iosity, in action. When
he is drawn out of himself at Mantua and sings for a time to please men,
he finds that the public do not understand him, and flies back to his
solitude, back to his own soul. And Mantua, and love, and adventure all
die within him. "I have all humanity," he says, "within myself--why then
should I seek humanity?" This is the way the age's passion for
individuality shows itself in him. Other men put it into love, war, or
adventure. He does not; he puts it into the lonely building-up of his
own soul. Even when he is brought into the midst of the action of the
time we see that he is apart from it. As he wanders through the turmoil
of the streets of Ferrara in Book iv., he is dreaming still of his own
life, of his own soul. His curiosity, wars and adventures are within.
The various lives he is anxious to live are lived in lonely
imaginations. The individuality he realises is in thought. At this point
then he is apart from his century--an exceptional temperament set in
strong contrast to the world around him--the dreamer face to face with
a mass of men all acting with intensity. And the common result takes
place; the exceptional breaks down against the steady and terrible pull
of the ordinary. It is Hamlet over again, and when Sordello does act it
is just as Hamlet does, by a sudden impulse which lifts him from
dreaming into momentary action, out of which, almost before he has
realised he is acting, he slips back again into dreams. And his action
seems to him the dream, and his dream the activity. That saying of
Hamlet's would be easy on the lips of Sordello, if we take "bad dreams"
to mean for him what they meant for Hamlet the moment he is forced to
action in the real world--"I could be bounded in a nut-shell and think
myself king of infinite space, had I not bad dreams." When he is
surprised into action at the Court of Love at Mantua, and wins the prize
of song, he seems to slip back into a sleepy cloud. But Palma, bending
her beautiful face over him and giving him her scarf, wins him to stay
at Mantua; and for a short time he becomes the famous poet. But he is
disappointed. That which he felt himself to be (the supernal greatness
of his individuality) is not recognised, and at last he feels that to
act and fight his way through a world which appreciates his isolated
greatness so little as to dare to criticise him, is impossible. We have
seen in the last chapter how he slips back to Goito, to his
cont