Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood
Edited by
[Stokes, $8.00]
WITH few poets are the facts of their private lives less important than with Browning, and few have more strenuously objected to public curiosity about them. He refused to ‘sonnet-sing you about himself, protesting that those interested must divine his soul from his poetry by exercising the ‘spirit-sense.’ Nevertheless his privacy was long since violated by the publication of the love letters, and after that there is not much that he could object to in the publication of this new discovery, even though the original correspondence was carefully kept secret by both participants.
Readers who find Browning’s poetry attractive will, I think, be most interested in the later letters of the series — those written when his friendship with Miss Wedgwood, temporarily broken by her wish, was renewed for a time on a footing less personal and more circumspect. The earlier ones offer a psychological study for those who care more for gossip than for literature; but they are expressed with so much verbal caracoling and curveting, and contain so many examples of Browning’s congenital inability to ‘speak like a man of this world,’that they hardly reward the effort to understand them. The situation they suggest is the familiar one of a famous author finding solace and refreshment in the admiration and sympathy of a much younger woman.
Miss Wedgwood, though afflicted with more than a little Victorian earnestness and gloom, was both witty and intelligent. She was quite competent to carry on such a correspondence. She did not lack courage in criticism, and was on the whole a good critic. She well understood her friend’s impetuosity, but also relied upon his honesty and good nature. Although, for the sake of decorum, she referred often to the disparity of their ages and mentioned his deceased wife and his son, she did not hesitate to indulge in expressions of regard; nor did she spare his feelings about himself and his work.
The later letters have considerable literary importance, especially those which deal with The Ring and the Book, a poem of which Miss Wedgwood’s admiration was decidedly limited. Little that has been said about it since, in general, is not anticipated in her strictures. She objected to the subject as not of sufficient dignity, scolded the poet for his absorption in criminal states of mind, argued that he violated dramatic verisimilitude by intruding his own erudition and by making his personages all talk like himself. Browning accepted her opinions with good humor, but refused to admit their validity. His defense must henceforth become a part of the literary history of the poem.
Besides these letters, which are the most valuable of all, others which refer to Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, Keats, Landor, or to other poems by Browning add interesting details to our conception of his personality. The most amusing letter in the book is that which describes the poet’s entertainment at tea by the Queen. As a contribution to biography, the collection may serve to correct the popular notion that after his wife’s death Browning was a lonely, dispirited, and melancholy man.
R. M. GAY