Part 13 (1/2)
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 clas.h.i.+ng, 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 flouris.h.!.+ 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--