INTRODUCTION. THIS little volume of Stories from Browning is made up on the pattern of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, and was probably suggested by them; and its author must have discovered, at a very early stage, that he had undertaken a difficult task; for the resemblance between Browning and Shakespeare stops at the very point at which the common treatment has been applied. As poets, they are united by their insight into all that is permanent in human life. As dramatists, they are separated by the whole extent of the social change which our country has undergone between the sixteenth century and the present day; and the most substantial result of the change is this that a great dramatic poet could be a teller of stories in Shakespeare's time, and cannot be so now. The amount of action and incident through which Shakespeare's deepest conceptions came to light have no modern equivalent but in the sensation play or the pantomime; and even when Mr. Browning's play is strongest in plot and incident, its real drama is internal. With Shakespeare, the story of a play is an outline of it; with Browning, it is a bare skeleton; and this brings us to what constitutes the greatest difficulty of Mr. Holland's attempted work. He was obliged to clothe his skeletons ; it was probably a matter of conscience with him to do it as much as possible in Mr. Browning's own words; and as these words are of the language of modern poetry, which is poetic in feeling as well as rhythmic in form, they must either jar on the tone of a simple narrative, or force the narrative into a halting agreement with themselves. If, in the face of all this, Mr. Holland had only told the stories of Mr. Browning's plays, in which the idea is bound up with the words, and in which there is nothing to explain, and little or nothing which it is desirable to omit, his exertions would, we think, have been misapplied. But Mr. Browning has given us some chapters in human experience which are not in the form of plays; in which the idea can be separated from the words, and which leave a good deal to be explained; and Mr. Holland has done much to recommend his plan, by including in it an abridged prose version of the most important of these. Such a treatment can no more do justice to 'Sordello,' 'The Ring and the Book,' and 'Aristophanes' Apology,' than it does to 'Strafford' and 'Luria;' but it helps the reader who has not unlimited time and knowledge to devote to these poems, to do justice to them for himself; and in this respect almost every step of the process has brought clear gain. Mr. Holland has done least for us in the case of 'Sordello,' in which he picks his way by the historical stepping-stones, never trusting himself very far into its speculative or poetic depths. Even this, however, constitutes helpful guidance in a narrative, of which the outward events are almost as puzzling as the internal. The difficulties of this work have not been much over rated. It was written when its author was very young, and his artistic judgment not yet on a level with his imagination. This was not so apparent in 'Paracelsus,' which requires careful reading, but will always repay it; and seems at first sight to be the work of an older rather than a younger man. 'Sordello' shows in reality an advance on 'Paracelsus,' both in wealth of imagination and in the power of grappling with the deepest problems of thought; but in 'Paracelsus,' the author was working at something outside himself; in 'Sordello,' he was more clearly depicting his own inmost experiences; and those experiences had a language of their own, which he had no idea of adapting to other people's minds. The intricate thought took an involved expression, and he did not see the necessity of breaking it up; and when, many years later, he wished to break it up, he found this to be impossible: re-writing the poem would have been re-casting it. So youthful a production did not seem to him worth the labour; and those who value the first-fruits of so powerful a genius will be glad that he abstained from any improvements, in which this earlier freshness must have disappeared. Even then he imagined the historic details of the story to be much less perplexing than they are: for he speaks of them, in the Preface to his later edition, as merely forming a background; whereas they are the subject of constant digressions, and assume a knowledge of the times in which Sordello lived, which a reader not primed for the occasion is very unlikely to possess. Mr. Browning has done the best for us which his judgment allowed, by heading the pages of his poem, so as to give a running index of their principal contents. Mr. Holland's summary of these contents is a further attempt at simplifying them. The first stumbling-block he has had to remove is the anticipation of the central scene of the story—that in which Sordello and Palma come to an understanding with each other. This scene is so full of dramatic contrast and artistic effect, that we can understand Mr. Browning's employing it as he does, as an opening picture, which melts away as soon as it has done its work on the reader's mind, to reappear when the proper moment has come; and it is very usual with him to begin a narrative by some statement of fact which actually or figuratively contains it as in a nutshell, so that our minds are worked up as we read, by a haunting half-consciousness of what is coming, which detracts in no way from our surprise or interest when it does come. What he has done in the case of Sordello is more simple than this, and amounts to little more than the novelist's device for laying hold of his reader's sympathy from the beginning; but in novels we have never any difficulty in recognising the opening scene, when we are led up to it again through a chapter or a volume, as the case may be, and have often no time to lose sight of it; whereas, in 'Sordello' we have plenty of time to lose sight of it, and are farther put off the track by re-entering it, as it were, through a different door; so that the very passages which prove its identity are apt to escape our notice. This defect might have been remedied by a stroke of the pen, and his failing to remedy it was a mark of literary inexperience on the author's part. Mr. Holland has done so in a simple manner by beginning his story after the Introduction, and transferring one or two descriptive touches from the latter into the former; and with this help, the student of the poem will not only follow its course more easily, but read the right meaning into the strange historic and romantic vision which its opening pages conjure up. Mr. Browning begins by announcing that for once he will tell his story from behind the scenes, and act as showman instead of spectator to the character he has brought upon the stage. He then marshals an imaginary audience, gathered from both the living and the dead; and last, by a stroke of his poetic wand, The past is hurled In twain up-thrust, out-staggering on the world, Its outline, kindles at the core, appears The news has just come that her prince, Count Richard of Saint Boniface, has been entrapped into Ferrara by the Ghibelline leader Salinguerra, and the whole city is flying to arms. Her magistrates are debating in Count Richard's palace, but the citizens have crowded into the market-place. We see them all with their quick gestures and hurried tones; the cross-fire of exclamation and allusion, of question and reply, which flashes from one to the other the tide of warlike and patriotic passion surging and swaying in the red light of the autumnal setting sun; and side by side with this, the little tapestried chamber, its darkness, its silence, and the mysterious stolen interview which is transforming Sordello's life. We recognise, even without help, that that interview was critical; but Mr. Browning would have forestalled the |