4131. Aubrey Thomas de Vere to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 37–39.
Currah Chase, Adare, Ireland
Feb 8. 58
My dear Browning
Some people are prevented by distance from writing a letter, & to the imagination at least it is a barrier; nevertheless as one has not to carry the letter oneself, or even to send a special messenger, I hardly see why the obstacle need be so insurmountable. Be this as it may when I was last at my friend Sir John Simeon[’]s place [1] in the Isle of Wight I was very near writing to you, having there for the first time fallen in with your last two volumes “Men & Women” which before though well acquainted with your earlier poems, I had hardly seen. I will only say that I did not fall short of my friend Simeon in admiration of those poems which seem to me, without meaning to detract from the merit of their predecessors, far your best. Having said thus much I ought in candour to add that, beautiful as I thought them, I cannot help thinking that you could easily make your Poetry still more beautiful if you would condescend more to the slow intelligence of your readers, in the way of a more complete perspicuity, &, secondly, by avoiding a certain metrical abruptness in some parts, which judging from the admirable harmony of others written with more continuity & smoothness of flow, I suspect must be the result of some theory of versification. Peculiar theories as to harmony are rather apt, are they not? to become snares, especially to writers of very original genius, from the circumstance that an author gets used to some special mode of reading particular cadences & so hardly knows how they fall on the ear of others who have not got the key to them. —You are very hard on Monasticism in one or two of those poems I remember– Well, every thing has two sides; & as the old proverb tells us, it is the best things which in their occasional corruptions, lead to the worst results. I will therefore forgive you even your “woeful sixteenth print” of the ‘scrofulous French Novel’ [2] without exacting any further penance than that you should illustrate with equal care & power, the other side of the case .. the Rule, in short instead of the the exception. What can be so wonderful or so poetical as the history of those Monastic orders, older than the oldest Dynasties, & universal as the civilized part of the human race. Give us a picture or two of the Benedictine Order, as it existed in those days when it was the solitary fortress of learning, or as it exists in ours at Subiaco [3] & in Charnwood Forest, [4] & delineate the triumphs of the Life Supernatural as well as the aberrations of a Life which is only Unnatural when it has become yet more false to Grace than to Nature. Wordsworth, you will remember, when he was last in Italy, could not help singing the praises of St. Francis. [5] How I envy you having a residence beside the Arno & having Fiesole within a walk, & that beautiful Carthusian Convent [6] nearer, & Bellosguardo nearer still! I was much grieved at not seeing you when I passed through Florence on my way from Rome. [7] I get more grieved to hear of the loss you & Mrs Browning had just sustained. [8] By the way I must tell you, in case by any chance you should see an Article on Coventry Patmore in the Jan. No. of the Edinburgh Review, [9] & hear that I am the Author of it, that in it I can only claim the mangled remains of the Article I sent the Editor. [10] I could forgive him for his large & numerous omissions, but not for several insertions, especially for two brief allusions to Aurora Leigh, both of them disparaging. [11] They are so exclusively his own that to make place for one of them he had to throw out the sentence which I had written, & which characterised the work simply in terms of praise! Had I seen his alterations before the Review was published, I should have required either that those passages of his should be omitted or that the paper should be suppressed– I wrote of course to complain of what he had done, & shall take good care not to send him anymore critiques– The one in question was the first I had written for years, & probably will be my last–
And now I must bid you farewell—thanking you once more for the great pleasure you gave me for several successive days by your “Men & Women.” In my “gratitude” I include of course that spiritual part of it .. the sense of “favour to come”, & pray you to let us have some more poetry soon– These northern climes want some gusts of sweetness from Italy–
Pray remember me kindly to Mrs Browning—I hope the beautiful boy I saw that evening is well & strong–
Yours very sincerely
Aubrey de Vere
Should I go to Italy next year I shall certainly look you up at Florence.
I am living here quite alone in my brother’s country seat with a large library & large woods to roam about [12] —for the sake of old boyish days have set to work reading Shelley again– What a genius & what a loss! When at Spezzia last year I felt as if he had been an old friend. [13]
Address, on integral page: (Via di Mare) / Robert Browning, Esq. / Casa Guidi / Firenze / Toscana / Italia.
Publication: None traced.
Source: Transcript in editors’ file.
1. John Simeon (1815–70), 3rd Baronet, served as M.P. for the Isle of Wight 1847–51 and 1865–70. His family seat was Swainston House, near Newport, Isle of Wight. Like Aubrey de Vere, Simeon converted to Roman Catholicism in 1851.
2. Cf. RB, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842), lines 62 and 57.
3. A town, 44 miles E. of Rome, home of the Benedictine monastery Santa Scolastica, founded in the sixth century by St. Benedict (ca. 480–ca. 544). Nearby, are the caves of Sacro Speco, where he lived for a time as a hermit.
4. Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in the Charnwood Forest, near Coalville, Leicestershire, was founded in 1835. It was the first Catholic abbey established in England since the Reformation.
5. In the poem “The Cuckoo at Laverna,” first published in William Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour in Italy (1837). Wordsworth and his travelling companion, Henry Crabb Robinson, stopped at Monte La Verna in May 1837. Situated in the Apennines of Tuscany, La Verna is the site of a Franciscan sanctuary where, according to legend, St. Francis received the stigmata.
6. The Certosa del Galluzzo (Charterhouse of Galluzzo), 2½ miles outside of Florence, beyond the Porta Romana. It is now occupied by Cistercians. The Carthusian order, founded by St. Bruno of Cologne in the eleventh century, is known for its rule of silence and solitude. The first monastery, the Grande Chartreuse, was established in a remote valley north of Grenoble, France.
7. On 1 April 1857, de Vere wrote that he hoped to see RB at Florence “in another month or so” (see letter 3982).
8. The death of EBB’s father on 17 April 1857.
9. De Vere’s review of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (2nd. ed., 1857), which combined the first two books of the same title subheaded The Betrothal (1854) and The Espousals (1856), appeared in the January 1858 issue of The Edinburgh Review (pp. 121–133).
10. Henry Reeve (1813–95), editor of The Edinburgh Review from 1855 until his death.
11. The two allusions were: “Within the last few years several poems have been written on the principle of versifying the manners of the day, but with very different degrees of success; Mr. Tennyson himself set the example, and after him we descend from the empassioned, but coarse and unrhythmical, pages of Aurora Leigh to the ‘City Poems’ of Mr. Alexander Smith” (The Edinburgh Review, January 1858, pp. 122–123); and “Novels have been frequently regarded as serious rivals in our day to poetry, stepping as they do into the field of imaginative literature, but demanding from the reader a less sustained exercise of the attention. In the work before us, as in ‘Aurora Leigh,’ poetry has in turn crossed the border and made reprisals. Nothing can be more slight than the texture of these compositions; but they have a sort of novelty derived from the poetic form they give to well-known objects; and Mr. Patmore’s style of versification is remarkable for the qualities of smoothness and refinement in which Mrs. Browning is so lamentably deficient” (p. 133).
12. At Currah Chase, near Adare, Co. Limerick, the seat of the de Veres and the home of Aubrey’s eldest brother, Vere Edmond de Vere (1808–80), 3rd Baronet.
13. Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia on 8 July 1822. During the previous two months, he had lived on the gulf at the Bay of Lerici, near the town of that name, not far from the city of La Spezia.
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