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Updated: June 12, 2025
The heart and brain of Sordello become the field of conflict between fierce, contending forces. All that is egoistic in his nature cries out for a life of pride and power and joy. At best it is but little that he could ever do to serve the suffering multitude. And yet should he falter because he cannot gain for them the results of time?
He even characterizes the Tragedy as an attempt 'to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch. 'Sordello' again occupied him during the remainder of 1837 and the beginning of 1838; and by the spring of this year he must have been thankful to vary the scene and mode of his labours by means of a first visit to Italy.
I am not deeply concerned about the minor characters in "Sordello," and have long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pass through this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello's story told in an intelligible manner. Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about my bookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here and there.
You might have written for him, I've a friend over the sea, . . . . It all grew out of the books I write, &c. You should see his fine wrath and scorn for the idiocy that doesn't at once comprehend you! He knows every word you have ever written; long ago 'Sordello' was an open book to him from title-page to closing line, and all you have printed since has been as eagerly and studiously devoured.
The most famous, however, of the Italian troubadours is certainly Sordello. There is much uncertainty concerning the facts of Sordello's life; he was born at Goito, near Mantua, and was of noble family. His name is not to be derived from sordidus, but from Surdus, a not uncommon patronymic in North Italy during the thirteenth century.
Happily the winter was of a miraculous mildness. Mrs Browning worked Aurora Leigh in "a sort of furia," and Browning set himself to the task a fruitless one as it proved of rehandling and revising Sordello: "I lately gave time and pains," he afterwards told Milsand in his published dedication of the poem, "to turn my work into what the many might, instead of what the few must like: but after all I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it" proud but warrantable words.
But the suggestion of two portrait busts of the period of classical decadence, one in marble representing a boy, and the other the powerful head of a man in granite, gave rise to Protus, one of the few flawless poems of Browning. His mastery over the rhymed couplet is nowhere seen to greater advantage, unless it be in a few passages of Sordello.
Verci, from whose "History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's intrigue with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as the most polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time, of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet, as his Provençal poems manifest.
But the world can no more understand the beauty of sin, than it can understand the preface to 'The Egoist, or the simplicity of 'Sordello. Sin puzzles it; and all that puzzles the world frightens the world; for the world is a child, without a child's charm, or a child's innocent blue eyes.
Two years later his drama of Stratford was performed by his friend Macready and Helen Faucit, and in 1840 the most difficult and obscure of his works, Sordello, appeared; but, except with a select few, did little to increase his reputation. Thereafter his home until his wife's death in 1861 was in Italy, chiefly at Florence.
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