SD2887. Lady Westmorland to Julian Fane
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 360.
Portman Square
April 1867.
Yesterday Browning called, and we had a good deal of talk, which reminded me of a conversation you and I once had when I ventured to differ from your opinion that no good poet had ever had any other occupation but study and writing. You will remember I instanced Petrarch and Dante, who were both active politicians. Yesterday Browning said for two years past he had devoted regularly six hours a day to the education of his son, preparatory to his going to Cambridge [sic, for Oxford], and that he had from his infancy entirely educated him himself. He had just before been talking of his last great poem in twelve books, which he only finished a few months back. I asked him if these six hours of lessons had not disturbed him in that composition. He said, on the contrary, he never found his poetic verve so strong as when he exercised it alternately with other hard mental work, and that all his life his best works had been written when he had other occupations obligatory upon him a part of the day. I said that was very curious to me, as you once told me your idea on the subject. He said, “Tell him to recollect the Latin and Greek poets; most of them were men of business; and our own Milton!” He also said if a man is entirely absorbed in his art as a poet, and does not put it out of his mind by other pursuits, he will become maniéré and unnatural. “When I have been hammering at Greek and Latin and mathematics with the boy and then come to my own work, it is like going into the fresh air to me, and I find my faculties all the brighter.”
Text: Rachel Weigall, Lady Rose Weigall (London, 1923), pp. 154–155.
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