The tragedies in question were to be 'King Victor and King Charles',and 'The Return of the Druses'.
This letter affords a curious insight into Mr.Browning's mode of work;it is also very significant of the small place which love had hitherto occupied in his life.It was evident,from his appeal to Miss Haworth's 'notion'on the subject,that he had as yet no experience,even imaginary,of a genuine passion,whether in woman or man.
The experience was still distant from him in point of time.
In circumstance he was nearer to it than he knew;for it was in 1839that he became acquainted with Mr.Kenyon.
When dining one day at Serjeant Talfourd's,he was accosted by a pleasant elderly man,who,having,we conclude,heard who he was,asked leave to address to him a few questions:'Was his father's name Robert?
had he gone to school at the Rev.Mr.Bell's at Cheshunt,and was he still alive?'On receiving affirmative answers,he went on to say that Mr.Browning and he had been great chums at school,and though they had lost sight of each other in after-life,he had never forgotten his old playmate,but even alluded to him in a little book which he had published a few years before.The next morning the poet asked his father if he remembered a schoolfellow named John Kenyon.He replied,'Certainly!This is his face,'
and sketched a boy's head,in which his son at once recognized that of the grown man.The acquaintance was renewed,and Mr.Kenyon proved ever afterwards a warm friend.Mr.Browning wrote of him,in a letter to Professor Knight of St.Andrews,Jan.10,1884:
'He was one of the best of human beings,with a general sympathy for excellence of every kind.He enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth,of Southey,of Landor,and,in later days,was intimate with most of my contemporaries of eminence.'It was at Mr.Kenyon's house that the poet saw most of Wordsworth,who always stayed there when he came to town.
In 1840'Sordello'appeared.It was,relatively to its length,by far the slowest in preparation of Mr.Browning's poems.
This seemed,indeed,a condition of its peculiar character.
It had lain much deeper in the author's mind than the various slighter works which were thrown off in the course of its inception.
We know from the preface to 'Strafford'that it must have been begun soon after 'Paracelsus'.Its plan may have belonged to a still earlier date;for it connects itself with 'Pauline'as the history of a poetic soul;with both the earlier poems,as the manifestation of the self-conscious spiritual ambitions which were involved in that history.
This first imaginative mood was also outgrowing itself in the very act of self-expression;for the tragedies written before the conclusion of 'Sordello'impress us as the product of a different mental state --as the work of a more balanced imagination and a more mature mind.
It would be interesting to learn how Mr.Browning's typical poet became embodied in this mediaeval form:whether the half-mythical character of the real Sordello presented him as a fitting subject for imaginative psychological treatment,or whether the circumstances among which he moved seemed the best adapted to the development of the intended type.
The inspiration may have come through the study of Dante,and his testimony to the creative influence of Sordello on their mother-tongue.
That period of Italian history must also have assumed,if it did not already possess,a great charm for Mr.Browning's fancy,since he studied no less than thirty works upon it,which were to contribute little more to his dramatic picture than what he calls 'decoration',or 'background'.But the one guide which he has given us to the reading of the poem is his assertion that its historical circumstance is only to be regarded as background;and the extent to which he identified himself with the figure of Sordello has been proved by his continued belief that its prominence was throughout maintained.He could still declare,so late as 1863,in his preface to the reprint of the work,that his 'stress'in writing it had lain 'on the incidents in the development of a soul,little else'
being to his mind 'worth study'.I cannot therefore help thinking that recent investigations of the life and character of the actual poet,however in themselves praiseworthy and interesting,have been often in some degree a mistake;because,directly or indirectly,they referred Mr.Browning's Sordello to an historical reality,which his author had grasped,as far as was then possible,but to which he was never intended to conform.
Sordello's story does exhibit the development of a soul;or rather,the sudden awakening of a self-regarding nature to the claims of other men --the sudden,though slowly prepared,expansion of the narrower into the larger self,the selfish into the sympathetic existence;and this takes place in accordance with Mr.Browning's here expressed belief that poetry is the appointed vehicle for all lasting truths;that the true poet must be their exponent.The work is thus obviously,in point of moral utterance,an advance on 'Pauline'.
Its metaphysics are,also,more distinctly formulated than those of either 'Pauline'or 'Paracelsus';and the frequent use of the term Will in its metaphysical sense so strongly points to German associations that it is difficult to realize their absence,then and always,from Mr.Browning's mind.But he was emphatic in his assurance that he knew neither the German philosophers nor their reflection in Coleridge,who would have seemed a likely medium between them and him.Miss Martineau once said to him that he had no need to study German thought,since his mind was German enough --by which she possibly meant too German --already.
