1900] The Browning Letters 373 



killing's sake, who compass the four continents of the earth at vast 

 labour and expense only to destroy, are a pitiful feature of the age we 

 live in. What have the lions and elephants in Africa done to Seton 

 Karr that he should travel 20,000 miles, and spend a fortune to ex- 

 tinguish their race? Men of his stamp, though he seems a very worthy 

 man, need to be put under restraint, far more than half the lunatics in 

 our asylums. They do a thousand times more harm. There is no pre- 

 tence with him of science, missionary work, or Imperial politics, and 

 in so far he is respectably sincere. His work of destruction does not 

 injure his moral nature, but he is a dangerous criminal all the same, and 

 ought to be straight-waistcoated. I see that my letter to the ' Times ' 

 of last winter has had the effect of causing regulations to be issued in 

 Egypt which, if carried out, will do something towards saving the small 

 wild birds there from extinction at the hand of European gunners. If 

 this succeeds, the British occupation will have done something to justify 

 itself in the eye of whatever force rules the world. 



" I have been reading Mrs. Browning's letters. They are interesting 

 in many ways, but on the whole poor literature, lacking, as they do, all 

 wit. They are gossiping, too, in not the best sense, and commonplace, 

 far inferior to her poems, for which I have the highest admiration. 

 There is nothing in them which makes one love the writer, and very 

 few of them would be worth preserving if not written by so famous a 

 poet. Browning stands out well in the volume, and the few scraps that 

 are given of his writing show the superiority of the man, as an intel- 

 lectual power, over his wife. Her enthusiasms are poor stuff in prose. 

 There are a few meagre allusions in them to Robert Lytton, and one, 

 a pretty one, to Anne, but the whole series written in Italy is infected 

 with the sentimental vulgarity of the Anglo-American colony, which 

 had its headquarters in Storey's rooms in the Palazzo Barberini, and 

 which so nauseated me thirty and more years ago at Rome. Browning 

 himself was not exempt from it, though this does not appear in the 

 volume, for I remember him in his later years, a gossipy diner-out in 

 London and teller of second-rate funny stories. He did not on these 

 occasions show to advantage, though beyond question he was a thinker 

 of a very high order, the most intellectual poet we have perhaps ever 

 had. 



" Another volume I have skimmed is Watts Dunton's absurd ro- 

 mance, ' Aylwin,' a thing of the lowest order of childish melodrama. 

 Kipling's ' Stalky ' is the third volume. Here, at least, we have vigour 

 and wit, though it is brutal in its realism and displays the seamy side 

 of our British schoolboy life without mercy. It needed courage to 

 print it. Kitchener, I fancy, has served in some sort as his model. 

 Lastly, I have read Tourgueneff's ' Smoke,' which is excellent. 



" yth Nov. — A day of great enjoyment. We landed at Alexandria 



