Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

The final act in this momentous drama was initiated with the introduction by Lord John Russell of the third Reform Bill in December, 1831. Again it was defeated in the House of Lords, whereupon some of the Cabinet wished to ask the King to create a sufficient number of new peers to force the bill through the House. Earl Grey was not at all in favor of this, but at last consented. This course was not welcome to the House of Lords, and the doubtful members in the House promised that if this suggestion were not carried into effect they would insure a sufficient majority in the House of Lords to carry the bill. This was done, but before the Lords went into committee a hostile motion postponing the disfranchisement clauses was carried. Then Earl Grey asked for the creation of new peers. As it would require the creating of about fifty new peers, the King refused, the ministry resigned and the Duke of Wellington came into power again. But his power, like that of Strafford, was broken. He had reached the point of recognizing that some reform was needed, but he could not persuade his colleagues of this. In the meantime the House of Commons passed a resolution of confidence in the Grey administration. Such determined opposition being shown not only in Parliament but by the people in various ways, Wellington felt his only course was resignation. William IV had, much to his chagrin, to recall Grey, but he escaped the necessity of creating a large number of peers, by asking the opposition in the House of Lords to withdraw their resistance to the bill. The Duke of Wellington and others thereupon absented themselves, and finding further obstruction was useless, the Lords at last passed the bill and it became law in June, 1832.

This national crisis through which Browning had lived could not fail to have made its impression on him. It is certainly an indication of the depth of his interest in the growth of liberalism that his first English subject, written only a few years subsequent to this momentous change in governmental methods, should have dealt with a period whose analysis and interpretation in dramatic form gave him every opportunity for the expression of his sympathy with liberal ideals. Broad-minded in his interpretation of Strafford’s career, in love with his qualities of loyalty, and his capabilities of genuine affection for the vacillating Charles, he made Strafford the hero of his play, but it is Pym whom, in his play, he has exalted as the nation’s hero, and into whose mouth he has put one of the greatest and most intensely pathetic speeches ever uttered by an Englishman. It is when he confronts Strafford at the last:

“Have I done well? Speak, England! Whose sole sake
I still have labored for, with disregard
To my own heart,—for whom my youth was made
Barren, my manhood waste, to offer up
Her sacrifice—this friend—this Wentworth here—
Who walked in youth with me, loved me, it may be,
And whom, for his forsaking England’s cause,
I hunted by all means (trusting that she
Would sanctify all means) even to the block
Which waits for him. And saying this, I feel
No bitterer pang than first I felt, the hour
I swore that Wentworth might leave us, but I
Would never leave him: I do leave him now.
I render up my charge (be witness, God!)
To England who imposed it. I have done
Her bidding—poorly, wrongly,—it may be,
With ill effects—for I am weak, a man:
Still, I have done my best, my human best,
Not faltering for a moment. It is done.
And this said, if I say ... yes, I will say
I never loved but one man—David not
More Jonathan! Even thus I love him now:
And look for that chief portion in that world
Where great hearts led astray are turned again,
(Soon it may be, and, certes, will be soon:
My mission over, I shall not live long)—
Ay, here I know and talk—I dare and must,
Of England, and her great reward, as all
I look for there; but in my inmost heart,
Believe, I think of stealing quite away
To walk once more with Wentworth—my youth’s friend
Purged from all error, gloriously renewed,
And Eliot shall not blame us. Then indeed ...
This is no meeting, Wentworth! Tears increase
Too hot. A thin mist—is it blood?—enwraps
The face I loved once. Then, the meeting be.”

At the same time that Browning was writing “Strafford,” he was also engaged upon “Sordello.” In that he has given expression to his democratic philosophy through his construction and interpretation of Sordello’s character as a champion of the people as well as a poet who ushered in the dawn of the Italian literary Renaissance. As he made Paracelsus develop from a dependence upon knowledge as his sole guide in his philosophy of life into a perception of the place emotion must hold in any satisfactory theory of life, and put into his mouth a modern conception of evolution illuminated by his own artistic emotion, so he makes Sordello develop from the individualistic type to the socialist type of man, who is bent upon raising the masses of the people to higher conditions. The ideal of liberal forms of government was even in Sordello’s time a growing one, sifting into Italy from Greek precedents, but Browning’s Sordello sees something beyond either political or ecclesiastical espousal of the people’s cause—namely, the espousal of the people’s cause by the people themselves, the arrival of the self-governing democracy, an ideal much nearer attainment now than when Browning was writing:

“Two parties take the world up, and allow
No third, yet have one principle, subsist
By the same injustice; whoso shall enlist
With either, ranks with man’s inveterate foes.
So there is one less quarrel to compose
The Guelf, the Ghibelline may be to curse—
I have done nothing, but both sides do worse
Than nothing. Nay, to me, forgotten, reft
Of insight, lapped by trees and flowers, was left
The notion of a service—ha? What lured
Me here, what mighty aim was I assured
Must move Taurello? What if there remained
A cause, intact, distinct from these, ordained
For me its true discoverer?”

The mood here portrayed was one which might have been fostered in Browning in relation to his own time. He doubtless felt that neither the progressive movements in the state nor those in religion really touched upon the true principles of freedom for the individual. He might not have defined these principles to himself any more definitely than as a desire for the greatest happiness of the whole number. And even of such an ideal as that he had his doubts because of the necessity of his mind to find a logical use for evil in the world. This he could only do by supposing it a divine means for the development of the human soul in its sojourn in this life. Speaking in his own person in “Sordello,” he gives expression to this doubt in the following passage in the third book:

“I ask youth and strength
And health for each of you, not more—at length
Grown wise, who asked at home that the whole race
Might add the spirit’s to the body’s grace,
And all be dizened out as chiefs and bards.
······
“——As good you sought
To spare me the Piazza’s slippery stone
Or keep me to the unchoked canals alone,
As hinder Life the evil with the good
Which make up Living rightly understood.”

Still, though vague as to what the good for the whole people might be, there was no vagueness in his mind as to the people’s right to possess the power to bring about their own happiness. Yet given the right principles, he would not have the attempt made to put them into practice all at once.

His final attitude toward the problem of the best methods for bettering human conditions in the poem is, strictly speaking, that of the opportunist working a step toward his ideal rather than that of the revolutionist who would gain it by one leap. Sordello should realize that

“God has conceded two lights to a man—
One, of men’s whole work, man’s first
Step to the plan’s completeness.”