3402. EBB to Mary Brotherton
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 201–202.
[Rome]
[ca. 28 April 1854] [1]
My dear Mrs Brotherton
Thank you much for the Athenæums– We are very very sorry for the pain which the criticism may give to our friend [2] —but, after all, he is used to the flavour of Athenæum dispensations, as they are dispensed usually to other people.
It is curious—just before I came to my own name I was saying to myself .. “Well! sun & soon are inadmissable certainly, but launched & glanced might at a pinch ......”– So that I perfectly deserved that rap over the knuckles! [3]
Was the ‘Critic’ returned to you from Florence? In the case of its being so, I should like much to see it .. I mean the Critic with Mr Hemans’s article on Frederick Tennyson. [4]
I have had a note from Isa Blagden, who arrived in Florence on saturday evening in the cold & wet (such as we have had here) & found no villa taken, [5] her preparatory letter having never reached her correspondent– She therefore went to our house, after the trial of a day or two of the hotels– Her knee had suffered from the exertions of the journey, but was recovering itself gradually—Louisa, well–
Now I should send this note by my child (.. my husband is in the campagna roaming ..) but he has a cold– You have a cold, I have a cold, everybody has a cold– Rome is as “clammy” as you properly call the Athenæum. If this is “April weather,” it is’nt after the April of the poets .. but a half and half between march & november rather, as mixed by prose writers when most prosy.
Most truly yours
EBB
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: University of Texas.
1. Dating based on EBB’s reference to the “note” Isa Blagden wrote a few days after her arrival in Florence on 22 April 1854.
2. EBB refers to a review of Frederick Tennyson’s Days and Hours that appeared in the 15 April 1854 issue of The Athenæum. The reviewer is given as William Allingham in the marked file copy now at City University (London). Commenting on a poem entitled “To April,” which is presented “as a specimen of the writer’s best manner,” Allingham writes: “Pretty as several of these lines are, it will at once be apparent that the poetry is by no means of a high class, nor even very good of its kind,—the painting … being neither broad nor yet exact, and the touch throughout, with some gracefulness, rather weak and flimsy” (no. 1381, p. 459). Allingham further complains that most of the poems have no subject and are “without organization, beginning and end, or sequence of thought or presentiment” (p. 460).
3. Allingham found it “inexplicable” that Tennyson “could suffer such rhymes to escape into the public street as sun and soon, and launched and glanced,—with others scarcely less heinous. Such faults as these … are usually … the result of carelessness; but in some cases we suspect them to be adopted, or at least retained, from a notion of their carrying an air of fine negligence and rapid execution—a heresy for the spread of which among the poetic million Mrs. Browning must perhaps stand partly accountable” (The Athenæum, p. 460).
4. A review by Charles Hemans of Days and Hours was published in two parts in The Critic of 15 March (pp. 155–156) and 1 April 1854 (pp. 183–185). While acknowledging Frederick Tennyson’s poetic faults, Hemans thought he should be “classed among the most gifted and deeply feeling poets of our age, whose merits have hitherto been strangely kept in the shade” (p. 155). In the second part of the review, Hemans quoted from the first two lines of EBB’s “The Poet” (1847). The title reviewed was given as Poems rather than Days and Hours, the latter not being issued until early April. As indicated in a letter from Mrs. Brotherton to Tennyson (13 December 1853, ms at Harvard), she had lent Hemans the privately printed set of poems from which Days and Hours was drawn (see letter 3207, note 13).
5. Villa Moutier, where Isa resided soon after her first arrival in Florence (see letter 2839, note 3).
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