927. EBB to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 264–265.
50 Wimpole Street
21. March– 1842.
My dear Mr Horne,
I send you my conclusion—with an emphatic self-congratulation in which you will duly sympathize. If I write any more for the Athenæum at present, it will be upon English poetry in the shape of a criticism .. ‘save the mark!’ [1] a review .. on the Book of the Poets. [2] Mr Dilke is courteous enough to trust the subject in my hands—rash enough! for (among other reasons) I shall certainly be contradictory to the great poet-crasher of that journal, Mr Darley, who not satisfied with holding his hopeful doctrine about the absolute extinction of English dramatic literature, takes an opportunity in the last number but one (see the article upon art, having the Darley character on the face of it) to promulgate the same heresy in relation to English poetry generally. [3] It is an old country, forsooth, this England! with a worn-out heart—& the voice of the singing birds can be heard no more, in such a land! [4] Qu[er]y Is it older than the Earth?
Do not tell of me or of my informant: but I have heard, as well as seen with my eyes in his writings, that this Mr Darley’s morbidity lieth in his temper! [5] He is a shrew of a poet—–be witness our Chaucer!– [6] If he shd be a particular friend of yours besides .. why forgive me for that Chaucer’s sake!
By the way, I never heard whether Chaucer accomplished my prophecy, or that of the more sanguine, by selling at all!! But no—I need’nt put such a question—still less, another, .. whether there will ever be a second volume. [7]
But you may tell me one thing, the next time––mind, the next time you write– Has the suggestion never occurred to you of publishing a volume of miscellanies—inclusive of your Fair, the odes, & poems in my remembrance? A few dramatic scenes, wd tell nobly among them,—& the whole wd not be “let die”. [8] I do wish you wd think of it—“carve out an hour” [9] or two out of your ebony nights, & think of it!– Do, Mr Horne!
Was there some nonsense in the last paper I sent you, about an “altar of rose trees”. Of course it was a misprint, & shd be read attar. [10]
Ever truly yours
Elizabeth B Barrett.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. I Henry IV, 3, 56.
2. EBB’s review of Scott, Webster and Geary’s The Book of the Poets appeared in five issues of The Athenæum: 4 June 1842 (no. 762, pp. 497–499); 11 June (no. 763, pp. 520–523); 25 June (no. 765, pp. 558–560); 6 August (no. 771, pp. 706–708) and 13 August (no. 772, pp. 728–729).
3. The Athenæum of 12 March (no. 750, pp. 219–220) carried a review of the first volume of A Hand-Book of the History of Painting by Franz Kugler, ed. Charles Locke Eastlake. In it, the putative writer, Darley, observed that “Literary Germany has not sown her wild oats yet: England has, long since, and is now perhaps come to her chaff.... The days of our Shakspeare and Milton are past; but it is one comfort, we had them!”
4. Cf. The Song of Solomon, 2:12.
5. EBB may be recalling a series of letters, addressed to various dramatists and censuring their preference for a “poetic” rather than “rhetorical” style. Written by Darley under the pseudonym John Lacy, they had been published in The London Magazine in 1822–23.
6. EBB had spoken in letter 796 of Darley’s “tomahawking” of those connected with Chaucer, Modernized. She returns to the subject in letter 946, where she castigates Darley as “the Herod of the Chaucer massacre.” For the full text of his review in The Athenæum of 6 February 1841, see pp. 389–391.
7. EBB’s prophecy, in letter 779, was that “the book is sure to be left, for the most part, in the publisher’s hands, & that no second volume will be called for.”
8. Cf. Zechariah, 11:9.
9. We have not located the source of this quotation.
10. The misprint (“the altar of a thousand rose trees”) occurs in her discussion of the works of Synesius, in The Athenæum of 12 March (p. 229, col. 1).
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