Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/276

250 THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING but actually to work out his position, map out his life, make a rough trial draft of his career, a private rehearsal, and cast a sort of horoscope. It is usual to praise Paracelsus and Sordello for " the completeness with which they portray remote historical personages." The hero of each certainly is an historical personage. But he was not born before May 7, 1812. These sketches are not retrospects, they are prospects — are, in fact, prospectuses — preliminary announcements of the proposed extensive develop- ment of the going concern called Robert Browning. It is just here that we young bloods of to-day are perhaps a little unfair to our elders. We forget that in their time, when the clear-cut aiguilles and gullies of the Dramatic Lyrics were still in the clouds, there was only one route up Browning, and that was over the vast slithering slopes of Sordello. Nowa- days, if we read it at all, it is on our descent, confidently skipping and glissading — slurring the difficulties light-heartedly, sustained by our knowledge of the peak. But to tackle it as Tennyson and Ruskin did, working heavily up into the unknown, is still to find Sordello pretty stiff. "Hard, very hard, it undoubtedly is," even that keen climber Mr. Symons has openly admitted. Yet not, as he suggested, for its " cragginess." It is scree — that is the difficulty ; the debris of his wander-year, made out of his changing moods and impressions, the stuff he quarried as he went seeking the Philosopher's Stone. And if the litter is thus due to a kind of canny level-headedness, to a dedication of poetry to the service of his life instead of his life to the service of poetry, there was something even more magni- ficently practical to follow. Like some emperor of old at the mouth of a dubious labyrinth, he had sent in these creatures of his, Paracelsus and Sordello, in advance, in order to test the way. Both expired,