SD2379. William Michael Rossetti to William Bell Scott
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 351–352 (in part).
Somerset House,
14 May 1860
Dear Scotus,
I now apply myself with due deliberation to your letter.
As to Sordello, I must give you up, hoping only that the pains of heresy don’t await you round the corner of something or other. Only let me hint that he did not belong to “the 15th century,” but to the earlier half of the 13th. The particulars of him given (you would say not given) by Browning are nearer the truth too than most people would suppose—or at least nearer some versions and hints of the truth, for his life is involved in great obscurity. I have read the notice of him in Nostredame’s Lives of the Provençal Poets, and find an extended account of him in Tiraboschi’s Italian Literature, which I shall look carefully into one day.
I see you are going in for the British lion, having maybe learned to appreciate the noble brute while studying for the Una. But you probably agree with me that one cannot judge any work involving even a moderate amount of intellect and originality by newspaper extracts, especially when culled for a hostile purpose. The Poems before Congress (which you really should read) are disfigured by Mrs. Browning’s weaknesses and disagreeablenesses, but there is much fine element in them too. I don’t remember that there is much about “grovelling England” etc., as you put it: and, if there was, I am by no means sure, considering our sublime national self-complacency, that such one-sided batteries are not as well directed against us as they could be against anything. The poem of The Curse, which was supposed to be aimed at England, turns out to be launched at the United States. For Aurora Leigh, I believe I agree with you: at least, I know that, after reading it through with a feeling of admiration that palled upon me, I laid it down with a bad taste in my mouth, and doubt very much whether I shall ever attack it again. …
Publication: Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie (University Park, Penn., 1990), pp. 110–113.
Manuscript: Princeton University.
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