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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Browning's critics and biographers never tire of recounting the original reception of Sordello. We are told again and again Tennyson's remark that only the first and last lines are intelligible and they are both false, or Mrs. Carlyle's comment that after reading the poem through she had still not discovered whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. But even more discouraging to the modern reader who wishes to take Sordello seriously is the tendency of later critics, including those otherwise friendly to Browning, to ignore the poem or pass it by with brief praise for what are sometimes called its “incidental beauties.” Sir Henry Jones, writing on Browning in the Cambridge History of English Literature, passes it by without an attempt at interpretation. Chesterton does the same in the English Men of Letters Series biography, while Phelps, conceding that “in its inmost citadel is some precious secret,” adds “but not only has no one found it, no one knows what it is.” The few studies since 1920 listed in the CBEL all deal with sources and composition, and the yearly bibliographies in PMLA since the publication of the CBEL (1941) list only one interpretive paper. DeVane, in his valuable Browning Handbook (1935), continues the study of sources and methods of composition, showing the evolution of the poem through three successive plans over a period of seven years. As might be expected, DeVane does not find the poem unified. It is, he concludes, “a bewildering potpourri of poetry, psychology, love, romance, humanitarianism, philosophy, fiction, and history.”
1 The quotations are from William Lyon Phelps, Robert Browning (Indianapolis, 1932), p. 376, and William Clyde DeVane, A Browning Handbook (New York, 1935), p. 79.
2 Edward Dowden, Robert Browning (London, 1904), pp. 33-41, esp. p. 39; Robert Browning, Sordello, ed. Arthur J. Whyte (London, etc., 1913), esp. p. 33 and n. 1, p. 286; Stewart Walker Holmes, “Browning's Sordello and Jung: Browning's Sordello in the Light of Jung's Theory of Types,” PMLA, lvi (Sept. 1941), 758-796. Holmes's theory has been supported by later research showing the close relationship between Romanticism and modern psychology, including the anticipation of the theory of the unconscious in the Romantic theory of inspiration in the arts. I am here assuming that, “Victorian” or not, Browning is heir to the idea's of the Romantic era. See Morse Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA, lxvi (March 1951), 3-23.
3 Book i, 541, 554, 676; ii, 428, 627, 846, 849, 994, 998; iii, 34, 45, 175, 178, 188, 215, 325, 568, 570; iv, 202, 276; v, 170, 366, 544; vi, 767. Line numbering here and elsewhere in this paper follows Whyte.
4 Dowden comments on this passage: “And the conclusion of the whole matter may be briefly stated: the primary need of such a nature as Sordello's—and we can hardly doubt that Browning would have assigned himself a place in the class to which the poet of his imagination belongs—is that of a Power above himself, which shall deliver him from egoism, and whose loyal service shall concentrate and direct his various faculties, and this a Power not unknown or remote, but one brought near and made manifest; or, in other words, it is the need of that which old religion has set forth as God in Christ” (p. 39). Holmes offers this reading: “The first ‘Power’ is God, who is concealed from mortal sight, unknowable but whom you choose to love. He has the authority of creator, is beyond rivalry—rivalry which would occasion unproductive, defensive conflict. The second ‘power’ is ‘revealed’ to you as your out-soul, the symbol, which points out the minute's work allotted you in the divine plan (‘its representative,’ ‘authority the same’), clear to your sight, so human that it is not oracular (‘none the minutest duct to that out-nature’), and yet objective enough (‘nought that would instruct’) so that it, again, does not awaken rivalry” (pp. 790-791).
There is no basic conflict between these interpretations. One of Jung's major contributions has been his stress on the psychological need for religious faith. Holmes quotes from Modern Man in Search of a Soul: “Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life” (p. 791). Browning can be a defender of religion, although I doubt if he thought of himself as particularly a defender of “old” religion—and a precursor of Jung at the same time. He is here related to Jung in that both begin with the psychic needs of the individual rather than with Revelation. In effect, both are saying not that we must believe in God because God is Truth, but that we must believe that God is Truth because we are so constituted that we will not be psychically sound unless we do believe. I would agree with Holmes that the “representative” or “communication” is the symbol through which one emotionally identifies himself with the outer world.
5 In a long personal digression in Book iii, Browning develops the peasant girl seen in Venice, to whom—as symbol of all the oppressed of the world—he dedicates himself and his poetry. As Holmes points out, the closeness with which Browning identified himself with Sordello is evident in the fact that although the encounter with the girl is credited to Browning, Sordello is thereafter treated as if it had occurred to him.