28 Via del Tritone, Rome: May 2, [1860].

My dear Mr. Chorley,--I make haste to answer your letter, and beg you to
do the like in putting out of your life the least touch of pain or
bitterness connected with me. It is true, true, true, that some of my
earliest gladness in literary sympathy and recognition came from you. I
was grateful to you then as a stranger, and I am not likely ever to
forget it as a friend. Believe this of me, as I feel it of _you_.

In the matter of reviews and of my last book, and before leaving the
subject for ever, I want you distinctly to understand that my complaint
related simply to the mistake in facts, and not to any mistake in
opinion. The quality of neither mercy nor justice should be strained in
the honest reviewer by the personal motive; and, because you felt a
regard for me, _that_ was no kind of reason why you should like my book.

In printing the poems, I well knew the storm of execration which would
follow. Your zephyr from the 'Athenaeum' was the first of it, gentle
indeed in comparison with various gusts from other quarters. All fair it
was from your standpoint, to see me as a prophet without a head, or even
as a woman in a shrewish temper, and if my husband had not been
especially pained by my being held up at the end of a fork as the
unnatural she-monster who had 'cursed' her own country (following the
Holy Father), I should have left the '_mistake_' to right itself,
without troubling the 'Athenaeum' office with the letter they would not
insert. In fact, Robert was a little vexed with me for not being vexed
enough. I was only vexed enough when the 'Athenaeum' corrected its
misstatement in its own way. _That did_ extremely vex me, for it made me
look ungenerous, cowardly, mean--as if, in haste to escape from the dogs
in England, I threw them the good name of America. 'Mrs. Browning _now
states_.'

Well, dear Mr. Chorley, it was not your doing. So the thing that 'vexed
me enough' in you was a mistake of mine. Let us forgive one another our
mistakes; and there, an end. _I_ was wrong in taking for granted that
the letter which referred to your review was entrusted to you to dispose
of; and you were not right in being in too much haste to condemn a book
you disliked to give the due measure of attention to every page of it.
The insurgents being plainly insurgents, you shot one at least of them
without trial, as was done in Spain the other day. True, that even
favorable critics have fallen here and there into your very mistake; but
is not that mainly attributable to the suggestive power of the
'Athenaeum,' do you not believe so yourself? 'Thais led the way!'

And now that we clasp hands again, my dear friend, let me say one word
as to the 'argument' of my last poems. Once, in a kind and generous
review of 'Aurora Leigh,' you complained a little of 'new lights.' Now I
appeal to you. Is it not rather _you_ than I, who deal in 'new lights,'
if the liberation of a people and the struggle of a nation for existence
have ceased in your mind to be the right arguments for poetry? Observe,
I may be wrong or right about Napoleon. He may be snake, scoundrel,
devil, in his motives. But the thing he did was done before the eyes of
all. His coming here was real, the stroke of his sword was indubitable,
the rising and struggle of the people was beyond controversy, and the
state of things at present is a fact. What if the father of poetry Homer
(to go back to the oldest lights) made a mistake about the cause of
Achilles' wrath. What if Achilles really wanted to get rid of Briseis
and the war together, and sulked in his tent in a great sham? Should we
conclude against the artistic propriety of the poet's argument
therefore?

You greatly surprise me by such objections. It is objected to 'new
lights,' as far as I know, that we are apt to be too metaphysical,
self-conscious, subjective, everything for which there are hard German
words. The reproaches made against myself have been often of this
nature, as you must be well aware. 'Beyond human sympathies' is a phrase
in use among critics of a certain school. But that, in any school, any
critic should consider the occasions of great tragic movements (such as
a war for the life of a nation) unfit occasions for poetry, improper
arguments, fills me with an astonishment which I can scarcely express
adequately, and, pardon me, I can only understand your objection by a
sad return on the English persistency in its mode of looking at the
Italian war. You have looked at it always too much as a mere table for
throwing dice--so much for France's ambition, so much for Piedmont's, so
much stuff for intrigue in an English Parliament for ousting Whigs, or
inning Conservatives. You have not realised to yourselves the dreadful
struggle for national life, you who, thank God, have your life as a
nation safe. A calm scholastic Italian friend of ours said to my husband
at the peace, '_It's sad to think how the madhouses will fill after
this._' You do not conceive clearly the agony of a whole people with
their house on fire, though Lord Brougham used that very figure to
recommend your international neutrality. No, if you conceived of it, if
you did not dispose of it lightly in your thoughts as of a Roccabella
conspiracy, full half vanity, and only half serious--a Mazzini
explosion, not a quarter justified, and taking place often on an affair
of _metier_--you, a thoughtful and feeling man, would cry aloud that if
poets represent the deepest things, the most tragic things in human
life, they need not go further for an argument. And _I_ say, my dear Mr.
Chorley, that if, while such things are done and suffered, the poet's
business is to rhyme the stars and walk apart, _I_ say that Mr. Carlyle
is right, and that the world requires more earnest workers than such
dreamers can be.

For my part, I have always conceived otherwise of poetry. I believe that
if anything written by me has been recognised even by _you_, the cause
is that I have written not to please you or any critic, but the deepest
truth out of my own heart and head. I don't dream and make a poem of it.
Art is not either all beauty or all use, it is essential truth which
makes its way through beauty into use. Not that I say this for myself.
Artistically, I may have failed in these poems--that is for the critic
to consider; but in the choice of their argument I have not failed
artistically, _I think_, or my whole artistic life and understanding of
life have failed.

There, I cannot persuade you of this, but I believe it. I have tried to
stand on the facts of things before I began to feel 'dithyrambically.'
Thought out coldly, then felt upon warmly. I will not admit of 'being
heated out of fairness!' I deny it, and stand upon my innocency.

And after all, 'Casa Guidi Windows' was a book that commended itself to
you, Mr. Chorley.

[_The rest of this letter is missing_]