BROWNING LOVE LETTERS.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1746, 10 May 1913, Page 11

BROWNING LOVE LETTERS.

[Bi Imogen.] Browning lovers would receive the news of tho sale by auction uf the love letters of. Robert Browning and his wife with •somewhat mixed feelings, one would think, and possibly tho fact that there are to be found compensations in obscurity would striko them afresh. In bald, brief words, tho cablegram stated tho news that_ they had bten sold for tho sum of ,£6550, and so, for a few thousand pounds, the outpourings of tho passionate love of the two poetic geniuses, whose elopement made at tho time one of tho \ greatest sensations in tho literary world, havo passed into alien hands. It is true that tho love letters were Published in book form by instructions of the son of" the two Brownings several years ago, the son stating that his father had authorised the publication of them after ho was dead, but such statements cannot lessen the regret that the autograph letters have been sold in such a way in order to pay the debts of the Kin who Lore their name. This son, Mr. Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning had died intestate and considerably in debt, and his legal personal representative, in order to satisfy the claims of creditors against the estate, had to realise whatever assets there were. Hence the Bale. Even in Brdwning"s day it was an ago in which the greatest curiosity was shown in the daily lives of celebrated people, and, apparently, not even their slightest action passed unnoticed. In "House" the poet ridiculed this attitude of the public, and it seems curious to think that he should at tho last havo contemplated the possibility of his and his wife s love letters becoming public property. Great writers, poets, painters, musicians fortunately have the gift, however, of getting beyond tHe personal outlook, or they would not be what they are, and possibly the cluo to the feeling with which Browning regarded the disposal of the love letters is to be found jn that. Edward Dowden, in his biography of Robert Browning, wrote that "in their case what sentimental persons fancy and grow cftuaire over was here the simplest, and vet always a miraculous reality—'He if the Heavens and earth brought us ' agether so wonderfully, holding two souls in His hands.'" "In the most iuminating words' of each correspondent," he wrote, "no merely private or peculiar feeling is expressed; it is the common wave of human passion, the common love of man and woman that here leaps from the depths to the heights, and o,ver which the iris of beauty ever and anon appears with—it is unusual intensity. And so, in reading the letters, we have no sense of prying into secrets; thore are no secrets to be discovered; what is most intimate is most common; only hero what is most common rises up to its highest point of attainment. The' disclosure in letters and in poems, being without reserve, affects us as no disclosure, but simply as an adequate expression of tho truth universal." In any case, wo are living in an age

which carries its passion for biography to extreme limit. Once a man or woman las achieved greatness the world acclaims him as its own—its own to the last writlon word,to the last thought it can drag nut of fee hidden'chambers of his mind. It is one of the penalties which he has to pay, and so jve cannot wonder that not even his love letters may jx? allowed to fade into ' the < tender obscurity of those of less gifted beings."