Sordello Strafford, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day

By ROBERT BROWNING. Boston : Ticknor & Fields.

IN his dedication to the new edition of “ Sordello,” Mr. Browning says,—“ I lately gave time and pains 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.”

This, on the whole, he has done; for, though a prose heading runs before every page, with a knowing wink to the reader, the mystery is not cleared up. As the view dissolves with every turn of a leaf, the Showman says, confidentially,—“ Now you shall see how a poet’s soul comes into play,—how he succeeds a little, but fails more,—tries again, is no better satisfied,—

We fear so; at any rate, the exhibition fails, because the showman cannot furnish brains to his commentary. The man who can read “ Sordello” is little helped by these headings, and the man who cannot is soon distracted by continual disappointment. We think he will end by reading only the headings. And they doubtless are the best for him. Otherwise, under the cerebral struggle to perceive how the prose interprets the poetry, he might become the idiot that Douglas Jerrold exclaimed that he, was at his first trial of “ Sordello.”

There has been a careful overhauling of the punctuation, with benefit to the text. Many lines have been altered, sometimes to the comfort of the reader; and about a hundred fresh lines have been interpolated here and there, to the weakening, we think, of the dramatic vigor of nearly every place that is thus handled. Many readers will, however, find this compensated by an increased clearness of the sense. On page l3l (page 152, first edition) there is an improved manipulation of the simile of the dwarf palm ; and four lines before the last one on page 147 (page 171, first edition) lighten up the thought. So there are eight lines placed to advantage after “ Sordello, wake!” on page 152 (page 176). But, on the whole, what Mr. Browning first imagined cannot be tampered with, and he must generously trust the elements of his own fine genius to do justice to his thought with all people who would not thank him to furnish an interpreter.

One day we argued earnestly for Browning with a man who said it was fatal to the poetry that it needed an argument, and that he did not want to earn the quickening of his imagination by the sweat of his brow,

— he could gather the same thought and beauty in less break-neck places,—all the profit was expended in mental gymnasties, — in short,

Find the rest of Mr. Average’s argument on page 67.

These objections to the poetry of Mr. Browning, which the dense, involved, and metaphysical treatment of “ Sordello” first suggested to the public, are made to apply to all his subsequent writings. We concede that “ Sordello ” over-refines, and that, after reading it, “ who would has heard Sordello’s story told,” but who would not and could not has probably not heard it. The very time of the poem, which is put several centuries back amid the scenery of the Guelph and Ghibelline feuds, as if to make the struggle of a humane and poetic soul to grow, to become recognized, to find a place and purpose, seem still more premature, puzzles the reader with remote allusions, with names that belong to obscure Italian narrative, with motives and events that require historical analysis. The poem is impatient with those very things which make the environment of the bard Sordello, and treats them in curt lines. A character is jammed into a sentence, like a witch into a snuff-box, the didactic parts grow metaphysical, and the life of Sordello does not fuse the events of the poem into one long rhythm. He thinks and dreams apart, and Palma’s ambition for him is an aside, and the events swing their arms and strike flery and cruel blows with Sordello absent. Considering Mr. Browning’s intent, there is a fine poetic success in this very fault of the poem, but it is not a plain one, and is an after-thought of the critic. The numerous splendid pages in “ Sordello ” do nothing towards making one complete impression which cannot be evaded. Naddo, the genius-haunter, would complain, that, in struggling out towards these aisles of beauty, he had seriously compromised his clothing in the underbrush.

But the faults which characterize “ Sordello ” are not prevalent in the subsequent writings which are loosely accused of them. They become afterwards exceptional, they vein here and there the surface, and Mr. Average stumbles over them and proceeds no farther. Still, Mr. Browning’s verse is not easy reading. He is economical of words to the point of harmony ; but what a hypocrite he would be, if he used more ! He brings you meaning, if you bring him mind; and there is Tupper outside, if you don’t care to trouble yourself. In saying this we are not arrogant atall, for there is a large and widening sympathy with Mr. Browning’s thought. Perhaps a whole generation of readers will fretfully break itself upon his style, and pass away, before the mind hails with ease his merits. But is Shakspeare’s verse easy reading? Not to this day, in spite of his level of common sense, the artlessness of his passion, and the broad simplicity of a great imagination, that causeth its sun to shine on the evil and the good. It was easy reading to Ben Jonson, to Milton, and to Chapman; it took “ Eliza and our James ” ; it had more theatrical success than the scholarly plays of Jonson : but two or three centuries have exhausted neither his commentators nor the subtile parts that need a comment. A good deal of Shakspeare is read, but the rest is caviare to the multitude. We need not comfort ourselves on the facility with which we take his name in vain. We venture to say that the whole of Shakspeare’s thought is inwardly tasted by as many people as enjoy the subtilty of Robert Browning. Shakspeare has broader places over which the waters lie, sweet and warm, to tempt disporting crowds, and places deep as human nature, upon whose brink the pleasure-seekers peer and shudder. But if Mr. Browning had a theatrical ability equal to his dramatic, and were content to exhibit a greater number of the stock-flgures of humanity, men would say that hero again they had love that maddened and grief that shattered, murdering ambition, humorous weakness, and imagination that remarries man and Nature.

Mr. Browning’s literary and artistic allusions prevent a ready appreciation of his genius. “Sordello” needs a key. How many friends, “ elect chiefly for love,” have spent time burrowing in encyclopædias, manuals of history, old biographies, dictionaries of painting, and the like, for explanations of the remote knowledge which Mr. Browning uses as if it had been left at the door with the morning paper ! On the very first page, who is “ Pentapolin, named o’ the Naked Arm ” ? If a man had just read Don Quixote, he might single out Pentapolin. Taurello and Ecelin were not familiar, — nor the politics of Verona, Padua, Ferrara, six hundred years ago. There was not a lively sympathy with Sordello himself. Who were the “ Pisan pair ” ? Lanzi’s pages were turned up to discover. And Greek scholars recognized the “Loxian.” But any reader might be pardoned for not at once divining that the double rillet of minstrelsy, on page 37, was the Troubadour and the Trouvère, nor for refusing to read pages 155 and 156 without a tolerable oufit of information upon the historical points and personages there catalogued.

There are not a few pages that appear like a long stretch of prose suddenly broken up and jammed in the current; some of the ends stick out, some have gone under, the sense has grown hummocky, and the reader’s whole faculty turns to picking his way. Take, for instance, page 95, of which we have prepared a translation, but considerately withhold it.

But turn now to the famous marble font, sculptured afresh in those perfect lines which begin at the middle of page 16, with the picture of the Castle Goito and the maple-panelled room. Here the boy Sordello comes every eve, to visit the marble standing in the midst, to watch the mute penance of the Caryatides, who flush with the dawn of his imagination. Read the description of his childhood, from page 25, and the delights of his opening, fancy : —

All these pages are filled with poetry ; the reflective element does not dominate severely. Sordello’s youthful genius craves sympathy, and he finds it by investing Nature with fanciful forms and attributes, He is Apollo,—that shall be the name.” How he ransacks the world for his youth’s outfit, as he climbs the ravine in the June weather, and emerges into the forest, which tries “ old surprises on him,” amid which he lingers, deep in the stratagems of his own fancy, till

Then comes a portrait of Palma, done with Titian’s brush and manner. As we turn the leaves where favorite passages lie brilliantly athwart the faded politics of an old story, we are tempted to try spinning its thread again for the sake of holding lip these lines, which are among the most delicate and sumptuous that Mr. Browning ever wrote. But room is at present dear as paper. Only turn, for instance, to pages 39-45, 72-74, the picturesque scenes on pages 84, 85, the opening of Book IV., Salinguerra’s portrait, like an old picture of Florence, on page 127, and lines single and by the half-dozen everywhere.

The tragedy of “ Strafford” is one of Mr. Browning’s earliest compositions. It was once placed upon the stage by Mr. Macready, but it is no more of an acting play than all the other pieces of Mr. Browning, and is too political to be good reading. The characters seem to be merely reporting the condition of parties under Charles I.; this and the struggle of the King with the Parliament are told, but are not represented, the passions of the piece belong too exclusively to the caucus and the councilchamber, and even the way in which the King sacrifices Strafford does not dramatically appear. In the last act, there is much tenderness in the contrast of Strafford’s doom with the unconsciousness of his children, and pathos in his confidence to the last moment that the King will protect him. The dialogue is generally too abrupt and exclamatory, Vane speaks well on page 222, and Hampden on page 231, and there are two good scenes between Charles and Strafford, where the King’s irresolution appears against the Earl’s devotedness. The closing scene of Act IV. has the dramatic form, but it is interfused with mere Civil commotion instead of color, and the motive is a transient one, important only to the historian. But we need not multiply words over that one of all his compositions which Mr, Browning probably now respects the least.

“ Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day ” is a beautiful poem, filled with thought, humor, and imagination. The mythical theory of Strauss was never so well analyzed as in the tilting lines from page 353 to 361. And there is good theology in this : —

Naddo will doubtless tell us that this poem is not built broadly on the human heart ; there is too much discussion about the difficulty of becoming a Christian, and the subtile genius flits so quickly through the lines that an ordinary butterfly-net does not catch it. That is well for the genius. But we are of opinion that the human heart will always find in this great poem the solemn and glorious things that belong to it, and more and more so as new and clearer thought is born into the world to read it. It is no more difficult to read than “ Paradise Lost,” while its scenery is less conventional, and the longings of a religious heart are taken by a bold imagination into serene and starry skies.