Correspondence

5304.  RB to Frederic Chapman

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 323.

19. Warwick Crescent,

Upper Westbourne Terr:

Dec. 17. ’63:

Dear Chapman,

I always send “Reviews” to my Father in Paris– I really have no late reviews except the couple I send: your own thing is the very last [1] —but though meant perhaps to be appreciative in the main, it seems uncandid in the determination to overlook whole plays & long poems of mine because written on subjects which the critic chooses to presuppose that, by a peculiarity of mind, I never write upon at all—no matter whether well or ill: this is to balance the praise he, quite liberally enough, awards to one faculty he recognises—as if I were a Strasburg Goose, with an overgrown liver & no lungs.

I wish a critic to read my works without reference to any other poets’, [2] and doing them simple justice, he will hurt nobody else, I am quite sure.

Yours ever truly

R Browning.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. The review by Richard Holt Hutton of RB’s Poetical Works (1863) in the October issue of The National Review, a quarterly magazine published by Chapman and Hall from 1856 to 1864. For the full text of Hutton’s review, see pp. 386–397.

2. Hutton compares RB’s ability to create female characters with Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s and compares RB’s powers of description with those of Tennyson.

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