Mr. Browning,--To begin with the end (which is only
characteristic of the perverse like myself), I assure you I read your
handwriting as currently as I could read the clearest type from font.
If I had practised the art of reading your letters all my life, I
couldn't do it better. And then I approve of small MS. upon principle.
Think of what an immense quantity of physical energy must go to the
making of those immense sweeping handwritings achieved by some persons
... Mr. Landor, for instance, who writes as if he had the sky for a
copybook and dotted his _i_'s in proportion. People who do such things
should wear gauntlets; yes, and have none to wear; or they wouldn't
waste their time so. People who write--by profession--shall I
say?--never should do it, or what will become of them when most of
their strength retires into their head and heart, (as is the case with
some of us and may be the case with all) and when they have to write a
poem twelve times over, as Mr. Kenyon says I should do if I were
virtuous? Not that I do it. Does anybody do it, I wonder? Do _you_,
ever? From what you tell me of the trimming of the light, I imagine
not. And besides, one may be laborious as a writer, without copying
twelve times over. I believe there are people who will tell you in a
moment what three times six is, without 'doing it' on their fingers;
and in the same way one may work one's verses in one's head quite as
laboriously as on paper--I maintain it. I consider myself a very
patient, laborious writer--though dear Mr. Kenyon laughs me to scorn
when I say so. And just see how it could be otherwise. If I were
netting a purse I might be thinking of something else and drop my
stitches; or even if I were writing verses to please a popular taste,
I might be careless in it. But the pursuit of an Ideal acknowledged by
the mind, _will_ draw and concentrate the powers of the mind--and Art,
you know, is a jealous god and demands the whole man--or woman. I
cannot conceive of a sincere artist who is also a careless one--though
one may have a quicker hand than another, in general,--and though all
are liable to vicissitudes in the degree of facility--and to
entanglements in the machinery, notwithstanding every degree of
facility. You may write twenty lines one day--or even three like
Euripides in three days--and a hundred lines in one more day--and yet
on the hundred, may have been expended as much good work, as on the
twenty and the three. And als