1189.5. John Kenyon to EBB
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 7.
[London]
27 March [1843]
My very dear and very foolish Cousin—Your note reached me when I was fully occupied—I just glanced at the words—“I have a conscience about it” and said to myself “Now that is just what I like—Libercur animam meam—and I would rather she would print the poem as it stands—than that she should have been ruled by me.”
But when, half an hour after I read your whole quote, I felt more pain than I thought any note of yours could give me– Do you not see to what a perfectly unexpected result you have led me? Do you not think I would as soon have cut off my hand as have written that criticism if I could have thought such would be its effect? If you were to persevere in your present plan the effect would be that I should feel like Cain—a poem’s murderer—marked–
It is quite sure that, never to the end of my life, should I ever enter into a point of personal criticism with any human being again– I did not expect you would give up your stanzas—I thought they injured the Poem. I think so still– But twenty persons—(to one) will like your poem all the better—tho’ I shall not think they are right– I will not talk to you of the great unreasonableness of your most generous semi-admission. I will not say that I look to that poem as destined to float up a good deal in which I and others shall take comparatively a greater interest—on account of the subject matter—which you and the majority prefer & have a right to prefer—but I will frankly say to you that if you print the book without that poem—I shall never—as long as I live—have heart to look into the book–
I know my own temperament well– If you keep to this resolution it will be a source of shy sorrow to me as long as I live– I wrote to you in the full confidence that we had agreed that the Author ought to be the judge– I myself think that all works are more satisfactory when never shown to any one else. I never showed a line of that “rhymed plea” to any one—and with all its faults and heresies still like it all the better on that acct.– But if suppression is to be the result—who will ever venture to give any literary opinion whatsoever–
The Archbishop of Granada was nothing to you my most detestable Coz.—so write at once and say that you relent—and then—my shyness will venture to call on you again—but not before. In fact you will be giving me more serious & lasting pain that you can imagine—I shall feel that I have met a misfortune.
Yrs. most affecty
John Kenyon
I have so much confidence that you will not choose to put me to mental torture, and that you will print the Poem—that I request a change in one word—Would it be as well to say—Go to dust like common mortals, By a common doom and track—They are not quite other mortals—these ideal folk—& I think the repetition of “common” is not without its beauty–
Address: Miss Barrett.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
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