5164. RB to George Stampe
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 187–189.
19. Warwick Crescent,
Harrow Road.
Jan: 21. ’63
Sir,
I have before me your letter with its promise of desisting from a procedure which would have caused me and others the deepest pain. In the face of this, which I am glad to declare a full and frank reparation of your mistake, I feel too much relief not to be desirous that, as my own annoyance is put a stop to, your own feelings should be spared as much as possible. I will cheerfully believe therefore—as your conduct really entitles you to expect—that you acted in ignorance of what the world thinks,—and certainly all those whom you ought to respect, think,—on the subject of a stranger’s undertaking to write the Life of a person but recently removed from the earth, and soliciting details, and correspondence illustrative of it, from friends, without the direct permission of that other person whom the Law of God & Man accurately regards as one with the former. I have had several applications made to me by individuals, of more or less ability, to permit them, in the event of my declining such a work, to attempt it: I refused this permission, with the courtesy which yourself would assuredly have experienced, had you not omitted this indispensable preliminary: of course, I could not be aware of the various good intentions which you protest until you directed yourself to me—which, you will admit, was not the case till the letters of which you complain had reached you. And you will also admit that it was unfortunate, since you were persuaded of the “purity of your motives,” and unaware that your undertaking would be offensive to me, or any near relative,—that your first request for materials should not have been made to us: did you actually suppose that we have less materials than the friends to whom you had recourse?
As for the “warmth of my expressions”—I shall only say, that it is satisfactory to me to hope, from the wonder you express at them, that yourself have never yet lost a near and dear relative: it cannot indeed be otherwise. Here are you, whose letters denote no incompetent nor uncultivated individual,—whose professions of literary taste & preference have my complete acquiescence,—here are you, a stranger, getting all the details concerning—and inspecting and exercising your judgment upon the intimate correspondence of—one whose very name I am unable to pronounce with firmness before the nearest in blood to me—my Father or my son: what imaginable right had you to do this? “Admiration for a Poet,” you plead—but where is the reverence which should accompany this? And what qualification for a biographer is such utter ignorance of the soul of his subject as is implied by your disregard of one of the most obvious traits in its character? Observe, I am still in the dark as to whether you have, or have not obtained other letters than those which you “prematurely spoke of as being secured”: but take those only—they were obtained by the chance of an old, blind, forsaken man dying [1] and leaving his papers at the mercy of the first comer: it would have broken his good, tender heart to let communications meant for his single ear be hawked about the world in order to distress his friend’s family and so repay her confidence. Do you think if that friend had possessed the privilege, denied by distance, of attending that death-bed, and, in consequence, had become the owner of a series of letters, say, addressed to him by Dr. Clarke, [2] —that these would have been caught up, studied, dealt with as the absolute property of the finder, and finally placed in the power of a stranger to use, take or leave, publish or be silent about, at his complete discretion? The letters are the present holder’s, just as a purse picked up or a parcel misdirected, might be.
But I shall say no more—nor should I have said so much but from a sincere wish to turn any pain I may have caused you to real good: I fancy you are young—and in a proper exercise of your faculty you may achieve distinction: be assured that all such interferences with the sacredness of the grave are abominable. You venerate Tennyson, according to the application which occasioned my hard words: read and lay to heart his admirable verses to the author of a Life and Letters, [3] far less objectionable in its nature than yours:—first remark what language he uses to such an one, and then consider what would have been its intensity had the delinquent’s victim, instead of the Poet’s predecessor, happened to be his wife.
I shall believe your word and take no further step in the matter.– I have written to Mr Smith, [4] and from the tone and character of his reply, earnestly trust that I may recover what should never have been alienated from me.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient humble servant
Robert Browning.
Publication: E.V. Lucas, “Robert Browning: A Castigation and A Sculptor’s Jest,” Methuen’s Annual (London, 1914), pp. 47–49.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Hugh Stuart Boyd.
2. Adam Clarke (1762–1832)—see letter 316, note 3—the father of Mary Ann Smith.
3. Alfred Tennyson’s “To --, After Reading a Life and Letters” first appeared in The Examiner, 24 March 1849 (p. 180) under the title “To --.” It was reprinted in Poems (1850) and then under it’s current title in Poems (1853). It refers to the Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, ed. Richard Monckton Milnes (1848).
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