1059. EBB to Cornelius Mathews
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 168–170.
50 Wimpole Street London.
Novr 25th 1842.
My dear Sir,
Wakondah has appeared! and having written to you of the delay in his avatar, [1] I write quickly to apprize you of its occurrence: assuring you at the same time that if I was obliged to you for your intended gift my gratitude has increased with my knowledge of its value. The poem is a fragment indeed,—and so fragmentary as to forbid all guessing at the full design & ultimate aspect of the whole. Still there are two great goods .. obvious in it: one is, the Americanism of the subject, .. & the other, a force & energy & occasional majesty of expression & cadence—which are not common qualifications of poems whether American or European– I am much struck by such lines as these, for instance, ..
‘The rivers loiter like a calm-bound sea’
or
‘With threatenings full of thought & stedfast ends’
or
‘A bulk that swallows up the sea-blue sky’. [2]
and I earnestly hope that Wakondah may attain his full ‘bulk’ as a worthy national poem & be recognized as such upon either side of the Atlantic. [3]
When American poets write as they too often do, English poems, .. must not the sad reason be that they draw their inspiration from the English poets, rather than from the grand omnipresence of nature? Must not both cause & result partake of a certain wrongness?– I fear so. And all should be hope, & nothing fear, in America! You have room there for whole choruses of poets—Autochthones [4] —singing out of the ground! You, with your Niagara for a Hippocrene [5] —and your silent cities of the woods, too old for ruins,—& your present liberties,—& your aspirations filling the future!
I am going to send ‘Wakondah’ to Miss Mitford who as she is the admired of so many in either world, is a dear friend to me,—& I like to share my pleasures with her, being grateful!
Arcturus has disappeared like the Pleiad, [6] —& not without a track of bright reputation—& I dare say, you regret none of the labor expended on that abandoned ground– On the subject of copyright there is wailing & gnashing of teeth here as with you! yet the wrong is likely to go on, in the face of even Boz. [7] And that reminds me of wishing to know, .. (I shd say .. of wishing to ask you, if questions cd be asked & answered from one end of the world to the other, ..) whether <you a>re pleased or displeased with Mr Dickens’s judgment on you, .. whether you shake your heads in wrath at it, as some are inclined to do here. [8]
But it is a great, clear evil for you, literary Americans, to be thrust aside from your own public, by such periodicals as we have at the present moment, in England—nay, it is a great, clear evil for not only you, but for your public itself. Our English periodicals do not certainly [‘]‘triumph gloriously” [9] at the present moment. There is cleverness & power in Blackwood, & cleverness & wit in the New Monthly Magazine, since Hood took it up to glorify it, .. and the Edinburgh & Quarterly Reviews have a show occasionally of strong articles! But of literature there is a dearth—of philosophical criticism whether upon literature generally or poetry particularly, there is scarcely a word,—scarcely one prevailing word. And I who regretted this state of things for England’s sake, regret it doubly now from your report, for the new world’s sake.
It is better however to want criticism than to want poetry—and poetry is rising with us, be sure—and I wd solicit your reverence for our Tennyson & our Browning (who though he speaks obscurely yet delivers oracles) & also for the dramatic sketches & tragedies of Mr Horne. Mr Tennyson is a great poet, notwithstanding that very scornful word which I was very sorry to see in the North American Review. [10]
Sincerely your obliged,
Elizabeth B. Barrett.
Address, on integral page: Cornelius Mathews Esqr / New York / United States / America.
Publication: The Collector, November 1891, pp. 34–35.
Manuscript: Eton College Library.
1. EBB refers to letter 1040. Her copy of Wakondah; The Master of Life (1841) appeared in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1572).
2. The lines quoted are, respectively, verse ix, line 6; verse xvii, line 5; and verse iv, line 7.
3. Wakondah was never finished, despite the intention expressed by Mathews in his reply (letter 1103).
4. One sprung from the soil he inhabits; an aboriginal (OED).
5. The spring on Mt. Helicon sacred to the Muses.
6. As previously noted (letter 986, note 3), Arcturus ceased publication with the May 1842 number. The Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, transformed into stars after death; one of the stars cannot be seen and is known as the lost Pleiad—held by some to be Electra, mourning the destruction of Troy.
7. During his visit to America, Dickens had attempted to promote support for an international copyright agreement to prevent the continued reprinting by American publishers of English works without payment to their authors.
8. Published after Dickens’s 1842 visit, American Notes for General Circulation caused offence in many quarters, although a review in Lowell’s magazine excused Dickens, saying that his “remarks on slavery seem to have raised the greatest storm of indignation, and yet the greatest part of his chapter on this system, which (call it crime or misfortune,) is surely the darkest blot on our national character, consisted only of quotations from our own newspapers.... The greatest and deepest fault we have to find with the book is the too frequent eulogy of brandy and water, and ill-concealed satire of the temperance reform” (The Pioneer, March 1843, p. 45).
9. Cf. Exodus, 15:1.
10. We have been unable to find any article in The North American Review containing “that very scornful word” about Tennyson, and his name does not appear in the index for 1841 or 1842.
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