Sordello: The Epic of Doubt

Introduction

“Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!” fulminated Pound.¹ And he warmed to his theme, addressing Browning:

So, for what it’s worth, I have the background. And you had a background, Watched “the soul,” Sordello’s soul, And saw it lap up life, and swell and burst— “Into the empyrean?” So you worked out new form, the meditative, Semi-dramatic, semi-epic story, And we will say: What’s left for me to do?

Sordello truly is, as Pound said, “semi-dramatic, semi-epic”. What does it mean to be “epic”? The epic is centrally concerned with representation of what there is in the world and what agents should do when seeking to do the right thing. That is to say: it is concerned with the representation of a set of ontological and normative views. For Homer, that meant the gods of the Olympian pantheon, and a battlefield of heroes. For Milton, it meant the Christian God and His distinctive views on free will. For Wordsworth, it meant a Spinozistic pantheism fused with Christian elements. What did it mean for Browning? And why, near the end of a long passage ruminating on Browning’s bizarre and demanding masterpiece, did Pound, with uncharacteristic weariness, a brittle tone of exasperation and expiry, declare, “Oh, we have worlds enough, and brave décors, | And from these like we guess a soul for man | And build him full of aery populations” (“Three Cantos I”)? That is to say: why did Pound feel so defeated by Browning’s great poem? The answer is to be found (where else?) in Browning’s epic.

The Metaphysics of Sordello

In Sordello, Browning makes clear that the protagonist chose to begin his ontology with mind, but the world-situation is soon thrown in doubt:

And then a low voice wound into his heart: […] Sordello, wake! […] Why count you, one The first step with the last step? What is gone Except that aëry magnificence— That last step you took first? an evidence You were ... no matter. (RBPW, vol. 2: 405)²

The phrase “no matter” humorously equivocates between the sense of “not mattering” and “not being matter”: the effect is disconcerting, introducing a note of casual inconsequence at a moment when one of Sordello’s deepest preoccupations is being discussed. Both Sordello’s poetical ambitions and his view of the world as immaterial are collapsed together by the phrase “that aëry magnificence”, which again, in a way that might well be read as oxymoronic, hints at inconsequence at the same time as metaphysical profundity. Through this kind of verbal disorientation, a characteristic feature of Browning’s reflexive epic, the reader begins to share in the experience of Sordello’s self-distancing irony: his epistemic skepticism draws into scrutiny not only the possibility of ontology, but also, as a side effect, the possibility of epic. The idealist starting point, the fact that all our knowledge of the world is mediated by conscious experience, is alluded to again, with a different emphasis, in Book VI: “Life’s i’ the tempest, thought | Clothes the keen hill-top, mid-day woods are fraught | With fervours” (RBPW, vol. 2: 456). This actually goes further than the idealist starting-point, moving from Kantian transcendental idealism toward fully-fledged objective idealism, suggesting, through the ambiguity of metaphor, that mind suffuses the objective world: “thought | Clothes the keen hill-top” might be construed as saying that the clothing thought is the thought of the individual perceiver, or as saying that thought partakes in the objective reality of the hill-top, which is described as “keen”—an ambiguous adjective, which may be construed as implying minded agency. The idea of the “woods […] fraught | With fervours” might, again, be taken as a transcendental idealist or an objective idealist remark: are the “fervours” with which the woods are “fraught” an objective aspect of the woods, part of their substantial constitution as mind, or not? Through ambiguities such as these, Browning outlines the intuitions and speculations that arise when one starts wondering about the place of mind in reality. Perhaps the most momentous passage in Sordello’s idealist journey comes when, in Book V, he describes a clearly Hegelian view of the philosophy of history. It is extremely unlikely that Browning could have written in this way had he not been moved by Hegel’s ideas and had he not meditated on them at some length. Sordello’s way of discussing them is too passionate for this to be an unfelt intellectual experiment: such enthused passion is a hallmark of poetical sincerity. It is understandable then that the idealist Henry Jones dedicated so much of his career to the study and public exegesis of Browning’s works.

Jones wrote a great deal on Browning, including: in his first book, Browning as Philosophical and Religious Teacher (1891); in The Immortality of the Soul in the Poems of Tennyson and Browning (1907); in Idealism as a Practical Creed (1909); in Essays on Literature and Education (1924). Browning’s poetry was an abiding concern, and one of Jones’s recurrent emphases was the place of love in Browning’s philosophy: Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher contains a chapter on “Browning’s Treatment of the Principle of Love” (1891: xiii). Thirty-three years later, the same theme appears: “There is little doubt as to the theme that called forth the fullness of the powers of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. It was love. It was love in the same cosmic sense as Wordsworth’s duty, which ‘preserved the stars from wrong,’ an omnipresent passion for the best in all nature and in all mankind.”³ As early as 1891, Jones prescribed Browning’s optimistic idealism as an alternative, and perhaps, for some, the beginnings of an antidote, to the views of Carlyle: in the précis for a chapter titled “Browning’s Optimism”, he wrote, “To Carlyle, God is an alien Taskmaster who imposes infinite duty upon man—To Browning, God is a power within, as well as a law without man”; “Complete refutation of Carlyle’s moral despair is possible only by philosophy, which reinterprets God, man, and nature—The task beyond Browning”.⁴ The “moral despair” of those such as Carlyle is energetically denounced in Sordello, by means of showing a character tirelessly working to find the best way of doing good in the world, placing morality at the heart of the human project.

Paraphrase encounters difficulty with Sordello, and would take too long to be attempted, but the best simplified summary of its events (which, as such, omits many of the poem’s philosophical and emotional considerations) is to be found in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, Volume Two, edited by Ian Jack and Margaret Smith. As Jones writes, of Sordello, “no simplification of the story suffices”.⁵ In a theatrical phrase that catches the plot’s prevailing atmosphere of dazzlement, Jones writes, “It is dark from the very intensity and multiplicity of the playing cross-lights; … confusingly rapid succession.”⁶ It is an artwork that must be experienced to be understood, having a complicated experientially-inflected message. Sordello is furnished with intricate historical detail, but it intersperses much philosophical labor. One can apply to Sordello what Peter McDonald writes of The Ring and the Book, Browning’s late masterpiece: “one is left with a good deal of admiration for the poet’s dedication to levels of historical discipline which would serve in the end, as he knew, to liberate his narrative from merely historical meaning.”⁷ There are, in short, lessons in Sordello, if we are willing to put in the effort to find them.

Henry Jones opposes Browning to Carlyle (“the infinite wail of this moral fatalist”) and Byron, two skeptics about morality (though Carlyle the more extreme: in Carlyle’s works, “there is far deeper pessimism than in anything which Byron could experience or express”): “Browning’s optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher, protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an invisible garment of contemplative holiness.”⁸ Browning looks “beyond the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good”, and this is partly what differentiates him from Emerson, whose “optimism was too easy to be satisfactory”.⁹ Carlyle, Jones argued, had raised skepticism “against the citadel of thought itself”: “self-consciousness, or the reflecting interpretation by man of himself and his world, the very activity that lifts him above animal existence and makes him man, instead of being a divine endowment, is declared to be a disease, a poisonous subjectivity destructive of all good.”¹⁰ Carlyle is presented as a deep kind of pessimist, one who is not properly aligned with the imperatives of the moral law: “The moral law is rarely looked at by Carlyle as a beneficent revelation, and still more rarely as the condition which, if fulfilled, will reconcile man with nature and with God.”¹¹ By contrast, Jones speaks of Browning as one who was markedly not despondent, one who trusted in the “deeper intuition of the significance of human life” and saw the “infinite worth” of individuals: “Now, as I have tried to show, one of the main characteristics of the opening years of the present era was its deeper intuition of the significance of human life, and, therefore, by implication, of its wants and claims. The spiritual nature of man, lost sight of during the preceding age, was rediscovered and the first and immediate consequence was that man, as man, attained infinite worth.”¹² Carlyle is not completely dismissed by Jones, but he is left in the position of being a despondent bemoaner of contemporary ills without suggestions that would be of practical use. By the utilitarian standard, which was ultimately absorbed as part of a broader antimetaphysical pragmatism by Browning in Sordello and Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh, Carlyle’s doomsaying was not to be valued. A problem with Carlyle, Jones said, was that “Carlyle was always more able to detect the disease than to suggest the remedy.”¹³ Aside from his willingness to endorse the pursuit of pragmatic solutions to problems in the world, as seen in Sordello’s weighing-up of considerations about the Ghibellines and Guelphs, Browning also presented an antithesis to Byronic and Carlylean pessimism: G. K. Chesterton described Browning as “something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more religiously significant than an optimist: he [was] a happy man.”¹⁴

The prophet was one model of agency that appealed to Browning’s Sordello. In a convoluted metaphorical flight, Sordello speculates about how a “Moses” might “forego his Promised Land” and “Figure as Metaphysic Poet”: the suggestion is that over-indulgence in metaphysical poetizing might lead even such a prophet astray from what ought to be done, a story that chimes sadly with Sordello’s. Sordello’s trajectory suggests that, far from providing the groundwork and motivation for moral action, metaphysical speculation may prove a distraction from the purposes of life. But how to know what those purposes are without adequate reflection? The objective idealist framework that he sides with ultimately leads to his decision to support the Guelph faction. Sordello’s main error, which lasts for much of the epic, is not coming to terms quickly enough with his position in the world. He realizes that delaying all action is not good: he wonders rhetorically whether he should “Wait | For some transcendent life reserved by Fate | To follow this?” and answers emphatically, “Oh never!” (RBPW, vol. 2: 471). The problem is perhaps that he does not see that one life that might be understood as a “transcendent life”, a life of duty in keeping with intuitions of the transcendent, is already possible. Speaking of soul and body, he knows that “The soul must needs instruct her weak compeer, | Run o’er its capabilities and wring | A joy thence” (RBPW, vol. 2: 479), but he struggles to effect this soulful redirection of matter, falling into lassitude for a year. Naddo, with skeptical distance, declares that “thoughts may be | Over-poetical for poetry” (RBPW, vol. 2: 305), a claim that seems, on one level, paradoxical, and yet communicates its meaning in the context of the narrative’s main trouble: that which Sordello considers to be “poetical” is the ruminative, the mindful, the metaphysically-inquiring, but this inquisitiveness can go too far and lead to a poetry unrooted in the world. In this way, Sordello’s dilemma suggests a critique of subjective idealism, which does not reconcile itself with realism, the view that the world is real outside of our minds: the over-thinking individual becomes, Naddo says, too detached from the world. Concurrently, after Sordello’s simultaneously self-excoriating and self-congratulatory reflections on how he could have “penetrated to its core | Our mortal mystery” had he not “Preferred elaborating in the dark | My casual stuff”, the narrative voice interjects,

Whereat he rose. The level wind carried above the firs Clouds, the irrevocable travellers, Onward. (RBPW, vol. 2: 304-5)

The sense of drift in these lines, with “Onward” strikingly enjambed after the polysyllabic elaboration of “Clouds” as “irrevocable travellers”, rhymed with surprising grace after “firs”, is characteristic of the narrator’s interruptions in Sordello, which often show natural phenomena or the course of events rushing swiftly “Onward” (see also “One more day, | One eve—appears Verona!” (RBPW, vol. 2: 305)). The local implication, deepened by accumulation, is that the choice between subjective idealism, an idealism that finds its focus in the self, and objective idealism, an idealism that finds its focus in the whole world, is a choice between ineffectual retreat and outward-looking embrace. The clouds, symbols both of the celestial and of nature’s independence from human activity, move irresistibly “Onward”, whereas Sordello is, in metaphorical terms, going nowhere. The conceptual effect of this accumulation snowballs through Sordello, contributing to the narrative’s sense of tragic inevitability. Sordello ends one line with “mankind” and then follows it with another of contradiction, “My own concern was just to bring my mind”, as if to imply, through the juxtaposed line’s rhyme-contrast, a preference for his own “mind” over that of all “mankind” (RBPW, vol. 2: 304). It is one of many moments in which Sordello’s ratiocinative prevarications peel back and their deep underlying selfishness is revealed. Sordello sees it as part of his project to dispel “the mist | Which hazard, custom, blindness interpose | Betwixt things and myself” (RBPW, vol. 2: 304), but this end is achieved far too late. He becomes the archetype of the failed epicist, one whose reflective tendency too often turns, or retreats, to subjective rather than objective idealism, one who cannot be reconciled with the prospect of limitation by objective reality. The objective idealist’s world-mind is one interpretation of the “out-soul” (RBPW, vol. 2: 305) with which he aspires to commune but ultimately fails to access.

The degree to which Sordello is laden and waylaid by strains of his metaphysical wrangling is hinted as late as the beginning of the final book of the epic, when the narrator humorously observes that “somewhat in Sordello’s mood | Confirmed [the] speciousness” of the ineffectual bard Eglamor’s thought that “Man shrinks to naught | If matched with symbols of immensity; | Must quail, forsooth, before a quiet sky” (RBPW, vol. 2: 452). The implication, delivered with comic indirection, is that Sordello, far from quailing at symbols of natural immensity, feels himself equal to, one with, or perhaps beyond, such things. However, the thought goes further than a humorous indictment of Sordello’s hubris: Sordello thinks that the place of mind in the universe is of such significance that juxtapositions of scale are relatively trivial concerns. After his erstwhile despondency about life and value, this passage represents an uplifting change of emphasis. Browning’s elucidatory marginal notes to Sordello sometimes play off the main body of the text to mimic the peculiar mix of doubt and certainty that characterizes Sordello’s mental development. A side-note at the beginning of Book III states, with tantalizingly hesitant optimism, “Nature may triumph therefore”, while the hortative second line of that book, “Braid moon fern now with mystic trifoly” evokes the kind of confident gnosticism associated with mysticism and strikingly at odds with the hesitation of the modal auxiliary “may” (RBPW, vol. 2: 294). It is not far into Book III, however, before whatever triumph Nature may have achieved is being situated in limits by another arch side-note: “But nature is one thing, man another—” (RBPW, vol. 2: 298).

Sordello is perplexed by the challenge of realizing his part in the whole of nature, wondering how to “remain | Myself” while self-diffusing sufficiently to understand “all natures”:

“To need become all natures, yet retain “The law of my own nature—to remain “Myself yet yearn … as if that chestnut, think, “should yearn for this first larch-bloom crisp and pink, “Or those pale fragrant tears where zephyrs stanch “March wounds along the fretted pine-tree branch! “Will and the means to show will, great and small, “Material, spiritual,—abjure them all “Save any so distinct, they may be left “To amuse, not tempt become! and thus bereft, “Just as I first was fashioned would I be! (RBPW, vol. 2: 296)

Paul de Reul, in The Art and Thought of Robert Browning (1926), showed limitations of reading when he wrote, “I doubt if Browning ever studied Hegel. […] Nowhere in Browning do I find this striking view of Hegel’s Weltanschauung, that of God or the Idea revealing itself progressively in the twin streams of history and nature, of Man and of things.”¹⁵ Browning’s presentation of Sordello’s idea of historical development is strikingly similar to that presented in the Aesthetics—appendix C in the Poetical Works, volume 2, summarizes:

In the history of poetry (to quote from Browning’s own headings) “dramatist, or, so to call him, analyst” succeeds “epoist” and is to turn “in due course synthesist”. The kind of poetry he has in mind, dealing with “the last of mysteries—Man’s inmost life” is illustrated by this poem itself[.] (RBPW, vol. 2: 525)

In the Aesthetics, Hegel traces the same development, emphasizing, as a characteristic of his system, the synthetic emergence of drama from lyric and epic. Browning’s Hegelianism, and his idea that Sordello counted as his epic, helps to make sense of his career-long preoccupation with the form placed higher than epic in Hegel’s system, namely drama. After the completion of Sordello, he would therefore, continuing with the trajectory of a poetic career following the perceived development of poetry, be ready to work in earnest on his dramatic compositions, the plays and monologues. The inclusion of the Hegelian historical-development passage in Sordello makes clear that Browning was deeply interested at this early stage in the potential arc of his poetical development, and of poetical development in general, and saw his epic as being not only an accomplishment in itself but a stepping stone to what he believed to be higher things. The fact that he had this trajectory in mind even while writing his epic goes some way to explaining the work’s implicit critique of aspects of the epic form itself: Sordello’s ruinous vacillations, getting lost in epistemological and ontological doubts while not taking opportunities to do direct good, shows an insufficiently-serious attitude to the dramatic exigencies of social reality. In this regard, Sordello is shown falling short of the expectation for an epic hero to engage with the limitations imposed on individual freedom by circumstances, both at the level of metaphysical limitations, which render him particularly deleteriously self-conscious (about free will, for example), and at the level of political considerations (navigating the Guelph-Ghibelline quarrel). On the political side, Sordello’s inadequacy often presents itself in the form of an insufficiently developed sense of the natural drama of human affairs: he is, for a long time, until near the conclusion (by which time it is too late), unwilling to adopt a clear stance in worldly matters, particularly one that would involve some degree of compromise or assailability by his own exacting standards. As Jones writes, Browning’s “interest in the complicated subtleties of diplomacy appeared in Sordello”, and, more sharply and movingly than this, the “complicated subtleties” of human decision-making about how best to exercise freedom of action.¹⁶

What is also clear from Sordello is that Browning wished to cast doubt on the usefulness, and perhaps also the correspondence to reality, of conceiving of history in the manner of Hegelian logic, seeing one way of being following on another and leading to syntheses that are in turn antithesized. This may seem odd for a writer so lauded by the idealists, who followed in Hegel’s general wake (though many rebelled against large aspects of his system), but it is perhaps understandable as in keeping with the character of an epic of such relentless doubt and scepticism. Sordello continually returns, directly and indirectly, to questions of knowledge and existence. When combined with the protagonist’s personal crisis, the effect is deeply unsettling and problematizes a number of aspects of the epic form, including: the degree of certainty presented about any given ontological picture; the way in which an inquiring attitude to foundational questions might shape an individual’s behaviour. The ellipticality of Browning’s style in Sordello is a central part of the epic’s artistic message, enacting Sordello’s epistemic concerns. Whenever the reader feels challenged to bridge gaps of meaning in the text, operating on insufficient knowledge for the kind of understanding desired, there is some experience of doubt. Localised linguistic doubt stands in for Sordello’s deeper doubts. As Browning wrote to John Ruskin, in 1855,

I cannot begin writing poetry till my imaginary reader has conceded licences to me […] I know that I don’t make out my conception by my language; all poetry being a putting the infinite within the finite. You would have me paint it all plain out, which can’t be; but by various artifices I try to make shift with touches and bits of outlines which succeed if they bear the conception from me to you. You ought, I think, to keep pace with the thought tripping from ledge to ledge of my “glaciers”, as you call them; not stand poking your alpen-stock into the holes, and demonstrating that no foot could have stood there; — suppose it sprang over there? In prose you may criticise so — because that is the absolute representation of portions of truth, what chronicling is to history — but in asking for more ultimates you must accept less mediates, nor expect that a Druid stone-circle will be traced for you with as few breaks to the eye as the North Crescent and South Crescent that go together so cleverly in many a suburb.¹⁷

Browning’s arrival at the druidic “stone-circle” metaphor is apt for the elliptical access to metaphysical truth that he claims to seek to convey in poetry generally, and certainly attempts in Sordello.

Perhaps the most striking, extended, and recognizably system-specific passage of ontological reflection comes when Sordello, in Book V, discourses as if he were a thirteenth-century Hegel. It is a memorable passage not just for its eloquence, but also in the way that metaphysics can be stirring, with its deep, systematic, and encompassing implications. A mysterious prophetic voice, “low as some old Pythoness | Conceding to a Lydian King’s distress”, persuades Sordello to build on his pantheistical intimation of participation in God or Nature and now embrace his limits as an individual in specific circumstances, moving through time toward “the plan’s completeness”—a phrase heavy with the teleological connotation often attached to Hegelianism (though it is worth noting that a non-teleological Hegelianism has recently been argued for by Fredric Jameson (2010)).¹⁸ Sordello embraces the teleological view:

And then a low voice wound into his heart: “Sordello!” (low as some old Pythoness Conceding to a Lydian King’s distress The cause of his long error—one mistake Of her past oracle) “Sordello, wake! “God has conceded two sights to a man— “One, of men’s whole work, time’s completed plan, “The other, of the minute’s work, man’s first “Step to the plan’s completeness: what’s dispersed “Save hope of that supreme step which, descried “Earliest, was meant still to remain untried “Only to give you heart to take your own “Step, and there stay, leaving the rest alone? “Where is the vanity?[”] (RBPW, vol. 2: 405)

This last rhetorical question shows how Hegelianism (diegetically out of its time) shakes Sordello from his doubt-ridden retreat, into the world of action: he sees that, in spirited situational action, there is no “vanity”—an ambiguous word which could be construed as “ineffectualness” or “self-regard”, thus neatly encapsulating Sordello’s resolve to derive worthwhile action from his protracted bouts of self-conscious rumination. What follows is a Hegelian series of reflections on the stages of world history: he considers the Crusades, followed by the Lombard League, followed by the “Treuga Dei”.¹⁹ There is, as Jack and Smith comment, “a sort of dialectic” at work in this progression, particularly seen in the fraught interactions of “knowledge” and “strength”. Ultimately, Sordello declares himself, long before the Hegelian event, the archetype of the Hegelian dialectician: “Ends | Accomplished turn to means: my art intends | New structure from the ancient” (RBPW, vol. 2: 433). Browning’s marginal comments wryly summarize the progress of approximately 160 lines (stretching from 482 to 643 in PW, vol. 2): “He [Sordello] asserts the poet’s rank and right, || basing these on their proper ground, || recognizing true dignity in service, || whether successively that of epoist, || dramatist, or, so to call him, analyst, || who turns in due course synthesist.”²⁰ As synthesist, it is Sordello’s role to deliver integrated verdicts on the conflicting currents of the age. This is what he proceeds to do, instructing his father Taurello—though, at this point their relation is still unknown to both. However, the parent–child relation will become known, as if by magic, immediately after Sordello has delivered his speech on the necessity of poetical governance and Taurello has handed over sovereignty to him. The implication of this construably-miraculous realization, which could also be explained in non-miraculous ways (sudden recognition, for example), is of the fitting together of pieces in a puzzle, as if to affirm, symbolically, that Sordello’s new self-conception as Hegelian synthesist is the correct way forward from his earlier troubles.

But to describe Sordello at this stage as “Hegelian” both misses the point of this passage and identifies it, because Browning’s wistful and humorous anachronism in Book V clearly sets out to frame Sordello as a surprising fusion of Dante and Hegel. This kind of self-reflexive anachronistic humor is entirely consistent with the general character of the narrator, who at one point interrupts one of Sordello’s reflections on the depths of his investigations into human character with a wry exclamatory mise en abîme:

“Once more I cast external things away, “And natures composite, so decompose “That” … Why, he writes Sordello! “How I rose, “And how you have advanced![”] (RBPW, vol. 2: 432)

This dramatic instance of rising (“How I rose”), mimetically after a mid-line break, is reminiscent of an earlier one, in Book III:

Whereat he rose. The level wind carried above the firs Clouds, the irrevocable travellers, Onward. (RBPW, vol. 2: 304-5)

The implication of such distant repetition is that Sordello’s long-term journey is one of periodic “risings” from one stage of being to another, a developmental journey slightly analogous to the gentle developmental emphasis of the Prelude, but having a stronger parallel in the fraught synthetic progression of Hegel’s Phenomenology. The realized Hegelian synthesist Sordello has gone far beyond where he was in Book III, wondering whether he should “abjure” the material and spiritual aspects of life (“Material, spiritual,—abjure them all” (RBPW, vol. 2: 296)). This philosophical synthesist Sordello, “rising” past the space assigned to poetry in the Phenomenology, has gone beyond the role that Hegel explicates for the epicist in the Aesthetics. Hegel saw the epicist as showing the limitations of the freedom of the individual when faced with objective reality, but the Sordello of Book V is spoken of as one who will achieve success, as Browning’s marginal note puts it, “if he consent to oppress the world”, showing how the world can have its freedom limited by the individual (a surprising and extravagant thought). This is the opposite of the achievement proper for the epicist, who should rather show the ways in which the freedom of the individual is limited by objective reality. (It is true, on one level, that an epicist might be construed, by an uncharitable reader, as somehow “oppress[ing] the world” but, even if this were the case, it would be an external consequence of epic-production and not part of its characteristic content as epic.) This disjunct between Sordello the poet and Sordello the philosopher of Book V is unsurprising given Hegel’s situation of poetry as a stage of development preceding religion and philosophy. It is also unsurprising given Sordello’s earlier frustrations about the unresponsiveness of audiences, including Naddo, to his fusing of metaphysics and poetry. Sordello’s journey thus suggests the limitations of epic relative to philosophy. These are suggested, from the narrator’s point of view, to be limitations rather than failures, because Browning clearly suggests that Sordello might have productively pursued the road of being a Dante-like figure (“Ecelin had pushed away | Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take | That step Sordello spurned, for the world’s sake” (RBPW, vol. 2: 495)). Dante, who is apostrophized early in Book I (“Sordello, thy forerunner, Florentine!” (RBPW, vol. 2: 212)) and mentioned again late in Book VI, thus book-ending Sordello’s story, is to Sordello approximately as Sordello is to Eglamor: he excels and eclipses him, using similar materials but with better judgement. There is a crucial difference, however: in the case of Eglamor and Sordello, the better judgement is poetical; but in the case of Sordello and Dante, the judgement is a judgement of what is fitting for individual, a form of self-knowledge.

Sordello claims to be a spokesperson for “the last of mysteries”, namely subjective consciousness: “Man’s inmost life shall have yet freer play” (RBPW, vol. 2: 431), a line probably alluding to the Kantian idea, in the Critique of Judgement, of the “free play” of the imagination and understanding.²¹ Sordello, however, is not content only to “play”. He feels that he has duties, moral and philosophically-investigative, beyond this. Rather than adopting an attitude of contentment with being able to achieve the good that is possible within his early limits, Sordello desires to expound on “mysteries” and his downfall (which is to say, his time-wasting from the consequentialist perspective) is partly attributable to his over-ambition in the face of such deep and intractable questions. Metaphysically, as well as politically, Sordello is “caught in the context of large and imperious circumstance”.²²

For Wordsworth, as for Browning, the social and political context is explicitly positioned as a counterpart to the deeper limitations put on the freedom of the individual mind by objective reality. This is starkest at the moments of high political turmoil. When Louvet accuses Robespierre and receives no help from his “irresolute friends”, and we are ominously told “'Tis well known | What was the issue of that charge”, Wordsworth breaks off suddenly by remarking,

But these are things Of which I speak only as they were storm Or sunshine to my individual mind, No further. (1805. x. 100-6)

The “No further”, dramatically enjambed, followed by one of Wordsworth’s characteristic mid-line breaks, gives this statement a particularly peremptory frisson, simultaneously implying emotional involvement and resolve. It might seem dramatically undermining to those invested in a political cause to have a poet assert that he only mentions this because it provides information on what was “storm | Or sunshine to my individual mind”. This may be a source of the commonplace accusation that Wordsworth endorses a sidelining of political freedom in the Prelude. But this is an assailable interpretation, based on a misunderstanding of what the deeper kinds of poetry do. The Prelude is an epic, not a political tract. As epic, its purpose is to show how individual minds encounter the limits set by objective reality. The fact that Wordsworth situates such a clear moment of political-to-poetical shift in the Louvet–Robespierre conflict, one that naturally invites challenge from some quarters, suggests some indistinct parallelism between his case as a poet potentially in the political–critical firing-line and that case: the reader might wonder whether Wordsworth imagines himself as a Louvet, speaking the difficult truth, knowing that the “over-zealous” might see it as a prime opportunity for challenge. This is likely because Wordsworth was highly adept at anticipating the responses of readers. It is not that Wordsworth dismisses politics here, only that he dismisses politics for its own sake: he endorses a politics grounded in moral and metaphysical intuitions. It is central to his epic project to show what those intuitions are.

The Challenges of a Normative Model of Agency

Having been given a copy of Sordello, Thomas Carlyle wrote to Browning, in a letter of 21 June, 1841, praising his “rare spiritual gift, poetical, pictorial, intellectual”: “A long battle, I could guess, lies before you, full of toil and pain, and all sorts of real fighting”.²³ The combative note was typical of Carlyle, who wanted Browning to be the kind of strong hero who would compel others. John Stuart Mill, by contrast, saw a place for heroism but was opposed to the Carlylean view, denouncing his idea of “hero-worship”:

The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual. The honour and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that initiative; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open. I am not countenancing the sort of “hero-worship” which applauds the strong man of genius for forcibly seizing on the government of the world and making it do his bidding in spite of itself. All he can claim is, freedom to point out the way. (On Liberty: 131)

Of Browning’s Pauline, Mill wrote, in an unpublished review of 1833, “the psychological history […] is powerful and truthful […] The self-seeking & self-worshipping state is well described […] if he once could muster a hearty hatred of his selfishness, it would go—as it i[s] he feels only the lack of good, not the positive evil.”²⁴ As DeVane notes, Sordello was partly meant to “take the place of Pauline, which had been an abject failure”.²⁵ Mill’s critique of Pauline anticipated his later belief, in On Liberty (1859), that heroic energy is generally of value to society:

Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one. […] The same strong susceptibilities which make the personal impulses vivid and powerful, are also the source from whence are generated the most passionate love of virtue, and the sternest self-control. It is through the cultivation of these, that society both does its duty and protects its interests: not by rejecting the stuff of which heroes are made[.] (On Liberty: 125)

In Luria, Browning wrote, “Brute force shall not rule Florence! Intellect | May rule her, bad or good, as chance supplies” (RBPW, vol. 4: 205). The terms of this statement reject Carlylean “Brute force” and embrace Millean trust in the energetic intellect. Oscar Wilde, in 1890, praised Browning’s energy, remarking on the “struggle, violence, and effort” in his work, describing him as “a man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud”.²⁶ This was a longstanding crux of critical consensus about Browning’s style: “there is an energy about him” (Merivale, 1837); “a strong energy of Stoic will” (Arnould, 1842); “His robust energy is informed by a subtle, penetrating spirit” (George Eliot, 1856).²⁷ As Willian DeVane commented, Sordello was Browning’s monumental work, the one into which he may have put “more time and pains than any other poem or volume of poems”.²⁸ Though convinced about heroic energy’s usefulness to society, Mill did worry about the prospect of the hero attempting to compel, “forcibly seizing on the government of the world” and thereby undermining democracy. In Sordello, Browning’s concern was more internal to the hero, but he also drew attention to the hero’s potential fallibility: he showed how anxious vacillation can thwart heroic action.

Sordello is an intricately thoughtful poem, presenting the various ways in which the clash between heroism and the democratic ideal might affect both the individual poet-hero and the wider community. Sordello’s speeches and those of the Sordello-narrator interrogate the notion of heroic purpose in the face of multi-perspectival plethora: to Sordello, “The real way seemed made up of all the ways” (RBPW, vol. 2: 453). Elsewhere, Browning more clearly has the heroism of a particular predecessor in his sights: flashes of Wordsworth, who introspected so widely and brilliantly, are glimpsed in Sordello’s utterances: “How should externals satisfy my soul?” (RBPW, vol. 2: 283). Sordello’s ineffectual interactions with politics and his agonized internal musings make him a plausible parody of the Wordsworthian hero, one who, Browning implies, makes the mistake of dwelling in thought and hesitating over action. Frequently, Browning hurries the narration on, as if impatient with Sordello’s time-wasting:

A signal wonder, song’s no whit Facilitated. Fast the minutes flit[.] (RBPW, vol. 2: 290)

The hurried precision of the quick vowel sounds and fricative consonants gives the distinct impression of hurtling ruthlessness, as though the narrator were scared of wasting time in the same way. Elsewhere, Sordello’s self-frustration bleeds over into the narrator’s tone of brusque summary: after discussion of the “Wasted” year in which Sordello “slept, but was aware he slept”, the narrator changes gear with an abrupt two-word sentence: “To finish.” (RBPW, vol. 2: 296–7). Sordello’s herohood is continually problematized by inactivity: as Maurice Blanchot writes, “Heroism is the act’s luminous sovereignty. […] the hero is nothing if he does not act”.²⁹

The heroism of Sordello is partly, with its extensive introspection and associated frustrations, a tragic parody of the poet-heroisms of Cowper and Wordsworth. It is also akin to that of Shelley’s hero Laon: both exert influence through song, “dulcet tones” (RBPW, vol. 2: 239), “holy and heroic verse” (SP, vol. 2: 104); both aspire to do the most good possible for “The common sort” (RBPW, vol. 2: 302), “The People” (RBPW, vol. 2: 457), Laon declaring, “Cythna mourned with me the servitude | In which the half of humankind were mewed” (SP, vol. 2: 106). Like Laon’s, the reach of Sordello’s poetical capacity is remarkable: he is “Half minstrel and half emperor” (RBPW, vol. 2: 239); confronted by early political stumbling blocks, “these a gracious hand advanced to thrones | Beneath him” (RBPW, vol. 2: 239). Browning simplifies this extraordinary praise by saying simply that Sordello had discovered poetry, the art of Apollo:

Wherefore twist and torture this, Striving to name afresh the antique bliss, Instead of saying, neither less nor more, He had discovered, as our world before, Apollo? (RBPW, vol. 2: 239)

Sordello is the archetypal poet-hero, one who might have done much with his skill, though he never quite believed so: “the god he never could become” (RBPW, vol. 2: 495) haunts the idealistic Sordello and ruins his life. Much of Sordello’s dilemma is over the role of the poet, whether he should seek to turn his capacity to delight toward a directly political end. Throughout, Sordello is characterised by that which Shelley said was fundamental to poets, “intense pensiveness” (SP, vol. 1: 481).

Shelley’s Laon and Cythna endorses courageously-led revolution and offers, perhaps as a Platonic “noble lie” or “magnificent myth”, the promise of a heaven for virtuous heroes, “The Temple of the Spirit” (SP, vol. 2: 260). Entirely unlike Laon and Cythna, however, the plot of Sordello is concerned with the difficulty of positioning oneself politically. The moral is partly that one should make up one’s mind, partly that having a divided mind about political matters is an ever-present danger for a Browningian poet, a divergent thinker, one steeped in sympathy, imaginatively “surrounded” by “A stream of lifelike figures”, “A sort of human life” (RBPW, vol. 2: 233). Far from granting access to a promised heaven at the end, Browning’s wry cynicism has Sordello misremembered as a heroic leader:

The Chroniclers of Mantua tired their pen Telling how Sordello Prince Visconti saved Mantua, and elsewhere notably behaved— Who thus, by fortune ordering events, Passed with posterity, to all intents, For just the god he never could become. (RBPW, vol. 2: 495)

The humorous incongruity is clear: Sordello hesitated in life, but in death he is remembered as decisive and heroic. The reader remembers, with frustrated observation of the irony, his many vacillations. As late as the sixth and final book, Sordello hesitates about allegiance—should he back the Guelphs or the Ghibellines? And would his chosen course of action be “truly service” (RBPW, vol. 2: 462)? He vacillates about committing “the life’s sum | Of service” (RBPW, vol. 2: 462) in any particular direction. It is so difficult, he says, to know what the outcome will actually be: “Plain you spy | Its ultimate effect, but many flaws | Of vision blur each intervening cause.” (RBPW, vol. 2: 462). Sordello has an unrealistic, epistemically-overdemanding tendency: he wishes to know too much about the consequences of his actions, hesitant to commit to anything until he has that knowledge. He disastrously carries “the soul’s absoluteness” (RBPW, vol. 2: 480), a phrase echoed from the earlier “the spirit’s absoluteness” (RBPW, vol. 2: 478), over into worldly affairs. Slipping temporarily, through free indirect discourse, into the voice of those who exhort Sordello to sing for them, the narrator declares,

In truth? Thou hast Life, then—wilt challenge life for us; our race Is vindicated so, obtains its place In thy ascent, the first of us; whom we May follow, to the meanest, finally, With our more bounded wills? (RBPW, vol. 2: 222)

One view of the task of the epic poet is here invoked by the allusion to Alexander Pope’s famous twist on the Miltonic wish to “justify the ways of God to men”: to “vindicate the ways of God to Man”.³⁰ The Miltonic background is underlined by the idea of a people being “vindicated so”, which is redolent of Milton’s question, in The reason of church-government urg’d against prelaty, as to whether an epic or tragedy should be “doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation”.³¹ Immediately after this talk of “bounded wills”, the Sordello-narrator presents a mindset that recoils from being “bounded” by such worldly ambitions:

Ah, but to find A certain mood enervate such a mind, […] task for mankind’s good Its nature just as life and time accord “—Too narrow an arena to reward “Emprize—the world’s occasion worthless since “Not absolutely fitted to evince “Its mastery!” (RBPW, vol. 2: 222-3)

“Emprize”, a poetical archaism for “enterprise”, is enjambed in imitation of the jolting thrill that such adventure ought to bring, but will not bring for the high-minded Sordello. The “world’s occasion” is, absurdly, “worthless” to such a figure because “Not absolutely fitted” to prove “Its mastery”, the full range of the powers of articulation. Sordello is capable of expressing marvelous metaphysical truths. Worldly matters, he thinks, at this stage in Book I, are beneath him: to articulate all his insights would be “Thrusting in time eternity’s concern”, “forcing our straitened sphere | Contain it” (RBPW, vol. 2: 223). The material world, the whole earthly sphere of action, seems “straitened” to the overreaching Sordello. He has become a strange inversion of Marlowe’s Faustus, who overreaches and trades what is metaphysically valuable, his soul, for fleeting worldly pleasure: Sordello overreaches and fritters away one thing that the narrator thinks valuable, worldly engagement, in exchange for abstruse metaphysical insight. Hence one of the narrator’s outbursts of impatience with the poet-hero:

Thrusting in time eternity’s concern,— So that Sordello…. Fool, who spied the mark Of leprosy upon him, violet-dark Already as he loiters? (RBPW, vol. 2: 223)

This is a clear rebuke to detachment from contemporary events caused by over-preoccupation with the articulation of metaphysical wonders. Sordello’s metaphysical overreaching, his hesitation and will to disengage from the world, is described as a kind of nascent “leprosy”. This proleptic vision of his hellish fall, really a very earthly fall to the ground in Book VI, causes a further moment of reflective frustration and self-consolation for the narrator:

Go back to the beginning, rather; blend It gently with Sordello’s life; the end Is piteous, you may see, but much between Pleasant enough. (RBPW, vol. 2: 224-5)

Sordello is cursed with desire for a foresight that cannot be, perpetually trying to adjust “Now, for the Then’s sake” (RBPW, vol. 2: 463). The narrator rejects this way of thinking, asserting that though the beginning is ominous and “the end | Is piteous”, there is nevertheless “much between | Pleasant enough” (RBPW, vol. 2: 225).

Daniel Karlin has examined Browning as a poet of eloquent hatreds and it is the language of love and hate that erupts at one point when Sordello wavers, “hating what you loved, | Loving old hatreds!” (RBPW, vol. 2: 463).³² But these are neither Browning’s nor Sordello’s loves and hates: these are what Sordello imagines to be the loves and hates of others, their factional political emotions. Sordello is hampered by his capacity to imagine the views of other people. It would be wrong to say that Sordello has tunnel-vision; on the contrary, he sees too much and from too many perspectives, having trouble coming to decisive conclusions. One charitable way of looking at the problem of seeing too much is that he is too insightful, too profound, to have genuine interest in surface matters. Challenged with the task of plucking a lily cup “off the castle-moat”, “Along with cup you raise leaf, stalk and root, | The entire surface of the pool to boot” (RBPW, vol. 2: 282–3):

“So could I pluck a cup, put in one song “A single sight, did not my hand, too strong, “Twitch in the least the root-strings of the whole. “How should externals satisfy my soul?[”] (RBPW, vol. 2: 283) ³³

“Externals” are seen as low-hanging fruit, not worth his time, regardless of what the crowd want—an unwillingness to please the public that, at least on one level, jars with his claim to wish the common people well. Both poetically and politically, Sordello is deleteriously high-minded. Sometimes the bringing of the systematic thinking of philosophy together with the art of poetry can lead to the remarkable simultaneity of a sense of connection to objects in the world and abstract understanding: as Dorothea Krook writes, “the best philosophers […] are, like the best poets, a perpetual threat to the conventional distinction between the abstractness of philosophy and the concreteness of poetry. For they give us, so intensely, the sense of being in touch with the concrete, indeed of never having lost touch with it, but only of having, as Coleridge says, generalized the particulars of experience, and generalized in such a way as to involve ultimately no loss of particularity.”³⁴ But Sordello’s generalizations do lead to disconnection, not necessarily from the “particulars of experience” but rather from the understanding of the audience. His will for poetical and political engagement is complicated by disdainful unwillingness to “gainsay those | He aimed at getting rid of”, who were too obsessed with ephemera, “the matter of the moment”:

’Twas not worth oppose The matter of the moment, gainsay those He aimed at getting rid of; better think Their thoughts and speak their speech, secure to sink Back expeditiously to his safe place, And chew the cud[.] (RBPW, vol. 2: 285)

One criticism leveled at Sordello, as reported to him by the jongleur Naddo, is that “He’d fain do better than the best, enhance | The subjects’ rarity, work problems out | Therewith.” (RBPW, vol. 2: 283). Naddo urges Sordello not to be so philosophical:

“Now, you’re a bard, a bard past doubt, “And no philosopher; why introduce “Crotchets like these? fine, surely, but no use “In poetry—which still must be, to strike, “Based upon common sense; there’s nothing like “Appealing to our nature! what beside “Was your first poetry?[”] (RBPW, vol. 2: 283)

But Sordello has outgrown his first mode, the time when people said, according to Naddo, “That man […] tells his own joys and woes: | […] We’ll trust him.” (RBPW, vol. 2: 283–4). Naddo counsels Sordello to “Build on the human heart” and renounce his deep thoughtfulness, but Sordello thinks this “restrict[ive]”, and Naddo responds, in mock outrage, “I restrict | “The poet? Don’t I hold the poet picked | “Out of a host of warriors, statesmen[?]” (RBPW, vol. 2: 284). Naddo, whom the narrator calls “busiest of the tribe | Of genius-haunters” (RBPW, vol. 2: 284–5), counsels well for worldly success but not for Sordello’s wish to understand and articulate deep truths.

After Naddo’s speech near the end of Book II, the narrator’s voice slips, as often, into free indirect discourse to discuss Sordello’s views on politics. Balancing private contemplations of public issues between the third-person voice and the first-person mindset is a feat of perspective-poise that simultaneously expresses close sympathy with Sordello’s point of view and distances it. This situates the hero alternately close, focalized, and far, as figure of psychological interest. The final book of Sordello becomes markedly tragicomic as the narrator tries to articulate Sordello’s peculiar pathology:

So seemed Sordello’s closing-truth evolved […] suddenly he felt himself alone, Quite out of Time and this world: all was known. What made the secret of his past despair? (RBPW, vol. 2: 476-8)

Is it his desire “The present’s complete sympathies to break, | Aversions bear with, for a future’s sake | So feeble?” (RBPW, vol. 2: 463). Should Sordello pursue future good at the cost of some present good and so, he asks metaphorically, “For a new segment spoil an orb half-done?” (RBPW, vol. 2: 463). The orb, an image of rulership and mathematical perfection, is apt because among the things that Sordello is weighing up are his own elevated position and his purist idealism. This leads to perturbing thoughts for the poet-hero who has spent so long desiring to do good:

“Where the salt marshes stagnate, crystals branch: “Blood dries to crimson; Evil’s beautified “In every shape. Thrust Beauty then aside “And banish Evil! Wherefore? After all, “Is Evil a result less natural “Than Good?[”] (RBPW, vol. 2: 464)

Inquisitiveness about morality is often good, particularly if it leads to good action, but this is distracting anxiety, an impediment to his participation in the world. Condemned for having fallen short of “what he should have been”, Sordello is ultimately framed as a less admirable, less brave, precursor to Dante, a Dante manqué:

what he should have been, Could be, and was not—the one step too mean For him to take,—we suffer at this day Because of: Ecelin had pushed away Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take That step Sordello spurned, for the world’s sake: He did much—but Sordello’s chance was gone. (RBPW, vol. 2: 495)

The lesson here is about doing what one can:

Had he embraced Their cause then, men had plucked Hesperian fruit And, praising that, just thrown him in to boot All he was anxious to appear, but scarce Solicitous to be. A sorry farce Such life is, after all! (RBPW, vol. 2: 496)

“Such life is” side-steps the farther-reaching “such is life”. Sordello’s life is a “farce” but it is also, as the word “sorry” hints, a tragedy, both in the colloquial sense that it is “sad” and in the more serious sense that it reveals a wide and terrifying truth about the possibility for human self-awareness to go wrong. The final line of the tale, a single sentence, is strangely qualifying, describing the type of reader required to have read so far with understanding: “Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.” (RBPW, vol. 2: 498). “Who would” is partly a rebuke to the reader too lazy to interpret the dense sense that Edward Dowden, writing on Sordello in 1867, described as “the unrelaxing demand which is made throughout upon the intellectual and imaginative energy and alertness of the reader”, a reminder that heroic energy in a writer may call for answering energy from readers.³⁵ The line is also implicitly a rebuke to the elitist view that democratic systems rely on communities often “incapable” of sustained thought: what is important, for understanding, is not such capacity but rather willingness. So if the majority of readers turn away from Sordello, it is due to incuriosity, rather than innate incapacity on their part; though this does not preclude the possibility of non-innate incapacitating factors, such as not having been taught to read, a prevalent social issue in 1840, when Sordello was published.³⁶ In the context of the story that has preceded it, the tone of the line could be heard as grandiose, weary, or indifferent. All the pomp of political action and deliberation has passed away. One lesson of Sordello’s life is that he would have been better off devoting himself solely to his poetry, which might have given joy to future generations as Dante’s did. “Sordello’s chance was gone[,]” (RBPW, vol. 2: 496) Browning writes, and this aspect of the moral is simple and moving: life should not be squandered. There is a prevailing sense at the end of Sordello that the life of the protagonist has been negatively instructive: as Marcuse wrote, contrasting traditional pre-Romantic epic with “the German Artist Novel” (which may here be understood as having some parallel in Romantic epic), “The rupture, the cleft, between what is and what could be, the ideal and the reality, has demolished the original wholeness.” (Art and Liberation: 72). Sordello endorses the epic interest in idealist monism as an ontological view, but ultimately the narrative hits a wall of frustrated possibility and personal failure that implies disunity at the level of human understanding. F. H. Bradley’s observation on the prevalence of wastefulness in the universe is applicable to such a message: “what seems to us sheer waste is, to a very large extent, the way of the universe. We need not take on ourselves to be anxious about that.” (Appearance: 508).

Sordello would have been better off either decisively pursuing one avenue of good in a meliorist fashion, rather than aspiring after a worldly panacea, or devoting himself to his art. This insightful realism about society and human capacities, recognizing fallibility and the challenge of compromise, is at the heart of Sordello. It is a wisdom voiced by Naddo, who makes excuses for Sordello when he does not appear for a pageant at the end of Book II:

“His Highness knew what poets were: in brief, “Had not the tetchy race prescriptive right “To peevishness, caprice? or, call it spite, “One must receive their nature in its length “And breadth, expect the weakness with the strength!” (RBPW, vol. 2: 293)

This is a call, in the voice of the arch-pragmatist Naddo, to accept the flawedness of the hero. But there is a substantial problem here, because Sordello’s flaws go far beyond “peevishness, caprice”: his perpetual internal wrangling has led to an incapacity to take action. The phrase “prescriptive right” has a legal connotation, signifying a right established by tradition, not by original desert: the implication is that Sordello’s petulance may be what has come to be expected of poets, but it is not a necessary condition of their being poets, and may in fact be a better-absent hurdle to their purposes.³⁷ Sordello is, the narrator shows, a deeply and debilitatingly flawed figure, not just as a function of his own peculiar neuroses but also due to the weight of certain aspects of tradition. Browning has extended the eighteenth-century debate about the degree to which a hero should be flawed or as close to perfection as possible: Sordello is far too flawed, specifically too indecisive, and consequently he produces no good outcomes.

In 1864, Walter Bagehot wrote, “[Browning] is the most of a realist, and the least of an idealist of any poet we know.”³⁸ Bagehot’s description applies fairly well to the writer of Sordello, who counsels a good measure of pragmatism for the idealist poet. Sordello’s aspiring toward perfection in earthly affairs, and resultant failure, is an indictment of the flaws to which an unwary idealist might fall prey: naïvety, disengagement, authoritarian tendencies. Thus, Browning’s qualms about the hesitant poet-hero become a version of Sidney Hook’s wariness of the hero generally: the problems of the individual become the problems of society, and the figure of the poet-hero, in particular, presents a substantial, if rarely-occurring, problem for the democratic community. Carlyle writes, “it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice”, but, as Hook notes, it is also very dangerous for democracy, if that voice is singular, the voice of an individual (On Heroes: 179). Hook argues that this danger must be seen clearly: “In a democratic community education must pitch the ideal of the hero in a different key from that of the event-making man.” (THIH: 237). Nor can the problem be wished away: “Great men do not ask permission to be born.” (THIH: 237). If agents with the potential to become heroes continue to appear even in democratic societies, then it is of the essence that people be educated in such a way that they know how to uphold the democratic ideal in spite of this. It would be invidious to deny that humans possess a variety of capabilities but, more, it is morally abhorrent to suggest that humans are not worthy of, in Ronald Dworkin’s words, “equal concern and respect”.³⁹

Sordello does believe in “equal concern and respect” for people, wishing to serve the interests of the people, at his best when trusting in “The staple of his verses, common sense” and “man’s broad nature” (RBPW, vol. 2: 269). In the fourth book, contemplating “the whole contest” of “Guelfs and Ghibellins”, wondering which of them are truly “The people’s friends”, Sordello asks, “which of them shall bring | Men good—perchance the most good—ay, it may | Be that; the question is which knows the way.” (RBPW, vol. 2: 363–5). Meanwhile, Naddo, addressing him, is sarcastic about the belief that all are capable of heroism: “True bards believe | “All able to achieve what they achieve— | “That is, just nothing—in one point abide | Profounder simpletons than all beside.” (RBPW, vol. 2: 284). It is a misguidedly “profound” kind of simplicity, an extension of the democratic mindset in a way that is not necessary. Sordello suffers from the accomplished artist’s curse, which is simultaneously self-effacing and destructive-of-good, of coming to believe that all are capable of doing what he does partly because what he does seems to him increasingly trifling. This is misguided. He has taken the mindset of the democratic hero to the strange extreme of not believing in his own “herohood”, to use Carlyle’s coinage (On Heroes: 342), and this leads to the tragic dissipation of his once-great potential. Meanwhile, Browning’s style, fractured by gaps of meaning, designed to be filled with inference, put pressure on the reader to take responsibility for actively and thoughtfully interpreting the poem: as Woolford writes, Browning “shift[ed] the ontological site of the poem from the text to the mind of its reader”.⁴⁰ This is achieved both at the level of style, partly through aposiopesis and absent information, and at the level of story, which ends irresolutely, with the moral about Sordello’s conduct still beleaguered by the complexities that gave Sordello pause. The difficulty insists on the capabilities of the reader, inverting Sordello’s misguided belief that “All [are] able to achieve what [he] achieve[s]” and that his art is therefore worthless: Browning presents a difficult art that the reader, with curiosity and effort, is capable of comprehending, a feat that exults the capacities of the individual, the fundamental particle of democratic society.

As an instructive figure and a cipher for the individual, how the model agent is conceptualized matters to society. Cowper and Wordsworth found a style that could reconcile the tensions inherent in democratic herohood, but Browning did something more dramatic and disconcerting: he put those tensions on display, magnifying them to a satiric-tragic degree, questioning the practicality of such a heroic mode. His critique was also a defense: by pointing out dangers, Browning showed what he believed to be a more effective route for democratic heroism. Sordello’s life is instructive, though not admirable, and for this reason he is perhaps best described as an “antihero”. Howsoever self-abnegating and determined, a hero who does not “contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world” is, Mill writes, “no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar”: “He may be an inspiriting proof of what men can do, but assuredly not an example of what they should.” (Utilitarianism: 63). This echoes the case of Sordello, who is a gleaming example of human capability and virtuous intention, but not a normative exemplar from a consequentialist perspective, the ethical view of the utilitarian Mill.⁴¹

Different ethical views determine one’s approach to heroism. From a virtue ethics perspective, Sordello might be considered a hero: his internal involutions are evidence of genuine striving to do good. With the negative framing of Sordello, however, Browning suggested that consequentialism, of which Mill’s utilitarianism was the most influential form in nineteenth-century Britain, provides the right yardstick to assess herohood. Whereas The Task, The Prelude, and The Excursion were largely influenced by the virtue-ethical view that was prevalent in the Aristotelian and Le Bossuan emphasis on flaws and admirable traits, Sordello is an epic preoccupied, with many reservations, with consequentialism: the hero could be flawed, but not so flawed as to prevent good outcomes, a failure that would vanquish admirability.⁴² Nevertheless, though Sordello is an antihero, the story clearly frames him as an example of what one should not be: so the poem is heroic in its message, even though the protagonist is antiheroic. This may be opposed to Don Juan, in which the protagonist is antiheroic, but the overall narrative frame does not make normative comment against him. For this reason, Don Juan is mock-epic, but Sordello is epic.⁴³

Wordsworth’s skepticism about heroism actually goes further than here stated. In Prelude V, the “mighty workers of our later age” are said to be in need of realizing

That in the unreasoning progress of the world A wiser spirit is at work for us, A better eye than theirs, most prodigal Of blessings and most studious of our good, Even in what seem our most unfruitful hours? (1805. V. 370-388)

Like Barrett Browning, who urged a realization that “every age” is “heroic in proportions”, according to the willingness of people to act courageously and morally, Wordsworth’s epic mode ultimately offers advice for the present on how to live up not to the content of past epic admirability, which in many instances would be no longer relevant, but rather to the form of admirable activity. Proper inhabitation of this transhistorical form of admirable activity is said to require awareness that “A wiser spirit is at work for us, | A better eye than theirs”. At this moment, Wordsworth deploys the characteristically Miltonic technique of epistrophic pronoun-variation, balancing the conjunctive “for us” against the comparative “than theirs”: the effect is of calling into question the wisdom of those who currently presume to have “better eye[s]”, a more perspicacious understanding of the world, than the rest. Wordsworth diagnoses the problem for contemporary people, which is being offered as a typically-Wordsworthian perspectival cure for despondency (“Even in what seem our most unfruitful hours”), as being the need to recognize “A wiser spirit” operating through events. In contrast to Sordello, however, Wordsworth is here anti-Hegelian: “the unreasoning progress of the world” is a phrase that directly contradicts the idea of the super-Platonic operations of logic through history that Hegel extensively asserted. Instead, Wordsworth is much more modest in his claim, but he nevertheless goes beyond the pared-down naturalistic Spinozism that pervades the Prelude: the idea that a “wiser spirit is at work for us”, “most prodigal | Of blessings and most studious of our good”, is not consistent with Spinoza’s view that God or Nature has no direct connection to human ideas of good and bad. Spinoza would not have said, in the context of ethical discussion, that God or Nature is “at work for us” (my italics), with all that implies about the significance of our ideas of good and bad in the framework of reality. Wordsworth thus refuses the full-blown Whitmanian pantheism that accepts moral skepticism, and instead aligns himself with a morally-inclined Spinozism, while not straying too far beyond pantheistical terminology in 1805. Part of Wordsworth’s purpose in explaining so extensively and carefully how he arrived at his views about the world, and how he erred along the way, was to establish a model of agency to which the word “heroic” could aptly be attached. The hero is a particular kind of agent, one who is held up as exemplary: Brandom writes, “The hero is allegorical for one who acts out of appreciation of his duty, one who fulfills his responsibilities, one who acts as he ought, as he is committed to act, one who in his practical attitudes and actions acknowledges the bindingness or authority of norms.”⁴⁴

The emphasis of this essay has been primarily on the literary uses of metaphysical ideas, but it has also included some literary political–theoretical discussion. It is not possible to represent the epic as an apolitical form, nor has this been intended here at any point. But it would be incorrect to suggest that the true “epic” (as the term is generally understood), a form driven by desire to understand human limitation in light of the deep reality, is political at base: such an assertion would indicate a misunderstanding of the kinds of question that epic seeks to answer. Giuseppe Mazzotta claims, “The impulse of the epic is always political. There is no epic that you can think of which is not trying to represent either the falling cities or the edification of new cities or, for that matter, locating a city in a great grand metaphysical drama.”⁴⁵ This is nearly true, and it may be made true with the following slight adaptation: “The impulse of the epic is always [partly] political.” This is because politics is a part, and often a very important part, of the limitations that individual conscious beings face in relation to objective reality. It can be represented as more or less important according to the inclinations of the author and the context of the work. But the underlying emphasis of epic means that political limitation will be represented in a particular way, namely as it pertains to the limitation of the freedom of the individual. The epic’s political side will not result, when it is artfully executed, in a simple expression of recommended government policies. Rather, it will show how individuals are limited by the ontological reality and by the political reality, and it will seek to show ways in which individuals might act admirably in light of these limitations. It is likely also to show how these different considerations can be connected to the same actions. In short, epic presents models for human agency, which integrate various considerations about the exigencies of circumstance.

Conclusion

When Pound turned wearily away from Sordello, from its challenge and seriousness, he was commenting on his own limitations as a writer. It is moving to see a writer so accomplished grappling with such limits:

But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks, Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form, Your Sordello, and that the modern world Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in (“Three Cantos I”)

But this was a mis-representation. Sordello is no rag-bag for eclectic stuffing. Only a shallow, desultory, insufficiently-integrated reading yields that interpretation. On the contrary, Sordello is a remarkably coherent and moving masterpiece. It tells the story of a young artist who, overwhelmed by the difficulty of deciding what to do with considerable talent, falls into vacillation. The result is tragic (on some readings, tragicomic: but the fitting response is more often, I think, tears rather than laughter). By the time Sordello sees his duty is to do the best he can to help the most people, he has wasted the little time that he had. He dies, an almost-completely pointless failure.

I started by asking why Pound felt so challenged by Browning’s great poem. The answer rests on the fact that the poem culminates in moral challenge: Stop wasting time and do all the good you can, while you still can! Why Pound felt himself unequal to such a difficult injunction remains a matter for him (for his spirit or soul, if it survives). His snowballing choices, political extremity and moral carelessness, are evidence of his failure to take the message of Browning’s formative epic seriously. Had he been properly influenced by Browning—had he had the kind of response to the poem that anyone reading it sincerely and carefully should have—then the course of his literary and intellectual career might well have been very different.