SD2959. Alexander Macmillan to John Trivett Nettleship

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 381.

[London]

February 27, 1868.

To J. T. Nettleship.

It was not more the excess than, as seemed to me, the inappropriateness of your diction in the two phrases Sheer love and Titanic. I certainly agree with you in recognising the beneficence of Browning’s genius. It seems to me that beneficence is an essential quality of genius. It is its utter absence in other writers, who shall be nameless, that makes me doubt the reality of their genius. In Browning it is very high, as in Shelley, but it is hardly so exclusive a quality in Browning as in poor, dear Shelley. It is more tempered, perhaps in some respects stronger for that, by other obvious qualities, yearning for knowledge, for beauty in nature and art. Sheer love is to my mind not accurate, and not even laudatory. Some such phrase as I have used above would, to my mind, be far truer and far more valuable to him. Titanic is a tall word. It would, I think, be finer and truer to say that you and I must have all our wits about us when reading Browning. Titanic qualities would not help us so much there as in a town and gown row.

Text: Letters of Alexander Macmillan, ed. George A. Macmillan (Glasgow, 1908), p. 240.

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