Correspondence

2193.  Alfred Domett to RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 31–35.

Nelson [New Zealand]

January 30th 1846

My dear Browning,

How shall I ever pay you my debts in the way of correspondence? I am bankrupt utterly in means thereto. And if I surrender all my effects into your hands alone—all the news or matter for epistles that can be got out of a New Zealand existence—a certificate of good intention is all that I can claim—for you will still have to be content with a penny in the pound. But I shall not any longer delay asking you about yourself—and how you get on, mentally & physically.

Arnould who is a gem of correspondents, writ me lately that you were complaining constantly of head-aches & giddiness—and you have yourself hinted the same thing to me. I am greatly afraid you overwork that brain of yours—which is absurd, besides a shame; for a thing of such fine material is not for drudgery, even at Poetry. Why use a Breguet [1] gold watch as flat as a halfcrown like a kitchen toasting jack—or an Accordion (if that’s the spelling) like a hurdy gurdy? You brood too much over your conceptions—and make pregnant at last only “a vast abyss.” [2] Cannot you come out of that green seclusion of yours and a silence that almost makes the brain’s working audible, into the fat easy triviality of life a little, and let the poor brain lie fallow meanwhile altogether for a season? The next crop will be richer for it you know. But it is not fair fallowing merely to abstain from publishing—which is after all only stacking & casting & selling your crop; you must abstain from thinking, have the seed out of the ground altogether—let it go into a healthy far niente [3] lethargy or at least vacancy. Three lines a day is a thousand a year—& if you live fifty such years, who is to read all you will have spun! Come out of it all—honour a fool wherever you meet him—worship the stomach greatly—and let the jolliest gourmand be the hero of your heart’s devotion. Hold camphor to your nose when you meet “a man of genius”—give an author the whole of the street to avoid him—feel for your laudanum—& brandy bottle the moment you catch sight of one—treat a book like a breaking plague-blotch—sprinkle chloride of lime before entering a room where one has been. Be in the open air all day long—have companions who hate thinking & don’t care much for talking—cut a man dead for an original observation—call him out if he says any thing worth repeating. Feel the glory of stupidity—the grandeur of being and caring to be nobody. Dont let any ideas come in—don’t let any go out—drop the whole connection.

Seriously, I know your complaint—and a tendency thereto has been one of my own sins for years. Take as I said all the open air exercise you can—souse your head in cold water till it aches & your scalp shrinks & tightens as though it was murderously bent on strangling your brain in spite of your skull—it will lower the circulation of the blood therein & with it the necessity for thinking—the inability to do without thought. It will strengthen & brace all the nerves which are tingling now in the pulp they form. Bathe all over in fact—shower baths are best– Work till you sweat, not in the “eye of Phœbus” [4] but when his eye is bunged up with clouds and the air is the coolest within absolute cold. Depend upon it this is the best course for such complaints– I am more sure of it than of any remedy your greatest physicians, if they all would agree, should prescribe. Swift as you know in his journal to Stella is for ever complaining of the same curse; & some Radcliffe or sickening quack of the kind used to force him to wear nightcaps stuffed with stimulating herbs or drugs or other buffoonery to cure “cold & moist humours in the head”!!! [5] The odious ideals—adding fuel to the fire and industriously driving him on to madness– Yet all the while—at least at other times—he is describing to Stella his walks from London to Chelsea in the hottest weather and how infinitely better he was from “sweating so profusely in the forehead.” I have felt the same thing so often myself that I am dead certain I am right in the other remedy—the cold water one. I am convinced that if Swift had bathed his bald head (that wig-wearing was very convenient in that respect) every morning of his life from youth upwards in the coldest water he could get, had it pumped on would perhaps be better, the madhouse he died in would never have had him within its walls. Depend upon it—whatever the mode of curing—whether by lowering circulation—or strengthening & bracing the nerves—the effect produced will be most beneficial. Therefore by all means try it.

Now after all this, must I break the rules I have laid down & talk to you about books? I know I ought not, and therefore shall say little about them. I do not know whether you have been concocting any lately—my last news of yourself from yourself is rather old. But I have one first and last request to make or advice to give you thereanent! It is simply this– Do for heaven’s sake, try to write commonplace. Strain as much for it as weaker poets do against it. And always write for fools, think of them as your audience instead of the Sidneys & Marvels & Landors or others you talk to in Sordello. [6] Make your language and thoughts such as a tripe man in St. Giles’s or a milliner in Cranbourne Alley may take out their slender or fat wits at one glance. Write for cads and omnibuses & coal heavers in “London Pool” [7] —for any one but poets & ‘litterateurs.’ Stain your pages not with “Tuscan grape” or Chian wine, but with heavy wet in mantua maker’s tea. [8] Ask someone always– The dullest ploddingest acquaintance you have how he, or she (if you can find a woman quite stupid enough) would have expressed your thought—& take his or her arrangement. Will you do this? I fear not—yet I know that herein lies your truest course.

Meanwhile do not think I do not value your actual done things—your old excellences. Paracelsus is still delightful to me—& Sordello (in bit) most delicious. I was glad 2 or 3 months ago to hear a newcomer to New Zealand—a man I remember at Trinity when I was at St John’s—of clear sarcastic head & much reading—who adored chiefly Rabelais & Aristophanes—whose fame here was that he had “translated all Shakespeare into Greek Iambics”—but who at Cambridge was a “fast man”—a “wild dog” as Dr Johnson would have said [9] —to hear this worthy, Carleton [10] by name, declare “that Browning was the only poet worth reading now.” I am not sure that the phrase was not stronger still—but so much can vouch to—& that it was genuine & of his own “mere motion.” But for all that & the much wine of that kind that excite—do not forget the coal-heavers & cabmen<.>

I do not much like your portrait in the Spirit of the Age (for the book bye the bye many thanks) you should have had one from the front face done[.] One of these days—if fortune uses me better—I shall insist on your having your resemblance fixed in something for me—either in Daguerreotype—or by human fingers in paint—or somehow. [11] Arnould too must send me his. Talking of the book I do not much like Horne’s notice of you either– It is the fault of these writers that they are so much more anxious to give clever things of their own than of their subjects! I think he twaddles awfully about Paracelsus & Sordello—that is—about the plot & design of them—his remarks upon the style & poetry are excellent enough. How admirable is the face of the Carlyle in that book! I think I must cut it out & stick it in the frame in the place of that by D’Orsay which I have now hung up. It will be a good accompaniment to yours & Arnoulds when I get them—an arro<g>ating “the grim man” [12] would not dislike if he knew you as I do<.>

Arnould writes with overflowing kindness about you—he is certainly a prince. I wish he said that you were oftener with him. His society is good for body & soul. The health of both in him is contagious. I think it would do you very much benefit. I, as your self constituted physician, prescribe for you more exercise, more Arnould, and more cold water– Take all without reserve and without stint.– Begin your writings to me again—but not as an addition to your task-writing– Write dullness write stupidity if possible– Write pointless gossip if you can, but write that you are better & much more idle. Remember me kindly to all your family I am acquainted with

And believe me ever

Your very sincere well[-]wisher (what better term than that

old[-]fashioned one?)

Alfred Domett.

Bell (Dillon Bell of the N Zd House [13] where I believe he was born as well as bred) looks on c<our>se back in at the window & bids me tell you you have several friends here you don’t know—which I can bear decided witness to. He is one.

Address, on integral page: Robert Browning Jr Esqre / Hatcham / New Cross / London.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Abraham Louis Bréguet (1747–1823) was a maker of clocks and watches; at age 15 he became the official horologist at Versailles. His designs are noted for their simplicity and elegance.

2. Cf. Paracelsus, I, 348.

3. “Do nothing.”

4. Cf. Henry V, IV, 1, 273.

5. In Journal to Stella (ed. Harold Williams, 1948), Swift says that Dr. Radcliffe prescribed “some herb-snuff” for his giddiness (p. 248).

6. RB’s “audience” is referred to in Sordello, I, 44–73, which includes a reference to Sidney (I, 69). The allusion to Landor is doubtless Book III, line 924, as explained by RB in a letter to F.J. Furnivall, dated 16 December 1881.

7. i.e., of the Thames River. Actually, there are two pools: the Upper Pool and the Lower Pool, the two being divided at London Bridge, below which most shipping docks were located until very recently.

8. i.e., dress-maker’s tea.

9. Perhaps a reference to Dr. Johnson’s “I love the young dogs of this age: they have more wit and humour and knowledge of life than we had; but then the dogs are not such good scholars” (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1791, I, 242).

10. Hugh Francis Carleton (1810–90), born in London and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, was a landowner in New Zealand.

11. We have not traced a likeness of RB made especially for Domett. RB’s portrait appeared with those of Tennyson, Carlyle, and Harriet Martineau in vol. 2 of A New Spirit of the Age; they are reproduced in our volume 8, facing p. 271.

12. See letter 1429 in which RB had related Carlyle’s response to a request for a likeness. This may explain Domett’s description of Carlyle as “the grim man.”

13. Francis Dillon Bell, who is listed as the New Zealand Commissioner for Land Claims in The Colonial Office List for 1862; Domett is listed in the same volume as the Crown Lands Commissioner at Nelson. Bell later became Speaker of the House of Representatives of New Zealand.

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