"But they had a belief which he has not. They knew what 'masters life.' For him the paramount fact is that of his own being...."
This is the last protest of the flesh within him. Sordello is dying, and probably feels that he is so; and he lapses into a calm contemplation, which reveals to him the last secret of his mistaken career. He already knew that he had ignored the bodily to the detriment of his spiritual existence. He now feels that he has destroyed his body by forcing on it the exigencies of the spirit. He has striven to obtain infinite consciousness, infinite enjoyment, from finite powers. He has broken the law of life. He has missed (so we interpret Mr. Browning's conclusion) the ideal of that divine and human Love which would have given the freest range to his spirit and yet accepted that law. Eglamor began with love. Will Sordello find it, meeting that gentle spirit on his course?
We know at least that the soul in him has conquered. His stamp upon the floor has brought Palma and Salinguerra to him in anxious haste. They find him dead:
"Under his foot the badge: still, Palma said,
A triumph lingering in the wide eyes,
Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies
Help from above in his extreme despair,...."
(vol. i. p. 279.)
Sordello is buried at Goito Castle, in an old font-tomb in which his mother lies, and beside whose sculptured female forms the child-poet had dreamed his earliest dreams of life and of love. Salinguerra makes peace with the Guelphs, marries a daughter of Eccelino the monk, and effaces himself once for all in the Romano house, leaving its sons Eccelino and Alberic to plague the world at their pleasure, and meet the fate they have deserved. He himself, after varied fortunes, dwindles into a "showy, turbulent soldier," less "astute" than people profess to think: whose qualities even foes admire; and whose aggressions they punish, but do not much resent. We see him for the last time at the age of eighty, a nominal prisoner in Venice.
The drama is played out. Its actors have vanished from the stage. One only lives on in Mr. Browning's fancy, in the pathos of his modest hopes, and acknowledged, yet scarcely comprehended failure—more human, and therefore more undying than Naddo himself: the poet Eglamor. Sordello he recalls only to dismiss him with less sympathy than we should expect: as ending the ambition for what he could not become, by the well-meant renunciation of what he was born to be; made a hero of by legends which credited him with doing what his conscience had forbidden him to do; leaving the world to suffer by his self-sacrifice; a type of failure more rare and more brilliant than that of Eglamor, yet more full of the irony of life.