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Updated: August 12, 2024
The poet and speaking in his own person Browning makes confession of his faith can adequately serve his mistress, "Suffering Humanity," only as a poet. Sordello failed to render into song the highest thoughts and aspirations of Italy; but Dante was to follow and was not to fail.
Stern is a long rambling rhapsody called "Florentine Nights," in which the author professes to pour into the ears of a dying mistress the history of some of his former amours and exaltations, the natural jealousy of the listener going for a stimulus in the recital. His first love, however, is an idealization a Greek statue which he visits by moonlight, as Sordello in Browning's poem does the
It is as difficult to read as 'Endymion' or the 'Revolt of Islam, and for the same reason the author's lack of experience in the art of composition. We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase in his house, which contained fine rooms, but no way of getting into them. 'Sordello' is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties, essayed a high thing.
He died 'twas shrewd: And came with all his youth and unblown hopes On the world's heart, and touched it into tears. In Sordello, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's Keats: I have seen more glory in sunrise Than in the deepening of azure noon,
Sutherland Orr says, "not only in this first, almost inevitable assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing readiness to support him in his literary career. 'Paracelsus, 'Sordello, and the whole of 'Bells and Pomegranates' were published at his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no return." An aunt, Mrs.
"Somebody is dead in 'Sordello," one of them wrote to her friend. "I don't quite know who it is, but it must make things a little clearer in the long run." Alas! a copious use of the guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of "Sordello." It is hardly to be hoped that "Sordello," or "Red Cotton Night Cap Country," or "Fifine," will continue to be struggled with by posterity.
These prolonged studies Paracelsus, Sordello, and, on a more contracted scale, Pauline each a study in "the development of a soul," gain and lose through the immaturity of the writer. He had, as yet, brought only certain of his faculties into play, or, at least, he had not as yet connected with his art certain faculties which become essential characteristics of his later work.
He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the restless energy and acumen of his father, Taurello, with the refinement and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it.
Two years later appeared Paracelsus, and then his tragedy Strafford was put upon the stage; but not till Sordello was published, in 1840, did he attract attention enough to be denounced for the obscurity and vagaries of his style. Thereafter, until his own work compelled attention, he was known chiefly as the man who married Elizabeth Barrett.
Much would have been lost had all poets been as reticent, yet one likes him better for it than if he had given us a new "Vita Nuova." What an immense long way I have wandered from "Sordello," my dear Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books, his thoughts, like those of a boy, "are long, long thoughts."
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