1062. Joseph Arnould [1] to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 174–178.
18 Vic[toria] Square
Nov. 27th 1842
My dear Browning
Finding it utterly impossible to express in prose the tumult of delight which your most noble Dramatic Lyrics have given me I have ventured as you will see to express, however imperfectly a tithe of what I felt in the following most crude & hasty lines—dashed off at hap hazard in the intoxication of the moment. I wish you could have seen the delight with which my wife [2] & myself devoured your “Pomegranate” & the ringing of “Bells” we set up afterwards[.] In such a store of beauties I hardly venture to particularize—but I must express my firm conviction that “Artemis” will henceforth stand alone, by the side of Comus as the most perfect gem of antiquity ever set in a modern language– “Madhouse Cells” I think as perfect as the noblest words & profoundest most passionate thoughts can make a poem– But you must let me grasp your hand as a friend for “Waring”: which I read & reread with tears in my eyes, I know you can guess why. [3]
My wife expressly charges me to give you her most heartfelt thanks for the deep delight & gratification you have conferred upon her. Directly I can escape the trammels of law which now holds me prisoner from “dawn to dewy eve” [4] or rather gaslit night—I hope to be able to accomplish with my wife our long projected visit to Miss Browning[.] Meanwhile with our united kind regards
Believe me
most faithfully yours
Joseph Arnould.
Forgive me, Browning, that I can’t dispose
My rebel thoughts to wear the garb of prose,
But seem impelled to deck them in a dress
Whose spangled skirts bewray their nakedness!
The fault, my friend, is yours; my ear is caught
In the sweet toils, my brain is music-fraught:
The generous Nile-flood of your noble song
In golden richness, sweet, profound, & strong
Has deluged all my soul, & sown there seeds
of fruits & flowers, perchance of vocal reeds—
My spirit, friend! is as the Theban cell
Shaken by it’s earth-thundering oracle;
as a dark crypt into whose depths the hymn
of Evening floats when vesper lights burn dim
Up in the great cathedral; yours the song
Mine the dim cloisters which its tones prolong—
Thank God for this! my heart is not yet dead
Life has not yet all centered in the head,
The world’s sworn bondman, yet at times I pine
In the pent damps of Labours o’erwrought mine,
At times I gasp for purer air, and hate
The self-forged chains to which our will gives weight,
Renew my spirit’s youth, and share with you
God’s chosen sons, your draughts of honey-dew.
Friend you have triumphed, with imperious skill,
and a strong energy of Stoic will,
Sage Lord of wealth unbounded you have taught
Language to be the minister of Thought;
No harlot handmaid, finically gay
Who seeks to rival Her she should obey,
No formal slave, whose niggard speech conceals
One half her sense, & mars what it reveals,
No mystic priest whose smoke of rare perfume
Enwraps his Deity in three-fold gloom,
But a sublime Interpreter; no doubt
With spells, & quaint devices hung about,
Floating in Persian robes, whose every fold
Is rich with antique gems & classic gold.
whose broad phylacteries are scrolled & chased
with solemn texts by Hebrew prophets traced
whose sandalled feet still leave whereer he treads,
Life[’]s homeliest walks, or misery’s lowliest sheds
Musk, nard & cassia’s aromatic smells
Brought from the ivory palace where he dwells—
and such should be the speech of those, who walk
with God & Nature in familiar talk
who sit beside the springs of thought, that flow
Beneath the haunted peaks, that seem aglow
with splendours inac[c]essible to those
who plod the dust of Life’s dull daily prose;
A noble thought will have a noble speech
And words be lofty as the truths they teach;
The Word & the Idea are more than kin
Before the ages they were born a Twin;
When the Divine Idea itself averred
A whole creation was its mighty Word;
When Love Divine itself to man addrest
Christ was the Word that made Love manifest;
and when a soul dwells high above the gaze
of Earth-bowed mortals in the wildering maze
of his own high creations, then be sure
The Word that shapes them will be deemed obscure;
and this because the thinker is possest
With what throngs round him in his inmost breast[.]
There, in himself he sees, he feels, he knows
His struggling thought, to struggling language glows,
one truth half-phrased, another is behind
The swift succession tasks his labouring mind
Light makes him dark, & too clear vision, blind.
So it will ever be; the full rich soul
O’erteemed with truths, too restless for controul
Chasing the fire-flies of thought that glance
Before, around him, in delirious dance
Clutching with too quick grasp each glittering prize
Impairs its beauty for the general eyes—
Such was Sordello’s fault—all art, all man
All nature grasped at in one noble plan–
All nature there, all man, all art was traced,
The poet saw, the poet had embraced;
But in his extacy of rapt delight
Too steeply soaring in his Godlike flight
He half forgot the multitude he meant
To carry with him in his grand intent,
And left them gazing in bewildered crowds
at gorgeous mists, & skirts of gilded clouds
Which wrapt from them the empyrean blue.
In whose pure void his revelling spirit flew—
All praise be his, the Poet’s,! he has learned
A noble lesson, and to Earth has turned,
Our beautiful, brave Earth, where not a sod
But, touched by Poetry, is quick with God[.]
Honour to him our Poet! he has broke
From his freed neck the metaphysic yoke[.]
He tracks no more through the Serbonian bog [5]
The wheels of Walter the Arch Mystagogue, [6]
But speaks, with Shakespeare’s heart, in Shakespeare’s tongue
Great thoughts from his great soul by passion wrung[.]
Honour to him our Poet who creates
Real human hearts with all their loves & hates.
Ottima’s queenly lust & Sebald’s scowl
of stung remorse & Victor’s stealthy prowl
Into the “noon-day haunted chamber” [7] where
Lies the gilt toy, whose loss is his despair—
Oh how the dash of that quick-picturing pen
Turns history into act, of names makes men
Paints climes & ages in a single scene,
Napoleon’s envoy or the Tourney Queen!
Now with rough hearty glee & loyal cheer
Calls up the plumed & booted Cavalier,
Now leads you captive his enchanted thralls
Th[r]ough madhouse cells, or marble-brinked canals.
Then, potent wizard, with some high-built line
That breathes of attic flowers, & Lesbian wine
of Cadmus’ brood & Pelops ancient race [8]
Calls down Diana from her dwelling-place;
And then again with strokes as fondly true
As friendship linked to genius ever drew
He paints, till the strong likeness makes you start
The much loved wandering brother of your heart— [9]
Honour my friend to you! the task is done
The triumph sure, the palms as good as won[.]
Three giant strides each firmer, than the last [10]
Have set you free—the peril’s overpast;
That quaking quicksand filled your friends with dread
There Keats nigh foundered, Landor still lies dead
But you are safe—erect & godlike, how
You spurn the slime of that inglorious slough,
Even yet perchance at moments we can trace
Some lingering remnants of the pool’s disgrace
But ’tis at moments only—when you tower
In the full plenitude of easy power
or poised at rest on your triumphant wings
Sublimely hover o’er all subject things[.]
Foul fall the lynx-eyed snarler, who detects
Through his smoked glass that even your Sun has specks[.]
Yet Browning other strides remain to take
The thirst you kindle you alone can slake!
Ours is a noble age, an age of faith
A resurrection after years of death[.]
The men who are, the men who are to come
Their hopes, their fears, their aims must not be dumb[.]
Rewakened Love & Reverence that requires
A Priest to guide it to the Sacred fires,
The boundless hope of something to supply
The want of that, which, while we want we die,
The strong assurance, dashed at times with doubt
That from our darkness Light must be struck out,
That the dim twilight which now lowers o’er all
Is but a cradle-curtain not a pall,
That the great hope, which swells the world[’]s great soul
Is impulse struggling to a glorious goal,—
To teach us this by some undying word
Is your high mission—be it’s mandate heard!
Then dash the veils away, the curtain rend
Make plain all riddles, let all mysteries end [11]
Let the throned Genius with majestic grace
Put by the mists that still obscure his face [12]
Divide the vapours with his parting hand
And full before the world then Seer & Teacher stand!–
Address: Robert Browning Esqre / New-Cross.
Publication: PMLA, 80, pp. 91–93.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library, Gordon N. Ray Bequest.
1. For details of RB’s friendship with Arnould, see pp. 361-363.
2. Arnould married Maria Ridgway on 13 June 1840 at St. James, Clerkenwell.
3. Because the poem was a fanciful depiction of their mutual friend Domett.
4. Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 743.
5. A marsh between the isthmus of Suez and the Nile delta, “Where armies whole have sunk” (Paradise Lost, II, 594).
6. We are unable to clarify this reference.
7. RB’s actual phrase was “noonday-lighted chamber” (“King Charles,” I, 190, in King Victor and King Charles).
8. With the help of Poseidon, Pelops won the hand of Hippodameia by beating her father, King Œnomaus of Pisa, in a chariot race.
9. i.e., Waring/Domett.
10. Dramatic Lyrics was the third of the Bells and Pomegranates series.
11. Arnould had originally written and struck out, “Unread the riddle, let the mystery end.”
12. For this and the preceding line, Arnould wrote and drew lines through: “Let the full God in his majestic grace / Put by the clouds that half obscure.”
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