SD2377. William Bell Scott to William Michael Rossetti
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 351.
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5 May 1860
My dear W.,
Is it possible I have not, till the other day … written you since your exposition of Sordello arrived? … But after all the wonder with me is not that I forgot to reply to it but how the devil you ever did it. The relationships of brother, sister, parent, child, in actual life don’t look the least like those of accident or passion, nor do human agents, especially those of the 15th century, at all resemble abstractions, neither are they mistaken for trees, statues, or public fountains, with or without ladles, and as all these things are elaborated and kneaded together in the poem, with an apparent intention on the part of the author that they should be “homologated”, and, as it were, chemically united into a new substance, the wonder is how you managed to decompose this singular result into its original elements. I have looked into Sordello with your exposition in my hand, and begin to think that with time and health, one could, by reading the book and nothing else, gradually lose the enjoyment of active distinct tangible things, and luxuriate in it. But having neither of these requisites I must content myself. …
[Regarding Poems Before Congress:] All the obfuscatory, puffy, flabby stuff about grovelling pure proud England with its venal House of Commons appears to me below notice; it is the lowest stuff of the trashy French school and is almost extinct even among the most ignorant Chartists. …
Publication: R.W. Peattie, “W.M. Rossetti and Browning’s Sordello,” Browning Society Notes, 22 (December 1994), 58.
Manuscript: University of Durham.
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