5374. Alfred Domett to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 49–53.
Auckland New Zealand
6 May 1864
My dear friend of old days —
Many & many a time I have been resolving to write to you and endeavour to renew an old familiarity as far as it could be under circumstances so adverse to it. For years I had hopes of getting back to England, though how or through what means was not very apparent—and recommencing an acquaintance in a more satisfactory style than this one of scribbling & being scribbled to on paper. But this is better than nothing—& as ‘returns to England’ are uncertain & I, if not you, am getting old, I think it best to delay no longer arousing your recollections of me.
I should tell you that although I must have been as good as dead to you, as you could never have heard of me during this long interval, you were & have been quite the reverse to me. Thanks to your occasional flashings-out before the public—& the brightness of them, which illuminated my far off obscure death-hole, (what else can I call it?) as well as the abodes of the really living, nearer at home.– Your books kept your presence before me—so that I suppose I can hardly realize the effect of my absence upon you by that of yours upon me– And as in old old days I used to be your warm & rather violent advocate & champion (for which I suppose I sometimes got your ridicule for thanks—“He slaughters you with savage looks &c”), [1] so in various proper quarters I have all along at intervals found myself sticking your poems “into the entrails” of the better sort of folk out here– With the same result I generally got formerly, that of securing their sincere admiration & often kindling a like enthusiasm. I particularly allude to the Brownes’ (Col Browne & wife—he, now Governor of Tasmania) [2] & his minister W. Richmond [3] & the numerous clique of the latter’s relations– I well remember in 1856 ranting from memory your “As I ride, as I ride” [4] to Mrs Richmond—& how I was then compelled to write it out—how it went to New Plymouth (from Auckland) and all the ‘young men’ of their families (“some dozens of brothers-in-law &c & cousins”, [5] you remember Shelley’s line which I spoil) then in the full swing of the novel enjoyment of a bush life, could not keep themselves for days from spouting aloud or enthusiastically muttering to themselves the glorious jingle
“Who dares chide my heart’s pride
As I ride as I ride” &c &c [6]
It was on a small scale like what Sterne quotes of the Abderites. [7] How much I should have to talk to you about all these things! And in my own house, the volume of your works with the ‘Piedpiper’ in, [8] has the leaves always much thumbed & loose, nearly dropping out, from the reckless affection of the children for it. Those early things are always one’s best—after all—although your ‘Bishop Blougram’ was a favorite of W. Richmond’s—& his brother James [9] (who for a year or more has been editing the Nelson Examiner) I have often heard crooning half aloud (the most thoroughly complimentary way of noticing a poet) over the “Dear dead women! & such hair too. What’s become of all the gold, Used to hang & brush their bosoms &c &c” [10]
You may judge what a stir of old feelings & emotions was suddenly caused in me, when one sunny afternoon, I think in 1857, in Nelson, I was turning over for the first time the pages of your ‘Men & Women’ just received from England—and came upon your unmistakeable allusion or rather ‘apostrophe’ to myself—although I was wondering for the moment before coming to the “Wairoa” line—who the new friend of my name was. [11] It was like a flash of light piercing from the Upper world down into the God-abandoned glooms of our infernal ‘bolge’ [12] where one lay lost forever in a life-in-death or death-in-life worse than death itself– But my feelings were, after of course a gush of surprize & satisfaction to find myself still so kindly remembered by you, something like (however unreasonable the entertaining them might be in my case) those Coleridge expresses in the lines to Wordsworth on the “Prelude” wasn’t it?– [13] At all events a double feeling of despair & “sense of life wasted” & everything being in vain. I wonder nevertheless how I refrained from writing to you then—but I suppose procrastination, as usual, must take the blame of it.
What a loss has the breaking off of our aquaintance or communion been to me! And that of your lost wife too! How I should have liked to have known her both for your sake & her own! Truly the “moon of poets.” [14] Perhaps you may recollect that I could scarce even ‘abide’ our English poetesses! The Mrs Hemans’s & LEL’s [15] used to nauseate me so & you, the true poet, used (ironically I suppose) to plead for them. But your wife was an exception & must always be classed among the real poets—& was always (to my credit) made an exception of by me. How often have I read aloud to the same set above alluded to, her “Geraldine’s Courtship.” Bertha in the lane &c. Curious—in an old note of yours—for I still have the bundle of your notes & letters—you use the phrase “Dear my friend & fellow student” [16] —applied to me—but I had not the remotest idea at that time nor for many years afterward what it was a quotation from. How came you never to speak to me of Miss Barrett[’]s poetry then? When you would talk of ‘Laman Blanchard’s LEL’ [17] & God knows who?
I have seen allusions in newspapers or reviews sometimes to your two double-stars (or single double-star) living in Florence—& to the “boy Browning.” I have a great longing to see & know that boy– Somehow I should feel towards him as if he were a son of my own– What is he to be? Claiming (again Shelley!) both from ‘sire’ & mother “the shelter of an illustrious name.” [18] Will the fire he should get by inheritance descend to him? or will he have a natural dislike to his father & mother’s pursuits—& be careless for [‘]‘renown” which from infancy he will have been accustomed to & familiar with & have seen, as it were the inside & ‘wrong’ side of? I think it often happens so with the children of those who have won fame– It has lost to them its illusion—they are too near the centre for the ‘rays to gather into a star–’ [19] Or do you encourage the old poetic fervor in him if he shows sparks of it?
I have too a boy [20] (indeed my own only one[—] the others [21] my wife’s) just now 14 years old, I think yours must be about the same age. He has (fortunately or unfortunately) a sort of taste, very decided, for poetry. I have left him & it greatly to themselves. But for years he has had the most singular love for Shakespeare—more especially for the comedies—& melodramas or whatever you call them– “Shaky-aky[”] he used as a child to call him—with a most presumptuous & unreverent affection– The notion of giving a “pet-name’[’] to “Shakespeare”—as if he had been a curled darling in a gondola—or other proper subject for such handling. The youngster a year ago took it into his head to write a long string of rhymes bringing in I think, almost every female character in Shakespeare—(doggerel of course) but curious (for he did them in an evening & morning) as shewing such an acquaintance with the book & all the plots. You will think I am turned into an old twaddler. Therefore pay me out unmercifully by telling me all you can of your own boy & his doings & sayings—which I know must all be dearer to you than are their children’s to most people– Such a lad as yours—so born—dropt, as it were, out of the very Sun’s disk of poetry—must be a “light-ray incarnate[”] [22] as Carlyle says. Shall our 2 boys ever be acquainted & friends?
One thing you must do or I shall not forgive you– Send me the best possible portraits (photographic) of yourself & your boy—also if procurable of your “poor glorious” wife. Your own, at least, large enough to frame—I want to have the outer husks of the ghosts I love—visible around me—‘foul with no vestige of the grave’s disgrace’ [23] —& yours ought to be prominent among them. True I have hung up that wretched little portrait out of Horne’s book [24] of old days—with a note from yourself framed up with it—which I sent to a little exhibition they got up once at Nelson– There is a photograph of Woolner’s medallion portrait of Carlyle [25] too—with the fine old boy’s autograph under it– And (what is a kind of relic) a lifesize plaister medallion portrait of Keats, specially valued by his friend Charles Brown whose it was—& whose son, [26] of same name, Supe[ri]ntendent of New Plymouth—made me a present of it not “caring much[”] or rather—at all himself about poets & their phizzes– You know, the father Brown emigrated to New Plymouth with his only son—& his household gods– I never (much to my regret) knew him—nor the son till some years after the father’s death. But the Keats portrait, I think, so desired, is I think valuable & must be reckoned a good likeness at least. It is that (or rather from that, I suppose) by one Giuseppe Girolami [27] —an engraving from wh: occurs in the Illustrated Edition of K._____ I see I have come to the bottom of my sheet– So now answer quickly—& if you (as I don’t think you will) resolve to send me the likenesses dont wait answering till they are ready. So now—with all the old feeling towards you not changed in one tittle or shade or tinge, if I know myself an atom. Believe me
Dear Browning always & ever
Affecty yours
Alfred Domett
Address: Robert Browning Esqre / Care of Messrs Chapman & Hall / 193 Piccadilly / London.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Alexander Turnbull Library.
1. RB, “Time’s Revenges” (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845), line 5. The first half of this poem is a playful ode to Domett—“a Friend, over the sea” (line 1).
2. Thomas Gore Browne (1807–87), army officer and colonial governor of New Zealand (1855–61) and of Tasmania (1862–68). He married in 1854 Harriet Louisa Campbell (1829–1906).
3. Christopher William Richmond (1821–95), barrister and politician, served as minister of native affairs (1858–60) in Browne’s administration. He married in 1852 Emily Elizabeth Atkinson (1829–1906).
4. A recurring line in each stanza of RB’s “Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr” (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845).
5. Cf. Shelley, “Letter to Maria Gisborne” (1824), lines 211–212: “The gifts of the most learn’d among some dozens / Of female friends, sisters-in-law and cousins.”
6. “Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr,” lines 11–12.
7. Domett refers to a chapter entitled “A Fragment” in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), where the narrator describes the town of Abdera as a place of “poisons, conspiracies and assassinations.” But “when things were at the worst,” the Euripides play Andromeda was performed there and changed the townspeople overnight: “Every man almost spoke pure iambics the next day … and the whole city, like the heart of one man, open’d itself to Love” (I, 106–108).
8. Dramatic Lyrics (1842).
9. James Crowe Richmond (1822–98), engineer and politician.
10. Cf. RB, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” (Men and Women, 1855), lines 44–45.
11. In “The Guardian-Angel,” RB addresses Domett twice, line 37: “(Alfred, dear friend) … ” and lines 54–55: “My Love is here. Where are you, dear old friend? / How rolls the Wairoa at your world’s far end?” The Wairoa is a river in the North Island of New Zealand.
12. “An adaptation of the It. bolgia ‘gulf-hole’ (Florio), applied by Dante to the gulfs of the eighth circle of the Inferno” (OED).
13. “To William Wordsworth” (1817).
14. RB, “One Word More” (Men and Women, 1855), line 188.
15. English poets Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–38), who wrote under her initials, and Felicia Dorothea Hemans (née Browne, 1793–1835).
16. Cf. EBB, “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” line 1.
17. A reference to the Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L. (1841) by Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–45); see letter 810, note 1, and letter 819, note 8.
18. Cf. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam (1818), “Dedication. ‘To Mary ——’,” 12, 9.
19. Cf. Philip James Bailey, Festus (2nd ed., 1845), “Scene—Home”: “Like the unfinished rudiments of light / Which gather time by time into a star” (p. 260).
20. Alfred Nelson Domett (1850–1929), artist, son of Alfred Domett (1811–87) and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Sarah (née Nelson, formerly George, 1814–96).
21. John Chapman St. George (1841–69) and Frederick Nelson George (1842–1914), sons of Mrs. Domett and her first husband, Edward Tobias George (1819–84). There was also a daughter from this marriage: Sarah Elizabeth George (afterwards Taylor, 1847–1919).
22. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1838), II, 5, 149.
23. RB, Sordello (1840), I, 46.
24. RB’s portrait, an engraving by James Charles Armytage based on a drawing by Margaret Gillies (ca. 1835), appeared in volume two of A New Spirit of the Age, ed. R.H. Horne (2 vols., 1844), at the beginning of the chapter “Robert Browning and J.W. Marston” (pp. 155–186). The engraving is reproduced in vol. 3, facing p. 164, and in vol. 8, facing p. 271.
25. Completed in 1850; it is now in the National Library of Scotland.
26. Charles (“Carlino”) Brown (1820–1901), son of Charles Armitage Brown (1787–1842), intimate friend of John Keats.
27. Giuseppe Girometti (1780–1851), gem engraver, sculptor, and medallist. An engraving based on his medallion of Keats appears in The Poetical Works of John Keats … Illustrated by 120 Designs, Original and from the Antique, Drawn on Wood by George Scharf (1854).
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