Andrugio, the venerable and heroic victim of
his craft and cruelty, is a figure not less living and actual than
stately and impressive: the changes of mood from meditation to passion,
from resignation to revolt, from tenderness to resolution, which mark
the development of the character with the process of the action, though
painted rather broadly than subtly and with more of vigor than of care,
show just such power of hand and sincerity of instinct as we fail to
find in the hot and glaring colors of his rival's monotonous ruffianism.
Again, in "The Wonder of Women," the majestic figures of Massinissa,
Gelosso, and Sophonisba stand out in clearer relief than the traitors of
the senate, the lecherous malignity of Syphax, or the monstrous profile
of the sorceress Erichtho. In this labored and ambitious tragedy, as in
the two parts of "Antonio and Mellida," we see the poet at his best--and
also at his worst. A vehement and resolute desire to give weight to
every line and emphasis to every phrase has too often misled him into
such brakes and jungles of crabbed and convulsive bombast, of stiff and
tortuous exuberance, that the reader in struggling through some of the
scenes and speeches feels as though he were compelled to push his way
through a cactus hedge: the hot and heavy blossoms of rhetoric blaze and
glare out of a thickset fence of jagged barbarisms and exotic
monstrosities of metaphor.
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