5252. RB to Richard Monckton Milnes
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 267–268.
19. Warwick Crescent
Upper Westbourne Terrace, W.
July 7. ’63.
My dear Milnes,
I should like to put down in words what I said last night when considerably surprised & a little annoyed: you will see how mere talk gets turned aside from its purpose; & for reasons, I am somewhat susceptible on this point.
I know next to nothing of Swinburne, [1] & like him much: I have received courtesy from him, and been told that he feels kindly to me—I believe it indeed. Of his works, since his first volume, [2] I know not a line, except a poem which I looked over a long while ago at Rossetti’s, and the pieces he recited the other night: [3] I could only have an opinion, therefore, on these. I thought them moral mistakes, redeemed by much intellectual ability. They may be a sample of the forthcoming book, [4] —or just the exceptional instances—I hope so.
When I was abruptly appealed to, some days after, for my estimate of Mr Swinburne’s powers,—I don’t know what I could do but say “that he had genius, and wrote verses in which to my mind there was no good at all.”
If I referred,—as I probably did, to a similarity of opinion on the part of others present, it was from the reluctance I had to stand forward and throw even this cherry-stone at a young poet.
How I came by this reluctance, and keep it increasingly in spite of age (“which loses all sense of the good & the beautiful, the this and the that”)—God knows! I have had for thirty years my own utter unintelligibility taught with such public & private zeal that I might be excused for fancying every young man’s knuckles wanted “dusting”—but I don’t fancy it. Unluckily the truth is the truth, and one must speak it now and then. It was a shame in this case for Chapman to quote my blame of two or three little pieces—given on a demand for unqualified praise which was impossible—as the reason for rejecting a whole bookful of what may be real poetry, for aught I am aware: [5] but as I am in the habit of being as truthful as I like about the quality of certain other things which he patronizes, and as I never saw their titles disappear from his advertisements in consequence—I conclude that he only uses my witnessing when he wants to cover his own conviction.
I am, my dear Milnes,
Yours ever faithfully
Robert Browning.
Publication: NL, pp. 150–151.
Manuscript: Trinity College, Cambridge.
1. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), poet, was at this time living at Tudor House, 16 Cheyne Walk, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith.
2. The Queen Mother and Rosamund, two plays in blank verse by Swinburne, published in late 1860 by Basil Montagu Pickering, but financed by the author.
3. Presumably, RB refers to the evening of 1 July, spent with William Michael Rossetti and Tennyson (see letter 5244, note 2).
4. It seems likely that the poems read by Rossetti appeared in Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866).
5. Milnes and RB continued their Swinburne discussion on 11 July, as described by Julia Wedgwood in a letter of the following day (see SD2650).
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