976. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 14–15.
[London]
June 22. 1842–
My very dear friend,
I thank you gratefully for your two notes with their united kindness & candour—the latter still rarer than the former, if less “sweet upon the tongue”. [1] Sir William Alexander’s tragedy (that is the right name I think—Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling) you will not find mentioned among my dramatic notices [2] —because I was much pressed for room, & had to treat the whole subject as briefly as possible—striking off like the Roman, only the heads of the flowers [3] —& I did not, besides, receive your injunction, until my third paper on the dramatists was finished & in the press. When you read it, you will find some notice of that tragedy by Marlowe, [4] the first knowledge of which I owe to you, my dear Mr Boyd—as how much besides? And then comes the fourth paper—and I tremble to anticipate the possible, nay, the very probable scolding I may have from you, upon my various heresies as to Dryden & Pope & Queen Anne’s versificators! [5] In the meantime you have breathing time—for Mr Dilke although very gracious & courteous to my offence of extending the two papers he asked for into four, yet cd find no room in the Athenæum last week for me, & only hopes for it this week. And after this week, comes the British Association business, which always fills every column for a month [6] —so that a further delay is possible enough. “It will increase” says Mr Dilke “the zest of the reader”—whereas I say (at least think) that it will help him quite to forget me. I explain all this, lest you shd blame me for neglect to yourself in not sending the papers. I am so pleased that you like, at least the second article!– That is encouragement to me.
Flushie did not seem to think the harp alive when it was taken out of the window & laid close to him. He examined it particularly, & is a philosophical dog– But I am sure that at first & while it was playing he thought so.
In the same way he can’t bear me to look into a glass, because he thinks there is a little brown dog inside every looking glass & he is jealous of its being so close to me. He used to tremble & bark at it, but now he is silently jealous, & contents himself with squeezing close, close to me & kissing me expressively.
Arabel’s love to you—& I am to explain how it rained on Saturday & she could not manage to pay you the visit she contemplated. It is to be paid very soon—& you are to be as preparatorily forgiving as you can.
My very dear friend’s ever gratefully affecte
EBB–
Address: H S Boyd Esqr / 21. Downshire Hill / Hampstead.
Publication: LEBB, I, 106–107.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. The Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 265.
2. i.e., her papers on The Book of the Poets. William Alexander, Earl of Stirling (1567?–1640), poet and statesman, was the author of The Tragedie of Darius (1603). A second tragedy, Crœsus, followed in 1604.
3. Ovid tells how, during the siege of Gabii by Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, last King of Rome, his son Sextus gained entry to the city by a strategem and then secretly sent a messenger to his father to ask advice regarding the next step in the conquest of the town. The messenger returned, dismayed that he had been given no word by the king, but described how Tarquinius Superbus strode up and down the garden striking off the heads of the tallest lilies; hearing this, Sextus slew all the chief men of the city, which then surrendered (Fasti, II, 685–710).
4. In her third paper, in The Athenæum of 25 June 1842, EBB mentioned Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604), calling him a “crowned poet … poet of the English Faustus, which we will not talk of against the German, nor set up its grand, luxurious, melancholy devil against Goethe’s subtle, biting, Voltairish devil” (p. 559).
5. EBB’s last paper was split in two by Dilke, so her “various heresies” appeared in the fourth and fifth articles. In the fourth (The Athenæum, 6 August), she spoke of Dryden as “a poet—an excellent poet—in marble!” finding him “a poet without passion” who “entertained the universe by potatoe patches” and “thrust out nature with a fork” (p. 707). In the fifth (The Athenæum, 13 August), she said of Pope that “To be correct, therefore, to be great through correctness, was the end of his ambition, an aspiration scarcely more calculated for the production of noble poems than the philosophy of utilitarianism is for that of lofty virtues” (p. 728).
6. The Athenæum did devote more than 40 pages, in five consecutive issues starting with that of 2 July, to the proceedings of the 12th meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
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