ABSTRACT
I broke off at the last sheet in mid-Browning. Of course I’ve been drenching myself with him at intervals since, only he got carried off by friends, and I have him not always by me. I wish you would let me hear in a speedy answer (there’s cheek for you!) all you think about his new work, and it shall nerve me to express my ideas in return; but since I have given up poetry as a pursuit of my own, I really find my thoughts on the subject generally require a starting-point from somebody else to bring them into activity; and as you’re the only man I know who’d be really in my mood of receptiveness in regard to Browning, and as I can’t get at you, I’ve been bottled up ever since Men and Women came out. By the bye, I don’t reckon William, the intensity of fellow-feeling on the subject making the discussion of it between us rather flat. I went the other day to a penny reading-room,—a real blessing, which now occupies the place of Burford’s Panorama, and where all papers and reviews whatsoever are taken in. There I saw two articles on Browning: one by Masson-really thoroughly appreciative, but slow-in the British Quarterly [No. 96]; and one by a certain Brimley, of Trinity College, Cambridge, in Fraser [No. 94],—the cheekiest of human products. This man, less than two years ago, had not read a line of Browning, as I know through my brother, and I have no doubt he has just read him up to write this article; which opens, nevertheless, with accusations against R.B. of nothing less than personal selfishness and vanity, so plumply put as to be justified by nothing less than personal intimacy of many years. When I went to Paris, I took my copy of Men and Women (which had been sent me the day before) with me, and got B. to write my name in it. Did you get a copy? We spoke often of you,— he with great personal and poetical regard, I of course with loathing. I enclose herewith a note which reached me before the book, containing emendations; copy them, if you please, and return the note. I spent some most delightful time with Browning at Paris, both in the evenings and at the Louvre, where (and throughout conversation) I found his knowledge of early Italian art beyond that of any one I ever met,— encyclopaedically beyond that of Ruskin himself. What a jolly thing
on reading Men and Women (and with it some of the other works which he did not know before), declared them, rebelliously, to be a mass of conundrums, and compelled me to sit down before him and lay siege for one whole night, the result of which was that he sent me next morning a bulky letter to be forwarded to B., in which I trust he told him that he was the greatest man since Shakespeare. …
