SD1152. Eliza Flower to Catherine Bromley

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 378.

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[ca. April 1841]

<***> I send you Bells and Pomegranates, not because you will like the thing any more than I do, but because you won’t like it less than I do. It is just like his way. This time he has got an exquisite subject, most exquisite, and it seemed so easy for a poet to handle. Yet here comes one of those fatal ifs, the egoism of the man, and the pity of it. He cannot metempsychose with his creatures, they are so many Robert Brownings. Still there are superb parts, the very last is quite lovely. But puppets, what a false word to use, as if God worked by puppets as well as Robert Browning! <***>

Text: Richard Garnett and Edward Garnett, The Life of W.J. Fox (London, 1910), p. 194.

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