he Italian language in the
poem. The passage to which I refer is about half-way in the second book.
As there is no real ground for representing Sordello as working any
serious change in the Italian tongue of literature except a slight
phrase in a treatise of Dante's, the representation is manifestly an
invention of Browning's added to the character of Sordello as conceived
by himself. As such it probably comes out of, and belongs to, his own
experience. The Sordello who acts thus with language represents the
action of Browning himself at the time he was writing the poem. If so,
the passage is full of interest.

All we know about Sordello as a poet is that he wrote some Italian
poems. Those by which he was famous were in Provencal. In Dante's
treatise on the use of his native tongue, he suggests that Sordello was
one of the pioneers of literary Italian. So, at least, Browning seems to
infer from the passage, for he makes it the motive of his little
"excursus" on Sordello's presumed effort to strike out a new form and
method in poetic language. Nothing was more needed than such an effort
if any fine literature were to arise in Italy. In this unformed but
slowly forming thirteenth century the language was in as great a
confusion--and, I may say, as individual (for each poet wrote in his own
dialect) as the life of the century.

What does Browning make Sordello do? He has brought him to Mantua as the
accepted master of song; and Sordello burns to be fully recognised as
the absolute poet. He has felt for some time that while he cannot act
well he can imagine action well. And he sings his imaginations. But
there is at the root of his singing a love of the applause of the people
more than a love of song for itself. And he fails to please. So Sordello
changes his subject and sings no longer of himself in the action of the
heroes he imagines, but of abstract ideas, philosophic dreams and
problems. The very critics cried that he had left human nature behind
him. Vexed at his failure, and still longing to catch the praise of men,
that he may confirm his belief that he is the loftiest of poets, he
makes another effort to amaze the world. "I'll write no more of
imaginary things," he cries; "I will catch the crowd by reorganising the
language of poetry, by new arrangements of metre and words, by elaborate
phraseology, especially by careful concentration of thought into the
briefest possible frame of words. I will take the stuff of t