5538. Alexander Macmillan to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 212–213.
[London]
February 1, 1865.
<***> Some little time since, in the course of some conversation I had with Mr. Frederick Chapman, it seemed to us that mutual advantages might accrue if we could arrange for including the selections from your works in our Golden Treasury Series. Apart from mercantile motives, which as a Scotchman, and the father of a family, may be supposed to have their weight with me, you will believe me when I say that I should feel it an honour if such an arrangement could be made. I mentioned to Mr. Chapman one difficulty that lay in the way. I had pleaded on more than one occasion when I had been asked to include a volume by a living author in our Series that it was our intention to keep to those accredited by death as great poets. I might plead that there were some, who, like Enoch, or Elijah, [1] were translated, and did not need the award of the grim King to be ranked among the immortals, and that you and Tennyson were the two in this time who had achieved that. But I would have been glad to have fortified myself with another plea, and this seemed to me more accessible in the shape of a selection from Mrs. Browning’s. If the two could be published together we had an obvious answer. Besides I should have liked it on other grounds. I have spoken to Chapman about the matter again, and told him that I will very gladly do this:—print and publish at my own risk, and give you and him a royalty for every 1000 copies I printed. This, of course, to be fixed when I knew precisely what the volumes would make. [2] <***>
Text: Letters of Alexander Macmillan, ed. George A. Macmillan (Glasgow, 1908), p. 186.
1. In the Bible, the characters Enoch and Elijah are transported to heaven while still alive; see II Kings 2:11 and Hebrews 11:5.
2. Nothing came of this scheme.
___________________
