Correspondence

525.  RB to Effingham Wilson [1]

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 172–173.

Camberwell.

March. 15. 1836.

Dear Sir,

I am so engaged just now as to be quite unable to call on you this morning. I am disposed to think, with all submission to your judgment, that either these two articles (and that in the New Monthly is to be followed, it seems, by another) [2] will carry off the remaining copies,—or that any further expence in the way of advertisements will be of little use. I am in hopes too that some of the large Reviews may be gracious. I will call, however, on the first opportunity and talk the matter over with you, till which pleasure I remain,

Dear Sir,

Your’s most truly

Robert Browning

E. Wilson Esq.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Michael Meredith.

1. After both Moxon and Saunders & Otley had declined to accept Paracelsus, W.J. Fox was instrumental in persuading the more liberal Effingham Wilson to publish it (though he did so at the expense of RB’s father).

2. The review of Paracelsus in The New Monthly Magazine (March 1836, XLVI, 289–308) praises the poem, saying that “We are going to prove … that a new genius for dramatic poetry is among us. Paracelsus … opens a deeper vein of thought, of feeling, and of passion, than any poet has attempted for years. Without the slightest hesitation we name Mr. Robert Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth.... Mr. Browning is a man of genius, he has in himself all the elements of a great poet, philosophical as well as dramatic.... He has written a book that will live.... Its subject-matter and treatment are both so startlingly original, and both so likely to be misunderstood; it … glances with such a masterly perception at some of the deepest problems of man’s existence.” It was evidently the intention of the reviewer (Forster) to follow this article with another devoted to Paracelsus, as he spoke, in the course of a review of Talfourd’s Ion (pp. 342–358 in Part the Second, 1836), of “closing our examination of the noble poem of Paracelsus, which the more immediate interest at present attaching to ‘Ion’ has induced us to defer,” but it seems this intention was never brought to fruition. The second article enclosed by RB was probably the review in Fraser’s Magazine (March 1836, XIII, 364–383). It commences “All hail, Robert Browning! Verily, thou art a man after our own heart! and to the ass Paracelsus thou hast been, like poor dear departed Coleridge, ‘wonderous kind’.” (For the full text of these reviews, see pp. 364–383.)

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