1672. EBB to John Kenyon
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 80–82.
[London]
Wednesday morng– [?7] [August 1844] [1]
I return Mr Chorley’s note, my dear cousin, with thankful thoughts of him .. as of you. I wish I cd persuade you of the rightness of my view about Essays on Mind & such things,—& how the difference between them & my present poems, is not merely the difference between two schools, as you seemed to intimate yesterday, nor even the difference between immaturity & maturity,—but that it is the difference between the dead & the living .. between a copy & an individuality; between what is myself and what is not myself. To you who have a personal interest & .. may I say? .. affection for me, the girl’s exercise assumes a factitious value—but to the public the matter is otherwise & ought to be otherwise. And for the “psychological” side of the question, do observe that I have not reputation enough to suggest a curiosity about my legends. Instead of your “legendary lore,” it wd be just a legendary bore. Now you understand what I mean. I do not underrate Pope nor his school—but I do disesteem everything which, bearing the shape of a book, is not the true expression of a mind—and I know & feel (& so do you!) that a girl’s exercise written when all the experience lay in books, & the mind was suited rather for intelligence than production––lying like an infant’s face with an undevelopped expression .. must be valueless in itself, & if offered to the public directly or indirectly as a work of mine, highly injurious to me. Why of the Prometheus volume, even, you know what I think & desire. [2] The ‘Seraphim,’ with all its feeblenesses & shortcomings & obscurities, yet is the first utterance of my own individuality, & therefore the only volume except the last, which it is not a disadvantage to me to have thought of—and happily for me, the early books never having been advertized, .. nor reviewed, except by accident, once or twice .. are as safe from the public as manuscript.
Oh—I shudder to think of the lines which might have been “nicked in” .. and all through Mr Chorley’s goodnature!– As if I had not sins enough to ruin me in the new poems, without reviving juvenile ones, sinned when I knew no better!— Perhaps you wd like to have the series of epic poems which I wrote from nine years old to eleven?– [3] They might illustrate some doctrine of innate ideas—& enrich (to that end) the myths of metaphysicians.
Dearest Mr Kenyon, dont think me perverse, & ungrateful. Try to agree with me, on the contrary! I cdnt rest without writing–
And also agree with me in reverencing that wonderful genius Keats, who rising as a grand exception from among the vulgar herd of juvenile versifiers, was an individual man from the beginning, & spoke with his own voice, though surrounded by the yet unfamiliar murmur of antique echoes. Leigh Hunt calls him “the young poet” [4] very rightly.
Most affectely yours
EBB.
Do thank Mr Chorley for me—will you?
Address: John Kenyon Esqr / 40 York Terrace / Regent’s Park.
Publication: LEBB, I, 187–188.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. The tone of this letter suggests that Chorley had approached Kenyon for information about EBB’s early works, preparatory to writing a review of Poems (1844) for the 24 August number of The Athenæum. From the context we infer that Chorley had not yet seen her new volumes, the publication date of which was 13 August; hence we tentatively date this letter to the preceding Wednesday.
3. We cannot clarify this reference. EBB had referred to The Battle of Marathon as “an Epic” (see letter 1438); however, it seems unlikely that she would refer to it as a “series of epics.”
4. In an account of his first meeting with Keats, Leigh Hunt wrote: “We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination.” See Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries; with Recollections of the Author’s Life, and of his Visit to Italy (1828), p. 247.
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