1429. RB to Alfred Domett
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 38–40.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.
Nov. 8. 1843.
Dear Domett,
“How did my heart rejoice to hear My friends devoutly say, A letter doth at length appear,” and so on, only altered, from Dr Watts! [1] But don’t you write such long letters .. for you will send me no such sheetfull in a hurry again—that I can never expect: and I want to hear about you often, if but in scraps and notelets. I wish you had said more about yourself,—and more encouragingly—but I take refuge now in what I used to deprecate once .. your habit of painting everything en noir: [2] as long as you can swim, for instance, how should you be “crippled”? All the same, if black is the colour about you, and may not be softened away, take ship, in Heaven’s name, and come here in the cursed six months! There you walk past our pond-rail (picking up one of the fallen horse-chesnuts) and now our gate-latch clicks and now—
It’s “and then,” unluckily—and I have “now” to answer your questions or, better, thank you heartily for your criticism, which is sound as old wine: [3] the fact is, in my youth (i.e childhood) I wrote only musically—and after stopped all that so effectually that I even now catch myself grudging my men and women their half-lines, like a parish overseer the bread-dole of his charge. But you will find a difference, I think, in what has reached you already, even,—and more in what shall reach you, D.V. [4] I really feel it awkward to beg you to say your mind and at length on what I send, so inestimable a favour is it, which those quiet words require! I must have told you in a former letter that the critique on me is by Horne– [5] A capital passage, better than most things in the book it noticed, was struck out by a certain Dr Worthington, who inserted that miserable piece of spite about Mr Kemble in Hunt’s article on Tennyson [6] —to Hunt’s horror and (protested) disgust—(I mean, he protested to Kemble against it). —Hunt’s criticism is neither kind nor just, I take it—he don’t understand that most of Tennyson’s poems are Dramatic—utterances coloured by an imaginary speaker’s moods– Thus “the Mermaid” is not purely sea woman enough for him, too coquettish and conscious, and like a girl of our own fancying “the only blessed life, the watery” [7] .. whereas, it is just that, a girl, looking characteristically at what might be viewed after many another fashion—Ariel’s for instance. It oddly happens that I met two days ago Mr Heraud whom you enquired about—not having “come across” him these two or three or four years– He is alive, memor tui, [8] (noticed you, he says, in “Fraser”), [9] and wholly bent on a new Puseyite-Repelling Magazine, and as new a Scheme for the renovation of the Drama [10] (God keep Bedlam off us!) by the help of the Aristocracy—they are to subscribe, only, and we (for he asked me, plump,) to—give our names!– I have not seen Carlyle lately– I shall tell him all you say—knowing it will delight him. You speak of his portrait—it happens that I have been employed to ask him (or his wife, rather) for the loan of one—and, says he, (reports the wife)—“If any man, or body of men, wants a likeness of me let him apply to Laurence and arrange with him for it … for L. is the only man living who has any of the elements of my face within him—and is besides a very fine little fellow”– [11] I quote from her note before me. I am not without hope of being able to send you an engraving from this “vera effigies” [12] at the year’s end– But Arnould, and Dowson—that passes my power! I dined with both a week ago, & we drank your health, and talked of you, till your ears must have tingled in your hut! ’Tis worth while running away to be so wished for again. All here desire their best regards to you.
Yours ever,
R Browning.
Publication: RB-AD, pp. 95–99.
Manuscript: British Library.
1. Lines 1–2 of Watts’s version of Psalm 122 (The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D., 1812–1813, IX, 112).
2. “In black; in a poor light.”
3. Cf. Luke, 5:39.
4. “Deo volente” (“God willing”).
6. An unsigned notice by Hunt of Tennyson’s Poems (1842) appeared in The Church of England Quarterly Review (October 1842, pp. 361–376). It included this passage: “humour and jest are not Mr. Tennyson’s forte … These, like his vaticinations on the future glory of one of the Kemble family—the only one without a ray of talent or genius, presumptuous, overbearing, a self-conceited coxcomb and liberal—Mr. T. should relinquish.” Tennyson’s poem “To J.M.K.” (John Mitchell Kemble, 1807–57) was published in 1830. James William Worthington was the editor of The Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review; we have not established his connection with the Church of England publication.
7. We have not located the source of this quotation.
8. “Mindful of you.”
9. Despite this comment, we found nothing under Domett’s name in Fraser’s Magazine between January 1841 and January 1844.
10. Heraud became a contributor to The Athenæum in 1843, and later was its dramatic critic. Nothing appears to have come of his “Puseyite-Repelling Magazine.”
11. RB may have approached Carlyle on Horne’s behalf; a portrait of Carlyle by Samuel Laurence (reproduced facing p. 271) was included in A New Spirit of the Age.
12. “True likeness.”
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