still think that it points to a real fault in his art—a fault, however, be it observed, of overplus, not of insufficiency. Such overpowering talents are almost as rare as the sometimes overpowered genius. Landor, writing, it is true, about twenty years earlier, said similarly of Browning: "I only wish he would atticise a little. Few of the Athenians had such a quarry on their property, but they constructed better roads for the conveyance of the material." And such comments but mark what Coleridge has noted in a certain stage of the development of Shakespeare: "The intellectual power and the creative energy wrestle as in a war-embrace." And the wrestling is mighty when both the athletes are Titanic.
Admitting that "Sordello" is very hard, if not obscure, I would observe that the difficulty is not so much in the mere language, as in the abrupt transitions, the rapid discursions, and the continual recondite allusions to matters with which very few readers can be familiar.[1] The yet young fire, struggling with its enormous mass of gnarled and intertangled fuel, burns murkily with fitful sheets of splendid flame, and the mass of metal is not thoroughly fused for the mould; the result differing herein decisively from the magnificent Sordello of the Purgatorio (vi.), defined, solid, massive, as if cast colossal in bronze, the most superb figure, I think, in all Dante; him who leaps from his haughty impassibility to embrace Virgil at the one word "Mantuan," kindling the Florentine to the fulgurant invective, Ahi serva Italia; the Sordello of that noble passage, not to be rendered into English:—
- ↑ Mr. J. T. Nettleship gives a very careful analysis of it in his volume.
