Life and Letters of Robert Browning [23]
obtained a `case' which leaves my fine fellow Mandeville
at a dead lock.
As for the book -- I hope ere long to better it, and to deserve your goodness.
In the meantime I shall not forget the extent to which I am, dear sir,
Your most obliged and obedient servant
R. B.
S. & O.'s, Conduit St., Thursday m-g.
==
==
I must intrude on your attention, my dear sir, once more than I had intended
-- but a notice like the one I have read will have its effect at all hazards.
I can only say that I am very proud to feel as grateful as I do,
and not altogether hopeless of justifying, by effort at least,
your most generous `coming forward'. Hazlitt wrote his essays,
as he somewhere tells us, mainly to send them to some one in the country
who had `always prophesied he would be something'! --
I shall never write a line without thinking of the source of my first praise,
be assured.
I am, dear sir,
Yours most truly and obliged,
Robert Browning.
March 31, 1833.
==
Mr. Fox was then editor of a periodical called the `Monthly Repository',
which, as his daughter, Mrs. Bridell-Fox, writes in her graceful article
on Robert Browning, in the `Argosy' for February 1890,
he was endeavouring to raise from its original denominational character
into a first-class literary and political journal. The articles comprised
in the volume for 1833 are certainly full of interest and variety,
at once more popular and more solid than those prescribed
by the present fashion of monthly magazines. He reviewed `Pauline' favourably
in its April number -- that is, as soon as it had appeared;
and the young poet thus received from him an introduction
to what should have been, though it probably was not,
a large circle of intelligent readers.
The poem was characterized by its author, five years later,
in a fantastic note appended to a copy of it, as `the only remaining crab
of the shapely Tree of Life in my Fool's Paradise.' This name is ill bestowed
upon a work which, however wild a fruit of Mr. Browning's genius,
contains, in its many lines of exquisite fancy and deep pathos,
so much that is rich and sweet. It had also, to discard metaphor,
its faults of exaggeration and confusion; and it is of these
that Mr. Browning was probably thinking when he wrote
his more serious apologetic preface to its reprint in 1868.
But these faults were partly due to his conception of the character
which he had tried to depict; and partly to the inherent difficulty
of depicting one so complex, in a succession of mental and moral states,
irrespectively of the conditions of time, place, and circumstance
which were involved in them. Only a very powerful imagination could have
inspired such an attempt. A still more conspicuous effort of creative genius
reveals itself at its close. The moment chosen for the `Confession'
has been that of a supreme moral or physical crisis.
The exhaustion attendant on this is directly expressed
by the person who makes it, and may also be recognized in the vivid,
yet confusing, intensity of the reminiscences of which it consists.
But we are left in complete doubt as to whether the crisis
is that of approaching death or incipient convalescence,
or which character it bears in the sufferer's mind; and the language used
in the closing pages is such as to suggest, without the slightest break
in poetic continuity, alternately the one conclusion and the other.
This was intended by Browning to assist his anonymity;
and when the writer in `Tait's Magazine' spoke of the poem as a piece
of pure bewilderment, he expressed the natural judgment of the Philistine,
while proving himself such. If the notice by J. S. Mill, which this
criticism excluded, was indeed -- as Mr. Browning always believed --
much more sympathetic, I can only record my astonishment;
for there never was a large and cultivated intelligence
one can imagine less in harmony than his with the poetic
at a dead lock.
As for the book -- I hope ere long to better it, and to deserve your goodness.
In the meantime I shall not forget the extent to which I am, dear sir,
Your most obliged and obedient servant
R. B.
S. & O.'s, Conduit St., Thursday m-g.
==
==
I must intrude on your attention, my dear sir, once more than I had intended
-- but a notice like the one I have read will have its effect at all hazards.
I can only say that I am very proud to feel as grateful as I do,
and not altogether hopeless of justifying, by effort at least,
your most generous `coming forward'. Hazlitt wrote his essays,
as he somewhere tells us, mainly to send them to some one in the country
who had `always prophesied he would be something'! --
I shall never write a line without thinking of the source of my first praise,
be assured.
I am, dear sir,
Yours most truly and obliged,
Robert Browning.
March 31, 1833.
==
Mr. Fox was then editor of a periodical called the `Monthly Repository',
which, as his daughter, Mrs. Bridell-Fox, writes in her graceful article
on Robert Browning, in the `Argosy' for February 1890,
he was endeavouring to raise from its original denominational character
into a first-class literary and political journal. The articles comprised
in the volume for 1833 are certainly full of interest and variety,
at once more popular and more solid than those prescribed
by the present fashion of monthly magazines. He reviewed `Pauline' favourably
in its April number -- that is, as soon as it had appeared;
and the young poet thus received from him an introduction
to what should have been, though it probably was not,
a large circle of intelligent readers.
The poem was characterized by its author, five years later,
in a fantastic note appended to a copy of it, as `the only remaining crab
of the shapely Tree of Life in my Fool's Paradise.' This name is ill bestowed
upon a work which, however wild a fruit of Mr. Browning's genius,
contains, in its many lines of exquisite fancy and deep pathos,
so much that is rich and sweet. It had also, to discard metaphor,
its faults of exaggeration and confusion; and it is of these
that Mr. Browning was probably thinking when he wrote
his more serious apologetic preface to its reprint in 1868.
But these faults were partly due to his conception of the character
which he had tried to depict; and partly to the inherent difficulty
of depicting one so complex, in a succession of mental and moral states,
irrespectively of the conditions of time, place, and circumstance
which were involved in them. Only a very powerful imagination could have
inspired such an attempt. A still more conspicuous effort of creative genius
reveals itself at its close. The moment chosen for the `Confession'
has been that of a supreme moral or physical crisis.
The exhaustion attendant on this is directly expressed
by the person who makes it, and may also be recognized in the vivid,
yet confusing, intensity of the reminiscences of which it consists.
But we are left in complete doubt as to whether the crisis
is that of approaching death or incipient convalescence,
or which character it bears in the sufferer's mind; and the language used
in the closing pages is such as to suggest, without the slightest break
in poetic continuity, alternately the one conclusion and the other.
This was intended by Browning to assist his anonymity;
and when the writer in `Tait's Magazine' spoke of the poem as a piece
of pure bewilderment, he expressed the natural judgment of the Philistine,
while proving himself such. If the notice by J. S. Mill, which this
criticism excluded, was indeed -- as Mr. Browning always believed --
much more sympathetic, I can only record my astonishment;
for there never was a large and cultivated intelligence
one can imagine less in harmony than his with the poetic