Browning's Sordello: The Art of the Makers-See

Autor: Daniel Stempel
Rok vydání: 1965
Předmět:
Zdroj: PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 80:554-561
ISSN: 1938-1530
0030-8129
DOI: 10.2307/460849
Popis: IN 1835 Robert Browning, in search of a publisher for Paracelsus, wrote to the Reverend William Johnson Fox, "I have another affair on hand rather of a more popular nature, I conceive; but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two, so I decide on trying the question with this."' Since the "affair on hand" was Sordello, whose reputation for tortured syntax and obscure allusions still persists, one may well wonder what Browning meant by "popular." The public found nothing difficult or strange in Paracelsus; although it did not appeal to the taste of the times, the praise of a few perceptive critics and readers showed that it was not totally ignored. Sordello, in contrast, struck a new note in the literature of the forties, a harsh dissonance which cut through the turgid harmonies of a decadent romanticism. Browning's poem, like Richard Wagner's music, sent the critics scurrying for shelter with their hands clapped over their ears. The notoriety of Sordello, which he conceived to be of "a more popular nature" than Paracelsus, haunted Browning for the rest of his life like that pungent, musky "after-gust" which he promised his readers in its concluding lines. It seems obvious that Browning was not referring to the anticipated reception of Sordello; he was hinting at something quite different-his experimentation with a new narrative method based on a popular form of public entertainment. If there is any single quality which marks Browning's poetry and sets it apart from the work of his contemporaries, it is his stubborn reliance on his own immediate experience and his relative independence of traditional literary forms and images, classical or romantic. Even Pauline (1833), his first major poem, was not a mere spontaneous romantic effusion; it was an honest, if naive, attempt to sketch the portrait of a typical "poet" by recording the gasps, panting, and declamatory self-accusation of a Byronic-Shelleyan stereotype. Browning protested, with some justice, that he was not the hero of Pauline; it was, he explained, only the first of a series of works in which he assumed the character proper to the author-"this poem, the other novel, such an opera, such a speech, etc., etc., . "2 But John Stuart Mill, making the natural assumption that the Poet and the author of Pauline were one, wrote such a scathing dissection of Browning's young poseur that he hastily disowned his creation and spoke of it later only "with extreme repugnance.")3 Actually, Mill's misunderstanding was a tribute to Browning's success in creating a living poet, even if he was an absurdly pompous representative of the genus. It was his own fault, Browning freely admitted, for building up his protagonist with "all manner of (to my then notion) poetical accessories."14 Although Browning abandoned the ambitious scheme which had begun with the publication of Pauline, he did not simply start all over again. He had not solved the problem of the true vocation of the poet to his own satisfaction and he returned to it in Paracelsus and Sordello, struggling to shape an adequate definition of the poet's duty to himself, to his fellow men, and to his art. Paracelsus, a "dramatic poem,}" took up the challenge directly; it was indeed more "decisive and explicit" than Sordello. The characters spoke for themselves, in the tradition of the theater, while their creator remained hidden, if not offstage, at least in the prompter's box. But this method was not analytical enough to assuage Browning's thirst for the knowledge of the unconscious foundations of personality which lie beneath the conscious explanation of motives. In Sordello he boldly substituted the dangerously complex device of the intermediary narrator for the simple dramatic confrontation of actors and audience. All that we know of Sordello comes to us through a single interpreter of scene, action, and character. Who-and what-is this factotum who serves as Browning's persona, exercising absolute command over the artistic illusion? The answer to this question can, I believe, provide us with the key to the telling of Sordello's story.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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