6062. RB to Thomas Forbes Kelsall
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 319–322.
19. Warwick Crescent,
Upper Westbourne Terrace,
May 22. ’68.
My dear Sir,
As I expected, from the moment I began reading the m.s.s. there was nothing for me but to go on and end. I have done so, wishing the matter to read were a year’s work rather than a few day’s: there is not one word I have missed: nor do I find that difficulty in the characters which you speak of. How such a dose of glorious poetry would have affected my brain had I gulped Beddoes for the first time, I hardly know: I am in the stage of opium-eating where it is satisfactory to say “the stimulant acts just as it used to do, wants no redoubling.” I will confine myself to your questions and the answers they require. On the whole, I think you dealt perfectly with Death’s Jest Book, in what you with[h]eld: such capital things as Saint Gingo and the Tailor it is a pity to absolutely lose,—but they may be given stripped of the accompanying dialogue. I see what Beddoes wanted to do, and what effect he aimed at in this interfusion of the “comic stuff” which Milton objects to when blent with “Tragic sadness & gravity”. [1] The “stuff” here is immeasurably below the general texture, not that it is other than remarkable,—but what a word would this be for the poetry of the piece! Had the comic faculty, and one or two others, been developed in the author equally with the tragic power,—what would have the man been? With the imperfect developments I rate some essential to a complete dramatist: such as a[n] insight into and sympathy with characters quite different from his own. I fancy Beddoes, with no more change than is usual with any one man in various circumstances, at once Melveric, Ziba, Wolfram & the rest. He thinks and speaks now as this and now that personage,—in every sense, as he himself likes best,—I never find a new actor speaking his own peculiarities whether Beddoes like them or no. Sibylla, for instance, is thin as her own ghost,—speaking fine things, all the same,—but they stick on her like a fruiterer’s contribution of real cherries & strawberries to an invisible wire-tree,—there is no living plant which one can see naturally has produced them,—a hand intervened and gave the skeleton “non sua poma.” [2] If I dare conjecture about the cause of the defect,—it may have come from Beddoes’ predominating desire, in the first stage of his artistry, to deliver himself of what was absorbingly & exclusively interesting to him at the time: had he printed the piece just as it stands, without any delay at all,—he would have at least done justice, in his own mind, to these conceptions of death and life and the intermediate possible state: the exhibition would have been both done and done with: he would have turned his attention to other subjects of thought and feeling, which, whether as congenial to him as the former, were at least new and unexpressed: whereas, he is prevented somehow from venting these, and so goes round and round them, ends in the exclusive occupation of his soul with them,—does not he? What good was got by suppressing the poem, or what harm could have followed the publication even in the worldly way of looking at things? Suppose it had been laughed at, blackguarded in Blackwood, fallen flat from the press? The worse for the world for the quarter of an hour: Beddoes would not have much cared, but probably made a clean breast and begun on something else. It is infinitely regrettable. I incline to think that in a future edition I should give the work (as Byron says “since it can do us good!”) [3] in its integrity: the indifferent readers won’t care in any case,—the sympathetic will bear all Mandrake & his wife, out of a scientific love of the precise intention of the author. And how curiously different it proves from that which is announced, and probably believed in, by Beddoes in his letter of verse to Procter: [4] he was to despoil Death of his terrors, strip him of his dart, & so on,—make him the “fool of the feast”: [5] he does exactly the reverse,—materializes and intensifies the horror, and frightens one to death at dying—just as they do abroad when on every church wall you see a horrible capering Death flourishing his scythe in your face, for “a fair warning to a careless world”, [6] as the old divines have it. The two prose tales, [7] —especially the first,—I could well let die,—they are of the fashion that passes,—and external & skin-deep work: only, the latter has a lyric in it, about Pluto, which wants the “setting” a little, as one finds it nakedly among the Poems in print: it becomes more intelligible as one takes it with the story. Now, as to the Extracts which might be made: why, you might pick out scenes, passages, lyrics, fine as fine can be: the power of the man is immense & irresistible. I don’t know, however, that it is advisable to make such a collection,—because you would have little indeed behind you in the two volumes. If one “cheated”—put in all the superlative passages of Death’s J.B. for instance,—telling the story so as to give the idea that it would be found,—equally with those passages,—worked out in the original,—to what a poem would you be sending people! However should you desire to make the trial, I will cheerfully help to the best of my ability and in the confidence of my profound admiration: but in better hands than yours I am increasingly convinced that it cannot be. Here must end these rapid & hasty words,—poor expression enough of the many feelings which your goodness has set a-stir in me as I turned the very papers of the very man of all others I have so long been interested about. And now– I will send you next week these “treasures,” as you properly call them: not before, because I wish to attend to the matter myself, and have to leave town for Oxford tomorrow—whence I return in a few days. I will apprise you of their consignment to the Railway—by a word through the post: and at some future time, perhaps you may further trust me with the remaining m.s.s: there is but little new matter here,—just the comic parts aforesaid. Was nothing left of Torrismond, [8] & the other Beginnings? No more lyrics?
I keep, pursuant to your generous pleasure, the two poems which you enclosed in your first letter: they will be valued, I think, as they deserve,—and for your kindness as well as their own beauty. So farewell, my dear Sir, and believe me ever gratefully yours
Robert Browning.
Address: Thomas F. Kelsall / Fareham.
Publication: Donner, pp. 103–105.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Cf. Milton, preface to Samson Agonistes (1671), “Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which is Call’d Tragedy.”
2. “Fruits not its own.” Vergil, Georgics, 2, 82, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold.
3. We have been unable to trace this quotation.
4. The letter is postmarked 7 March 1826 from Göttingen. It was later published in The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. Edmund Gosse (1894), pp. 91–98.
5. From the verse letter to Procter: “But he who fills the cups and makes the jest / Pipes to the dancers, is the fool o’ the feast. / Who’s he? I’ve dug him up and decked him trim / And made a mock, a fool, a slave of him / Who was the planet’s tyrant: dotard Death” (Gosse, p. 94).
6. RB probably has in mind Fair Warnings to a Careless World, or, the Serious Practice of Religion Recommended by the Admonitions of Dying Men (1707), by Josiah Woodward (1657–1712), Anglican divine.
7. Unidentified. Kelsall describes them in letter 6055.
8. An unfinished play, published in The Poems Posthumous and Collected of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, [ed. T.F. Kelsall] (2 vols., 1851), I, 57–86.
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