Life of Robert Browning [41]
due to the poet's solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and "dewy eve",
in the wooded districts south of Dulwich, at Hatcham, and upon
Wimbledon Common, whither he was often wont to wander and to ramble for hours,
and where he composed one day the well-known lines upon Shelley,
with many another unrecorded impulse of song. Here, too, it was,
that Carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by `a beautiful youth',
who introduced himself as one of the philosopher's profoundest admirers.
It was from the Dulwich wood that, one afternoon in March,
he saw a storm glorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty;
a memorable vision, recorded in an utterance of Luigi to his mother:
here too that, in autumnal dusks, he saw many a crescent moon
with "notched and burning rim." He never forgot the bygone
"sunsets and great stars" he saw in those days of his fervid youth.
Browning remarked once that the romance of his life was in his own soul;
and on another occasion I heard him smilingly add, to some one's
vague assertion that in Italy only was there any romance left,
"Ah, well, I should like to include poor old Camberwell!"
Perhaps he was thinking of his lines in "Pippa Passes", of the days
when that masterpiece came ebullient from the fount of his genius --
"May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights --
Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"
There is all the distinction between "Pippa Passes" and "Sordello"
that there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx.
The latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness;
but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the `symmetria prisca'
of ideal sculpture. I have already alluded to "Sordello"
as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry. This, indeed, it still seems to me,
notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem
who have hoped "I should do it justice," thereby meaning
that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece. It is a gigantic effort,
of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan.
That the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable,
also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound thoughts
and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all shape
towards high thinking.
But it is monotonous as one of the enormous American inland seas
to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight.
The fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness,
has, coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision,
been Browning's ruin here.
There is one charge even yet too frequently made against "Sordello",
that of "obscurity". Its interest may be found remote,
its treatment verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those
unaccustomed to excursions from the familiar highways of old usage,
but its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain
compared with the "silva oscura" of the "Divina Commedia".
Surely this question of Browning's obscurity was expelled
to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne,
in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot,
wrote his famous incidental passage in his "Essay on Chapman".
Too probably, in the dim disintegrating future which will reduce
all our o'ertoppling extremes, "Sordello" will be as little read
as "The Faerie Queene", and, similarly, only for the gleam
of the quenchless lamps amid its long deserted alleys and stately avenues.
Sadly enough, for to poets it will always be an unforgotten land --
a continent with amaranth-haunted Vales of Tempe, where,
as Spenser says in one of the Aeclogues of "The Shepherd's Calendar",
they will there oftentimes "sitten as drouned in dreme."
It has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own.
I know of no other poem in the language which is at once
so wearisome and so seductive. How can one explain paradoxes?
There is a charm, or there is none: that is what it amounts to,
for each individual. `Tutti ga i so gusti, e mi go i mii' --
"everybody follows his taste, and