Joseph Arnould and Robert Browning: New Letters (1842–50) and A Verse Epistle

Abstract

“Arnould wrote the cleverest, gratefullest verse-thanks to me, the other day, for these lyrics of mine,” Robert Browning told Alfred Domett in a letter of 1842, “and brought you in so happily.” Joseph Arnould himself, writing Domett some months later, spoke disparagingly of his epistle as “very schoolboy verses.” Though they had said exactly what he had felt at the time and still felt about the beauty and power of Browning's recent poetry, Arnould could not help fancying that his lines had given Browning “a bad opinion of my sincerity.” Arnould does less than justice to his verse critique. He is sincere to the point of much tactful admonishment, and though his tone is ingenuous and his style colorful rather than polished, he is selective and informed in many of his judgments. The epistle tells us much about this cultivated friend, and it suggests still more about the intellectual environment in which Browning worked during the early 1840's while he was trying to write dramas for the stage and at the same time feeling his way toward his special subject and manner. That Browning himself valued Arnould's epistle is shown by his giving it (perhaps along with other poems) to Elizabeth Barrett; for on 1 May 1846 Elizabeth wrote: “I am delighted with the verses and quite surprised by Mr. Arnould's, having expected to find nothing but love and law in them, and really, there is a great deal besides. Hard to believe, it was, that a university prize poet (who was not Tennyson) could write such good verses.” F. G. Kenyon, when he was collecting Browning's letters to Domett for Robert Browning and Alfred Domett (1906), a book that also contains letters and excerpts from letters of Arnould to Domett, seems to have had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the verse epistle. Fortunately the manuscript of this piece, together with the accompanying letter and six additional letters of Arnould's to Browning written in the years 1846–50, has recently come into the possession of Gordon N. Ray, President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Mr. Ray has kindly made them available for reproduction here.