SD1195. Joseph Arnould to Alfred Domett
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 331–333 (in part).
18 Victoria Square, Pimlico.
[ca. 8 November 1843]
Did I not know you, my dear Domett, so well as I do I should feel rather hurt at your not having written to me …
Browning & Sister[,] Dowson & wife dined with us a week back, Browning read us your letter, a capital one. (I could not help wishing I had one for myself)—of course there was abundant talk of you & your health with all the honours was drank [sic] as of course– A variety of little petty circumstances has prevented my seeing so much of Browning as I otherwise <…> fact is I am very much absorbed in law, & getting less equal to converse with him on our old topics perhaps) but every time I see him I like him more, he is so thoroughly & out & out right in heart & head—your advice to him as to his language, r[h]ythm &c was admirable & he seemed really grateful for it– “Now this” he said “is what one wants; how few men there are who will give you this” he read it out to us himself & I can assure you there was not in his manner the slightest semblance of anything approaching to offence, on the contrary, he seemed to feel what he said[:] “How friendly this is!” I told you in my last all about the play & the miserable pettinesses & villainies of Macready,—I think Browning seems thoroughly to have left behind him any soreness or annoyance which for the time no doubt must have been caused by such extraordinary malignity—he is working as he always is, but at what I know not, I shall be most anxious to see his next book. I was very interested with all you said about Tennyson. Browning & I both exclaimed: “I was sure he would like Locksley Hall best.[”] “the Plump head waiter at the Cock[”] would also I knew be a favourite but I don’t know whether I should have hit upon the talking Oak. What think you of Godiva, Dora, & the two or 3 descriptions in the Gardeners Daughter. I own, that bit of Flemish landscape (beginning “not wholly in the busy world nor yet Beyond it lies the garden that I love”) seems to me the most perfect piece of word painting I ever met with– Like you I cannot understand his omissions in the present edition—and regret them greatly. Browning says he [Tennyson] is living in seclusion in a remote watering place seeing no man & having his letters directed (of all conceivable beings) to a muffin-man. The comfortable cockneyism of such a functionary in a remote seaside place gives the whole tale in my eyes an apocryphal air. If ’tis true, ’tis pity for the very thing Tennyson most wants is more intercourse with his fellow creatures. One grand thing gained is that he has learnt that poetry consists in thought & passion more than in mere beauty of metre or airiness of imagination & that the commonest things, people & situations are full of poetry to the poet. What a pity he has not the intense vigour of Robert Browning– I still believe as devoutly as ever in Paracelsus & find more wealth of thought <…> in it than any book except Shakespeare. The more one reads the more miraculous does that book seem as the work of <a man> of five & twenty. Browning[’]s conversation is as rema[r]kably good as his books though so different[;] in conversaton he is anecdotical vigorous, showing great thought & reading but in his language most simple energetic & accurate. From the habit of good & extensive society he has improved in this respect wonderfully. We remember him as hardly doing justice to himself in society[.] Now it is quite the reverse—no one could converse with him without being struck by his great conversational power—he relates admir<ably;> in fact altogether I look upon him as to be our foremost literary man. You had not received the play when you wrote but I know you will think it in parts as grand as anything in Webster or Beaumont & Fletcher– Browning always reminds me a great deal of Webster, whose Duchess of Malfi & Vittoria Corombona I have been re-reading lately with the highest pleasure—in vigour—grandeur & fire they are much alike[;] of course in speculative intellect Browning has the superiority just as Webster certainly beats him in plot & stage effect & also, to my thinking, in dramatic style. Though in this respect I think the Blot in the Scutcheon was a great improvement on any thing since Paracelsus– The revolt of the Druses I confess hardly pleased me so much as I expected—it was too full of the old faults of style & the object not plain enough– Dramatic Lyrics, on the other hand, filled me with delight & enthusiasm which worked itself off in a very hastily written epistle of very schoolboy verses, which I cannot help fancying gave Browning a bad opinion of my sincerity though they expressed exactly what I actually felt at the time & still feel with regard to the extraordinary beauty & power of the Dramatic Lyrics. That is almost the only deviation into rhyme of which I have been guilty since I saw you; & in fact I believe I have now such a just appreciation of what poetry is & requires that I shall be saved from the ridicule of adding another to the metrical prosers of the day, still I have as great an interest as ever in all that concerns the tuneful tribe & would feel my own happiness more increased by Browning’s achieving a yet greater & more decisive triumph than he has yet realised, than by any other event in literature, always except indeed that of your bursting out upon us with some great, deeply reasoned, grandly conceived work—the birth of your enforced leisure among your potato acres. …
Publication: RB-AD, pp. 78–91.
Manuscript: British Library.
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