An Introduction to the Study of Browning

oetical Works, 1889,

dozen considerable poems; indeed, its very fault lies in its plethora of ideas, the breathless crowd of hurrying thoughts and fancies, which fill and overflow it. That this is not properly to be called "obscurity" has been triumphantly shown by Mr. Swinburne in his essay on George Chapman. Some of his admirable statements I have already quoted, but we may bear to be told twice that Browning is too much the reverse of obscure, that he is only too brilliant and subtle, that he never thinks but at full speed. But besides this characteristic, which

quently caused the two interests of the poem, the psychological and the historical, to clash; the background to intrude on and confuse the middle distance, if not even the foreground itself. Every one

s with brooding suspense, which has an almost unaccountable fascination for those who once come under its charm, and nowhere in Browning's work are there so

s the

den. Mincio,

d water, in nex

mists broke up

nd, burned like

ashing of a m

a window, is shown with the sa

arose

to Verona's a

ay black be

h of torchfire,

d harangued t

people surgi

ute

And there are other splendours and rarities, not only in the evocation of actual scenes and things, but i

ay, some Ethio

vers, dips a

blood, into t

course which g

ibe again, wh

cause he gues

poison-wattle

izard wrested

(whose skin, the

stril with, an

odshot through t

eached its bo

nks o'er enchant

ague his enemie

hair; but, these

uts them so

ects a cool ret

od of winnin

s that, takes c

iver's brink, hi

close to their

or the Mountai

e of another order, thrilling as the trumpet's "golden cry," in the passionate invocation of Dante, e

he-fo

his hearts' bl

falter now)-f

y forerunner

r I know tho

into the co

from its righ

l path with

its allot

f the prog

s it not! His

ights, desponds wi

ised brillianc

h thee, its

urneth prosper

I approach th

h only one na

urrent soft

ce mate in th

sea whose fire w

cendent vision,

Dante, pace

ell disgorgeth

ts whirring s

rieved and obsc

kness quie

ranths grown b

ilights where

is! If I shou

he shrinks; at the approach or the call of action, his will refuses to act. We might sum up his character in a general sense by saying that his imagination overpowers every other faculty; an imagination intensely personal, a sort of intellectual egoism, which removes him equally from action and from sympathy. He looks on men as foils to himself, or as a background on which to shine. But the root of his failure is this, and it is one which could never be even apprehended by a vulgar egoism: he longs to grasp the whole of life at once, to realise his aims in their entirety, without complying with the necessary conditions. His mind perceives the infinite and essential so clearly that it scorns or spurns the mere accidents. But earth being earth, and life growth, and accidents an inevitable part of life, the rule remains that m

ord. Sordello, he says, excelled in all kinds of composition, and by his experiments in the dialects of Cremona, Brescia and Verona, cities near Mantua, helped to form the Tuscan tongue. But besides the brief record of Dante, there are certain accounts of Sordello's life, very confused and conflicting, in the early Italian Chronicles and the Proven?al lives of the Troubadours. Tiraboschi sifts these legends, leaving very little of them. According to him, Sordello was a Mantuan of noble family, born at Goito at the close of the twelfth century. He was a poet and warrior, though not, as some reports profess, captain-general or governor of Mantua. He eloped with Cunizza, th

es we have of the historic Sordello to suggest the "feverish poet" of the poem. The fugitive personality of the half mythical fighting poet eludes the grasp, and Browning has rather given the name of Sordello to an imagined type of the poetic character than con

TNO

1

contained; 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

1

llo, a good and sympathetic account will be found in Mr. Eug