SD2891. Jane Maria Strachey to Richard Strachey

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 361 (in part).

32 George Square

April 25th / 67.

My dearest Richard,

All is going on as usual in Edinburgh …

I have been doing nothing particular except Euclid every morning as before, & reading Sordello till I am nearly crazed; it is perfectly intelligible if one chooses to take a little trouble which is amply repaid—though no doubt it will be hard construing for the New Zealander; Browning told me he has never known above half a dozen people who had cared to understand it—(N.B. I told him I was one) & that he had written it when he was young and proud. There is a delightful fable in it about John the Beloved—an excellent specimen of the true Browning humour—with which indeed the whole poem abounds, the ‘high lights’ of humour with which he relieves his pictures of the tangles of the human mind is one of the many points in which he resembles Shakespeare as no other does … How many of the ordinary people would understand Shakespeare if they did not believe to begin with, he was worth exerting themselves for? But because they can’t run their eye over Browning as they do over a Times leader they fling him aside—for their children to pick up, their grandchildren to commentate, their great-grand-children to adore—at a distance perhaps. …

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: India Office Records.

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