Then I had the curiosity to ask Carlyle in my yearly letter to him. He also is, or was, a friend of B.’s, and used to say that he looked on him as a sort of light-cavalry man to follow you. Well, Carlyle writes, “Browning’s book I read—insisted on reading: it is full of talent, of energy, and effort, but totally without backbone, or basis of common sense. I think among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted man.” (Italics are his.)
Who, then, are the people that write the nonsense in the Reviews? I believe the reason at the bottom is that R. B. is a clever London diner-out, etc., while A. T. holds aloof from the newspaper men, etc. “Long life to him!” But I don’t understand why Venables, or some of the men who think as I do, and wield trenchant pens in high places, why they don’t come out, and set all this right. I only wish I could do it: but I can only see the right thing, but not prove it to others. “I do not like you, Dr. Fell,” etc.
I found a Memorandum the other day (I can’t now light on it) of a Lincolnshire story about “Haxey Wood” or “Haxey Hood”—which—if I had not told it to you, but left it as by chance in your way some thirty years ago, you would have turned into a shape to outlast all R. B.’s poems put together. There is no use in my finding and sending it now, because it doesn’t do (with Paltry Poets) to try and drag them to the water. The two longest and worst tales (I think) in Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall, were suggested to him by Sir S. Romilly, and “a lady in Wiltshire.” I wish Murray would let me make a volume of “Selections from Crabbe”—which I know I could, so that common readers would wish to read the whole original; which now scarce any one does; nor can one wonder they do not. But Crabbe will flourish when R. B. is dead and buried. Lots of lines which he cut out of his MS. would be the beginning of a little fortune to others. I happened on this couplet the other day:
The shapeless purpose of a soul that feels,
And half suppresses wrath and half reveals.
Not that Crabbe is to live by single couplets or epigrams, but by something far better, as you know better than I. There is a long passage in the Tales of the Hall (Old Bachelor) which always reminds me of you, A. T., where the Old Bachelor recounts how he pleaded with his Whig father to be allowed to marry the Tory Squire’s daughter; when,
Coolly my father looked, and much enjoy’d
The broken eloquence his eye destroy’d, etc.
and then pleads to the Tory mother of the girl.
Methinks I have the tigress in my eye, etc.
Do look at this, A. T., when you get the Book, and don’t let my praise set you against it.
I have written you a very long letter, you see, with one very bad eye too. I thought it had mended, by help of cold water and goggles; but these last three days it has turned rusty again. I believe it misses the sea air.