._

A Mantuan poet of the name of Sordello is mentioned by Dante in the
"Purgatorio," where he is supposed to be recognized as a fellow-townsman
by Virgil.

"Surse ver lui del luogo ove pria stava,
Dicendo, O Mantovan, Io son Sordello
Della tua terra: e l' un l' altro abbracciava."[12]

And also in his treatise "De vulgare Eloquentia," where he speaks of him
as having created the Italian language. These facts are related by
Sismondi in his "Italian Republics," vol. ii., page 202; and the writer
refers us for more particulars to his work on the "Literature of
Southern Europe." He seems, however, to exhaust the subject when he
tells us that the nobility of Sordello's birth, and his intrigue or
marriage with Cunizza are attested by contemporaries; that a "mysterious
obscurity" shrouds his life; and that his violent death is obscurely
indicated by Dante, whose mention of him is now his only title to
immortality. According to one tradition he was the son of an archer
named Elcorte. Another seems to point to him when it imputes a son to
Salinguerra as the only offspring of his first marriage, and having died
before himself. Mr. Browning accepts the latter hypothesis, whilst he
employs both.

The birth of his Sordello, as probably of the real one, coincides with
the close of the twelfth century; and with an active condition of the
family feuds which were just merging in the conflict of Guelphs and
Ghibellines. The "Biographie Universelle" says:

"The first encounter between the two parties took place at Vicenza
towards 1194. Eccelino the Second, who allied himself with the republics
of Verona and Padua, was exiled from Vicenza himself his whole family
and his faction, by a Podesta, his enemy. Before submitting to this
sentence, he undertook to defend himself by setting fire to the
neighbouring houses; a great part of the town was burned during the
conflict, in which Eccelino was beaten. These were the first scenes of
confusion and massacre, which met the eyes of the son of the Lord of
Romano, the ferocious Eccelino the Third, born 4th of April, 1194."

In Mr. Browning's version, Adelaide, wife of Eccelino II., is saved with
her infant son--this Eccelino the Third--by the devotion of an archer,
Elcorte, who perishes in the act. Retrude, wife of Salinguerra, and also
present on this occasion, only lives to be conveyed to Adelaide's castle
at Goito; but her new-born child survives; and Adelaide, dreading his
future rivalry with her own, allows his father to think him dead, and
brings him up, under the name of Sordello, as her page, declaring him to
be Elcorte's son adopted out of gratitude. The "intrigue" between him
and Palma (Cunizza) appears in due time as a poetical affinity,
strongest on her side, and which determines her to see him restored to
his rightful place. Palma's subsequent marriage with Richard, Count of
San Bonifacio, serves to justify the idea of an engagement to him,
ratified by her father before his retirement from the world, and which
she and Salinguerra conspire to break, the one from love of Sordello,
the other in the interests of her House. Eccelino's real assumption of
the monastic habit after Adelaide's death is represented as in part
caused by remorse--for Salinguerra is his old and faithful ally, and he
has connived at the wrong done to him in the concealment of his son; and
his return to the Guelph connexion from which his daughter has sprung,
as a general disclaimer of his second wife's views.

The Lombard League also figures in the story, as the consequence of
Salinguerra's and Palma's conspiracy against San Bonifacio; though it
also appears as brought about by the historic course of events.
Salinguerra, under cover of military reprisals, has entrapped the Count
into Ferrara, and detained him there, at the moment when he was expected
to meet his lady-love in his own city of Verona. Verona prepares to
resent this outrage on its Prince, and with it, the other States which
represent the Guelph cause; and when Palma--seizing her
opportunity--summons Sordello thither in his character of her minstrel,
and reveals to him her projects for him and for herself, their interview
is woven into the historical picture of a great mediaeval city suddenly
called to arms. What Sordello sees when he goes with Palma to Ferrara,
belongs to the history of all mediaeval warfare; and his sudden and
premature death revives the historical tradition though in a new form.
The intermediate details of his minstrel's career are of course
imaginary; but his struggle to increase the expressiveness of his mother
tongue again records a fact.

I have mentioned such accessible authorities as Sismondi and the
"Biographie Universelle," because they _are_ accessible: not from any
idea that they give the measure of Mr. Browning's knowledge of his
subject. He prepared himself for writing "Sordello" by studying all the
chronicles of that period of Italian history which the British Museum
supplied; and we may be sure that every event he alludes to as
historical, is so in spirit, if not in the letter; while such details as
come under the head of historical curiosities are absolutely true. He
also supplemented his reading by a visit to the places in which the
scenes of the story are laid.


_Its Dramatic Idea._

The dramatic idea of "Sordello" is that of an imaginative nature,
nourished by its own creations, and also consumed by them; and breaking
down in consequence under the first strain of real conflict and
passion. The mysterious Italian poet,--scarcely known but as a voice, a
mere phantom among living men--was well fitted to illustrate such an
idea; he might also perhaps have suggested it. But we know that it was
already growing in Mr. Browning's mind; for Sordello had been
foreshadowed in Aprile, though the two are as different as their common
poetic quality allows. Aprile is consumed by a creative passion, which
is always akin to love; Sordello by an imaginative fever which has no
love in it; and in this respect he presents a stronger contrast to
Aprile than Paracelsus himself. As a poet he may be said to contain both
the artist and the thinker, and therefore to transcend both; and his
craving is for neither love nor knowledge, as the foregoing poem
represents them, but for that magnitude of poetic existence, which means
all love and all knowledge, as all beauty and all power in itself. But
he makes the same mistake as Aprile, or at least as Paracelsus, and
makes it in a greater degree; for he rejects all the human conditions of
the poetic life: and strives to live it, not in experience or in
sympathy, but by a pure act of imagination, or as he calls it, of
_Will_; and he wears himself out body and soul by a mental strain which
proves as barren as it is continuous. The true joy of living comes home
to him at last, and with it the first challenge to self-sacrifice. Duty
prevails; but he dies in the conflict, or rather of it.

The intended lesson of the story is distinctly enforced in its last
scene, but is patent almost from the first--that the mind must not
disclaim the body, nor imagination divorce itself from reality: that the
spiritual is bound up with the material in our earthly life. All Mr.
Browning's practical philosophy is summed up in this truth, and much of
his religion; for it points to the necessity of a human manifestation of
the Divine Being; and though Sordello's story contains no explicit
reference to Christian doctrine, an unmistakeable Christian sentiment
pervades its close. That restless and ambitious spirit had missed its
only possible anchorage: the ideal of an intellectual existence at once
guided and set free by love.

Mr. Browning has indeed prefaced the poem by saying that in writing it
he has laid his chief stress _on the incidents in the development of a
soul_. It must be read with reference to this idea; and I should be
bound to give precedence to it over the poetic inspiration of the story
if Mr. Browning had practically done so. This is not, however, the case.
Sordello's poetic individuality overshadows the moral, and for a time
conceals it altogether. The close of his story is distinctly the
emerging of a soul from the mists of poetic egotism by which it has been
obscured; and Mr. Browning has meant us from the first to see it
struggling through them. But in so doing he has judged Sordello's poetic
life as a blind aspiration after the spiritual, while the egotism which
he represents as the keynote of his poetic being was in fact the
negation of it. The idea was just: that the greatest poet must have in
him the making of the largest man. His Sordello is imperial among men
for the one moment in which his song is in sympathy with human life; and
Mr. Browning would have made it more consistently so, had he worked out
his idea at a later time. But the poem was written at a period in which
his artistic judgment was yet inferior to his poetic powers, and the
need of ordering his vast material from the reader's, as well as the
writer's, point of view--though he states it by implication at the end
of the third book--had not thoroughly penetrated his mind.

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