On Sordello:
"Better known, of course, is the story of Tennyson who said that the first line of the poem--
'Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,'
and the last line--
'Who would has heard Sordello's told,'
were the only two lines in the poem that he understood and they were lies.
Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed and began to read Sordello. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly pale, put down the book, and said, 'My God! I'm an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.'" p 34-5
On his obscurity:
"But they all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to give that neat and aesthetic character to his speech which is almost invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental superiority." p 36
" He was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious [...] A young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not hink that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expressssion of this beautiful optimmism. Sordello was the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man." 37-38
"He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one." 40
"If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, and Browning an intellectual democrat." 41
"His father was a student of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ grinder." 41
"This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in ouselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out in action which our neighbors see. We see only a welter of minute mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own conscience, and Hamlet fourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon." 42
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