R400328A. Sordello.
The Atlas, 28 March 1840, p. 203.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 416–417.
We are disappointed in this poem, and have no inclination to dwell at length upon the causes of what we must consider a descent from the high promise of Paracelsus. The faults of that production were obvious—rugged and abrupt lines—strange turns of expression—want of fullness and completeness. Its merits were equally striking—intense enthusiasm—rich imagery—profound feeling—strong delineation. In the poem of Sordello, all the faults recur in exaggerated shapes, without being relieved or compensated for by an equal amount of excellence in any single point of view.
The subject is one of deep and extraordinary interest. The readers of Dante need not be reminded of it, nor need it be suggested to them as a theme pregnant with capabilities. Mr. Browning has treated it in the narrative form; and an odd, fantastic narrative he has made of it—sometimes starting off into a mood of scoffing humour, anon melting into pathos, and then bursting out into passion, but fulfilling none of the conditions of any of these fits, and producing a mosaic of bits and tints which it is difficult to trace with satisfaction or coherency. Nor does he make amends to us even by occasional fragments of the beautiful, such as we believe his genius to be able to accomplish. The whole structure is faulty, not only in its entire outline, but in its minutest details. One example, long enough to include samples of most of the peculiarities of the writer, will suffice as an illustration:—
Is it the same Sordello in the dusk
As at the dawn? merely a perished husk
Now, that arose a power like to build
Up Rome again? The proud conception chilled
So soon? Ay, watch that latest dream of thine
—A Rome indebted to no Palatine,
Drop arch by arch, Sordello! Art possest
Of thy wish now?—rewarded for thy quest
To-day among Ferrara’s squalid sons?—
Are this, and this, and this the shining ones
Meet for the Shining City? Sooth to say
Our favoured tenantry pursue their way
After a fashion? This companion slips
On the smooth causey, t’other blinkard trips
At his mooned sandal. Leave to lead the brawls
Here i’ the atria? No, friend. He that sprawls
On aught but a stibadium suffers .... goose,
Puttest our lustral vase to such an use?
Oh, huddle up the day’s disasters—march
Ye runagates, and drop thou, arch by arch,
Rome!
Yet before they quite disband—a whim—
Study a shelter, now, for him, and him,
Nay, even him, to house them! any cave
Suffices—throw out earth. A loophole! Brave!
They ask to feel the sun shine, see the grass
Grow, hear the larks sing? Dead art thou, alas,
And I am dead! But here’s our son excels
At hurdle-weaving any Scythian, fells
Oak and devises rafters, dreams and shapes
That dream into a door-post, just escapes
The mystery of hinges. Lie we both
Perdue another age. The goodly growth
Of brick and stone! Our building-pelt was rough
But that descendant’s garb suits well enough
A portico-contriver. Speed the years—
What’s time to us? and lo, a city rears
Itself! nay, enter—what’s the grave to us?
So our forlorn acquaintance carry thus
A head! successively sewer, forum, cirque—
Last age that aqueduct was counted work,
And now they tire the artificer upon
Blank alabaster, black obsidion,
—Careful Jove’s face be duly fulgurant,
And mother Venus’ kiss-creased nipples pant
Back into pristine pulpiness, ere fixed
Above the baths. What difference betwixt
This Rome and ours?
Here we have the same pitching, hysterical, and broken sobs of sentences—the same excisions of words—the same indications of power—imperfect grouping of thoughts and images—and hurried, exclamatory, and obscure utterance of things that would, probably, be very fine if we could get them in their full meaning, but which, in this bubbling and tumult of the verse, are hardly intelligible—the same idiosyncrasy of mind and manner that was first exhibited in Paracelsus, and that was afterwards carried to still greater excess in Strafford. We looked for an improvement upon all this in Sordello. We expected that the poet would have shaken off these crudities, and emerged a natural and free man, disenchanted out of his youthful heresies, and prepared to exhibit a sound and vigorous maturity. But we are disappointed. Sordello is worse than Strafford, with less excuse, for what might be tolerated in the clamour and heat of action in a drama, is intolerable in a narrative; and it is further chargeable with betraying the disagreeable truth that the author has not only benefited nothing from experience, but that the sins of his verse are premeditated, wilful and incurable.
Reviewed:
Sordello (RB), London: Moxon, 1840.
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