Chapters 11
-
1 01 - Note, Advertisement, January 1845 22:51
January 1845. Note.
In considering the question of publishing these letters, which are all that ever passed between my father and mother, for after their marriage they were never separated, it seemed to me that my only alternatives were to allow them to be published or to destroy them. I might, indeed, have left the matter to the decision of others after my death, but that would have been evading a responsibility which I feel that I ought to accept. Ever since my mother's death, these letters were kept by my father in a certain inlaid box, into which they exactly fitted, and where they have always rested, letter beside letter, each in its consecutive order, and numbered on the envelope by his own hand. My father destroyed all the rest of his correspondence, and not long before his death he said, referring to these letters, There they are.
Do with them as you please when I am dead and gone. A few of the letters are of little or no interest, but their omission would have saved only a few pages, and I think it well that the correspondence should be given in its entirety. I wish to express my gratitude to my father's friend and mine, Mrs. Miller Morrison, for her unfailing sympathy and assistance in deciphering some words which had become scarcely legible owing to faded ink. R. B. B. 1898. Advertisement. The correspondence contained in these volumes is printed exactly as it appears in the original letters, without alteration, except in respect of obvious slips of the pen. Even the punctuation, with its characteristic dots and dashes, has for the most part been preserved.
The notes in square brackets have been added mainly in order to translate the Greek phrases and to give the references to Greek poets. For these, thanks are due to Mr. F. G. Kenyon, who has revised the proofs with the assistance of Mr. Roger Ingpen, the latter being responsible for the index.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey. Postmark, January 10, 1845. I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, and this is no offhand complimentary letter that I shall write. Whatever else, no prompt, matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing. Since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me, for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of the habit of purely passive enjoyment when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration. Perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter.
But nothing comes of it all, so into me it has gone, and part of me it has become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew. Oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat, and prized highly, and put in a book with a proper account at the top and bottom, and shut up, And put away. And the book called a flora, besides. After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time. Because, even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought. But in this addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether.
I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart, and I love you, too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing—really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning, Would you like to see Miss Barrett? Then he went to announce me. Then he returned. You were too unwell. And now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world's wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push, and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be. While these poems were to be, And this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself, yours ever faithfully, Robert Browning.
Robert Browning, Esquire, New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey. 50 Wimpole Street, January 11th, 1845. I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter, and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand. Sympathy is dear, very dear to me, but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me. Will you take back my gratitude for it, agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from Tyre to Carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most princely thing. For the rest you draw me on with your kindness. It is difficult to get rid of people when you once have given them too much pleasure.
That is a fact, and we will not stop for the moral of it. What I was going to say, after a little natural hesitation, is that if ever you emerge without inconvenient effort from your passive state, and will tell me of such faults as rise to the surface and strike you as important in my poems, for, of course, I do not think of troubling you with criticism in detail, you will confer a lasting obligation on me, and one which I shall value so much that I covet it at a distance. I do not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism, and it is possible enough that I might not be altogether obedient to yours. But with my high respect for your power in your art, and for your experience as an artist, it would be quite impossible for me to hear a general observation of yours on what appear to you my master faults, without being the better for it hereafter in some way.
I ask for only a sentence or two of general observation, and I do not ask even for that so as to tease you. But in the humble, low voice, which is so excellent a thing in women, particularly when they go a-begging, the most frequent general criticism I receive is, I think, upon the style. If I would but change my style. But that is an objection, isn't it, to the writer bodily? Buffon says, and every sincere writer must feel, that le style, c'est l'homme. A fact, however, scarcely calculated to lessen the objection with certain critics. Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure and honour of making your acquaintance? And can it be true that you look back upon the lost opportunity with any regret?
But, you know, if you had entered the crypt you might have caught cold or been tired to death, and wished yourself a thousand miles off, which would have been worse than travelling them. It is not my interest, however, to put such thoughts in your head about its being all for the best. And I would rather hope, as I do, that what I lost by one chance I may recover by some future one. Winter shut me up, as they do Dormouse's eyes. In the spring we shall see. And I am so much better that I seem turning round to the outward world again. And in the meantime I have learnt to know your voice, not merely from the poetry, but from the kindness in it. Mr. Kenyon often speaks of you. Dear Mr. Kenyon, and most unspeakably, or only speakably with tears in my eyes, has been my friend and helper, and my book's friend and helper, critic and sympathizer, true friend of all ours.
You know him well enough, I think, to understand that I must be grateful to him. I am writing too much, and notwithstanding that I am writing too much, I will write of one thing more. I will say that I am your debtor, not only for this cordial letter, and for all the pleasure which came with it, But in other ways, and those the highest, and I will say that while I live to follow this divine art of poetry, in proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, I must be a devout admirer and student of your works. This is in my heart to say to you, and I say it. And for the rest I am proud to remain your obliged and faithful, Elizabeth B. Barrett.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey, Jan 13, 1845. Dear Miss Barrett, I shall just say, in as few words as I can, that you make me very happy, and that, now the beginning is over, I dare say I shall do better, because my poor praise, number one, was nearly as felicitously brought out as a certain tribute to no lesser personage than Tasso, which I was amused with at Rome some weeks ago, in a neat pencilling on the plaster wall by his tomb at Sant Onofrio. A la cara memoria. Please fancy solemn interspaces and grave capital letters at the new lines, di Torquatto Tasso, il Dottore Bernardini, offriva il Seguente Carme, O Tu, and no more. The good man, it should seem, breaking down with the overload of love here.
But my O Tu was breathed out most sincerely, and now you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come after. Only, and which is why I write now, it looks as if I have introduced some phrase or other about your faults so cleverly as to give exactly the opposite meaning to what I meant, which was that in my first ardour I had thought to tell you of everything which impressed me in your verses, down even to whatever faults I could find. A good earnest, when I had got to them, that I had left out not much between. As if some Mr. Fellows were to say, in the overflow of his first enthusiasm of rewarded adventure, I will describe you all the outer life and ways of these Lycians, down to their very sandal-thongs, whereto the becorresponded one rejoins, Shall I get next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs?
Yes, and a little about the Olympian horses and God-charioteers as well. What struck me as false were not matters on the removal of which one was to have Poetry, or high poetry, but the very highest poetry, so I thought, and that to universal recognition. For myself, or any artist, in many of the cases there would be a positive loss of time, peculiar artist's pleasure, for an instructed eye loved to see where the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow. For these two muches for the everybody's picture are so many helps to the making out the real painter's picture as he had it in his brain. And all of the Titian's Naples Magdalene must have once been golden in its degree to justify that heap of hair in her hands, the only gold effected now.
But about this soon, for night is drawing on, and I go out, yet cannot, quiet at conscience, till I report, to myself, for I never said it to you, I think, that your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you, for you do what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. You speak out, you. I only make men and women speak, give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me. But I am going to try. So it will be no small comfort to have your company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women aforesaid, you are busied with them, whereas it seems bleak, melancholy work, this talking to the wind, for I have begun.
Yet I don't think I shall let you hear, after all, the savage things about popes and imaginative religions that I must say. See how I go on and on to you, I who— Whenever now and then pulled, by the head and hair, into letter-writing, get sorrowfully on for a line or two, as the cognate creature urged on by stick and string, and then come down flop upon the sweet haven of page one, line last, as serene as the sleep of the virtuous. You will never more, I hope, talk of the honour of my acquaintance, but I will joyfully wait for the delight of your friendship and the spring. And my chapel site, after all. Ever yours most faithfully, R. Browning. For Mr. Kenyon, I have a convenient theory about him and his otherwise quite unaccountable kindness to me, but tis quite night now, and they call me.
50 Wimple Street, January 15, 1845. Dear Mr. Browning, the fault was clearly with me and not with you. When I had an Italian master years ago, he told me that there was an unpronounceable English word which absolutely expressed me, and which he would say in his own tongue, as he could not in mine, Testa lunga. Of course, the signor meant headlong, and now I have had enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall. But, you see, I do not. Headlong I was at first, and headlong I continued, precipitously rushing forward through all manner of nettles and briars instead of keeping the path, guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary, tearing open letters and never untying a string, and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning.
And so, at your half-word, I flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, and wrote what you read. Our common friend, as I think he is, Mr. Horn, is often forced to entreat me into patience and coolness of purpose, though his only intercourse with me has been by letter. And, by the way, you will be sorry to hear that during his stay in Germany he has been headlong, out of a metaphor, twice—once in falling from the Drachenfels, when he only just saved himself by catching out a vine, and once quite lately, at Christmas, in a fall on the ice of the Alba and skating, when he dislocated his left shoulder in a very painful manner. He is doing quite well, I believe, but it was sad to have such a shadow from the German Christmas tree, and he a stranger.
In art, however, I understand that it does not do to be headlong, but patient and laborious, and there is a love strong enough, even in me, to overcome nature. I apprehend what you mean in the criticism you just intimate, and shall turn it over and over in my head until I get practical good from it. What no mere critic sees, but what you, an artist, know, is the difference between the thing desired and the thing attained, between the idea in the writer's mind and the adlong cast off in his work. All the effort, the quickening of the breath, and beating of the heart in pursuit, which is ruffling and injurious to the general effect of a composition, all which you call insistency, and which many would call superfluity, and which is superfluous in a sense, you can pardon, because you understand.
The great chasm between the thing I say and the thing I would say would be quite dispiriting to me, in spite even of such kindnesses as yours, if the desire did not master the despondency. Oh, for a horse with wings! It is wrong of me to write so of myself. Only you put your finger on the root of a fault which has, to my fancy, been a little misapprehended. I do not say everything I think, as has been said of me by master critics, but I take every means to say what I think. Which is different, or I fancy so. In one thing, however, you are wrong. Why should you deny the full measure of my delight and benefit from your writings? I could tell you why you should not. You have in your vision two worlds, or, to use the language of the schools of the day, you are both subjective and objective in the habits of your mind.
You can deal both with abstract thought and with human passion in the most passionate sense. Thus you have an immense grasp in art, and no one at all accustomed to consider the usual forms of it could help regarding with reverence and gladness the gradual expansion of your powers. Then you are masculine to the height, and I, as a woman, have studied some of your gestures of language and intonation wistfully as a thing beyond me far, and the more admirable for being beyond. Of your new work I hear with delight, how good of you to tell me! And it is not dramatic in the strict sense I am to understand. Am I right in understanding so? And you speak, in your own person, to the winds? No, but to the thousand living sympathies which will awake to hear you.
A great dramatic power may develop itself otherwise than in the formal drama, and I have been guilty of wishing, before this hour, for reasons which I will not thrust upon you after all my tedious writing, that you would give the public a poem, unassociated directly or indirectly with the stage, for a trial on the popular heart. I reverence the drama, but—but I break in on myself out of consideration for you. I might have done it, you will think, before. I vex your serene sleep of the virtuous like a nightmare. Do not say no, I am sure I do. As to the vain parlance of the world, I did not talk of the honor of your acquaintance without a true sense of honor. Indeed. But I shall willingly exchange it all, and now, if you please, at this moment, for fear of worldly mutabilities, For the delight of your friendship.
Believe me, therefore, dear Mr. Browning, faithfully yours, and gratefully, Elizabeth B. Barrett. For Mr. Kenyon's kindness, as I see it, no theory will account. I class it with mesmerism for that reason.
New Cross, Hatcham, Monday Night, Postmark, January 28th, 1845. Dear Miss Barrett, Your books lie on my table here, at arm's length from me, in this old room where I sit all day, and when my head aches, or wanders, or strikes work, as now and then it will, I take my chance for either green-covered volume, as it were so much fresh trefoil to feel in one's hands this winter-time. And round I turn, and, putting a decisive elbow on three or four half-done-with bells of mine, read, read, read, and just as I have shut up the book and walked to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there, and that in an unwise hour I engaged to do so. Meanwhile the days go by. The White Throat is come and sings now.
And as I would not have you, look down on me from your white heights, as promise-breaker, evader, or forgetter, if I could help, and as, if I am very candid and contrite, you may find it in your heart to write to me again, who knows? I shall say at once that the said faults cannot be lost, must be somewhere, and shall be faithfully brought you back whenever they turn up, as people tell one of missing matters. I am rather exacting myself, with my own gentle audience, and get to say spiteful things about them when they are backward in their dues of appreciation. But really, really, could I be quite sure that anybody as good as—I must go on, I suppose, and say, as myself, even—were honestly to feel towards me as I do towards the writer of Bertha, and the drama, and the Duchess, and the page, and—the two whole volumes.
I should be paid after a fashion, I know. One thing I can do, pencil if you like, and annotate and dissertate upon that I love most and least. I think I can do it, that is. Here an odd memory comes, of a friend who, volunteering such a service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality in a side column of short criticisms on Sonnet I, and starting off the beginning three lines with, of course, bad, worse, worst, Made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run of his epithets, Worser, Worserer, Worserist, pay off the second turzit in full. No, Bader, Baderer, Baderist fell to the second's allowance, and Worser, etc. answered the demands of the third. Worser, Worserer, Worsterist supplied the emergency of the fourth, and bestowing his last Worsteristist and Worsestist On lines thirteen and fourteen, my friend, slapping his forehead like an emptied strongbox, frankly declared himself bankrupt and honourably incompetent to satisfy the reasonable expectations of the rest of the series.
What an illustration of the law by which opposite ideas suggest opposite, and contrary images come together. See now how, of that friendship you offer me, and here Juliet's word rises to my lips, I feel sure once and forever. I have got already, I see, into this little pet handwriting of mine, not anyone else's, which scratches on as if theatrical copyists, ah me, and Bradbury and Evans' reader were not. But you shall get something better than this nonsense one day, if you will have patience with me. Hardly better, though, because this does me real good, gives real relief to write. After all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me, and that stops me. Spring is to come, however. If you hate writing to me, as I hate writing to nearly everybody, I pray you never write, if you do, as you say, care for anything I have done.
I will simply assure you that meaning to begin work in deep earnest, begin without affectation, God knows, I do not know what will help me more than hearing from you, and therefore If you do not so very much hate it, I know I shall hear from you, and very little more about your tiring me. Ever yours faithfully, Robert Browning.
-
2 02 - Alternate section 1 24:40
I. Jan. 1845. NOTE.
In considering the question of publishing these letters, which are all that ever passed between my father and mother, for after their marriage they were never separated, it seemed to me that my only alternatives were to allow them to be published or to destroy them. I might, indeed, have left the matter to the decision of others after my death, but that would have been evading a responsibility which I feel that I ought to accept. Ever since my mother's death, these letters were kept by my father in a certain inlaid box, into which they exactly fitted, and where they have always rested, letter beside letter, each in its consecutive order, and numbered on the envelope by his own hand. My father destroyed all the rest of his correspondence, and not long before his death he said, referring to these letters, There they are.
Do with them as you please when I am dead and gone. A few of the letters are of little or no interest, but their omission would have saved only a few pages, and I think it well that the correspondence should be given in its entirety. I wish to express my gratitude to my father's friend and mine, Mrs. Miller Morrison, for her unfailing sympathy and assistance in deciphering some words which had become scarcely legible owing to faded ink. R. B. B.
Advertisement. The correspondence contained in these volumes is printed exactly as it appears in the original letters, without alteration, except in respect of obvious slips of the pen. Even the punctuation, with its characteristic dots and dashes, has for the most part been preserved. The notes in square brackets have been added mainly in order to translate the Greek phrases and to give the references to Greek poets. For these, thanks are due to Mr. F. G. Kenyon, who has revised the proofs with the assistance of Mr. Roger Ingpen, the latter being responsible for the index.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey. Postmark, January 10, 1845. I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, and this is no offhand complimentary letter that I shall write. Whatever else, no prompt, matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing. Since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me, for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of the habit of purely passive enjoyment when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration. Perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault, and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter.
But nothing comes of it all. So into me it has gone, and part of me it has become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew. Oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat, and prized highly, and put in a book with a proper account at the top and bottom, and shut up and put away, and the book called a flora besides. After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time. Because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, The exquisite pathos and true new brave thought. But in this addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether.
I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart, and I love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing, really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning, Would you like to see Miss Barrett? Then he went to announce me. Then he returned. You were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world's wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push, and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be. Well, these poems were to be, and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself, yours ever faithfully, Robert Browning.
Robert Browning, Esquire, New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey. 50 Wimpole Street, January 11th, 1845. I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter, and even if the object had not been answered I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear, very dear to me. But the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me. Will you take back my gratitude for it? Agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from Tyre to Carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most princely thing. For the rest, you draw me on with your kindness. It is difficult to get rid of people when you once have given them too much pleasure.
That is a fact, and we will not stop for the moral of it. What I was going to say, after a little natural hesitation, is that if ever you emerge without inconvenient effort from your passive state, and will tell me of such faults as rise to the surface and strike you as important in my poems, for of course I do not think of troubling you with criticism in detail, you will confer a lasting obligation on me, and one which I shall value so much that I covered it at a distance. I do not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism, and it is possible enough that I might not be altogether obedient to yours. But with my high respect for your power in your art, and for your experience as an artist, it would be quite impossible for me to hear a general observation of yours on what appear to you my master faults, without being the better for it hereafter in some way.
I ask for only a sentence or two of general observation. And I do not ask even for that so as to tease you, but in the humble, low voice which is so excellent a thing in women, particularly when they go a-begging. The most frequent general criticism I receive is, I think, upon the style. If I would but change my style. But that is an objection, isn't it, to the writer bodily? Buffon says, and every sincere writer must feel, that le style, c'est l'homme, a fact, however, scarcely calculated to lessen the objection with certain critics. Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure and honour of making your acquaintance? And can it be true that you look back upon the lost opportunity with any regret?
But, you know, If you had entered the crypt you might have caught cold, or been tired to death and wished yourself a thousand miles off, which would have been worse than travelling them. It is not my interest, however, to put such thoughts in your head about its being all for the best, and I would rather hope, as I do, that what I lost by one chance I may recover by some future one. Winters shut me up as they do Dormouse's eyes. In the spring— We shall see. And I am so much better that I seem turning round to the outward world again. In the meantime, I have learnt to know your voice, not merely from the poetry, but from the kindness in it. Mr. Kenyon often speaks of you, dear Mr. Kenyon, who most unspeakably, or only speakably with tears in my eyes, has been my friend and helper, and my book's friend and helper, critic and sympathiser True friend of all ours.
You know him well enough, I think, to understand that I must be grateful to him. I am writing too much, and notwithstanding that I am writing too much, I will write of one thing more. I will say that I am your debtor, not only for this cordial letter and for all the pleasure which came with it, but in other ways, and those the highest. And I will say that while I live to follow this divine art of poetry, in proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, I must be a devout admirer and student of your works. This is in my heart to say to you, and I say it. And for the rest, I am proud to remain your obliged and faithful Elizabeth B. Barrett. Robert Browning, Esquire, New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey, Dear Miss Barrett, I shall just say, in as few words as I can, that you make me very happy, and that, now the beginning is over, I dare say I shall do better, because my poor praise, number one, was nearly as felicitously brought out as a certain tribute to no less a personage than Tasso, which I was amused with at Rome some weeks ago, in a neat pencilling on the plaster wall by his tomb at St. Onofrio. A la cara memoria. Di. Please fancy solemn interspaces and grave capital letters at the new lines. Di. Torquatto tasso. Il dottore Bernardini. Offriva. Il seguente carme. Oh, tu! And no more. The good man, it should seem, breaking down with the overload of love here.
But my, oh, tu, was breathed out most sincerely, and now you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come after. Only—and which is why I write now—it looks as if I have introduced some phrase or other about— Your faults so cleverly as to give exactly the opposite meaning to what I meant, which was that in my first ardour I had thought to tell you of everything which impressed me in your verses, down even to whatever faults I could find. A good earnest, when I had got to them, that I had left out not much between, as if some Mr. Fellows were to say, in the overflow of his first enthusiasm of rewarded adventure, I will describe you all the outer life and ways of these Lycians, down to their very sandal-thongs, whereto the becorresponded one rejoins, Shall I get next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs?
Yes, and a little about the Olympian horses and God-charioteers as well. What struck me as false were not matters on the removal of which one was to have Poetry, or high poetry, but the very highest poetry, so I thought, and that to universal recognition. For myself, or any artist, in many of the cases there would be a positive loss of time, peculiar artist's pleasure, for an instructed eye loves to see where the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow. For these two muches for the everybody's picture are so many helps to the making out the real painter's picture as he had it in his brain. And all of the Titian's Naples Magdalene must have once been golden in its degree to justify that heap of hair in her hands, the only gold effected now.
But about this soon, for night is drawing on and I go out, yet cannot, quiet at conscience, till I report, to myself, for I never said it to you, I think, that your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you, for you do what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. You speak out, you. I only make men and women speak, give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me. But I am going to try. So it will be no small comfort to have your company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women aforesaid, you are busied with them, whereas it seems bleak, melancholy work, this talking to the wind, for I have begun.
Yet I don't think I shall let you hear, after all, the savage things about popes and imaginative religions that I must say. See how I go on and on to you, I who— Whenever now and then pulled, by the head and hair, into letter-writing, get sorrowfully on for a line or two, as the cognate creature urged on by stick and string, and then come down flop upon the sweet haven of page one, line last, as serene as the sleep of the virtuous. You will never more, I hope, talk of the honour of my acquaintance. But I will joyfully wait for the delight of your friendship and the spring. And my chapel site after all. Ever yours most faithfully, R. Browning. For Mr. Kenyon, I have a convenient theory about him and his otherwise quite unaccountable kindness to me, but tis quite night now, and they call me.
50 Wimpole Street, January 15, 1845. Dear Mr. Browning, the fault was clearly with me and not with you. When I had an Italian master, years ago, he told me that there was an unpronounceable English word which absolutely expressed me, and which he would say in his own tongue, as he could not in mine, Testa lunga. Of course, the signor meant headlong, and now I have had enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall. But you see, I do not. Headlong I was at first, and headlong I continue. Precipitously rushing forward through all manner of nettles and briars, instead of keeping the path, guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary, tearing open letters and never untying a string, and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning.
And so, at your half-word, I flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, and wrote what you read. Our common friend, as I think he is, Mr. Horne, is often forced to entreat me into patience and coolness of purpose, though his only intercourse with me has been by letter. And, by the way, you will be sorry to hear that during his stay in Germany he has been headlong, out of a metaphor, twice. Once in falling from the Drachenfels, when he only just saved himself by catching the vine. And once quite lately at Christmas, in a fall on the ice of the Elba in skating, when he dislocated his left shoulder in a very painful manner, he is doing quite well, I believe, but it was sad to have such a shadow from the German Christmas tree, and he a stranger.
In art, however, I understand that it does not do to be headlong, but patient and laborious. And there is a love strong enough even in me to overcome nature. I apprehend what you mean in the criticism you just intimate, and shall turn it over and over in my mind until I get practical good from it. What no mere critic sees, but what you, an artist, know, is the difference between the thing desired and the thing attained, between the idea in the writer's mind and the Edolon cast off in his work. All the effort, the quickening of the breath, and beating of the heart in pursuit, which is ruffling and injurious to the general effect of a composition, all which you call insistency, and which many would call superfluity, and which is superfluous in a sense, you can pardon, because you understand.
The great chasm between the thing I say and the thing I would say—the Would be quite dispiriting to me, in spite even of such kindness as of yours, if the desire did not master the despondency. Oh, for a horse with wings! It is wrong of me to write so of myself. Only you put your finger on the root of a fault which has, to my fancy, been a little misapprehended. I do not say everything I think, as has been said of me by master critics. But I take every means to say what I think, which is different, or I fancy so.
In one thing, however, you are wrong. Why should you deny the full measure of my delight and benefit from your writings? I could tell you why you should not. You have in your vision two worlds, or, to use the language of the schools of the day, you are both subjective and objective in the habits of your mind. You can deal both with abstract thought, and with human passion in the most passionate sense. Thus you have an immense grasp in art, and no one at all accustomed to consider the usual forms of it could help regarding with reverence and gladness the gradual expansion of your powers. Then you are masculine to the height, and I, as a woman, have studied some of your gestures of language and intonation wistfully.
As a thing beyond me far, and the more admirable for being beyond.
Of your new work I hear with delight. How good of you to tell me! And it is not dramatic in the strict sense I am to understand. Am I right in understanding so? And you speak in your own person to the winds? No, but to the thousand living sympathies which will awake to hear you. A great dramatic power may develop itself otherwise than in the formal drama, and I have been guilty of wishing before this hour, for reasons which I will not thrust upon you after all my tedious writing, that you would give the public a poem, unassociated directly or indirectly with the stage, for a trial on the popular heart. I reverence the drama, but—but I break in on myself out of consideration for you. I might have done it, you will think, before.
I vex your serene sleep of the virtuous like a nightmare. Do not say no, I am sure I do. As to the vain parlance of the world, I did not talk of the honour of your acquaintance, without a true sense of honour, indeed. But I shall willingly exchange it all, and now, if you please, at this moment, for fear of worldly mutabilities, for the delight of your friendship. Believe me, therefore, dear Mr. Browning, faithfully yours, and gratefully, Elizabeth B. Barrett. For Mr. Kenyon's kindness, as I see it, no theory will account. I class it with mesmerism for that reason.
New Cross, Hatcham, Monday Night, Postmark, January 28th, 1845. Dear Miss Barrett, Your books lie on my table here, at arm's length from me, in this old room where I sit all day, and when my head aches, or wanders, or strikes work, as now and then it will, I take my chance for either green-covered volume as it were so much fresh trefoil to feel in one's hands this winter-time, And round I turn, and, putting a decisive elbow on three or four half-done-with bells of mine, read, read, read, and just as I have shut up the book and walked to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there, and that in an unwise hour I engaged to do so. Meanwhile the days go by. The White Throat is come and sings now.
And as I would not have you, look down on me from your white heights as promise-breaker, evader, or forgetter, if I could help, and as, if I am very candid and contrite, you may find it in your heart to write to me again, who knows? I shall say at once that the said faults cannot be lost, must be somewhere, and shall be faithfully brought you back whenever they turn up, as people tell one of missing matters. I am rather exacting myself with my own gentle audience, and get to say spiteful things about them when they are backward in their dues of appreciation. But really, really, could I be quite sure that anybody as good as—I must go on, I suppose, and say, as myself, even—were honestly to feel towards me as I do towards the writer of Bertha, and the drama, and the Duchess, and the page, and—the two whole volumes!
I should be paid after a fashion, I know. One thing I can do—pencil, if you like, and annotate and dissertate upon that I love most and least—I think I can do it, that is. Here an odd memory comes of a friend who, volunteering such a service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality in a side column of short criticisms on sonnet the first, and starting off the beginning three lines with, of course, bad, worse, worst, Made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run of his epithets, Worser, Worserer, Worserist, pay off the second turzit in full. No, Bader, Baderer, Baderist fell to the second's allowance, and Worser, etc. answered the demands of the third. Worser, Worsterer, Worsterist supplied the emergency of the fourth, and bestowing his last Worsteristist and Worsstistist On lines thirteen and fourteen, my friend, slapping his forehead like an emptied strong-box, frankly declared himself bankrupt and honourably incompetent to satisfy the reasonable expectations of the rest of the series.
What an illustration of the law by which opposite ideas suggest opposite, and contrary images come together! See now how, of that friendship you offer me, and here Juliet's word rises to my lips, I feel sure once and for ever. I have got already, I see, into this little pet handwriting of mine, not anyone else's, which scratches on as if theatrical copyists, ah, me, and Bradbury and Evans' reader were not. But you shall get something better than this nonsense one day, if you will have patience with me. Hardly better, though, because this does me real good, gives real relief to write. After all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me, and that stops me. Spring is to come, however. If you hate writing to me, as I hate writing to nearly everybody, I pray you never write, if you do, as you say, care for anything I have done.
I will simply assure you that, meaning to begin work in deep earnest, begin without affectation, God knows, I do not know what will help me more than hearing from you, and therefore, If you do not so very much hate it, I know I shall hear from you, and very little more about your tiring me. Ever yours faithfully, Robert Browning.
-
3 03 - February 1845 51:33
Transcriber's note, so, in original, should be Wimpole Street. Why, how could I hate to write to you, dear Mr. Browning? Could you believe in such a thing? If nobody likes writing to everybody, except such professional letter-writers as you and I are not, yet everybody likes writing to somebody, and it would be strange and contradictory if I were not always delighted both to hear from you and to write to you. This talking upon paper being as good a social pleasure as another, when our means are somewhat straightened. As for me, I have done most of my talking by post of late years, as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottos on the walls. Not that I write to many in the way of regular correspondence, as our friend Mr.
Horne predicates of me in his romances, which is mere romancing. But that there are a few who will write and be written to by me without a sense of injury. Dear Miss Mitford, for instance. You do not know her, I think, personally, although she was the first to tell me, when I was very ill and insensible to all the glories of the world except poetry, of the grand scene in Pippa Passes. She has filled a large drawer in this room with delightful letters, heart-warm and soul-warm. Driftings of Nature, if the sunshine could drift like snow, and which, if they should ever fall the way of all writing into print, would assume the folio shape as a matter of course, and take rank on the lowest shelf of libraries, with Benedictine editions of the Fathers, Caetel Epomena.
I write this to you to show how I can have pleasure in letters, and never think them too long, nor too frequent, nor too illegible from being written in little pet hands. I can read any manuscript except the writing on the pyramids. And if you will only promise to treat me en bon camarade, without reference to the conventionalities of ladies and gentlemen, taking no thought for your sentences, nor for mine, nor for your blots, Nor for mine. Nor for your blunt speaking. Nor for mine. Nor for your bad spelling. Reader's note. Two Ds in bad, one L in spelling. Nor for mine. And if you agree to send me a blotted thought whenever you're in the mind for it, and with as little ceremony and less legibility than you would think it necessary to employ towards your printer, Why, then, I am ready to sign and seal the contract, and to rejoice in being articled as your correspondent.
Only don't let us have any constraint, any ceremony. Don't be civil to me when you feel rude, nor loquacious when you are inclined to silence, nor yielding in the manners when you are perverse in the mind. See how out of the world I am. Suffer me to profit by it in almost the only profitable circumstance. And let us rest from the bowing and the curtsying, you and I, on each side. You will find me an honest man, on the whole, if rather hasty and prejudging, which is a different thing from prejudice, at the worst. And we have great sympathies in common, and I am inclined to look up to you in many things, and to learn as much of everything as you will teach me. On the other hand, you must prepare yourself to forbear and to forgive, will you?
While I throw off the ceremony, I hold the faster to the kindness.
Is it true, as you say, that I know so little of you? And is it true, as others say, that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature, that, in the minor sense, man is not made in the image of God? It is not true, to my mind, and therefore it is not true that I know little of you. Except in as far as it is true, which I believe, that your greatest works are to come. Need I assure you that I shall always hear with the deepest interest every word you will say to me of what you are doing or about to do. I hear of the old room and the bells lying about, with an interest which you may guess at, perhaps. And when you tell me besides of my poems being there, and of your caring for them so much beyond the tide-mark of my hopes, the pleasure rounds itself into a charm and prevents its own expression.
Overjoyed I am with this cordial sympathy, but it is better, I feel, to try to justify it by future work than to thank you for it now. I think, if I may dare to name myself with you in the poetic relation— that we both have high views of the art we follow, and steadfast purpose in the pursuit of it, but that we should not, either of us, be likely to be thrown from the course by the casting of any Atalanta ball of speedy popularity. But I do not know, I cannot guess, whether you are liable to be pained deeply by hard criticism and cold neglect, such as original writers like yourself are too often exposed to, or whether the love of art is enough for you, and the exercise of art the filling joy of your life.
Not that praise must not always of necessity be delightful to the artist, but that it may be redundant to his content. Do you think so? Or not? It appears to me that poets who, like Keats, are highly susceptible to criticism, must be jealous in their own persons of the future honour of their works, because if a work is worthy, honour must follow it, though the worker should not live to see that following overtaking. Now, is it not enough that the work be honoured? Enough, I mean, for the worker? And is it not enough to keep down a poet's ordinary wearing anxieties, to think that if his work be worthy it will have honour, and if not, that Sparta must have nobler sons than he? I am writing nothing applicable, I see, to anything in question, but when one falls into a favourite train of thought one indulges oneself in thinking on.
I began in thinking and wondering what sort of artistic constitution you had, being determined, as you may observe, with a sarcastic smile at the impertinence, to set about knowing as much as possible of you immediately. Then you spoke of your gentle audience. You began. And I, who know that you have not one but many enthusiastic admirers, the fit and few in the intense meaning, Yet not the diffused fame which will come to you presently, wrote on down the margin of the subject till I parted from it altogether. But after all we are on the proper matter of sympathy, and after all, and after all that has been said and mused upon, the natural ills, the anxiety and wearing out experienced by the true artist, is not the good immeasurably greater than the evil?
Is it not great good, and great joy? For my part, I wonder sometimes, I surprise myself wondering, how without such an object and purpose of life, people find it worthwhile to live at all. And for happiness, why, my only idea of happiness, as far as my personal enjoyment is concerned, but I have been straightened in some respects and in comparison with the majority of livers, lies deep in poetry and its associations. And then, The escape from pangs of heart and bodily weakness, when you throw off yourself, what you feel to be yourself, into another atmosphere, and into other relations where your life may spread its wings out new, and gather on every separate plume a brightness from the sun of the sun.
Is it possible that imaginative writers should be so fond of depreciating and lamenting over their own destiny? Possible, certainly, but reasonable not at all, and grateful less than anything.
My faults, my faults. Shall I help you? Ah, you see them too well, I fear. And do you know that I also have something of your feeling about being about to begin, or I should dare to praise you for having it? But in you it is different. It is in you a virtue. When Prometheus had recounted a long list of sorrows to be endured by Io, and declared at last that he was mede por en proemios , poor Io burst out crying. And when the author of Paracelsus and the Bells and Pomegranates says that he is only going to begin, we may well, to take the opposite idea, as you write, rejoice and clap our hands. Yet I believe that, whatever you may have done, you will do what is greater. It is my faith for you.
And how I should like to know what poets have been your sponsors, to promise and vow for you. And whether you have held true to early tastes, or leapt violently from them, and what books you read, and what hours you write in, how curious I could prove myself, if it isn't proved already. But this is too much, indeed, past all bearing, I suspect. Well, but if I ever write to you again—I mean, if you wish it—it may be in the other extreme of shortness. So do not take me for a born heroine of Richardson, or think that I sin always to this length, else you might indeed repent your quotation from Juliet, which I guessed at once, and of course, I have no joy in this contract to-day. It is too unadvised, too rash and sudden.
Ever faithfully yours, Elizabeth B. Barrett.
Hatcham, Tuesday. Postmark, February 11th, 1845. Dear Miss Barrett, People would hardly ever tell falsehoods about a matter if they had been let tell truth in the beginning, for it is hard to profane one's very self, and nobody who has, for instance, used certain words and ways to a mother or a father could, even if by the devil's help he would, reproduce or mimic them with any effect to anybody else that was to be won over. And so, if I love you were always outspoken when it might be, there would, I suppose, be no fear of its desecration at any after time. But lo! only last night I had to write, on the part of Mr. Carlyle, to a certain ungainly foolish gentleman who keeps back from him with all the fussy impotence of stupidity.
Not bad feeling, alas, for that we could deal with. A certain manuscript letter of Cromwell's, which completes the collection now going to press. And this Long Ears had to be dear-sirred and obedient-servanted, till I said, to use a mild word, commend me to the sincerities of this kind of thing. When I spoke of you knowing little of me, one of the senses in which I meant so was this. That I would not well vowel-point my commonplace letters and syllables with a masoretic other sound and sense, make my dear something intenser than dear's in ordinary, and yours ever a thought more significant than the run of its like. And all this came of your talking of tiring me, being too envious, etc., etc., which I should never have heard of, had the plain truth looked out of my letter with its unmistakable eyes.
Now, what you say of the bowing and convention that is to be, and temps de façon that are not to be, helps me once and forever, For I have not a right to say simply that, for reasons I know, for other reasons that I don't exactly know, but might if I choose to think a little, and for still other reasons which, most likely, all the choosing and thinking in the world would not make me know, I had rather hear from you than see anybody else. Never you care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers. Are not their fates written? There! Don't you answer this, please, but mind, it is on record, and now then, with a lighter conscience, I shall begin replying to your questions.
But then, what I have printed gives no knowledge of me. It evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will, and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion—that, I think—but I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end. R.B. A poem. And next, if I speak, and God knows feel, as if what you have read were sadly imperfect demonstrations of even mere ability, it is from no absurd vanity, though it might seem so. These scenes and song scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean fairs I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you.
And no doubt then, precisely, does the poor drudge that carries the cresset set himself most busily to trim the wig. For don't think I want to say I have not worked hard. This head of mine knows better, but the work has been inside, and not when at stated times I held up my light to you, and, that there is no self-delusion here, I would prove to you, and nobody else, even by opening this desk I write on, and showing what stuff, in the way of wood, I could make a great bonfire with, if I might only knock the whole clumsy top off my tower. Of course, every writing body says the same, so I gain nothing by the avowal. But when I remember how I have done what was published, and half done what may never be, I say with some right you can know but little of me.
Still, I hope sometimes, though phrenologists will have it that I cannot, and I'm doing better with this darling Luria so safe in my head, and a tiny slip of paper I cover with my thumb. Then you inquire about my sensitiveness to criticism, And I shall be glad to tell you exactly, because I have, more than once, taken a course you might else not understand. I shall live always, that is for me, I am living here this 1845, that is for London. I write from a thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief that, after every drawback and shortcoming, I do my best, all things considered, that is, for me, and so being, the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope, in no wise affect me.
But of course I must, if, for merely scientific purposes, know all this, 1845, its ways and doings, and something I do know, as that for a dozen cabbages, if I pleased to grow them in the garden here, I might demand, say, a dozen pence at Covent Garden Market. And that for a dozen scenes, of the average goodness, I may challenge as many plaudits at the theatre close by, and a dozen pages of verse, brought to the rialto where verse merchants most do congregate, ought to bring me a fair proportion of the reviewer's gold currency, seeing the other traders pouch their winnings, as I do see. Well, when they won't pay me for my cabbages, nor praise me for my poems, I may, if I please, say, more's the shame.
And bid both parties decamp to the crows, in Greek phrase, and yet go very lighthearted back to a garden full of rose-trees, and a soul full of comforts. If they had bought my greens, I should have been able to buy the last number of punch, and go through the toll-gate of Waterloo Bridge, and give the blind clarionet player a trifle, and all without changing my gold. If they had taken to my books, my father and mother would have been proud of this, and the other favourable critique, and, at least so folks hold, I should have to pay Mr. Moxon less by a few pounds, whereas—but you see—indeed, I force myself to say ever and anon, in the interest of the market gardener's regular, and Keats's proper, it's nothing to you— Critics, hucksters, all of you, if I have this garden and this conscience, I might go diet Rome, or take to gin and the newspaper, for what you would care.
So I don't quite lay open my resources to everybody. But it does so happen that I have met with much more than I could have expected in this matter of kindly and prompt recognition. I never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers, and no bad reviewers. I am quite content with my share. No, what I laughed at at my gentle audience is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place. Enough to make an apostle swear. That does make me savage. Never the other kind of people. Why, think now, take your own drama of exile, and let me send it to the first twenty men and women that shall knock at your door to-day and after. of whom the first five are the postmen, the seller of cheap sealing-wax, Mr.
Hawkins, Jr., the butcher for orders, and the tax-gatherer. Will you let me, by Cornelius Agrippa's assistance, force these five and these fellows to read, and report on this drama? And, when I have put these faithful reports into fair English, do you believe they would be better than, if as good as the general run of periodical criticisms? Not they, I will venture to affirm. But then, once again, I get these people together and give them your book, and persuade them, moreover, that by praising it the postman will be helping its author to divide Longacre into two beats, one of which she will take with half the salary and all the red collar, that a sealing-wax vendor will see red wafers brought into vogue, and so on with the rest, And won't you just wish for your spectators and observers and Newcastle-upon-Tyne hebdomidal mercuries back again?
You see the inference. I do sincerely esteem it a perfectly providential and miraculous thing that they are so well behaved in ordinary, these critics. And for Keats and Tennyson to go softly all their days for a gruff word or two is quite inexplicable to me, and always has been. Tennyson reads the Quarterly, and does as they bid him, with the most solemn face in the world. Out goes this, in goes that, all is changed and ranged. Oh, me! Out comes the sun, in comes the times, and eleven strikes. It does, already. And I have to go to town, and I have no alternative but that this story of the critic and the poet, the bear and the fiddle, should begin but break off in the middle. Yet I doubt. Nor will you henceforth, I know, say, I vex you, I am sure, by this lengthy writing.
Mind that spring is coming, for all this snow, And know me for yours ever faithfully, R. Browning. I don't dare, yet I will, ask, can you read this? Because I could write a little better, but not so fast. Do you keep writing just as you do now?
50 Wimpole Street, February 17, 1845. Dear 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 manuscript upon principle. Think what an immense quantity of physical energy must go into 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 copy-book, and dotted his eyes 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 also, as you say, the lamp is trimmed behind the wall, and the act of utterance is the evidence of foregone study still more than it is the occasion to study. The deep interest with which I read all that you had the kindness to write to me of yourself, you must trust me for, as I find it hard to express it. It is sympathy in one way, and interest every way. And now, see, although you proved to me with admirable logic that, for reasons which you know, and reasons which you don't know, I couldn't possibly know anything about you, though that is all true and proven, which is better than true, I really did understand of you before I was told exactly what you told me.
Yes, I did indeed. I felt sure that, as a poet, you fronted the future, and that your chief works in your own apprehension were to come. Oh, I take no credit of sagacity for it, as I did not long ago to my sisters and brothers, when I professed to have knowledge of all their friends, whom I never saw in my life, by the image coming with the name. And threw them into shouts of laughter by giving out all the blue eyes and black eyes and hazel eyes, and noses Roman and Gothic ticketed aright for the Mr. Smiths and the Miss Hawkinses, and hit the bullseye and the true features of the case ten times out of twelve. But you are different. You are to be made out by the comparative anatomy system. You have thrown out fragments of us, sublime, Indicative of soul-mammothism, and you live to develop your nature, if you live.
That is easy and plain. You have taken a great range, from those high, faint notes of the mystics which are beyond personality, to dramatic impersonations gruff with nature. Grrr, you swine! And when these things are thrown into harmony, as in a manner they are in Pippa purses, Which I could find in my heart to covet the authorship of more than any of your works. The combinations of effect must always be striking and noble, and you must feel yourself drawn on to such combinations more and more. But I do not, you say, know yourself, you. I only know abilities and faculties. Well, then, teach me yourself, you. I will not insist on the knowledge, and in fact you have not written the R.B. poem yet.
Your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. I see you only in your moon. Do tell me all of yourself that you can and will, before the R.B. poem comes out. And what is Luria? A poem and not a drama. I mean, a poem not in the dramatic form. Well... I have wondered at you sometimes, not for daring, but for bearing to trust your noble works into the great mill of the rank popular playhouse, to be ground to pieces between the teeth of vulgar actors and actresses. I, for one, would as soon have my soul among lions. There is a fascination in it, says Miss Mitford, and I am sure there must be to account for it. Publix in the mass are bad enough, but to distill the dregs of the public, and baptize oneself in that acrid moisture, where can be the temptation?
I could swear by Shakespeare, as was once sworn by those dead at Marathon, that I do not see where. I love the drama, too. I look to our old dramatists as to our kings and princes in poetry. I loved them through all the deeps of their abominations. But the theatre in those days was a better medium between the people and the poet, and the press in those days was a less sufficient medium than now. Still, the poet suffered by the theatre even then, and the reasons are very obvious.
How true, how true is all you say about critics. My convictions follow you in every word. And I delighted to read your views of the poet's right aspect towards criticism. I read them with the most complete appreciation and sympathy. I have sometimes thought that it would be a curious and instructive process, as illustrative of the wisdom and apprehensiveness of critics, if anyone would collect the critical soliloquies of every age touching its own literature, as far as such may be extant. and confer them with the literary product of the said ages. Professor Wilson has begun something of the kind, apparently, in his initiatory paper of the last Blackwood number on critics, beginning with Dryden, but he seems to have no design in his notice.
It is a mere critique on the critic. And then he should have begun earlier than Dryden, earlier even than Sir Philip Sidney. Who, in the noble discourse on poetry, gives such singular evidence of being stone-critic blind to the gods who moved around him. As far as I can remember, he saw even Shakespeare, but indifferently. Oh, it was in his eyes quite an unillumed age, that period of Elizabeth which we see full of suns. And few can see what is close to the eyes, though they run their heads against it. The denial of contemporary genius is the rule rather than the exception. No one counts the eagles in the nest till there is a rush of wings, and, lo, they are flown. And here we speak of understanding men such as the Sydneys and the Drydens.
Of the great body of critics you observe rightly that they are better than might be expected of their badness. Only the fact of their influence is no less undeniable than the reason why they should not be influential. The brazen kettles will be taken for oracles all the world over. But the influence is for today, for this hour, not for tomorrow and the day after, unless, indeed, as you say, the poet do himself perpetuate the influence by submitting to it. Do you know Tennyson? That is, with a face-to-face knowledge. I have a great admiration for him. In execution he is exquisite, and, in music, a most subtle wear out to the ear of fine airs. That such a poet should submit blindly to the suggestions of his critics—I do not say that suggestions from without may not be accepted, with discrimination sometimes, to the benefit of the acceptor—blindly and implicitly.
to the suggestions of his critics, is much as if Babbage were to take my opinion and undo his calculating machine by it. Napoleon called poetry science creuse, which, although he was not scientific in poetry himself, is true enough. But anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then, these are more serious things. Yes, and it does delight me to hear of your garden full of roses, and soul full of comforts. You have the right to both. You have the key to both. You have written enough to live by, though only beginning to write, as you say of yourself. And this reminds me to remind you that when I talked of coveting most the authorship of your Pippa, I did not mean to call it your finest work—you might reproach me for that—but just to express a personal feeling.
Do you know what it is to covet your neighbour's poetry? Not his fame, but his poetry? I dare say not. You are too generous. And in fact, beauty is beauty. And whether it comes by our own hand or another's, blessed be the coming of it. I, besides, feel that. And yet—and yet—I have been aware of a feeling within me which has spoken two or three times to the effect of a wish that I had been visited with the vision of Pippa before you, and—confite or tibi—I confess the baseness of it. The conception is to my mind most exquisite and altogether original, and the contrast in the working out of the plan singularly expressive of various faculty.
Is the poem under your thumb emerging from it, and in what metre? May I ask such questions?
And does Mr. Carlyle tell you that he has forbidden all singing to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing? And have you told Mr. Carlyle that song is work, and also the condition of work? I am a devout sitter at his feet, and it is an effort to me to think him wrong in anything, and once, when he told me to write prose and not verse, I fancied that his opinion was I had mistaken my calling. A fancy which, in infinite kindness and gentleness, he stooped immediately to correct. I shall never forget the grace of that kindness. But then, for him to have thought ill of me, would not have been strange. I often think ill of myself, as God knows. But for Carlyle to think of putting away, even for a season, the poetry of the world, was wonderful, and has left me ruffled in my thoughts ever since.
I do not know him personally at all, but as his disciple I ventured, by an exceptional motive, to send him my poems, and I heard from him as a consequence. Dear and noble he is indeed, and a poet unaware of himself, all but the sense of music. You feel it so, do you not? And the dear sir has let him have the letter of Cromwell, I hope, and satisfied the obedient servant. The curious thing in this world is not the stupidity, but the upper-handism of the stupidity. The geese are in the capital, and the Romans in the farmyard, and it seems all quite natural that it should be so, both to geese and Romans. But there are things you say which seem to me supernatural, for reasons which I know, and for reasons which I don't know.
You will let me be grateful to you, will you not? You must, if you will or not. And also, I would not wait for more leave, if I could but see your desk, as I do your death's heads and the spiderwebs appertaining, but the soul of Cornelius Agrippa fades from me. Ever faithfully yours, Elizabeth B. Barrett. 1845. Real warm spring, dear Miss Barrett, and the birds know it, and in spring I shall see you, surely see you, for when did I once fail to get whatever I had set my heart upon, as I ask myself sometimes with a strange fear? I took up this paper to write a great deal. Now I don't think I shall write much. I shall see you, I say. That Luria you inquire about shall be my last play. For it is but a play, woes me.
I have one done here, a soul's tragedy, as it is properly enough called, but that would not do to end with, end I will, and Luria is a moor of Othello's country, and devotes himself to something he thinks Florence, and the old fortune follows. All in my brain yet, but the bright weather helps, and I will soon loosen my braccio and putcio, a pale, discontented man, and Tiburzio, the Pisan. Good true fellow, this one, and Domitia, the lady. Loosen all these on dear foolish, ravishing must his folly be, golden-hearted Luria, all these with their worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways. And, for me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with these as with him. So there can no good come of keeping this wild company any longer, and Luria and the other sadder ruin of one Chiapino These got rid of.
I will do as you bid me, and, say first I have some romances and lyrics, all dramatic to dispatch, and then I shall stoop of a sudden under and out of this dancing ring of men and women hand in hand, and stand still a while, should my eyes dazzle, and when that's over they will be gone and you will be there, pas vrai? For, as I think I told you, I always shiver involuntarily when I look. No glance at this first poem of mine to be. Now, I call it, what upon my soul, for a solemn matter it is, what is to be done now, believed now, so far as it has been revealed to me? Solemn words, truly, and to find myself writing them to anyone else. Enough now. I know Tennyson face to face, no more than that.
I know Carlyle and love him. Know him so well that I would have told you he had shaken that grand head of his at singing, so thoroughly does he love and live by it. When I last saw him, a fortnight ago, he turned from I don't know what other talk, quite abruptly on me with, Did you never try to write a song? Of all things in the world, that I should be proudest to do. Next came his definition of a song. Then, with an appealing look to Mrs. C., I always say that some day, in spite of nature and my stars, I shall burst into a song. He is not mechanically musical, he meant, and the music is the poetry, he holds, and should enwrap the thought, as Dunn says, An amber drop enwraps a bee. And then he began to recite an old Scotch song, stopping at the first rude couplet.
The beginning words are merely to set the tune, they tell me. And then again at the couplet about, or to the effect that, give me, but in broad Scotch, give me but my lass, I care not for my kogi. He says, quoth Carlyle magisterially, that if you allow him the love of his lass, you may take away all else, even his kogi, his cup or can, and he cares not, just as a professor expound like a fron. And just before I left England, six months ago, did I not hear him croon? If not certainly sing, Charlie is my darling, my darling with an adoring emphasis. And then he stood back, as it were, from the song to look at it better, and said, How must that notion of ideal wondrous perfection have impressed itself in this old Jacobite's young cavalier?
They go to save their land and the young cavalier. When I, who care nothing about such a rag of a man, cannot but feel as he felt in speaking his words after him. After saying which, he would be sure to counsel everybody to get their heads clear of all singing. Don't let me forget to clap hands. We got the letter, dearly bought as it was by the dear sirs, etc., and insignificant scrap as it proved, but still it is got, to my encouragement in diplomacy. Who told you of my skulls and spider-webs? Horn? Last year I petted extraordinarily a fine fellow, a garden-spider, There was the singularity, the thin, clever even for a spider sort, and they are so spirited and sly, all of them. This kind makes a long cone of a web, with a square chamber of vantage at the end, and there he sits loosely and looks about, a great fellow that housed himself with real gusto in the jaws of a great skull, whence he watched me as I wrote, and I remember speaking to Horn about his good points.
Phrenologists look gravely at that great skull, by the way, and hope, in their grim manner, that its owner made a good end. He looks quietly now, out at the green little hill behind. I have no little insight to the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me. Very revolting, all the same. Portraits obliged to face each other for ever. Prints put together in portfolios. My Polidoro's perfect Andromeda, along with Boer's carousing by Ostad. Where I found her, my own father's doing, or I would say more. And when I have said I like Pippa better than anything else I have done yet, I shall have answered all you bad me.
And now may I begin questioning? No, for it is all a pure delight to me, so that you do but write. I never was without good, kind, generous friends and lovers, so they say, so they were and are. Perhaps they came at the wrong time. I never wanted them, though that makes no difference in my gratitude, I trust. But I know myself, surely, and always have done so, for is there not somewhere the little book I first printed when a boy, with John Mill, the metaphysical head, his marginal note that the writer possesses a deeper self-consciousness than I ever knew in a sane human being? So I never deceived myself much, nor called my feelings for people other than they were. And who has a right to say, if I have not, that I had, but I said that, supernatural or no?
Pray tell me too of your present doings and projects, and never write yourself grateful to me, who am grateful, very grateful to you, for none of your words but I take in earnest. And tell me if spring be not coming. Come, and I will take to writing the gravest of letters, because this beginning is for gladness' sake, like Carlyle's song-couplet. My head aches a little to-day, too, and as poor dear Kirk White said to the moon from his heap of mathematical papers, I throw aside the learned sheet, I cannot choose but gaze, she looks so mildly sweet. Out on the foolish phrase, but there's hard rhyming without it. Ever yours faithfully, Robert Browning. 50 Wimpole Street, February 27th, 1845 Yes, but, dear Mr.
Browning, I want the spring according to the new style, mine, and not the old one of you and the rest of the poets. To me, unhappily, the snowdrop is much the same as the snow. It feels as cold underfoot. And I have grown sceptical about the voice of the turtle, the east winds blow so loud. April is a Parthian with a dart, and May, at least the early part of it, a spy in the camp. That is my idea of what you call spring, mine in the new style. A little later comes my spring, and indeed after such severe weather from which I have just escaped with my life, I may thank it for coming at all. How happy you are to be able to listen to the birds without the commentary of the east wind, which, like other commentaries, spoils the music.
And how happy I am to listen to you when you write such kind, open-hearted letters to me. I am delighted to hear all you say to me of yourself, and Luria, and Spider, and to do him no dishonour in the association of the great teacher of the age, Carlisle, who is also yours and mine. He fills the office of a poet, does he not, by analysing humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions of the hour. That is, strictly speaking, the office of the poet, is it not? And he discharges it fully, and with a wider intelligibility, perhaps, as far as the contemporary period is concerned, than if he did forthwith burst into a song. But how I do wonder! I meant to say, and I will call myself back to say, that spring will really come some day, I hope and believe, and the warm, settled weather with it, and that then I shall be probably fitter for certain pleasures than I can appear even to myself now.
And in the meantime I seem to see Luria instead of you. I have visions and dream dreams. And the soul's tragedy, which sounds to me like the step of a ghost in an old drama. And you are not to think that I blaspheme the drama, dear Mr. Browning, or that I ever thought of exhorting you to give up the solemn robes and tread of the buskin. It is the theatre which vulgarises these things, the modern theatre in which we see no altar, where the thimelé is replaced by the caprice of a popular actor. And also I have a fancy that your great dramatic power would work more clearly and audibly in the less definite mould, but you ride your own faculty as Oceanus did his seahorse, directing it by your will, and woe to the impertinence which would dare to say, turn this way, or turn from that way.
It should not be my impertinence. Do not think I blaspheme the drama. I have gone through all such reading as should never be read, that is, by women, through my love of it, on the contrary, and the dramatic faculty is strong in you, and therefore, as I speak unto a wise man, judge what I say. For myself and my own doings, you shall hear directly what I have been doing and what I am about to do. Some years ago, as perhaps you may have heard, but I hope not, for the few who hear of it the better, some years ago I translated, or rather undid, into English, The Prometheus of Aeschylus. To speak of this production moderately, not modestly, it is the most miserable of all miserable versions of the class.
It was completed in the first place in thirteen days, the iambics thrown into blank verse. The lyrics into rhymed octosyllabics and the like, and the whole together as cold as Caucasus, and as flat as the nearest plain. To account for this the haste may be something, but if my mind had been properly awakened at the time I might have made still more haste and done it better. Well, the comfort is that the little book was unadvertised and unknown, and that most of the copies, through my entreaty of my father, are shut up in the wardrobe of his bedroom. If ever I get well, I shall show my joy by making a bonfire of them. In the meantime, the recollection of this sin of mine has been my nightmare and day-mare, too, and the sin has been the blot on my escutcheon.
I could look in nobody's face with a, Thou canst not say I did it. I know I did it. And so I resolved to wash away the transgression, and translate the tragedy over again. It was an honest, straightforward proof of repentance, was it not? And I have completed it, except the transcription and last polishing. If Aeschylus stands at the foot of my bed now, I shall have little breath to front him. I have done my duty by him, not indeed according to his claims, but in proportion to my faculty. Whether I shall ever publish or not, remember, remains to be considered. That is a different side of the subject. If I do, it may be in a magazine, or—but this is another ground. And then I have in my head to associate with the version a monodrama of my own—not a long poem, but a monologue of Aeschylus as he sat a blind exile on the flats of Sicily, and recounted the past to his own soul, just before the eagle cracked his great massy skull with a stone.
But my chief intention just now— is the writing of a sort of novel poem, a poem as completely modern as Geraldine's courtship, running into the midst of our conventions and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like where angels fear to tread, and so meeting face to face and without mask the humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly. That is my intention. It is not mature enough yet to be called a plan. I'm waiting for a story, and I won't take one, because I want to make one, and I like to make my own stories, because then I can take liberties with them in the treatment.
Who told me of your skulls and spiders? Why, couldn't I know it without being told? Did Cornelius Agrippa know nothing without being told? Mr. Horne never spoke it to my ears. I never saw him face to face in my life, although we have corresponded for long and long, and he never wrote it to my eyes. Perhaps he does not know that I know it. Well, then, if I were to say that I heard it from you yourself, how would you answer? And it was so. Why, are you not aware that these are the days of mesmerism and clairvoyance? Are you an infidel?" I have believed in your skulls for the last year, for my part. And I have some sympathy in your habit of feeling for chairs and tables. I remember when I was a child, and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place.
This not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude. Other books I used to treat in a like manner, and to talk to the trees and the flowers was a natural inclination. But between me and that time the cypresses grow thick and dark.
Is it true that your wishes fulfil themselves? And when they do— Are they not bitter to your taste? Do you not wish them unfulfilled? Oh, this life, this life! There is comfort in it, they say, and I almost believe, but the brightest place in the house is the leaning out of the window, at least for me.
Of course you are self-conscious. How could you be a poet otherwise? Tell me. Ever faithfully yours, E.B.B. And was the little book written with Mr. Mill pure metaphysics, or what?
-
4 04 - March 1845 32:14
The letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, section 3, March 1845. Saturday night, March 1, 1845. I do find now that with the octaves on octaves of quite new golden strings you enlarged the compass of my life's harp with, there is added, too, such a tragic etc.
But if my truest heart's wishes avail, as they have hitherto done, you shall laugh at east winds yet as I do. See now, this sad feeling is so strange to me that I must write it out. Must, and you might give me great, the greatest pleasure for years, and yet find me as passive as a stone used to wine libations, and as ready in expressing my sense of them, but when I am pained I find the old theory of the uselessness of communicating the circumstances of it singularly untenable. I have been spoiled in this world, to such an extent, indeed, that I often reason out, may it dawn on me, I shall not have lost my life, no. Out of all which you are, please, to make a sense, not longer, years ago, knowing nothing about it or you, and I only looked to see what rendering a passage had received that Browning's later translation of the Prometheus, Prometheus.
I did restrain besides my mortals from premeditating death. Chorus. How didst thou medicine the plague-fear of death? I set blind hopes to inhabit in their house. By that gift thou didst, for yours ever, R. B. March 5, 1845. But I did not mean to strike a tragic chord. Indeed, I did not. Sometimes one's melancholy will be uppermost, and sometimes one's mirth. The world goes round, you know. And I suppose that in that letter of mine the melancholy took the turn. As to escaping with my life, it was just a phrase. At least it did not signify more than that the sense of mortality and discomfort of it Is peculiarly strong with me when east winds are blowing and waters freezing. For the rest, I am essentially better, and have been for several winters, and I feel as if it were intended for me to live and not die, and I am reconciled to the feeling.
Yes, I am satisfied to take up with the blind hopes again, and have them in the house with me, for all that I sit by the window. By the way, did the chorus utter scorn in the Meg or Philema? I think not. It is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the window-panes, is it not?
There is an obscurer passage on which I covet your thoughts, where Prometheus, after the sublime declaration that, with a full knowledge of the penalty reserved for him, he had sinned of free will and choice, goes on to say, or to seem to say, that he had not, however, foreseen the extent and detail of the torment, the skyey rocks, and the friendless desolation. See, verse 275. The intention of the poet might have been to magnify to his audience the torment of the martyrdom, but the heroism of the martyr diminishes in proportion, and there appears to be a contradiction and oversight. Or is my view wrong? Tell me, and tell me too, is Aeschylus not the divinest of all the divine Greek souls? People say, after Quintilian, that he is savage and rude, a sort of poetic orson, with his locks all wild.
But I will not hear it of my master. He is strong as Zeus is, and not as a boxer, and tender as power itself, which always is tenderest. But, to go back to the view of life with the blind hopes, you are not to think, whatever I may have written or implied, that I lean either to the philosophy or affectation which beholds the world through darkness instead of light, and speaks of it wailingly. Now may God forbid that it should be so with me. I am not desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion, I come out with two learnt lessons, as I sometimes say, and oftener feel, the wisdom of cheerfulness, and the duty of social intercourse. Anguish has instructed me in joy, and solitude in society.
It has been a wholesome and not unnatural reaction. And altogether I may say that the earth looks brighter to me in proportion to my own deprivations. The laburnum trees and rose trees are plucked up by the roots. But the sunshine is in their places, and the root of the sunshine is above the storms. What we call life is a condition of the soul, and the soul must improve in happiness and wisdom, except by its own fault. These tears in our eyes, these faintings of the flesh, will not hinder such improvement. And I do like to hear testimonies like yours, to happiness. And I feel it to be a testimony of a higher sort than the obvious one. Still, it is obvious, too, that you have been spared, up to this time, the great natural afflictions, against which we are nearly all called, sooner or later, to struggle and wrestle, or your step would not be on the stair quite so lightly.
And so we turn to you, dear Mr. Browning, for comfort and gentle spiriting. Remember that as you owe your unscathed joy to God, you should pay it back to his world, and I thank you for some of it already. Also, writing us from friend to friend, as you say rightly that we are, I ought to confess that of one class of griefs, which has been called to the bitterest, I know as little as you. The cruelty of the world, and the treason of it, the unworthiness of the dearest, Of these griefs I have scanty knowledge. It seems to me from my personal experience that there is kindness everywhere in different proportions, and more goodness and tender-heartedness than we read of in the Moralists. People have been kind to me, even without understanding me, and pitiful to me without approving of me.
Nay, have not the very critics tamed their bare-dom for me, and roared delicately as sucking doves on behalf of me? I have no harm to say of your world, though I am not of it, as you see. And I have the cream of it in your friendship, and a little more, and I do not envy much the milkers of the cows. How kind you are! How kindly and gently you speak to me! Some things you say are very touching, and some surprising. And although I am aware that you unconsciously exaggerate what I can be to you, yet it is delightful to be broad awake and think of you as my friend. May God bless you. Faithfully yours, Elizabeth B. Barrett.
Tuesday morning, postmark, March 12th, 1845. Your letter made me so happy, dear Miss Barrett, that I have kept quiet this while. Is it too great a shame to begin to want more news of you, and to say so? Because there has been a bitter wind ever since. Will you grant me a great favour? Always when you write, though about your own works, not Greek plays merely, put me in, always, a little official bulletin line that shall say, I am better, or still better, will you? That is done then, and now what do I wish to tell you first? The poem you propose to make for the times, the fearless, fresh, living work you describe, is the only poem to be undertaken now by you or anyone that is a poet at all, the only reality, only effective piece of service to be rendered God and man.
It is what I have been all my life intending to do, and now shall be much, much nearer doing, since you will along with me. And you can do it, I know, and am sure, so sure, that I could find in my heart to be jealous of your stopping in the way even to translate the Prometheus, though the accompanying monologue will make amends too. Or shall I set you a task I meant for myself once upon a time, which, oh, how you would fulfil! Restore the Prometheus purphoros, as Shelley did the Luomenos. When I say restore, I know, or very much fear, that the Purphoros was the same with the Purcaeos, which, by a fragment, we sorrowfully ascertain to have been a satiric drama. But surely the capabilities of the subject are much greater than in this we now wonder at.
Nay, they include all those of this last, for just see how magnificently the story unrolls itself. The beginning of Jupiter's dynasty. The calm in heaven after the storm. The ascending. Stop. I will get the book and give the words. Hoppus Tacistaton patroion eis thronon cathetzet. Euphus daimosin neme gera aloisin alla. Aesculus, Prometheus, two to eight and following. When at first he filled his father's throne, he instantly made various gifts of glory to the gods. All the while Prometheus being the first among the first in honour, as Caitoi theoissi tois neoiss tutoiss geratis allos, ego pantalos deorise, for see, their honours to these new-made gods, what other gave but I. Then the one black hand-cloudlet storming the joyous blue and gold everywhere.
Broton, Deiton, Talaiporon, Logon, Uch, Eskain, Udena. Alone of men, of miserable men, he took no count. And the design of Zeus to blot out the whole race and plant a new one. And Prometheus with his grand solitary Ego der Tholmesa. But I dared it. And his saving them as the first good from annihilation. And then comes the darkening brow of Zeus, and estrangement from the benign circle of grateful gods, and the dissuasion of old confederates, and all the right that one may fancy in might, the strongest reasons, pauestai tropu philanthropu, leave off his old trick of loving man, coming from the own mind of Titan, if you will, And all the while he shall be proceeding steadily in the alleviation of sufferings of mortals whom, nepius ontas toprin, enus cae threnon eperbolus etherce, being fools before, I made them wise and true in aim of soul.
While still in proportion shall the doom he is about to draw on himself manifest itself more and more distinctly, Till at the last he shall achieve the salvation of man, body by the gift of fire, and soul by even those tuflai elpides, blind hopes, hopes of immortality. And so, having rendered him utterly, according to the mythos here, independent of Jove, for observe, Prometheus in the play never talks of helping mortals more, of fearing for them more, of even benefiting them more by his sufferings. The rest is between Jove and himself. He will reveal the master secret to Jove when he shall have released him, etc. There is no stipulation that the gifts to mortals shall be continued. Indeed, by the fact that it is Prometheus who hangs on Caucasus while the ephemerals possess fire, One sees that somehow mysteriously they are past Jove's harming now.
Well, this wholly achieved, the price is as wholly accepted, and off into the darkness passes in calm triumphant grandeur the Titan, with strength and violence, and Vulcan's silent and downcast eyes, and then the gold clouds and renewed flushings of Felicity shut up the scene again, with might in his old throne again, Yet with a new element of mistrust and conscious shame and fear that writes significantly enough above all the glory and rejoicing that all is not as it was, nor will ever be. Such might be the framework of your drama. Just what cannot help striking one at first glance, and would not such a drama go well before your translation? Do think of this and tell me. It nearly writes itself.
You see, I meant the megophilerma. A great benefit. To be a deep, great truth. If there were no life beyond this, I think the hope in one would be an incalculable blessing for this life, which is melancholy for one like Aeschylus to feel if he could only hope, because the argument as to the ulterior good of those hopes is cut clean away, and what had he left? I do not find it take away from my feeling of the magnanimity of Prometheus that he should, in truth, complain, as he does from beginning to end, of what he finds himself suffering. He could have prevented all, and can stop it now, of that he never thinks for a moment. That was the old Greek way. They never let an antagonistic passion neutralise the other which was to influence the man to his praise or blame.
A Greek hero fears exceedingly and battles it out, cries out when he is wounded, and fights on, does not say his love or his hate makes him see no danger or feel no pain. Aeschylus, from first word to last, I des the me hoia pasco, behold what I suffer, to Esau reis me, hos ectica pasco, dost see how I suffer this wrong? insists on the unmitigated reality of the punishment which only the sun and divine ether and the godhead of his mother can comprehend. Still, still, that is only what I suppose Aeschylus to have done. In your poem you shall make Prometheus our way. And now enough of Greek, which I am fast forgetting. For I never look at books I loved once. It was your mention of the translation that brought out the old, fast-fading outlines of the poem in my brain.
The Greek poem, that is. You think, for I must get to you, that I unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me. Now, you don't know what that is, nor can I very well tell you, because the language with which I talk to myself of these matters is spiritual attic, and loves contractions, as grammarians say. But I read it myself, and well know what it means. That's why I told you I was self-conscious. I meant that I never yet mistook my own feelings one for another. There. Of what use is talking? Only do you stay here with me in the house these few short years. Do you think that I shall see you in two months, three months? I may travel, perhaps. So you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think.
For me, I always hated it, have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late. And now that I have done most of what is to be done, any lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me. I don't even care about reading now, the world and pictures of it, rather than writings about the world. But you must read books in order to get words and forms for the public if you write, and that you needs must do if you fear God. I have no pleasure in writing myself, none in the mere act, though all the pleasure in the sense of fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other.
But I think you like the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or making music. Do you not? After all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing, and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work. But—I don't know why—my heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it. Yet but for what I have written you would never have heard of me, and through what you have written, not properly for it, I love and wish you well. Now, will you remember what I began my letter by saying? How you have promised to let me know if my wishing takes effect, and if you still continue better. And not even, since we are learned in magnanimity, don't even tell me that or anything else if it teases you.
But wait your own good time, and know me for, if these words were but my own, and fresh minted for this moment's use, yours ever faithfully, R. Browning. 50 Wimple Street, March 20, 1845. Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr. Browning, it is not to be sure that I take my own good time, but submit to my own bad time. It was kind of you to wish to know how I was, and not unkind of me, to suspend my answer to your questions, for indeed I have not been very well, nor have had much heart for saying so. This implacable weather! This east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon. Who can be well in such a wind? Yet for me I should not grumble. There has been nothing very bad the matter with me as there used to be.
I only grow weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal in a corner. And then all this must end. April is coming. There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things. And perhaps after all we may. And as to seeing you, besides, I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity, and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such a secluded life as mine, notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about social duties and the like. Well, If you have such knowledge, or if you have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth to rights again, so as to make pleasures of the sort possible.
For if you think that I shall not like to see you, you are wrong for all your learning. But I shall be afraid of you at first, though I am not in writing this. You are Paracelsus. I am a recluse, with nerves that have been all broken on the rack, and now hang loosely, quivering at a step and breath. And what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of your life and mine. You seem to have drunken the cup of life full with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly, or with sorrow for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more of society than I, who am scarcely to be called young now.
I grew up in the country, had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle. And but for one, in my own house—but of this I cannot speak. It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in, and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around like the bees about the grass. And so time passed, and passed, and afterwards, when my illness came— And I seemed to stand at the edge of the world, with all done and no prospect, as appeared at one time, of ever passing the threshold of one room again. Why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness, after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe, that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave, that I had seen no human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, That I had beheld no great mountain or river.
Nothing, in fact. I was as a man dying, who had not read Shakespeare. And it was too late. Do you understand? And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? Why, if I live on, and yet do not escape from this seclusion— Do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages, that I am in a manner as a blind poet? Certainly there is a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis I make great guesses at human nature in the main. But how willingly I would, as a poet, exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books for some experience of life and man, for some— But all grumbling is a vile thing.
We should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us. I write so that you may not mistake what I wrote before in relation to society. Although you do not see from my point of view, and that you may understand what I mean fully when I say that I have lived all my chief joys, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that name, and relate to myself personally, in poetry, and in poetry alone. Like to write. Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write. It is life for me. Why, what is to live, not to eat and drink and breathe, but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being passionately and joyfully? And thus one lives in composition, surely, not always, but when the wheel goes round and the procession is uninterrupted.
Is it not so with you? Oh, it must be so. For the rest, there will be necessarily a reaction, and in my own particular case, whenever I see a poem of mine in print, or even smoothly transcribed, the reaction is most painful. The pleasure, the sense of power, without which I could not write a line, is gone in a moment, and nothing remains but disappointment and humiliation. I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces, if you took me at the right moment. I have a seasonable humility, I do assure you.
How delightful to talk about oneself! But as you tempted me and I did eat, I entreat your long-suffering of my sin, and ah, if you would but sin back so in turn. You and I seem to meet in a mild, contrarious harmony. As in the si non, si non of an Italian duet. I want to see more of men, and you have seen too much, you say. I am in ignorance, and you in satiety. You don't even care about reading now. Is it possible? And I am as fresh about reading as ever I was, as long as I keep out of the shadow of the dictionaries, and of theological controversies and the like. Shall I whisper it to you under the memory of the last rose of last summer? I am very fond of romances. Yes, and I read them not only as some wise people are known to do, for the sake of the eloquence here, and the sentiment there, and the graphic intermixtures here and there, but for the story, just as little children would, sitting on their papa's knee.
My childish love of a story never wore out with my love of plum-cake, and now there is not a hole in it. I make it a rule, for the most part, to read all the romances that other people are kind enough to write, and woe to the miserable white who tells me how the third volume endeth. Have you in you any surviving innocence of this sort? Or do you call it idiocy? If you do, I will forgive you, only smiling to myself, I give you notice, with a smile of superior pleasure. Mr. Chorley made me quite laugh the other day by recommending Mary Hewitt's Improvisatore, with a sort of deprecating reference to the descriptions in the book, just as if I never read a novel. Aye! I wrote a confession back to him, which made him shake his head, perhaps, and now I confess to you, unprovoked.
I am one who could have forgotten the plague listening to Boccaccio's stories, and I am not ashamed of it. I do not even see the better part, I am so silly.
Ah, you tempt me with a grand vision of Prometheus. I, who have just escaped with my life after treading Milton's ground, and you would send me to Aeschylus's. No, I do not dare. And besides— I am inclined to think that we want new forms as well as thoughts. The old gods are dethroned. Why should we go back to the antique moulds, classical moulds as they are so improperly called? If it is a necessity of art to do so. Why then, those critics are right who hold that art is exhausted, and the world too worn out for poetry? I do not for my part believe this. And I believe the so-called necessity of art to be the mere feebleness of the artist. Let us all aspire rather to life, and let the dead bury their dead.
If we have but courage to face these conventions, to touch this low ground, we shall take strength from it instead of losing it. And of that I am intimately persuaded. For there is poetry everywhere. The treasure— See the old fable, lies all over the field. And then Christianity is a worthy myth, and poetically acceptable. I had so much to say to you, or at least something, of the blind hopes, etc., but am ashamed to take a step into a new sheet. If you mean to travel, why, I shall have to miss you. Do you really mean it? How is the play going on, and the poem? May God bless you. Ever and truly yours, E. B. B.
Monday Morning, Postmark, March 31st, 1845. When you read Don Quixote, my dear romance reader, do you ever notice that flower of an incident of good fellowship where the friendly squire of Him of the Moon, or the Looking-Glasses, I forget which, passes to Sancho's dry lips All under a cork-tree one morning, a plump wineskin. And do you admire dear brave Miguel's knowledge of thirsty nature when he tells you that the drinker, having seriously considered for a space the pleiades fell, as he slowly returned the shrivelled bottle to its donor, into a deep musing of an hour's length, or thereabouts, and then, mark, only then, fetching a profound sigh, Broke silence with, such a piece of praise as turns pale the labours in that way Rabelais and the Théan, if he wasn't a Byzantine monk, alas, and our Mr.
Kenyon's stately self, since my own especial poet Amois, that can do all with anybody, only sips like a fly, she says, and so cares not to compete with these behemoths that drink up Jordan. Well, then. Oh, I must get quick to the sentence's end, and be brief as an oracle explainer. The giver is you, and the taker is I, and the letter is the wine, and the star-gazing is the reading the same, and the brown study is— How shall I deserve and be grateful enough to this new strange friend of my own, that has taken away my reproach among men, that have each and all their friend, so they say? Not that I believe all they say. They boast too soon sometimes, no doubt. I once was shown a letter wherein the truth stumbled out after this fashion.
Dear Smith, I calls you dear because you are so in your shop. And the great sigh is... There is no deserving nor being grateful at all, and the breaking silence is, and the praise is—ah, there, enough of it! This sunny morning is as if I wished it for you, ten strikes by the clock now. Tell me if at ten this morning you feel any good from my heart's wishes for you. I would give you all you want out of my own life and gladness, and yet keep twice the stock that should by right have sufficed the thin white face that is laughing at me in the glass yonder at the fancy of its making any one afraid. And now, with another kind of laugh, at the thought that, when its owner travels next, he will leave off Miss Barrett along with the port wine.
Di Meloria Pius, and among them to, yours everywhere, and at all times yours, R. Browning. I have all to say yet. Next letter, R. B.
-
5 05 - April 1845 13:05
April 1845. Tuesday night, postmark, April 16th, 1845. I heard of you, dear Miss Barrett, between a polka and a salarius the other evening, of Mr. Kenyon. How this wind must hurt you! And yesterday I had occasion to go your way, past, that is, Wimpole Street, the end of it. And do you know, I did not seem to have leave from you to go down it yet, much less count number after number till I came to yours. Much least than less look up when I did come there. So I went on to a viperine she-friend of mine who, I think, rather loves me, she does so hate me. And we talked over the chances of certain other friends who were to be balloted for at the Athenaeum last night, one of whom, it seems, was in a fright about it.
"'To such little purpose,' said my friend, "'for he is so inoffensive. Now, if any one were to style you that—'or you,' I said. And so we hugged ourselves in our grimness like tiger-cats. Then there is a deal in the papers to-day about Maynooth, and a meeting presided over by Lord Mayor Gibbs, and the Reverend Mr. Somebody's speech. And Mrs. Norton has gone and book-made at a great rate about the Prince of Wales, pleasantly putting off till his time all that used of old to be put off till his mother's time. Altogether, I should dearly like to hear from you, but not till the wind goes and sun comes, because I shall see Mr. Kenyon next week and get him to tell me some more. By the way, do you suppose anybody else looks like him?
If you do, the first room full of real London people you go among you will fancy to be lighted up by a saucer of burning salt and spirits of wine in the background. Monday. Last night, when I could do nothing else, I began to write to you, such writing as you have seen. Strange! The proper time and season for good, sound, sensible, and profitable forms of speech. When ought it to have occurred? And how did I evade it in these letters of mine? For people begin with a graceful, skittish levity, lest you should be struck all of a heap with what is to come. And that is sure to be the staff and staple of the man, full of wisdom and sorrow. And then again comes the fringe of reeds and pink little stones on the other side, that you may put foot on land, and draw breath, and think what a deep pond you have swum across.
But you are the real deep wonder of a creature, and I sail these paper boats on you rather impudently. But I always mean to be very grave one day. When I am in better spirits, and can go fuori di me. And one thing I want to persuade you of, which is that all you gain by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and have done rightly in trusting to your innate ideas, or not rightly in distrusting them, as the case may be. You get, too, a little, perhaps a considerable good in finding the world's accepted moulds everywhere into which you may run and fix your own fused metal. But not a grain Troy weight do you get of new gold, silver, or brass. After this you go boldly on your own resources, and are justified to yourself, that's all.
Three scratches with a pen, even with this pen, and you have the green little Sireneusa, where I have sat and heard the quails sing. One of these days I shall describe a country I have seen in my soul only, fruits, flowers, birds, and all. Ever yours, dear Miss Barrett, R. Browning. Thursday morning, April 18, 1845. If you did but know, dear Mr. Browning, how often I have written, not this letter I am about to write, but another better letter to you, in the midst of my silence, you would not think for a moment that the east wind, with all the harm it does to me, is able to do the great harm of I am not putting out the light of the thought of you to my mind, for this, indeed, it has no power to do.
I had the pen in my hand once to write, and why it fell out I cannot tell you. And you see, all your writing will not change the wind. You wished all manner of good to me one day, as the clock struck ten. Yes, and I assure you I was better that day, and I must not forget to tell you so, though it is so long since. And therefore I was logically bound to believe that you had never thought of me since, unless you thought east winds of me. That was quite clear, was it not? Or would have been, if it had not been for the supernatural conviction I had above all of your kindness, which was too large to be taken in the hinge of the syllogism. In fact, I have long left off thinking that logic proves anything.
It doesn't, you know. But your Lamia has taught you some subtle, viperine reasoning, and motiving, for the turning down one street instead of another. It was conclusive. Ah, but you will never persuade me that I am the better, or as well, for the thing that I have not. We look from different points of view, and yours is the point of attainment. Not that you do not truly say that, when all is done, we must come home to place our engines, and act by our own strength. I do not want material as material. No one does. But every life requires a full experience, a various experience, and I have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut off from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage.
Can you, speaking for yourself, separate the results in you from the external influences at work around you, that you say so boldly that you get nothing from the world? You do not directly, I know, but you do indirectly, and by a rebound. Whatever acts upon you becomes you, and whatever you love or hate, whatever charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you and becomes you. Have you read the Improvisatore, or will you? The writer seems to feel, just as I do, the good of the outward life, and he is a poet in his soul. It is a book full of beauty, and had a great charm to me. As to the Polkas and the Solariuses, I do not covet them, of course. But what a strange world you seem to have to me at a distance!
What a strange husk of a world! How it looks to me like mandarin life, or something as remote—nay, not mandarin life, but mandarin manners—life, even the outer life, meaning something deeper, in my account of it. As to dear Mr. Kenyon, I do not make the mistake of fancying that many can look like him, or talk like him, or be like him. I know enough to know otherwise. When he spoke of me, he should have said that I was better notwithstanding the east wind. It is really true. I am getting up slowly from the prostration of the severe cold, and feel stronger in myself. But Mrs. Norton discourses excellent music, and for the rest there are fruits in the world so overripe that they will fall without being gathered.
Let Maynooth witness to it, if you think it worth while. Ever yours, Elizabeth B. Barrett. And is it nothing to be justified to oneself in one's resources? That's all, indeed. For the soul's country we will have it also, and I know how well the birds sing in it. How glad I was, by the way, to see your letter.
Wednesday morning, postmark, April 30, 1845. If you did but know, dear Miss Barrett, how the full stop after morning just above has turned out the fullest of stops, and how for about a quarter of an hour since the ink dried I have been reasoning out the why and wherefore of the stopping, the wisdom of it, and the folly of it. By this time you see what you have got in me. You ask me questions, if I like novels, if the improvisatore is not good. If travel and sight-seeing do not effect this and that for one, and what I am devising, play or poem, and I shall not say I could not answer all manner of lengths, but let me only begin some good piece of writing of the kind, and no, you shall have it, have what I was going to tell you stops such judicious beginnings, in a parallel case, out of which your ingenuity shall, please, pick the meaning.
There is a story of Disraeli's, an old one, with an episode of strange interest, or so I found it years ago. Well, you go breathlessly on with the people of it, page after page, till at last the end must come, you feel. And the tangled threads draw to one, and an out-of-door feast in the woods helps you. That is, helps them, the people, wonderfully on. And lo! the dinner is done, and Vivian Gray is here, and Violet Fain there, and a detachment of the party is drafted off to go catch butterflies, and only two or three stop behind. At this moment Mr. Somebody, a good man, and rather the lady's uncle, in answer to a question from Violet, drew from his pocket a small, neatly written manuscript. And, seating himself on an inverted wine-cooler, proceeded to read the following brief remarks upon the characteristics of the Meso-Gothic literature.
This ends the page, which you don't turn at once. But when you do, in bitterness of soul, turn it, you read, On consideration I shall keep them for Mr. Coburn's new magazine, and deeply you draw thankful breath. Note this parallel case of mine is pretty sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings. You will ask what it means, and this it means, or should mean, all of it, instance and reasoning and all, that I am naturally earnest, in earnest about whatever thing I do, and little able to write about one thing while I think of another. I think I will really write verse to you some day. This day it is quite clear I had better give up trying. No, spite of all the lines in the world, I will make an end of it, as Ophelia with her swan's song, for it grows too absurd.
But remember that I write letters to nobody but you, and that I want method and much more. That book you like so, the Danish novel, must be full of truth and beauty, to judge from the few extracts I have seen in reviews. That a Dane should write so confirms me in an old belief, that Italy is stuff for use of the North, and no more. Pure poetry there is none, nearly as possible none in Dante even, material for poetry in the pitifulest Romancist of their thousands, on the contrary. Strange that those great wide black eyes should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them. Alfieri, with even grey eyes, and a life of travel, writes you some fifteen tragedies as colourless as salad grown under a garden-glass with matting over it.
As free, that is, from local colouring, touches of the soil they are said to spring from. Think of Sol and his Greek attempts. I expected to see Mr. Kenyon at a place where I was last week, but he kept away. Here is the bad wind back again, and the black sky. I am sure I never knew till now whether the east or west or south were the quarter to pray for. But surely the weather was a little better last week. And you, were you not better? And do you know? But it's all self-flattery, I believe. Still, I cannot help fancying the east wind does my head harm too. Ever yours faithfully, R. Browning.
-
6 06 - May 1845, part 1 37:34
May 1845. Part 1. Thursday, May, Second, Eighteen Forty Five. People say of you and of me, dear Mr. Browning, That we love the darkness and use a sphinx-sine idiom in our talk. And really you do talk a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from Vivian Gray. Once I sat up all night to read Vivian Gray, but I never drew such an argument from him. Not that I give it up, nor you up, for a mere mystery. Nor that I can see what you have got in you from a mere guess. But just observe. If I ask questions about novels, is it not because I want to know how much elbow-room there may be for our sympathies, and whether there is room for my loose sleeves and the lace lappets as well as for my elbows, and because I want to see you by the refracted lights as well as by the direct ones, And because I am willing for you to know me, from the beginning, with all my weaknesses and foolishnesses, as they are accounted by people who say to me, No one would ever think without knowing you that you were so-and-so.
Now, if I send all my idle questions to Colburn's magazine, with other Gothic literature, and take to standing up in a perpendicular personality like the angel on the schoolman's needle in my letters to come, without further leaning to the left or the right, why, the end would be that you would take to running after the butterflies for change of air and exercise. And then— Oh, then my small, neatly written manuscripts might fall back into my desk. Not a full stop. Indeed, I do assure you, I never for a moment thought of making conversation about the Improvisatore or novels in general when I wrote what I did to you. I might, to other persons, perhaps. Certainly not to you. I was not dealing round from one pack of guards to you and to others.
That's what you meant to reproach me for, you know, and of that I am not guilty at all. I never could think of making conversation in a letter to you. Never. Women are said to partake of the nature of children, and my brothers call me absurdly childish sometimes, and I am capable of being childishly in earnest about novels and straws and such puppy-dog's tales as my flushes. Also, I write more letters than you do. I write, in fact, almost as you pay visits, and one has to make conversation in turn, of course. But, give me something to vow by, whatever you meant in the Vivienne Gray argument, you were wrong in it. And you never can be much more wrong, which is a comfortable reflection. Yet you leap very high at Dante's crown, or you do not leap, you simply extend your hand to it, and make a rustling among the laurel leaves, which is somewhat profane.
Dante's poetry only materials for the northern rhymers. I must think of that, if you please, before I agree with you. Dante's poetry seems to come down in hail rather than in rain, but count me the drops congealed in one hailstone. Oh, the flight of the Duchess, do let us hear more of her. Are you, I wonder, not a self-flatterer, but a flatterer? Ever yours, E. B. B. Saturday morning, postmark, May 3rd, 1845. Now shall you see what you shall see. Here shall be sound speech not to be reproved. For this morning you are to know that the soul of me has it all her own way, dear Miss Barrett, this green, cool, nine-in-the-morning time for my chestnut tree over there, and for me who only coaxed my good-natured body up after its three hours' night rest on condition it should lounge or creep about incognito and without consequences, and so it shall.
All but my right hand, which is half-spirit, and cuts its poor relation, and passes itself off for somebody, that is, some soul, and is doubly active and ready on such occasions. Now I shall tell you all about it, first what last letter meant, and then more. You are to know, then, That for some reason, that looked like an instinct, I thought I ought not to send shaft on shaft, letter plague on letter, with such an uninterrupted clanging. That I ought to wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs. But not being exactly foibos-apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, Oh, boy! Let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ankles.
Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away. Not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written to, not spoken to. When I turned again, you had grown formidable somehow. Though that's not the word, nor are you the person either. It was my fortune, my privilege, of being your friend this one way, that it seemed a shame for me to make no better use of than taking it up with talk about books and I don't know what. Write what I will. You would read for once, I think. Well, then, what I shall write shall be. Something on this book, and the other book, and my own books, and Mary Howitt's books, and at the end of it, good-bye. And I hope here is a quarter of an hour rationally spent.
So the thought of what I should find in my heart to say, and the contrast with what I suppose I ought to say—all these things are against me. But this is very foolish all the same, I need not be told, and is part and parcel of an older, indeed primitive, body of mine, which I shall never wholly get rid of, of desiring to do nothing when I cannot do all, seeing nothing. Getting, enjoying nothing, when there is no seeing and getting and enjoying wholly. And in this case, moreover, you are you, and know something about me, if not much, and have read Bosse on the art of supplying ellipses, and, after particularly I have confessed all this, why and how it has been, you will subaudire when I pull out my medieval Gothic architectural manuscript.
So it was, I remember now, and instruct you about corbeils and ogives. Though, after all, it was none of Vivian's doing, that. All the kind uncle or man's which I never professed to be. Now you see how I came to say some nonsense. I very vaguely think, what, about Dante, some desperate splash I know I made for the beginning of my picture, as when a painter at his wit's end and hunger's beginning says, Here shall the figure's hand be, and spots that down, meaning to reach it naturally from the other end of his canvas, and leaving off tired, there you see the spectral disjoined thing, and nothing between it and rationality. I intended to shade down, and soften off, and put in, and leave out, and, before I had done, bring Italian poets round to their old place again in my heart, giving new praise if I took old.
Anyhow, Dante is out of it all, as who knows but I, with all of him in my head and my heart. But they do fret one, those tantalizing creatures, of fine, passionate class, with such capabilities and such a facility of being made pure mind of. And the special instance that vexed me. Was that a man of sands and dog-roses and white rock and green sea-water just under should come to Italy where my heart lives and discover the sights and sounds. Certainly discover them. And so do all northern writers, for take up handfuls of sonnetti, rime, poemetti, doings of those who never did anything else, and try and make out for yourself what Say, what flowers they tread on, or what trees they walk under, as you might bid them.
Those tree- and flower-loving creatures pick out of our North Poetry a notion of what our daisies and harebells and firs bushes and brambles are. Odorosi fioretti, rose poporine, bianchissimi gigli. And which of you eternal triflers was it called yourself Shelley, and so told me years ago that in the mountains it was a feast When one should find those globes of deep-red gold, which in the woods the strawberry tree doth bear, suspended in their emerald atmosphere. So that when my uncle walked into a sorb-tree, not to tumble sheer over Monte Calvano, And I felt the fruit against my face. The little ragged, bare-legged guide fairly laughed at my knowing them so well. Njursi, Sorbi. No, no, does not all Naples Bay and half Sicily, shore and inland, come flocking once a year to the Piedi Grotta fate, only to see the blessed King's Volanti, or livery servants, all in their best?
As though heaven opened, and would not I engage to bring the whole of the piano of Sorrento in likeness to a red velvet dressing-gown properly spangled over, before the priest that held it out on a pole had even begun his story of how Noah's son Shem, the founder of Sorrento, threw it off to swim thither, as the world knows he did? Oh, it makes one's soul angry, so enough of it. But never enough of telling you. Bring all your sympathies. Come with loosest sleeves and longest lace lappets, and you and yours shall find elbow-room. Oh, shall you not? For never did man, woman, or child, Greek, Hebrew, or as Danish as our friend, like a thing, not to say love it, but I liked it and loved it, one liking neutralizing the rebellious stir of its fellow, so that I don't go about now wanting the fixed stars before my time.
This world has not escaped me, thank God, and, what other people say is the best of it, may not escape me after all, though until so very lately I made up my mind to do without it. Perhaps on that account, and to make fair amends to other people who, I have no right to say, complain without cause. I have been surprised, rather, with something not unlike illness of late. I have had a constant pain in the head for these two months, which only very rough exercise gets rid of, and which stops my luria, and much besides. I thought I could never be unwell. Just now, all of it is gone thanks to polking all night and walking home by broad daylight to the surprise of the thrushes in the bush here. And do you know, I said, this must go, cannot mean to stay, so I will not tell Miss Barrett why this and this is not done.
But I mean to tell you all, or more, of the truth, because you call me flatterer, so that my eyes widened again. I, and in what? Of whom, pray? Not of you, at all events. Of whom, then? Do tell me, because I want to stand with you, and I'm quite in earnest there. And the flight of the Duchess to leave nothing out is only the beginning of a story written some time ago, and given to poor Hood in his emergency at a day's notice. The true stuff and story is all to come. The flight, and what you allude to, is the mere introduction. But the magazine has passed into other hands, and I must put the rest in some bell or other. It is one of my dramatic romances. So is a certain Saul I should like to show you one day.
An ominous liking, for nobody ever sees what I do till it is printed. But as you do know the printed little part of me, I should not be sorry if— In justice, you knew all I have really done, written in the portfolio there, though that would be far enough from this me that wishes to you now. I should like to write something in concert with you. How I would try! I have read your letter through again. Does this clear up all the difficulty? And do you see that I never dreamed of reproaching you for dealing out one sort of cards to me and everybody else, but that Why, that which I have, I hope, said, so need not resay. I will tell you, Sidney Smith laughed somewhere at some Methodist or other whose wont was, on meeting an acquaintance in the street, to open at once on him with some inquiry after the state of his soul.
Sidney knows better now, and sees that one might quite as wisely ask such questions as the price of Illinois stock, or condition of Gleebland, and I could say such, could. The plague of it. So no more at present from your loving. Oh, let me tell you I am going to see Mr. Kenyon on the twelfth inst, that you do not tell me how you are, and that yet if you do not continue to improve in health, I shall not see you. Not, not, not. What knots to untie? Surely the wind that sets my chestnut-tree dancing, all its baby-cone blossoms, green now, flocking like fairy castles on a hill in an earthquake. That is South-West, surely. God bless you, and me in that, and do write to me soon, and tell me who was the flatterer, and how he never was.
Yours, R.B.
Monday and Tuesday. Postmark May 6, 1845. So when wise people happen to be ill, they sit up till six o'clock in the morning and get up again at nine. Do tell me how lurias can ever be made out of such ungodly imprudences. If the wind blows east or west, where can any remedy be while such evil deeds are being committed? And what is to be the end of it? And what is the reasonableness of it in the meantime, when we all know that thinking, dreaming, creating people like yourself have two lives to bear instead of one, and therefore ought to sleep more than others? Throwing over and buckling in that fold of death, to stroke the life-purple smoother. You have to live your own personal life, and also Luria's life, and therefore you should sleep for both.
It is logical indeed, and rational, which logic is not always. And if I had the tongue of men and of angels, I would use it to persuade you. Polka, for the rest, may be good, but sleep is better. I think better of sleep than I ever did, now that she will not easily come near me except in a red hood of poppies. And besides, praise your good-natured body as you like. It is only a seeming good nature. Bodies bear malice in a terrible way, be very sure, appear mild and smiling for a few short years, and then— Out with a cold steel, and the soul has it with a vengeance, according to the phrase. You will not persist, will you, in this experimental homicide? Or tell me, if you will, that I may do some more tearing?
It really, really is wrong. Exercise is one sort of rest, and you feel relieved by it, and sleep is another, one being as necessary as the other. This is the first thing I have to say. The next is a question. What do you mean about your manuscripts, about Saul and the portfolio? For I am afraid of hazardously supplying ellipses, and your boss comes to bus epiglose. Aeschylus Agamemnon, line 36. An ox hath trodden on my tongue, a Greek proverb implying silence. I get half-bribed to silence by the very pleasure of fancying. But if it could be possible that you should mean to say you would show me, can it be? Or am I reading this attic contraction quite the wrong way? You see, I am afraid of the difference between flattering myself and being flattered, the fatal difference.
And now will you understand that I should be too overjoyed to have revelations from the portfolio, however incarnated with blots and pen-scratches, to be able to ask impudently of them now? Is that plain? It must be, at any rate, that if you would like to write something together with me, I should like it still better. I should like it for some ineffable reasons, and I should not like it a bit the less for the grand supply of jests it would administer to the critical Board of Trade about visible darkness multiplied by two mounting into palpable obscure. We should not mind, should we? You would not mind if you had got over certain other considerations, deconsiderating to your coadjutor. Yes, but I dare not do it.
I mean, think of it. Just now, if ever. And I will tell you why in a medieval Gothic architectural manuscript. The only poet by profession, if I may say so, except yourself, with whom I ever had much intercourse even on paper, if this is near to much, has been Mr. Horne. We approached each other on the point of one of Miss Mitford's annual editorships, and ever since he has had the habit of writing to me occasionally, and when I was too ill to write at all in my dreary Devonshire days, I was his debtor for various little kindnesses. For which I continue his debtor. In my opinion he is a true-hearted and generous man. Do you not think so? Well, long and long ago he asked me to write a drama with him on the Greek model, that is, for me to write the choruses and for him to do the dialogue.
Just then it was quite doubtful in my own mind, and worse than doubtful, whether I should ever write again. And the very doubtfulness made me speak my yes more readily. Then I was desired to make a subject, to conceive a plan, and my plan was of a man, haunted by his own soul, making her a separate personal psyche, a dreadful, beautiful psyche, the man being haunted and terrified through all the turns of life by her. Did you ever feel afraid of your own soul, as I have done? I think it is a true wonder of our humanity, and fit subject enough for a wild, lyrical drama. I should like to write it by myself at least well enough. But with him I will not now. It was delayed, delayed. He cut the plan up into scenes, I mean into a list of scenes, a sort of ground map to work on.
And there it lies. Nothing more was done. It all lies in one sheet, and I have offered to give up my copyright of idea in it, if he likes to use it alone, or I should not object to work it out alone on my own side, since it comes from me, only I will not consent now to a double work in it. There are objections, none be it well understood in Mr. Horne's disfavour, for I think of him as well at this moment, and the same in all essential points as I ever did. He is a man of fine imagination. And is besides good and generous. In the course of our acquaintance, on paper, for I never saw him, I was never angry with him except once, and then I was quite wrong and had to confess it. But this is being too medieval.
Only you will see from it that I am a little entangled on the subject of compound works, and must look where I tread. And you will understand, if you ever hear from Mr. Kenyon or elsewhere that I am going to write a compound poem with Mr. Horne, how it was true, and isn't true any more. Yes, you are going to Mr. Kenyon's on the 12th. And yes, my brother and sister are going to meet you and your sister there one day to dinner. Shall I have courage to see you soon, I wonder? If you ask me, I must ask myself. But, oh, this make-believe May, it can't be May, after all. If a south-west wind sat in your chestnut-tree, it was but for a few hours. The east wind came up this way by the earliest opportunity of succession.
As the old mysteries showed Beelzebub with a beard, even so has the east wind had a beard of late, in a full growth of bristling exaggerations. The English spring winds have excelled themselves in evil this year, and I have not been downstairs yet. But I am certainly stronger and better than I was, that is undeniable, and I shall be better still. You are going away soon, are you? In the meantime, you do not know what it is to be a little afraid of Paracelsus. So right about the Italians, and the rose-porporine which made me smile. How is the head? Ever yours, E.B.B. Is the flight of the Duchess in the portfolio? Of course you must ring the bell. That poem has a strong heart in it to begin so strongly.
Poor Hood! And all those thoughts fall mixed together. May God bless you.
Sunday, in the last hour of it. Postmark May 12th, 1845. May I ask how the head is? Just under the bag? Mr. Kenyon was here to-day, and told me such bad news that I cannot sleep to-night, though I did think once of doing it, without asking such a question as this, dear Mr. Browning. Let me hear how you are, will you? And let me hear, if I can, that it was prudence or some unchristian virtue of the sort, and not a dreary necessity, which made you put aside the engagement for Tuesday, for Monday. I had been thinking so of seeing you on Tuesday, with my sister's eyes, for the first sight. And now, if you have done killing the mules and the dogs, let me have a straight quick arrow for myself, if you please.
Just a word to say how you are. I ask for no more than a word, lest the writing should be hurtful to you. May God bless you always. Your friend, E.B.B.
Monday, postmark May 12th, 1845. My dear own friend, I am quite well now, or next to it, but this is how it was. I have gone out a good deal of late, and my head took to ringing such a literal alarm that I wondered what was to come of it. And at last, a few evenings ago, as I was dressing for a dinner somewhere, I got really bad of a sudden, and kept at home to my friend's heart-rending disappointment. Next morning I was no better. And it struck me that I should be really disappointing dear, kind Mr. Kenyon, and wasting his time if that engagement, too, were broken with as little warning. So I thought it best to forego all hopes of seeing him at such a risk. And that done, I got rid of every other promise to pay visits for next week and next, and told everybody, with considerable dignity, that my London season was over for this year, as it assuredly is, and I shall be worried no more, and let walk in the garden, and go to bed at ten o'clock, and get done with what is most expedient to do, and my flesh shall come again like a little child's, and one day O the day, I shall see you with my own own eyes.
For how little you understand me, or rather yourself, if you think I would dare see you, without your leave, that way. Do you suppose that your power of giving and refusing ends when you have shut your room door? Did I not tell you I turned down another street even, the other day, and why not down yours? And often as I see Mr. Kenyon, have I ever dreamed of asking any but the merest conventional questions about you, your health, and no more? I will answer your letter, the last one, to-morrow. I have said nothing of what I want to say. Ever yours, R. B.
Tuesday morning, postmark May 13, 1845. Did I thank you with any effect in the lines I sent yesterday, dear Miss Barrett? I know I felt most thankful, and, of course, began reasoning myself into the impropriety of allowing a more or a most in feelings of that sort towards you. I am thankful for you, all about you, as do you not know. Thank you from my soul. Now, let me never pass occasion of speaking well of Horn, who deserves your opinion of him. It is my own, too. He has unmistakable genius, and is a fine, honest, enthusiastic, chivalrous fellow. It is the fashion to affect to sneer at him of late, I think. The people he has praised fancying that they pose themselves sculpturesquely in playing the greatly indifferent, and the other kind shaking each other's hands in hysterical congratulations at having escaped such a dishonour.
I feel grateful to him, I know, for his generous criticism, and glad and proud of in any way approaching such a man's standard of poetical height. And he might be a disappointed man, too, for the players trifled with and teased out his very nature, which has a strange aspiration for the horrible tin-and-lacquer crown they give one from their clouds, of smooth-shaven deal done over blue. And he don't give up the bad business yet, but thinks a small theatre would somehow not be a theatre, and an actor not quite an actor. I forget in what way, but the upshot is he baits not a jot in that rouged, wigged, padded, empty-headed, heartless tribe of grimaces that came and canted me. Not I, them, a thing he cannot understand.
So I am not the one he would have picked out to praise had he not been loyal. I know he admires your poetry properly. God help him, and send him some great artist from the country, who can read and write beside comprehending Shakespeare, and who exasperates his H's, when the feat is to be done, to undertake the part of Cosmo, or Gregory, or what shall most soothe his spirit. The subject of your play is tempting indeed, and reminds one of that wild drama of Calderon's which frightened Shelley just before his death. Also, of Fuseli's theory with reference to his own picture of Macbeth in the Witch's Cave, wherein the apparition of the armed head from the cauldron is Macbeth's own. If you ask me, I must ask myself.
That is, when am I to see you? I will never ask you. You do not know what I shall estimate that permission at. Nor do I quite. But you do, do not you, know so much more of me as to make my asking worse than a form? I do not ask you to write to me, not directly ask, at least. I will tell you, ask you not to see me, so long as you are unwell or mistrustful of. No, no, that is being too grand. Do see me when you can, and let me not be only writing myself. Yours, R.B.
A kind, so kind, note from Mr. Kenyon came. We, I and my sister, are to go in June instead. I shall go nowhere till then. I am nearly well, all save one little wheel in my head that keeps on its sostenuto B-flat. That you are better, I am most thankful. Next letter. To say how you must help me with all my new romances and lyrics and lays and plays, and read them and heed them and end them and mend them.
Thursday, May 16th, 1845. But how mistrustfulness! And how that way! What have I said or done? I, who am not apt to be mistrustful of anybody, and should be a miraculous monster if I began with you. What can I have said, I say to myself again and again? One thing, at any rate, I have done, that way or this way. I have made what is vulgarly called a piece of work about little, or seemed to make it. Forgive me, I am shy by nature, and by position and experience. By having had my nerves shaken to excess, and by leading a life of such seclusion. By these things together, and by others besides, I have appeared shy and ungrateful to you. Only not mistrustful. You could not mean to judge me so. Mistrustful people do not write as I write, surely.
For wasn't it a Richelieu, or Mazarin, or who, who said that with five lines from any one's hand, He could take off his head for a corollary. I think so. Well, but this is to prove that I am not mistrustful, and to say that if you care to come to see me you can come, and that it is my gain, as I feel it to be, and not yours, whenever you do come. You will not talk of having come afterwards, I know, because although I am fast bound to see one or two persons this summer, besides yourself whom I receive of choice and willingly— I cannot admit visitors in a general way, and, putting the question of health quite aside, it would be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company show of an infirmity and hold a beggar's hat for sympathy.
I should blame it in another woman, and the sense of it has had its weight with me sometimes.
For the rest, when you write that I do not know how you would value etc., nor yourself quite, You touch very accurately on the truth, and so accurately in the last clause, that to read it made me smile tant bien que mal. Certainly you cannot quite know, or know at all, whether the least straw of pleasure can go to you from knowing me otherwise than on this paper, and I, for my part, quite know my own honest impression, dear Mr. Browning, that none is likely to go to you. There is nothing to see in me, nor to hear in me. I never learnt to talk as you do in London, though I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me.
I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours. The rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark. And if I write all this egotism, it is for shame, and because I feel ashamed of having made a fuss about what is not worth it, and because you are extravagant in caring so for a permission which will be nothing to you afterwards. Not that I am not touched by your caring so at all. I am deeply touched now, and presently I shall understand. Come, then. There will be truth and simplicity for you, in any case, and a friend. And do not answer this. I do not write it as a fly-trap for compliments. Your spider would scorn me for it too much. Also, as to the how and when, you are not well now, and it cannot be good for you to do anything but be quiet and keep away that dreadful musical note in the head.
I entreat you not to think of coming until that is all put to silence satisfactorily. When it is done, you must choose whether you would like best to come with Mr. Kenyon or to come alone, and if you would come alone, you must tell me on what day, and I will see you on any day, unless there should be an unforeseen obstacle, any day after two or before six, and my sister will bring you upstairs to me, and we will talk, or you will talk. And you will try to be indulgent and like me as well as you can. If, on the other hand, you would rather come with Mr. Kenyon, you must wait, I imagine, till June, because he goes away on Monday and is not likely immediately to return. No, on Saturday, tomorrow.
In the meantime, why I should be thanked is an absolute mystery to me, but I leave it. You are generous and impetuous, that I can see and feel, and so far from being of an inclination to mistrust you or distrust you, I do profess to have had as much faith in your full, pure loyalty as if I had known you personally as many years as I have appreciated your genius. Believe this of me, for it is spoken truly.
In the matter of Shakespeare's poor players, You are severe, and yet I was glad to hear you severe. It is a happy excess, I think. When men of intense reality, as all great poets must be, give their hearts to be trodden on and tied up with ribbons in turn by men of masks, there will be torture if there is not desecration. Not that I know much of such things, but I have heard—heard from Mr. Kenyon, heard from Miss Mitford— Who, however, is passionately fond of the theatre as a writer's medium, not at all from Mr. Horne himself, except what he has printed on the subject. Yes, he has been infamously used on the point of the new spirit. Only he should have been prepared for the infamy. It was leaping into a gulf, not to save the Republic, but pourrir.
It was not merely putting one's foot into a hornet's nest, but taking off a shoe and stocking to do it. And to think of Dickens being dissatisfied, to think of Tennyson's friends grumbling. He himself did not, I hope and trust. For you, you certainly were not adequately treated, and above all you were not placed with your peers in that chapter. But there was an intention to do you justice, and that there is a righteous appreciation of you in the writer, I know and am sure, and that you should be sensible to this is only what I should know and be sure of you. Mr. Horne is quite above the narrow, vicious, hateful jealousy of contemporaries which we hear reproached, too justly sometimes, on men of letters.
I go on writing as if I were not going to see you, soon, perhaps. Remember that the how and the when rest with you, except that it cannot be before next week at the soonest. You are to decide. Always your friend. E.B.B.
-
7 07 - May 1845, part 2 41:00
May 1845. Part 2. Friday night.
Postmark May 17th, 1845. My friend is not mistrustful of me, no, because she don't fear I shall make main prize of the stray cloaks and umbrellas downstairs, or turn an article for Colburn's on her sayings and doings upstairs. But spite of that she does mistrust. So mistrust my common sense, nay, uncommon and dramatic poet's sense, if I am put on asserting it. All which pieces of mistrust I could detect and catch struggling, and pin to death in a moment, and put a label in, with name, genus, and species, just like a horrible entomologist. Only I won't, because the first visit of the North Wind will carry the whole tribe into the Red Sea, and those horns and tails and scale-wings are best forgotten altogether.
And now will I say a cutting thing and have done. Have I trusted my friend so? Or said even to myself, much less to her, she is even as Mr. Simpson, who desireth the honour of the acquaintance of Mr. B., whose admirable works have long been his, Simpson's, especial solace in private, and who accordingly is led to that personage by a mutual friend, Simpson blushing as only adorable ingenuousness can, and twisting the brim of his hat like a sailor giving evidence. Whereupon Mr. B. beginneth by remarking that the rooms are growing hot, or that he supposes Mr. S. has not heard if there will be another adjournment of the house to-night. Whereupon Mr. S. looketh up all at once, brusheth the brim smooth again with his sleeve, and takes to his assurance once more in something of a huff, And after staying his five minutes out, for decency's sake, noddeth familiarly an adieu, and, spinning round on his heel, ejaculateth mentally.
Well, I did expect to see something different from that little yellow commonplace man, and, now I come to think, there was some precious trash in that book of his. Have I said, so will Miss Barrett ejaculate? Dear Miss Barrett, I thank you for the leave you give me, and for the infinite kindness of the way of giving it. I will call at two on Tuesday, not sooner, that you may have time to write should any adverse circumstances happen. Not that they need inconvenience you, because—what I want particularly to tell you for now and hereafter—do not mind my coming in the least, but—should you be unwell, for instance, just send or leave word— And I will come again, and again, and again. My time is of no importance, and I have acquaintances thick in the vicinity.
Now if I do not seem grateful enough to you, am I so much to blame? You see, it is high time you saw me, for I have clearly written myself out. Ever yours, R.B. Postmark, May 17, 1845. I shall be ready on Tuesday, I hope, but I hate and protest against your horrible entomology. Beginning to explain would thrust me lower and lower down the circles of some sort of an inferno, only with my dying breath I would maintain that I never could consciously or unconsciously mean to distrust you, or, the least in the world, to Simpsonize you. What I said— It was you that put it into my head to say it, for certainly in my usual disinclination to receive visitors such a feeling does not enter. There now, there I am a whole giro lower.
Now you will say perhaps that I distrust you and nobody else. So it is best to be silent, and bear all the cutting things with resignation. That is certain.
Still, I must really say, under this dreadful incubus charge of Simpsonism, that you who know everything, or at least make awful guesses at everything in one's feelings and motives, and profess to be able to pin them down in a book of classified inscriptions, should have been able to understand better, or misunderstand less, in a matter like this. Yes, I think so. I think you should have made out the case in some such way as it was in nature, viz that you had lashed yourself up to an exorbitant wishing to see me, you who could see any day people who are a hundredfold and to all social purposes my superiors, because I was unfortunate enough to be shut up in a room and silly enough to make a fuss about opening the door, and that I grew suddenly abashed by the consciousness of this.
How different from a distrust of you! How different! Ah, if after this day you ever see any interpretable sign of distrustfulness in me, you may be cutting again, and I will not cry out. In the meantime, here is a fact for your entomology. I have not so much distrust as will make a doubt as will make a curiosity for next Tuesday. Not the simplest modification of curiosity enters into the state of feeling with which I wait for Tuesday, and if you are angry to hear me say so, why, you are more unjust than ever. Let it be three instead of two, if the hour be as convenient to yourself. Before you come, try to forgive me for my infinite kindness in the manner of consenting to see you. Is it the cruelest cut of all, when you talk of infinite kindness, yet attribute such villainy to me?
Well, but we are friends till Tuesday, and after, perhaps. Ever yours, E.B.B. If on Tuesday you should not be well, pray do not come. Now, that is my request to your kindness.
Tuesday evening, postmark May 21st, 1845. I trust to you for a true account of how you are, if tired, if not tired, if I did wrong in any thing, or if you please write in any thing. Only not one more word about my kindness which, to get done with, I will grant is acceptive. But let us so arrange matters, if possible, and why should it not be, that my great happiness, such as it will be if I see you, as this morning, from time to time, may be obtained at the cost of as little inconvenience to you as we can contrive. For an instance, just what strikes me, they all say here I speak very loud, a trick caught from having often to talk with a deaf relative of mine. And did I stay too long? I will tell you unhesitatingly of such corrigenda.
Nay, I will again say, do not humiliate me, do not again by calling me kind in that way. I am proud and happy in your friendship, now and ever. May God bless you. R. B.
Wednesday morning, Postmark, May 22nd, 1845. Indeed, there was nothing wrong. How could there be? And there was everything right, as how should there not be? And as for the loud speaking, I did not hear any, and instead of being worse, I ought to be better for what was certainly, to speak it or be silent of it, happiness and honor to me yesterday. Which reminds me to observe that you are so restricting our vocabulary as to be ominous of silence in a full sense presently. First one word is not to be spoken, and then another is not. And why? Why deny me the use of such words as have natural feelings belonging to them? And how can the use of such be humiliating to you? If my heart were open to you, you could see nothing offensive to you in any thought there, or trace of thought that has been there.
But it is hard for you to understand with all your psychology, and to be reminded of it I have just been looking at the preface of some poems by some Mr. Gurney, where he speaks of the reflective wisdom of a Wordsworth, and the profound psychological utterances of a Browning. It is hard for you to understand what my mental position is after the peculiar experience I have suffered, and what ti emoi kai soi, what have I to do with you. A sort of feeling is irrepressible from me to you, when from the height of your brilliant happy sphere you ask, as you did ask, for personal intercourse with me. What words but kindness, but gratitude? But I will not in any case be unkind and ungrateful, and do what is displeasing to you.
And let us both leave the subject with the words. Because we perceive in it from different points of view. We stand on the black and white sides of the shield, and there is no coming to a conclusion. But you will come, really, on Tuesday, and again when you like and can together. And it will not be more inconvenient to me to be pleased, I suppose, than it is to people in general, will it, do you think? Ah, how you misjudge! Why, it must obviously and naturally be delightful to me to receive you here when you like to come, and it cannot be necessary for me to say so in set words, believe it, of your friend, E.B.B.
Mr. Browning's letter, to which the following is in answer, was destroyed. See, page two hundred and sixty-eight for the present volume. That is, R.B.'s note of November, sixth, eighteen forty-five.
Friday evening, postmark, May 24th, 1845. I intended to write to you last night and this morning, and could not. You do not know what pain you give me in speaking so wildly. And if I disobey you, my dear friend, in speaking, either my part, of your wild speaking, I do it not to displease you. But to be in my own eyes and before God a little more worthy, or less unworthy, of a generosity from which I recoil by instinct, and at the first glance, yet conclusively, and because my silence would be the most disloyal of all means of expression in reference to it. Listen to me, then, in this. You have said some intemperate things, fancies, which you will not say over again, nor unsay. But forget at once and for ever having said at all, and which, so, will die out between you and me alone, like a misprint between you and the printer.
And this you will do for my sake, who I am your friend, and you have none truer. And this I ask, because it is a condition necessary to our future liberty of intercourse. You remember, surely you do, that I am in the most exceptional of positions. And that just because of it I am able to receive you as I did on Tuesday. And that for me to listen to unconscious exaggerations is as unbecoming to the humilities of my position as unpropitious, which is of more consequence to the prosperities of yours. Now, if there should be one word of answer attempted to this, or of reference, I must not—I will not—see you again, and you will justify me later in your heart. So, for my sake you will not say it, I think you will not, and spare me the sadness of having to break through an intercourse just as it is promising pleasure to me, to me who have so many sadnesses and so few pleasures.
You will, and I need not be uneasy, and I shall owe you that tranquillity as one gift of many. For, that I have much to receive from you in all the free gifts of thinking, teaching, master-spirits, That I know. It is my own praise that I appreciate you, as none can more. Your influence and help in poetry will be full of good and gladness to me, for with many to love me in this house, there is none to judge me now. Your friendship and sympathy will be dear and precious to me all my life, if you indeed leave them with me so long or so little. Your mistakes in me, which I cannot mistake, and which have humbled me by too much honouring, I put away gently and with grateful tears in my eyes, because all that hail will beat down and spoil crowns as well as blossoms.
If I put off next Tuesday to the week after, I mean your visit, shall you care much? For the relations I name to you are to be in London next week, and I am to see one of my aunts whom I love, and have not met since my great affliction. And it will all seem to come over again, and I shall be out of spirits and nerves. On Tuesday week you can bring a tomahawk and do the criticism, and I shall try to have my courage ready for it. Oh, you will do me so much good! And Mr. Kenyon calls me docile sometimes, I assure you, when he wants to flatter me out of being obstinate, and in good earnest I believe I shall do everything you tell me. The Prometheus is done. But the monodrama is where it was, and the novel not at all.
But I think of some half-promises half-given about something I read for Saul, and the flight of the Duchess, where is she? You are not displeased with me? No, that would be hail and lightning together. I do not write as I might of some words of yours, but you know that I am not a stone, even if silent like one. And if in the unsilence I have said one word to vex you, pity me for having had to say it. And for the rest, may God bless you far beyond the reach of vexation from my words or my deeds. Your friend in grateful regard, E.B.B.
Don't you remember I told you, once on a time, that you knew nothing of me, whereat you demurred? But I meant what I said, and knew it was so. To be grand in a simile, for every poor speck of a Vesuvius or a Stromboli in my microcosm there are huge layers of ice and pits of black cold water. And I make the most of my two or three fire eyes, because I know by experience, alas, how these tend to extinction, and the ice grows and grows. Still, this last is true part of me, most characteristic part, best part, perhaps, and I disown nothing, only, when you talked of knowing me. Still, I am utterly unused of these late years particularly To dream of communicating anything about that to another person.
All my writings are purely dramatic, as I am always anxious to say. That when I make never so little an attempt, no wonder if I bungle notably. Language, too, is an organ that never studied this heavy, heavy head of mine. Will you not think me very brutal if I tell you I could almost smile at your misapprehension of what I meant to write? Yet I will tell you, because it will undo the bad effect of my thoughtlessness, and at the same time exemplify the point I have all along been honestly earnest to set you right upon, my real inferiority to you—just that, and no more. I write to you, in an unwise moment, on the spur of being again thanked, and, unwisely writing just as if thinking to myself, Said what must have looked absurd enough as seen apart from the horrible counterbalancing, never to be written, rest of me, by the side of which, could it be written and put before you, my note would sink to its proper and relative place, and become a mere thank you for your good opinion, which I assure you is far too generous, for I really believe you to be my superior in many respects, and feel uncomfortable till you see that too.
Since I hope for your sympathy and assistance, and frankness is everything in such a case. I do assure you that, had you read my note, only having known so much of me as is implied in having inspected, for instance, the contents merely of that fatal and often referred to portfolio there, de Meliora Pis, you would see in it the note, not the portfolio, The blandest utterance ever mild gentleman gave birth to. But I forget that one may make too much noise in a silent place by playing the few notes on the ear-piercing fife, which in Othello's regimental band might have been thumped into decent subordination by his spirit-stirring drum, to say nothing of gong and ophiclade. Will you forgive me, on promise to remember for the future, and be more considerate?
Not that you must too much despise me neither. Nor, of all things, apprehend I am attitudinizing à la Byron, and giving you to understand unutterable somethings, longings for Leith and all that. Far from it! I never committed murders, and sleep the soundest of sleeps. But the heart is desperately wicked, that is true, and though I dare not say I know mine, yet I have had signal opportunities. I who began life from the beginning, and can forget nothing, but names, and the date of the Battle of Waterloo, and have known good and wicked men and women, gentle and simple, shaking hands with Edmund Keane and Father Matthew, you, and Ottima. Then I had a certain faculty of self-consciousness, years and years ago, at which John Mill wondered, and which ought to be improved by this time.
If constant use helps at all, and meaning, on the whole, to be a poet, if not THE poet, for I am vain and ambitious some nights, I do myself justice, and dare call things by their names to myself, and say boldly, this I love, this I hate, this I would do, this I would not do, under all kinds of circumstances, and talking, Thinking in this style to myself, and beginning, however tremblingly, in spite of conviction, to write in this style for myself, on the top of the desk which contains my Songs of the Poets, No. 1, MP, I wrote, What you now forgive I know. Because I am, from my heart, sorry that by a foolish fit of inconsideration I should have given pain for a minute to you. Towards whom, on every account, I would rather soften and sleeken every word as to a bird, and not such a bird as my black self that goes screeching about the word for dead horse, Corvus Picus, Mirandola.
I too, who have been at such pains to acquire the reputation I enjoy in the world. Ask Mr. Kenyon, and who dine and wine and dance and enhance the company's pleasure till they make me ill and I keep house as of late. Mr. Kenyon, for I only quote where you may verify if you please, he says my common sense strikes him, and its contrast with my muddy metaphysical poetry. And so it shall strike you, for though I am glad that, since you did misunderstand me. You said so, and have given me an opportunity of doing by another way what I wished to do in that. Yet, if you had not alluded to my writing, as I meant you should not, you would have certainly understood something of its drift when you found me next Tuesday precisely the same quiet—no, for I feel I speak too loudly, in spite of your kind disclaimer, but— The same mild man-about town you were gracious to the other morning.
For, indeed, my own way of worldly life is marked out long ago, as precisely as yours can be, and I am set going with a hand, winker-wise, on each side of my head, and a directing finger before my eyes, to say nothing of an instinctive dread I have that a certain whiplash is vibrating somewhere in the neighbourhood in playful readiness. So, I hope there be proofs, Dobry's satisfaction, that, first, I am but a very poor creature compared to you, and entitled by my wants to look up to you, all I meant to say from the first of the first, and that next I shall be too much punished if, for this piece of mere inconsideration, you deprive me, more or less, or sooner or later, of the pleasure of seeing you.
A little overboisterous gratitude for which, perhaps, caused all the mischief. The reasons you give for deferring my visits next week are too cogent for me to dispute, that is too true, and, being now and henceforward on my good behaviour, I will at once cheerfully submit to them, if needs must. But should your mere kindness and forethought, as I half suspect, have induced you to take such a step, You will now smile with me at this new and very unnecessary addition to the fears of me I have got so triumphantly over in your case. Wise man was I not, to clench my first favourable impression so adroitly, like a recent Cambridge Worthy my sister heard of, who, being on his theological examination, was asked by the tutor, who wished to let him off easily, Who was the first king of Israel?
Saul, answered the trembling youth. Good, nodded approvingly the tutor. Otherwise called Paul, subjoined the youth in his elation. Now I have begged pardon, and blushingly assured you that was only a slip of the tongue, and that I did really mean all the while. Paul, or no Paul, the veritable son of Kish, he that owned the asses, and found listening to the harp the best of all things for an evil spirit. Pray write me a line to say, oh, if that's all, and remember me for good, which is very compatible with a moment's stupidity, and let me not for one fault, and that the only one that shall be, lose any pleasure. For your friendship I am sure I have not lost. God bless you, my dear friend. R. Browning.
And by the way, will it not be better, as cooperating with you more effectually in your kind promise to forget the printer's error in my blotted proof, to send me back that same proof, if you have not inflicted proper and summary justice on it? When Mephistopheles last came to see us in this world outside here, he counselled sundry of us never to write a letter. And never to burn one. Do you know that? But I never mind what I am told. Seriously, I am ashamed. I shall next ask a servant for my paste in the high fantastical style of my own Luria.
Sunday, May 25th, 1845. I owe you the most humble of apologies, dear Mr. Browning, for having spent so much solemnity on so simple a matter. And I hasten to pay it, confessing at the same time, as why should I not, that I am quite as much ashamed of myself as I ought to be, which is not a little. You will find it difficult to believe me, perhaps, when I assure you that I never made such a mistake, I mean of over-seriousness to indefinite compliments, no, never in my life before. Indeed, my sisters have often jested with me, in matters of which they were cognisant. On my supernatural indifference to the superlative degree in general, as if it meant nothing in grammar. I usually know well that boots may be called for in this world of ours, just as you called for yours, and that to bring Boots were the vilest of malaproposities.
Also, I should have understood Boots, where you wrote it in the letter in question. If it had not been for the relation of two things in it, and now I perfectly seem to see how I mistook that relation—seem to see, because I have not looked into the letter again since your last night's commentary, and will not—inasmuch as I have observed before in my own mind that a good deal of what is called obscurity in you arises from a habit of very subtle association, so subtle that you are probably unconscious of it. and the effect of which is to throw together on the same level and in the same light things of likeness and unlikeness, till the reader grows confused, as I did, and takes one for another. I may say, however, in a poor justice to myself, that I wrote what I wrote so unfortunately through reverence for you, and not at all from vanity in my own account.
Although I do feel palpably while I write these words here and now that I might as well leave them unwritten, for that no man of the world who ever lived in the world, not even you, could be expected to believe them, though said, sung, and sworn.
For the rest, it is scarcely an apposite moment for you to talk, even dramatically, of my superiority to you. Unless you mean, which perhaps you do mean, my superiority in simplicity, and verily to some of the adorable ingenuousness sacred to the shade of Simpson, I may put in a modest claim, and have my claim allowed. Pray do not mock me, I quote again from your Shakespeare, to you who are a dramatic poet, and I will admit anything that you like, being humble just now, even that I did not know you." I was certainly innocent of the knowledge of the ice and cold water you introduce me to, and am only just shaking my head as flush would after a first wholesome plunge. Well, if I do not know you, I shall learn, I suppose, in time.
I am ready to try humbly to learn, and I may, perhaps, if you are not done in Sanskrit, which is too hard for me. Notwithstanding that I had the pleasure yesterday to hear from America of my profound skill in various languages less known than Hebrew—a liberal paraphrase on Mr. Horne's large fancies on the like subject, and a satisfactory reputation in itself, as long as it is not necessary to deserve it. So I hear in close to you your letter back again, as you wisely desire, Although you never could doubt, I hope, for a moment of its safety with me in the completest of senses, and then, from the heights of my superior stultity and other qualities of the like order, I venture to advise you, however, to speak of the letter critically, and as the dramatic composition it is, it is to be admitted to be very beautiful and well worthy of the rest of its kin in the portfolio.
"'Lays of the Poets,' or otherwise, I venture to advise you to burn it at once. And then, my dear friend, I ask you, having some claim, to burn at the same time the letter I was fortunate enough to write to you on Friday, and this present one. Don't send them back to me. I hate to have letters sent back. But burn them for me, and never mind Mephistopheles." After which friendly turn, you will do me the one last kindness of forgetting all this exquisite nonsense, and of refraining from mentioning it by breath or pen to me or another. Now I trust you so far, you will put it with the date of the Battle of Waterloo, and I with every date in chronology, seeing that I can remember none of them. And we will shuffle the cards, and take patience, and begin the game again, if you please.
And I shall bear in mind that you are a dramatic poet, which is not the same thing by any means with us of the primitive simplicities, who don't tread on coffins, nor shift the mask in the scene. And I will reverence you both as a poet, and as THE poet, because it is no false ambition but a right you have, and one which those who live longest will see justified to the uttermost. In the meantime, I need not ask Mr. Kenyon if you have any sense, because I have no doubt that you have quite sense enough, and even if I had a doubt, I shall prefer judging for myself without interposition. Which I can do, you know, as long as you like to come and see me. And you can come this week, if you do like it, because our relations don't come till the end of it, it appears.
Not that I made a pretense out of kindness. Pray don't judge me so outrageously. But if you like to come, not on Tuesday, but on Wednesday at three o'clock, I shall be very glad to see you, and I for one shall have forgotten everything by that time, being quick at forgetting my own faults, usually. If Wednesday does not suit you, I am not sure that I can see you this week, but it depends on circumstances. Only don't think yourself obliged to come on Wednesday. You know I began by entreating you to be open and sincere with me, and no more. I require no sleekening of every word. I love the truth, and can bear it, whether in word or deed, and those who have known me longest would tell you so fullest.
Well, may God bless you. We shall know each other some day, perhaps. And I am always and faithfully your friend, E. B. B.
Postmark, May 26th, 1845. Nay, I must have the last word, as all people in the wrong desire to have, and then no more of the subject. You said that I had given you great pain. So long as I stop that, think anything of me you choose or can. But before your former letter came, I saw the preordained uselessness of mine. Speaking is to some end, apart from foolish self-relief, which, after all, I can do without. And where there is no end, you see, or to finish characteristically, since the offering to cut off one's right hand to save anybody a headache is in vile taste, even for our melodramas, seeing that it was never yet believed in on the stage or off it, How much worse to really make the ugly chop, and afterwards come sheepishly in, one's arm in a black sling, and find that the delectable gift had changed aching to nausea.
There. And now exit, prompt side, nearest door, Luria. And enter, R.B., next Wednesday, as boldly as he suspects most people do just after they have been soundly frightened. I shall be most happy to see you on the day, and at the hour you mention. God bless you, my dear friend. R. B.
Monday morning. Postmark, May 27th, 1845. You will think me the most changeable of all the changeable, but indeed it is not my fault that I cannot, as I wished, receive you on Wednesday. There was a letter this morning, and our friends not only come to London, but come to this house on Tuesday, tomorrow, to pass two or three days, until they settle in an hotel for the rest of the season. Therefore, you see, it is doubtful whether the two days may not be three, and the three days four. But if they go away in time, and if Saturday should suit you, I will let you know by a word, and you can answer by a yea or nay. While they are in the house, I must give them what time I can, and indeed it is something to dread altogether.
Tuesday. I send you the note I had begun before receiving yours of last night, and also a fragment from Mrs. Headley's, herein enclosed. Me on Tuesday or Wednesday? If on Tuesday I shall come by the three o'clock train, if on Wednesday early in the morning, as I shall be anxious to secure rooms. So that your uncle and Arabel may come up on Thursday. A full and complete certificate, that you may know, quite know, what the real and only reason of the obstacle to Wednesday is. On the Saturday, perhaps, or on Monday, more certainly, there is likely to be no opposition, at least not on the Côte-et-Gouche, my side, to our meeting, but I will let you know more.
For the rest, We have both been a little unlucky, there's no denying, in overcoming the embarrassments of a first acquaintance, but suffer me to say as one other last word, and quite, quite the last this time, in case there should have been anything approaching, however remotely, to a distrustful or unkind tone in what I wrote on Sunday, and I have a sort of consciousness that, in the process of my self-scorning, I was not in the most sabbatical of moods, perhaps. that I do recall and abjure it, and from my heart entreat your pardon for it, and profess, notwithstanding it, neither to choose nor to be able to think otherwise of you than I have done, as of one most generous and most loyal, for that if I chose I could not, and that if I could I should not choose.
Ever and gratefully your friend, E. B. B. And now we shall hear of Luria, shall we not, and much besides. And Miss Mitford has sent me the most high comical of letters to read, addressed to her by R. B. Hayden, historical painter, which has made me quite laugh, and would make you, expressing his righteous indignation at the great fact and gross impropriety of any man who has thoughts too deep for tears, agreeing to wear a bag-wig, the case of poor Wordsworth's going to court, you know. Mr. Hayden being infinitely serious all the time, and yet holding the doctrine of the divine right of princes in his left hand. How is your head? May I be hoping the best for it? May God bless you.
Postmark May 28th, 1845. Saturday, Monday, as you shall appoint. No need to say that, or my thanks. But this note troubles you, out of my bounden duty to help you, or Miss Mitford, to make the painter run violently down a steep place into the sea, if that will amuse you, by further informing him, what I know on the best authority, that Wordsworth's bagwig, or at least the more important of his court habiliments, were considerately furnished for the nonce by Mr. Rogers from his own wardrobe, to the manifest advantage of the laureate's pocket. but more problematic improvement of his person, when one thinks of the astounding difference of build in the two poets. The fact should be put on record, if only as serving to render less chimerical a promise sometimes figuring in the columns of provincial newspapers, that the two apprentices, some grocer or other advertises for, will be boarded and clothed like one of the family.
May not your unfinished, really good, head of the great man have been happily kept waiting for the body which can now be added on, with all this picturesqueness of circumstances. Precept on precept, but then line upon line is allowed by as good authority, and may I not draw my confirming black line after yours, yet not break pledge? I am most grateful to you for doing me justice, doing yourself. Your own judgment, Justice, since even the playwright of Theseus and the Amazon found it one of his hardest devices to write me a speech, lest the lady be frightened, wherein it shall be said that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but etc., etc. God bless you. One thing more, but one. You could never have misunderstood the asking for the letter again.
I feared you might refer to it pour constater le fait. And now I am yours, R.B. My head is all but well now. Thank you. Just one word to say that if Saturday to-morrow should be fine, because in the case of its raining I shall not expect you, you will find me at three o'clock. Yes, the circumstances of the costume were mentioned in the letter, Mr. Rogers' bag wig and the rest, and David Wilkie's sword, and also that the laureate, so equipped, fell down upon both knees in the superfluity of etiquette, and had to be picked up by two lords-in-waiting. It is a large exaggeration, I do not doubt, but then I never sympathized with the sighing kept up by people about that acceptance of the laureateship which drew the bag-wig as a corollary after it.
Not that the laureateship honored him, but that he honored it, and that so honoring it, he preserves a symbol instructive to the masses, who are children and to be taught by symbols now as formerly. Isn't it true? Or at least, may it not be true? And won't the court laurel, such as it is, be all the worthier of you for Wordsworth's having worn it first? And in the meantime I shall see you to-morrow, perhaps, or if it should rain, on Monday at the same hour. Ever yours, my dear friend, E.
B. B.
-
8 08 - June 1845 54:40
Friday morning, postmark, June 7th, 1845. When I see all you have done for me in this Prometheus, I feel more than half ashamed both of it and of me for using your time so, and forced to say in my own defence, not to you but myself, that I never thought of meaning to inflict such work on you who might be doing so much better things in the meantime both for me and for others, Because, you see, it is not the mere reading of the manuscript, but the comparing of the text, and the melancholy comparisons between the English and the Greek, quite enough to turn you from your pilantropo tropo, that I brought upon you, and, indeed, I did not mean so much, nor so soon, yet, as you have done it for me. For me, who expected a few jottings down with a pencil and a general opinion, it is, of course, of the greatest value, besides the pleasure and pride which come of it.
And I must say of the translation, before putting it aside for the nonce, that the circumstance of your paying it so much attention, and seeing any good in it, is quite enough reward for the writer, and quite enough motive for self-gratulation, if it were all torn to fragments at this moment. Which is a foolish thing to say, because it is so obvious, and because you would know it if I said it or not.
And while you were doing this for me, you thought it unkind of me not to write to you. Yes, and you think me at this moment the very princess of apologies and excuses and depreciations and all the rest of the small family of distrust or of hypocrisy, who knows? Well, but you are wrong. Wrong to think so. And you will let me say one word to show where you are wrong. Not for you to controvert, because it must relate to myself especially and lies beyond your cognizance, and is something which I must know best after all. And it is— That you persist in putting me into a false position with respect to fixing days, and the like, and making me feel somewhat as I did when I was a child, and Papa used to put me up on the chimney-piece, and exhort me to stand up straight like a hero, which I did, straighter and straighter, and then suddenly— Was where, as we say in the ballads, of the walls, growing alive behind me, and extending two stony hands to push me down that frightful precipice to the rug, where the dog lay, dear old Havana, and where he and I were likely to be dashed to pieces together, and mix our uncanonized bones.
Now my present false position, which is not the chimney-pieces, Is the necessity you provide for me in the shape of my having to name this day or that day, and of your coming because I name it, and of my having to think and remember that you come because I name it? Through a weakness, perhaps, or morbidness, or one knows not how to define it, I cannot help being uncomfortable in having to do this. It is impossible. Not that I distrust you. You are the last in the world I could distrust, and then, although you may be sceptical, I am naturally given to trust, to a fault, as some say, or to a sin, as some reproach me, and then again, if I were ever such a distruster, it could not be of you. But if you knew me, I will tell you, if one of my brothers omits coming to this room for two days, I never ask why it happened.
If my own father omits coming upstairs to say good-night, I never say a word, and not from indifference. Do try to make out these readings of me as a dexit casobonus, and don't throw me down as a corrupt text, nor convict me for an infidel which I am not. On the contrary, I am grateful and happy to believe that you like to come here, and even if you came here as a pure act of charity and pity to me, As long as you chose to come, I should not be too proud to be grateful and happy still. I could not be proud to you, and I hope you will not fancy such a possibility which is the remotest of all. Yes, and I am anxious to ask you to be wholly generous, and leave off such an interpreting philosophy as you made use of yesterday, and forgive me when I beg you to fix your own days for coming for the future.
Will you— It is the same thing in one way. If you like to come really every week, there is no hindrance in it. You can do, and the privilege and obligation remain equally mine. And if you name a day for coming on any week when there is an obstacle on my side, you will learn it from me in a moment. Why, I might as well charge you with distrusting me, because you persist in making me choose the days. And it is not for me to do it, but for you. I must feel that. And I cannot help chafing myself against the thought that for me to begin to fix days in this way, just because you have quick impulses like all imaginative persons, and wish me to do it now, may bring me to the catastrophe of asking you to come when you would rather not, which, as you say truly, would not be an important vexation to you, but to me would be worse than vexation, to me.
And therefore I shrink from the very imagination of the possibility of such a thing, and ask you to bear with me, and let it be as I prefer, left to your own choice of the moment. And bear with me above all, because this shows no want of faith in you, none, but comes from a simple fact with its ramifications, that you know little of me personally yet, and that she... You guess, even, but very little, of the influence of a particular experience over me and out of me, and if I wanted a proof of this, we need not seek further than the very point of discussion, and the hard worldly thoughts you thought I was thinking of you yesterday, I who had not thought one of them. But I am so used to discern the correcting and ministering angels by the same footsteps on the ground, That it is not wonderful that I should look down there at any approach of a philia taxis whatever to this personal me.
Have I not been ground down to browns and blacks? And is it my fault if I am not green? Not that it is my complaint. I should not be justified in complaining. I believe, as I told you, that there is more gladness than sadness in the world. That is, generally. And if some natures have to be refined by the sun, and some by the furnace, the less genial ones, both means are to be recognized as good, however different in pleasurableness and painfulness, and though furnace fire leaves scorched streaks upon the fruit. I assured you there was nothing I had any power of teaching you, and there is nothing except grief. Which I would not teach you, you know, if I had the occasion granted. It is a multitude of words about nothing at all.
This, but I am like Marianna in the moated Grange, and sit listening too often to the mouse in the wainscot. Be as forbearing as you can, and believe how profoundly it touches me that you should care to come here at all, much more so often. And try to understand that If I did not write as you half asked, it was just because I failed at the moment to get up enough pomp and circumstance to write on purpose to certify the important fact of my being a little stronger or a little weaker on one particular morning. That I am always ready and rejoiced to write to you, you know perfectly well. And I have proved by superfluity of naughtiness and prolixity through some twenty posts, and this, and therefore you will agree altogether to attribute no more to me on these counts, and determine to read me no more backwards with your Hebrew, putting in your own vowel points without my leave.
Shall it be so?
Here is a letter grown from a note which it meant to be. And I have been interrupted in the midst of it, or it should have gone to you earlier. Let what I have said in it of myself pass unquestioned and unnoticed, because it is of me and not of you, and, if in any wise, lunaticle, all the talking and writing in the world will not put the implied moon into another quarter. Only be patient with me a little. And let us have a smooth ground for the poems which I am foreseeing the sight of with such pride and delight—such pride and delight! And one thing, which is chief, though it seems to come last—you will have advice, will you not, if that pain does not grow much better directly. It cannot be prudent or even safe to let a pain in the head go on so long, and no remedy be attempted for it.
And you cannot be sure that it is a merely nervous pain, and that it may not have consequences, and this quite apart from the consideration of suffering. So you will see someone with an opinion to give, and take it. Do, I beseech you, you will not say no.
Also, If on Wednesday you should be less well than usual, you will come on Thursday instead, I hope, seeing that it must be right for you to be quiet and silent when you suffer so, and a journey into London can let you be neither. Otherwise I hold to my day Wednesday. And may God bless you, my dear friend, ever yours, E.B.B.
You are right, I see, nearly everywhere, if not quite everywhere, in the criticisms. But of course I have not looked very closely. That is, I have read your papers, but not in connection with my side of the argument. But I shall lose the post after all.
Saturday morning, post-mark, June 7th, 1845. I ventured to hope this morning might bring me news of you, first East Winds on you, then myself, then those criticisms. I do assure you I am properly apprehensive. How are you? May I go on Wednesday without too much Alphadea? Pray remember what I said and wrote, to the effect that my exceptions were, in almost every case, to the reading, not to your version of it. But I have not specified the particular ones, not written down the Greek of my suggested translations, have I? And if you do not find them in the margin of your copy, how you must wonder. Thus, in the last speech but one of Hermes, I prefer Porson and Bloomfield's Ae me datucron ti calai manion to the old combinations that include oitucer, though there is no manuscript authority for emendation, it seems.
But in what respect does Prometheus fare well, or better even, since the beginning? And is it not the old argument over again, that when a man fails he should repent of his ways? And while thinking of Hermes, let me say that, merder moi diplas hodus pros baleis, is surely, don't subject me to the trouble of a second journey by paying no attention to the first. So says Scoliast A, and so backs him Scoliast B. Especially created, it should appear, to show that there could be in rerum natura such another as his predecessor. A few other remarks occur to me, which I will tell you, if you please. Now I really want to know how you are, and write for that. Ever yours, R.B. Postmark June 9th, 1845. Just after my note left, yours came.
I will try so to answer it as to please you, and I begin by promising cheerfully to do all you bid me about naming days, etc. I do believe we are friends now and for ever. There can be no reason, therefore, that I should cling tenaciously to any one or other time of meeting, as if, losing that, I lost everything. And for the future, I will provide against sudden engagements, outrageous weather, etc., to your heart's content. Nor am I going to accept against here and there a little wrong I could get up, as when you imply from my quick impulses and the like. No, my dear friend, for I seem sure I shall have quite, quite time enough to do myself justice in your eyes. Let time show. Perhaps I feel nonetheless sorely when you thank me for such company as mine, that I cannot avoid confessing to myself that it would not be so absolutely out of my power, perhaps, to contrive really and deserve thanks in a certain acceptation.
I might really try, at all events, and amuse you a little better when I do have the opportunity. And I do not. But there is the thing. It is all of a piece. I do not seek your friendship in order to do you good, any good, only to do myself good. Though I would, God knows, do that too. Enough of this. I am much better, indeed, but will certainly follow your advice should the pain return. And you? You have tried a new journey from your room, have you not? Do recollect at any turn. Any chance so far in my favour that I am here and yours should you want any fetching and carrying in this outside London world? Your brothers may have their own business to mind. Mr. Kenyon is at New York, we will suppose.
Here I am. What else? What else makes me count my cleverness to you, as I know I have done more than once by word and letter, but the real wish to be set at work? I should have, I hope, better taste than to tell any every-day acquaintance, who could not go out one single morning even, on account of a headache, that the weather was delightful, much less that I had been walking five miles and meant to run ten. Yet to you I boasted once of polking and waltzing and more. But then would it not be a very superfluous piece of respect in the four-footed bird to keep his wings to himself, because his master Oceanus could fly, forsooth? Whereas he begins to wave a flap and show how ready they are to be off, for what else were the good of him?
Think of this, and, Know me for yours, R.B.
For good you are to these notes, you shall have more, that is, the rest, On Wednesday, then, at three, except as you accept. God bless you. Oh, let me tell you. I suppose Mr. Horne must be in town, as I received a letter two days ago from the contriver of some literary society or other who had before written to get me to belong to it. Protesting against my reasons for refusing, and begging that, at all events, I would suspend my determination till I had been visited by Mr. H. on the subject. And, as they can hardly mean to bring him express from the Drakenfels for just that, he is returned, no doubt. And as he is your friend, I take the opportunity of mentioning the course I shall pursue with him, or any other friend of yours I may meet.
And everybody else, I may add, the course I understand you to desire with respect to our own intimacy. While I may acknowledge, I believe, that I correspond with you, I shall not, in any case, suffer it to be known that I see or have seen you. This I just remind you of, lest any occasion of embarrassment should arise, for a moment, from your not being quite sure how I had acted in any case. Con che le bacio le mani. Arrivederla.
Tuesday morning, postmark June 10, 1845. I must thank you by one word for all your kindness and consideration, which could not be greater, nor more felt by me. In the first place, afterwards, if that should not be Irish dialect, do understand that my letter passed from my hands to go to yours on Friday. But was thrown aside carelessly downstairs and covered up, they say, so as not to be seen until late on Saturday, and I can only humbly hope to have been cross enough about it, having conscientiously tried, to secure a little more accuracy another time. And then, if ever I should want anything done or found, a rock's egg or the like, you may believe me that I shall not scruple to ask you to be the finder.
But at this moment I want nothing, indeed, except your poems. And that is quite the truth. Now, do consider and think what I could possibly want in your outside London world, you who are the genius of the lamp. Why, if you light it, and let me read your romances, etc., by it, is not that the best use for it? And am I likely to look for another? Only I shall remember what you say, gratefully and seriously. And if ever I should have a good fair opportunity of giving you trouble, as if I had not done it already, you may rely upon my evil intentions, even though dear Mr. Kenyon should not actually be at New York, which he is not, I am glad to say, as I saw him on Saturday. Which reminds me that he knows of your having been here, of course, and will not mention it, as he understood from me that you would not.
Thank you. Also, there was an especial reason which constrained me, on pain of appearing a great hypocrite, to tell Miss Mitford the bare fact of my having seen you, and reluctantly I did it, though placing some hope in her promise of discretion. And how necessary the discretion is will appear in the awful statistical fact of our having at this moment, as my sisters were calculating yesterday, some forty relations in London, to say nothing of the right wing of the enemy. For Mr. Horne, I could have told you, and really I thought I had told you, of his being in England.
Last paragraph of all is that I don't want to be amused, or rather that I am amused by everything and anything. Why, surely, surely you have some singular ideas about me. So till tomorrow. E.B.B.
Instead of writing this note to you yesterday, as should have been, I went downstairs, or rather was carried, and am not the worse.
Friday, June 14, 1845. Yes, the poem is too good in certain respects for the prizes given in colleges, when all the pure parsley goes naturally to the rabbits. and has a great deal of beauty here and there in image and expression. Still, I do not quite agree with you that it reaches the Tennyson standard anywise, and for the blank verse, I cannot for a moment think it comparable to one of the grand passages in Oinone and Arthur and the like. In fact, I seem to hear more in that latter blank verse than you do. To hear not only a mighty line, as in Marlow, but a noble, full, orbicular wholeness in complete passages, which always struck me as the mystery of music and great peculiarity in Tennyson's versification, inasmuch as he attains to these complete effects, without that shifting of the pause practiced by the masters, Shelley and others.
A linked music, in which there are no links, That you would take to be a contradiction, and yet something like that my ear has always seemed to perceive, and I have wondered curiously again and again how there could be so much union and no fastening. Only, of course, it is not model versification, and for dramatic purposes it must be admitted to be bad. Which reminds me to be astonished for the second time. How you could think such a thing of me as that I wanted to read only your lyrics, or that I preferred the lyrics or something barbarous in that way? You don't think me ambidexter or either-handed, and both hands open for what poems you will vouchsafe to me? And yet, if you would let me see anything you may have in a readable state by you, the flight of the Duchess, or act or scene of the soul's tragedy, I shall be so glad and grateful to you.
Oh, if you change your mind, and choose to be bien prier, I will grant it as your right, and begin my liturgy directly. But this is not teasing, in the intention of it. And I understand all about the transcription and the inscrutableness of rough copies, that is, if you write as I do, so that my guardian angel or Monsieur Champollion cannot read what is written. Only whatever they can, remember, I can. And you are not to mind trusting me with the cacistography possible to mortal readers.
The sun shines so that nobody dares complain of the east wind. And indeed, I am better altogether. May God bless you, my dear friend. E.B.B.
Postmark June 14, 1845 When I ask my wise self what I really do remember of the prize poem, the answer is, both of Chapman's lines are top, quite worth any prize for their quota. Then, the good epithet of Green Europe contrasting with Africa. Then, deep in the piece, a picture of a vestal in a vault, where I see a dipping and winking lamp plainest, and last of all the ominous All Was Dark that dismisses you. I rated the poem many years ago, and never since, though I have an impression that the versification is good. Yet from your commentary I see I must have said a good deal more in its praise than that. But have you not discovered by this time that I go on talking with my thoughts anyway? I know I have always been jealous of my own musical faculty.
I can write music. Now that I see the uselessness of such jealousy, and am for loosing and letting it go, it may be cramped, possibly. Your music is more various and exquisite than any modern writer's to my ear. One should study the mechanical part of the art, as nearly all that there is to be studied, for the more one sits and thinks over the creative process, the more it confirms itself as inspiration, nothing more nor less. Or at worst, you write down old inspirations, what you remember of them, but with that it begins. Reflection is exactly what it names itself, a re-presentation, in scattered rays from every angle of incidence, of what first of all became present in a great light, a whole one.
So tell me how those lights are born, if you can. But I can tell anybody how to make melodious verses. Let him do it, therefore. It should be exacted of all writers. You do not understand what a new feeling it is for me to have someone who is to like my verses or I shall not ever like them after. So far differently was I circumstance of old, that I used rather to go about for a subject of offence to people, writing ugly things in order to warm the ungenial and timorous off my grounds at once. I shall never do so again, at least. As it is, I will bring all I dare in as great quantities as I can, if not next time, after then, certainly. I must make an end, print this autumn my last four bells, lyrics, romances, the tragedy, and Luria, and then go on with a whole heart to my own poem.
Indeed, I have just resolved not to begin any new song even till this grand clearance is made. I will get the tragedy transcribed to bring... To bring, next Wednesday, if you know how happy you make me. May I not say that, dear friend, when I feel it from my soul? I thank God that you are better. Do pray make fresh endeavours to profit by this partial respite of the weather. All about you must urge that. But even from my distance some effect might come of such wishes. But you are better, look so, and speak so. God bless you. R.B. You let flowers be sent you in a letter, everyone knows, and this hot day draws out our very first yellow rose.
Monday, postmark June 17th, 1845. Yes, I quite believe, as you do, that what is called the creative process in works of art is just inspiration and no less. Which made somebody say to me not long since, and so you think that Shakespeare's Othello was of the effluence of the Holy Ghost? Rather a startling deduction. Only not quite as final as might appear to somebody's, perhaps. At least it does not prevent my going on to agree with the saying of Spiridion. Do you remember? Tout ce que l'homme appelle inspiration, je l'appelle aussi revelation. If there is not something too self-evident in it, after all, my sole objection. And is it not true that your inability to analyze the mental process in question is one of the proofs of the fact of inspiration?
As the gods were known of old by not being seen to move their feet, coming and going in an equal sweep of radiance, and still more wonderful than the first transient great light you speak of, And far beyond any work of reflection, except in the pure analytical sense in which you use the word, appears that gathering of light on light upon particular points as you go in composition step by step till you get intimately near to things, and see them in a fullness and clearness. And an intense trust in the truth of them, which you have not in any sunshine of noon called real, but which you have then, and struggle to communicate, an ineffectual struggle with most writers—oh, how ineffectual!—and, when effectual, issuing in the Pippa Parsis and other masterpieces of the world.
You will tell me what you mean exactly by being jealous of your own music. You said once that you had a false notion of music, or had practiced it according to the false notions of other people. But did you mean besides that you ever had meant to despise music altogether? Because that—that is hard to set about trying to believe of you, indeed. And then you can praise my verses for music. Why, are you aware that people blame me constantly for wanting harmony? From Mr. Boyd, who moans aloud over the indisposition of my trochies, and no less a person than Mr. Tennyson, who said to somebody who repeated it, that in the want of harmony lay the chief defect of the poems, although it might verily be retrieved, as he could fancy that I had an ear by nature.
Well, but I am pleased that you should praise me, right or wrong—I mean whether I am right or wrong in being pleased, and I say so to you openly. Although my belief is that you are under a vow to Our Lady of Loreto to make giddy with all manner of high vanities some head not too strong for such things, but too low for them, before you see again the embroidery on her divine petticoat. Only there's a flattery so far beyond praise, even your praise, as where you talk of your verses being liked, etc., and of your being happy to bring them here, that is scarcely a lawful weapon, and see if the Madonna may not signify so much to you. Seriously, you will not hurry too uncomfortably, or uncomfortably at all, about the transcribing.
Another day, you know, will do as well. And patience is possible to me if not native to the soil.
Also, I am behaving very well in going out into the noise, not quite out of doors yet, on account of the heat, and I am better, as you say, without any doubt at all, and stronger. Only my looks are a little deceitful, and people are apt to be heated and flushed in this weather one hour, to look a little more ghastly an hour or two after. Not that it is not true of me that I am better, mind, because I am.
The flower in the letter was from one of my sisters, from Arabelle, though many of these poems are ideal, will you understand? And your rose came quite alive and fresh, though in act of dropping its beautiful leaves because of having to come to me instead of living on in your garden as it intended. But I thank you for this and all. My dear friend, E.B.B.
Thursday morning, postmark June 19th, 1845. When I next see you, do not let me go on and on to my confusion about matters I am more or less ignorant of, but always ignorant. I tell you plainly I only trench on them and entrench in them from gaucherie, pure and respectable. I should certainly grow instructive on the prospects of hay crops and pasture land, if deprived of this resource. And now here is a week to wait before I shall have any occasion to relax into Greek literature, when I am thinking all the while, now I will just ask simply what flattery there was, etc., etc., which, as I had not courage to say then, I keep to myself for shame now. This I will say then. Wait and know me better.
As you will one long day at the end. Why I write now is because you did not promise, as before, to let me know how you are. This morning is miserably cold again. Will you tell me at your own time? God bless you, my dear friend.
R.B.
If, on Greek literature or anything else, it is your pleasure to cultivate a reputation for ignorance, I will respect your desire, and indeed the point of the deficiency in question being far above my sight, I am not qualified either to deny or assert the existence of it, so you are free to have it all your own way. About the flattery, however, there is a difference, and I must deny a little having ever used such a word. As far as I can recollect, and I have been trying to recollect, as that word of flattery. Perhaps I said something about your having vowed to make me vain by writing this or that of my liking your verses, and so on, and perhaps I said it too lightly, which happened because when one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, it is far best, as a general rule, to laugh.
But the serious truth is that it was all nonsense together, what I wrote, and that instead of talking of your making me vain, I should have talked, if it had been done sincerely, of your humbling me. Inasmuch as nothing does humble anybody so much as being lifted up too high. You know what vaulting ambition did once for himself, and when it is done for him by another, his fall is still heavier. And one moral of all this general philosophy is that if, when your poems come, you persist in giving too much importance to what I may have courage to say of this or of that in them, you will make me a dumb critic, and I shall have no help for my dumbness. So I tell you beforehand, nothing extenuating nor exaggerating nor putting down in malice.
I know so much of myself as to be sure of it. Even as it is, the insolence which people blame me for and praise me for, the recklessness which my friends talk of with mitigating countenances, seems gradually going and going. And really, it would not be very strange, without that, if I, who was born a hero-worshipper, and have so continued, and who always recognized your genius... Should find it impossible to bring out critical doxies on the workings of it. Well, I shall do what I can, as far as impressions go, you understand, and you must promise not to attach too much importance to anything said. So that is a covenant, my dear friend. And I am really gaining strength, and I will not complain of the weather.
As long as the thermometer keeps above sixty, I am content for one, and the roses are not quite dead yet, which they would have been in the heat. And last, and not least, may I ask you if you were told that the pain in the head was not important, or was, in the causes, and was likely to be well soon, or was not? I am at the end. E.B.B.
Upon second or third thoughts, Isn't it true that you are a little suspicious of me? Suspicious, at least, of suspiciousness.
Sunday afternoon. Postmark, June 23rd, 1845. And if I am suspicious of your suspiciousness, who gives cause, pray? The matter was long ago settled, I thought, when you first took exception to what I said about higher and lower, and I consented to this much. That you should help seeing, if you could, our true intellectual and moral relation each to the other, so long as you would allow me to see what is there fronting me. Is my eye evil because yours is not good? My own friend, if I wished to make you vain, if having found the bower, I did really address myself to the wise business of spoiling its rose roof, I think that at least where there was such a will, there would be also something not unlike away.
That I should find a proper hooked stick to tear down flowers with, and write you other letters than these. Quite, quite others, I feel. Though I am far from going to imagine, even for a moment, what might be the precise prodigy, like the notable son of Zeus that was to have been, and done the wonders, Only he did not because, etc., etc. But I have a restless head today, and so let you off easily. Well, you ask me about it, that head, and I am not justified in being positive when my doctor is dubious. As for the causes, they are neither superfluity of study, nor fancy, nor care, nor any special naughtiness that I know how to amend. So if I bring you nothing to signify on Wednesday... Though I hope to do more than that, you will know exactly why it happened.
I will finish and transcribe the flight of the Duchess since you spoke of that first. I am truly happy to hear that your health improves still. For me, going out does me good. Reading, writing, and, what is odd, infinitely most of all sleeping do me the harm. Never any very great harm. And all the while I am yours ever. R.B.
Monday, postmark June 24th, 1845. I had begun to be afraid that I did not deserve to have my questions answered, and I was afraid of asking them over again. But it is worse to be afraid that you are not better at all in any essential manner, after all your assurances, and that the medical means have failed so far. Did you go to somebody who knows anything? Because there is no excuse, you see, in common sense, for not having the best and most experienced opinion when there is a choice of advice. And I am confident that pain should not be suffered to go on without something being done. What I said about nerves related to what you had told me of your mother's suffering, and what you had fancied of the relation of it to your own, and not that I could be thinking about imaginary complaints.
I wish I could. Not either that I believe in the relation, because such things are not hereditary, are they? And the bare coincidence is improbable. Well, but I wanted particularly to say this. Don't bring the Duchess with you on Wednesday. I shall not expect anything. I write distinctly to tell you, and I would far rather that you did not bring it. You see, it is just as I thought, for that whether too much thought or study did or did not bring on the illness, yet you admit that reading and writing increases it, as they would naturally do any sort of pain in the head. Therefore, if you will but be in earnest and try to get well first, we will do the bells afterwards, and there will be time for a whole peal of them, I hope and trust, before the winter.
Now do admit that this is reasonable, and agree reasonably to it. And if it does you good to go out and take exercise, why not go out and take it? Nay, why not go away and take it? Why not try the effect of a little change of air, or even of a great change of air, if it should be necessary or even expedient? Anything is better, you know, or even if you don't know, I know, than to be ill really seriously. I mean for you to be ill, who have so much to do and enjoy in the world yet, and all those bells waiting to be hung, so that if you will agree to be well first, I will promise to be ready afterwards to help you in anything I can do, transcribing or anything, to get the books through the press in the shortest of times.
And I am capable of a great deal of that sort of work without being tired. Having the habit of writing in any sort of position, and the long habit, since before I was ill even, I never used to write at a table, or scarcely ever, but on the arm of a chair, or on the seat of one, sitting myself on the floor, and calling myself a Lollard for dignity. So, you will put by your Duchess, will you not? Or let me see just that one sheet? If one should be written which is finished, up to this moment, you understand, finished now. And if I have tired and teased you with all these words, it is a bad opportunity to take, and yet I will persist in saying through good and bad opportunities that I never did give cause, as you say, to your being suspicious of my suspiciousness, as I believe I said before.
I deny my suspiciousness altogether. It is not one of my faults. Nor is it quite my fault that you and I should be always quarrelling about over-appreciations and under-appreciations, and after all I have no interest or wish, I do assure you, to depreciate myself, and you are not to think that I have the remotest claim to the Montillon prize for good deeds in the way of modesty of self-estimation. Only when I know you better, as you talk of, and when you know me too well. The right and the wrong of these conclusions will appear in a fuller light than ever so much arguing can produce now. Is it unkindly written of me? No, I feel it is not, and that now and ever we are friends, just as you think.
I think besides, and am happy in thinking so, and could not be distrustful of you if I tried. So may God bless you, my ever dear friend, and mind to forget the Duchess, and to remember every good counsel. Not that I do particularly confide in the medical oracles. They never did much more for me than when my pulse was above 140 with fever, to give me digitalis to make me weak, and when I could not move without fainting with weakness, to give me quinine to make me feverish again. Yes, and they could tell from the stethoscope how very little was really wrong in me, if it were not on a vital organ, and how I should certainly live, if I didn't die sooner. But then, nothing has power over affections of the chest except God and his winds, and I do hope that an obvious quick remedy may be found for your head.
But do give up the writing and all that does harm. Ever yours, my dear friend. E. B. B. Miss Mitford talked of spending Wednesday with me, and I have put it off to Thursday. And if you should hear from Mr. Chorley that he is coming to see her and me together on any day, do understand that it was entirely her proposition and not mine, and that certainly it won't be acceded to as far as I am concerned, as I have explained to her finally. I have been vexed about it, but she can see him downstairs, as she has done before. And if she calls me perverse and capricious, which she will do, I shall stop the reflection by thanking her again and again, as I can do sincerely, for her kindness and goodness in coming to see me herself so far.
So my friend did not in the spirit see me write that first letter on Friday, which was too good and true to send, and met, five minutes after, its natural fate accordingly. Then on Saturday I thought to take health by storm, and walked myself half dead all the morning, about town, too. Last post-hour from this thule of a suburb, 4 p.m. on Saturdays, next expedition of letters, 8 a.m. on Mondays. And then my real letter set out with the others, and, it should seem, set at rest a wonder whether thy friend's questions deserved answering. Deserved answering. Parenthetically so much, I want most, though, to tell you, leaving out any slightest attempt at thanking you, that I am much better, quite well to-day.
That my doctor has piloted me safely through two or three illnesses, and knows all about me, I do think, and that he talks confidently of getting rid of all the symptoms complained of, and has made a good beginning if I may judge by to-day. As for going abroad, that is just the thing I most want to avoid, for a reason not so hard to guess, perhaps, as why my letter was slow in arriving. So, till to-morrow, My light through the dark week. God ever bless you, dear friend. R.B.
Tuesday evening, June 25th, 1845. What would you think when I write to ask you not to come tomorrow, Wednesday, but on Friday, perhaps, instead? But do see how it is, and judge if it is to be helped. I have waited hour after hour hoping to hear from Miss Mitford that she would agree to take Thursday and change for Wednesday, and just as I begin to wonder whether she can have received my letter at all, or whether she may not have been vexed by it into taking a vengeance and adhering to her own devices, for it appealed to her esprit de sex on the undeniable axiom of women having their way, and she might choose to act it out. Just as I wander over all this, and consider what a confusion of the elements it would be if you came and found her here, and Mr.
Chorley at the door, perhaps, waiting for some of the light of her countenance, comes a note from Mr. Kenyon, to the effect that he will be here at four o'clock p.m., and comes a final note from my aunt Mrs. Headley, supposed to be at Brighton for several months, to the effect that she will be here at twelve o'clock m. So do observe the constellation of adverse stars, or the convey of bad birds, as the Romans called them, and that there is no choice but to write as I am writing. It can't be helped, can it? For take away the doubt about Miss Mitford and Mr. Kenyon remains, and take away Mr. Kenyon, and there is Mrs. Headley, and thus it must be for Friday, which will learn to be a fortunate day for the nonce, unless Saturday should suit you better.
I do not speak of Thursday because of the doubt about Miss Mitford, and if any harm should happen to Friday, I will write again, but if you do not hear again, and are able to come then, you will perhaps come then.
In the meantime, I thank you for the better news in your note, if it is really, really to be trusted in, but, you know, you have said so often that you were better and better without being really better, that it makes people— Suspicious. Yet it is full amends for the disappointment to hope. Here I must break off, or be too late. May God bless you, my dear friend. E.B.B. 12 o'clock, Wednesday. Postmark, June 25th, 1845. Pomegranates you may cut deep down the middle and see into, but not hearts. So why should I try and speak? Friday is best day, because nearest, but Saturday is next best, it is next near, you know. If I get no note, therefore, Friday is my day. Now is post time, which happens properly.
God bless you, and so your own, R.B. After all, it must be for Saturday, as Mrs. Headley comes again on Friday, tomorrow, from New Cross, or, just beyond it, Eltham Park, to London for a few days, on account of the illness of one of her children. I write in the greatest haste after Miss Mitford has left me, and so tired, to say this, that if you can and will, come on Saturday, or, if not, on Monday or Tuesday, there is no reason against it. Your friend always." EBB.
Friday morning, postmark June 27th, 1845. Let me make haste and write down, tomorrow, Saturday, and not later, lest my selfishness be thoroughly got under in its struggle with a better feeling that tells me you must be far too tired for another visitor this week. What shall I decide on? Well, Saturday is said. But I will not stay quite so long, nor talk nearly so loud as of old times. Nor will you, if you understand anything of me, fail to send down word should you be at all indisposed. I should not have the heart to knock at the door unless I really believed you would do that. Still saying this, and providing against the other, does not amount, I well know, to the generosity, or justice, rather, of staying away for a day or two altogether.
But what a day or two may not bring forth. Change to you, change to me. Not all of me, however, can change, thank God. Yours ever, R.B. Or write as last night, if needs be. Monday, Tuesday is not so long to wait. Will you write?
Friday evening, postmark, June 28th, 1845. You are very kind and always. But really that does not seem a good reason against your coming tomorrow, so come, if it should not rain. If it rains, it concludes for Monday, or Tuesday, whichever may be clear of rain. I was tired on Wednesday by the confounding confusion of more voices than usual in this room, but the effect passed off, and though Miss Mitford was with me for hours yesterday, I am not unwell today. And pray, speak bona verba about the awful things which are possible between this now and Wednesday. You continue to do better, I do hope. I am forced to the brevity you see, by the post on one side and my friends on the other, who have so long overstayed the coming of your note, but it is enough to assure you that you will do no harm by coming, only give pleasure.
Ever yours, my dear friend, E.B.B.
Monday, June 30, 1845. I sent back the prize poems, which have been kept away far too long, even if I do not make excuses for the keeping. But our sins are not always to be measured by our repentance for them. Then I am well enough this morning to have thought of going out, till they told me it was not at all a right day for it, to Windy. Soft and delightful as the air seems to be, particularly after yesterday, when we had some winter back again in an episode. And the roses do not die, which is quite magnanimous of them, considering their reverses, and their buds are coming out in most exemplary resignation, like birds singing in a cage. Now that the windows may be open, the flowers take heart to live a little in this room.
And think of my forgetting to tell you on Saturday that I had known of a letter being received by somebody from Miss Martineau, who was at Ambleside at this time, and so entranced with the lakes and mountains as to be dreaming of taking or making a house among them, to live for the rest of her life. Mrs. Trollope, you may have heard, had something of the same nymphalepsy. No, her daughter was settled in the neighbourhood. That is the more likely reason for Mrs. Trollope. And the spirits of the hills conspired against her the first winter, and almost slew her with the fog, and drove her away to Italy, where the oreadocracy has gentler manners. And Miss Martineau is practising mesmerism and miracles on all sides, she says, and counts on Archbishop Wakely as a new adherent.
I even fancy that he has been to see her in the character of a convert. All this from Mr. Kenyon. There's a strange, wild book called The Autobiography of Heinrich Stilling, one of those true, devout, deep-hearted Germans who believe everything, and so are nearer the truth, I am sure, than the wise who believe nothing, but rather over-German sometimes, and redolent of sauerkraut. And he gives a tradition, somewhere between mesmerism and mysticism, Of a little spirit with gold shoe-buckles, who was his familiar spirit, and appeared only in the sunshine, I think, mottling it over with its feet, perhaps, as a child might snow. Take away the shoe-buckles, and I believe in the little spirit, don't you?
But these English mesmerists make the shoe-buckles quite conspicuous, and insist on them broadly, and the archbishop's weightly may be drawn by them, who can tell, more than by the little spirit itself. How is your head to-day, now really and nothing extenuating? I will not ask of poems till the quite well is authentic. May God bless you always, my dear friend. E. B. B.
After all, the book must go another day. I live in chaos, do you know, and I am too hurried at this moment. Yes, it is here.
-
9 09 - July 1845, part 1 33:36
How are you? May I hope to hear soon? I don't know exactly what possessed me to set my next day so far off as Saturday. It was said, however, so let it be. And I will bring the rest of the Duchess, four or five hundred lines, Heu Ereba Mala Crescit, as I once saw mournfully penciled on a white wall at Azolo. But you will tell me if you quite remember the main of the first part. Parts there are none, except in the necessary process of chopping up to suit the limits of a magazine, and I gave them as much as I could transcribe at a sudden warning. Because, if you please, I can bring the whole, of course. After seeing you that Saturday, I was caught up by a friend and carried to see Vidocq, who did the honours of his museum of knives and nails and hooks that have helped great murderers to their purposes.
He scarcely admits, I observe, an implement with only one attestation to its efficacy. But the one or two exceptions rather justify his latitude in their favour. Thus one little sort of dessert-knife did only take one life. But then, says Vidocq, it was the man's own mother's life, with fifty-two blows, and all four, I think, fifteen francs she had got. So prattles good-naturedly Vidocq. One of his best stories of that lacenaire, Jeune homme d'un caractère fort avenant, mais c'était un poète, quoth he, turning sharp on me out of two or three other people around him. Here your letter breaks in, and sunshine too. Why'd you send me that book? Not let me take it. What trouble for nothing! An old French friend of mine, a dear, foolish, very French heart and soul, is coming presently.
His poor brains are whirling with mesmerism in which he believes, as in all other unbelief. He and I are to dine alone. I have not seen him these two years. And I shall never be able to keep from driving the great wedge right through his breast and descending lower, from riveting his two foolish legs to the wintry chasm. For that I stammer and answer haphazard with you, get proportionately valiant and voluble with a mere cupful of Diderot's rinsings and a man into the bargain. If you were prevented from leaving the house yesterday, assuredly today you will never attempt such a thing. The wind, rain, All is against it. I trust you will not make the first experiment except under really favourable auspices, for by its success you will naturally be induced to go on or leave off.
Still, you are better. I fully believe, dare to believe, that will continue. As for me, since you ask, find me but something to do and see if I shall not be well, though I am well now, almost. How good you are to my roses! They are not of my making, to be sure. Never, by the way, did Miss Martineau work such a miracle as I now witness in the garden. I gathered at Rome, close to the Fountain of Egeria, a handful of fennel seeds from the most indisputable plant of fennel I ever chanced upon, and, lo, they are come up hemlock or something akin. In two places, moreover. Wherein does hemlock resemble fennel? How could I mistake? No wonder that a stone's cast off from that Egeria's fountain is the temple of the god Ridiculous.
Well, on Saturday then, at three, and I will certainly bring the verses you mention, and trust to find you still better. Vivi felice, my dear friend. God bless you. R.B.
Wednesday to Thursday evening. Postmark July 4th, 1845. Yes, I know the first part of the Duchess, and have it here. And for the rest of the poem, don't mind about being very legible, or even legible in the usual sense, and remember how it is my boast to be able to read all such manuscript writing as never is read by people who don't like caviar. Now you won't mind. Really, I rather like blots than otherwise, being a sort of patron saint of all manner of untidiness, if Mr. Kenyon's reproaches, of which there's a stereotyped addition, are justified by the fact. And he has a great organ of order, and knows disorderly persons at a glance, I suppose. But you won't be particular with me in the matter of transcription.
That is what I want to make sure of. And even if you are not particular, I am afraid you are not well enough to be troubled by writing, and writing and the thinking that comes with it. It would be wiser to wait till you are quite well, now wouldn't it? And my fear is that the almost well means very little better. And why, when there is no motive for hurrying, run any risk? Don't think that I will help you to make yourself ill. That I refuse to do even so much work as the little dessert-knife in the way of murder. Do think. So, upon the whole, I expect nothing on Saturday from this distance, and if it comes unexpectedly—I mean the Duchess, and not Saturday—let it be at no cost, or at the least cost possible, will you?
I am delighted in the meanwhile to hear of the quantity of mala herba, and hemlock does not come up from every seed you sow. Though you call it by ever such bad names. Talking of poetry, I had a newspaper, in help of social and political progress, sent to me yesterday from America, addressed to, just my name, Poetess London. Think of the simplicity of those wild Americans in calculating that people in general here in England know what a poetess is. Well, the post-office authorities, after deep meditation, I do not doubt, on all probable varieties of the chimpanzee, and a glance to the Surrey Gardens on one side, and the Zoological Department of Regions Park on the other, thought of Poet's Corner, perhaps, and wrote at the top of the parcel, Inquire at Paternoster Row, whereupon the Paternoster Row people wrote again, Go to Mr.
Moxon, and I received my newspaper.
And talking of poetesses, I had a note yesterday, again, which quite touched me, from Mr. Hemans, Charles, the son of Felicia, written with so much feeling that it was with difficulty I could say my perpetual no to his wish about coming to see me. His mother's memory is surrounded to him, he says, with an almost divine lustre, and as it cannot be to those who knew the writer alone, and not the woman. Do you not like to hear such things said? And is it not better than your tradition about Shelley's son? And is it not pleasant to know that that poor, noble, pure-hearted woman, the Vittoria Colonna of our country, should be so loved and comprehended by some, by one at least, of her own house? Not that, in naming Shelley, I meant for a moment to make a comparison.
There is not equal ground for it. Vittoria Colonna does not walk near Dante, no, and if you promise never to tell Mrs. Jameson, nor Miss Martineau, I would confide to you perhaps my secret profession of faith, which is—which is—that, let us say and do what we please and can, there is a natural inferiority of mind in women, Of the intellect, not by any means of the moral nature, and that the history of art and of genius testifies to this fact openly. Oh, I would not say so to Mrs. Jameson for the world. I believe I was a coward to her altogether, for when she denounced carpet-workers injurious to the mind, because it led the workers into fatal habits of reverie, I defended the carpet-work as if I were striving pro ares et focus, I, who am so innocent of all that knowledge, and said not a word for the poor reveries which have frayed away so much of silken time for me, and let her go away repeating again and again, oh, but you may do carpet-work with impunity, yes, because you can be writing poems all the while.
Think of people making poems and rugs at once. There's complex machinery for you. I told you that I had a sensation of cold blue steel from her eyes, and yet I really liked and like and shall like her. She is very kind, I believe, and it was my mistake, and I correct my impressions of her more and more to perfection, as you tell me who know more of her than I. Only I should not dare—ever, I think— To tell her that I believe women, all of us in a mass, to have minds of quicker movement, but less power and depth, and that we are under your feet because we can't stand upon our own. Not that we should either be quite under your feet, so you are not to be too proud, if you please. And there is certainly some amount of wrong.
But it never will be righted in the manner and to the extent contemplated by certain of our own prophetesses, nor ought to be, I hold in intimate persuasion. One woman, indeed, now alive, and only that one down all the ages of the world, seems to me to justify for a moment an opposite opinion. That wonderful woman, Georges Sand, who has something monstrous in combination with her genius, there is no denying at moments— For she has written one book, Leila, which I could not read, though I am not easily turned back. But whom, in her good and evil together, I regard with infinitely more admiration than all other women of genius who are or have been. Such a colossal nature in every way, with all that breadth and scope of faculty which women want.
Magnanimous, and loving the truth, and loving the people, and with that hate of hate, too, which you extol, so eloquent, and yet earnest as if she were dumb, so full of a living sense of beauty, and of noble, blind instincts towards an ideal purity, and so proving a right even in her wrong. By the way, what you say of the Vidocq museum reminds me of one of the Chamber of Masonic trial scenes in Consuelo. Could you like to see those knives?
I began with the best intentions of writing six lines, and see what is written, and all because I kept my letter back from a doubt about Saturday. But it is worn away, and the appointment stands good, for me. I have nothing to say against it.
But belief in mesmerism is not the same thing as general unbelief, to do it justice, now is it? It may be super-belief as well. Not that there is not something ghastly and repelling to me in the thought of Dr. Eliotson's great bony fingers seeming to touch the stops of a whole soul's harmonies, as in frenomagnetism. And I should have liked far better than hearing and seeing that To have heard you pour the cupful of Diderot's rinsings out. And indeed I can fancy a little that you and how you could do it, and break the cup too afterwards. Another sheet, and for what? What is written already, if you read, you do so meritoriously, and it's an example of bad writing, if you want one in the poems. I'm ashamed, you may see, of having written too much.
Besides, Which is much worse, but one writes and writes. I do, at least, for you are irreproachable. Ever yours, my dear friend, as if I had not written, or had, e. B. B.
Monday afternoon, postmark, July 7th, 1845. While I write this, Three o'clock you may be going out, I will hope, for the day is very fine, perhaps all the better for the wind. Yet I got up this morning sure of bad weather. I shall not try to tell you how anxious I am for the result, and to know it. You will of course feel fatigued at first, but persevering as you mean to, do you not? Persevering, the event must be happy. I thought, And still think to write you about George Song, and the vexed question, a very Bermothese of the mental claims of the sexes relatively considered, so was called the, I do believe, worst poem I ever read in my life, and Mrs. Hemans, and all and some of the points referred to in your letter.
But by my fae I cannot reason to-day, and by a consequence I feel the more So I say how I want news of you, which, when they arrive, I shall read meritoriously, do you think? My friend, what ought I to tell you on that head, or the reverse, rather, of your discourse? I should like to match you at a fancy flight, if I could, give you nearly as pleasant an assurance that there's no merit in the case, but the hot weather and lack of wit get the better of my goodwill. Besides, I remember once to have admired a certain enticing simplicity in the avowal of the Treasurer of a charitable institution at a dinner got up in its behalf, the funds being at lowest, debt at highest. In fact, this dinner was the last chance of the charity, and this Treasurer's speech the main feature in the chance, and our friend, inspired by the emergency, went so far as to say, with a bland smile, Do not let it be supposed that we despise annual contributors.
We rather solicit their assistance. All which means, do not think I take any merit for making myself supremely happy. I rather etc. etc. Always rather mean to deserve it a little better, but never shall. So it should be for you and me, and as it was in the beginning, so it is still. You are the But you know, and why should I tease myself with words? Let me send this off now, and to-morrow some more, because I trust to hear you have made the first effort and with success. Ever yours, my dear friend, R.B.
Monday, postmark July 8th, 1845. Well, I have really been out, and I'm really alive after it, which is more surprising still. Alive enough, I mean, to write even so to-night. But perhaps I say so with more emphasis to console myself for failing in my great ambition of getting into the park, and of reaching Mr. Kenyon's door, just to leave a card there, vaingloriously, all which I did fail in, and was forced to turn back from the gates of Devonshire Place. The next time it will be better, perhaps." And this time there was no fainting nor anything very wrong, not even a cowardice on the part of the victim, be it recorded, for one of my sisters was as usual in authority, and ordered the turning back just according to her own prudence, and not my self-will.
Only you will not, any of you, ask me to admit that it was all delightful, pleasanter work than what you wanted to spare me in taking care of your roses on Saturday. Don't ask that, and I will try it again presently."
I ought to be ashamed of writing this I and me-ism, but since your kindness made it worth while asking about, I must not be over-wise and silent on my side. Tuesday. Was it fair to tell me to write, though, and be silent of the Duchess, and when I was sure to be so delighted, and you knew it? I think not, indeed. And to make the obedience possible, I go on fast to say that I heard from Mr. Horne a few days since, and that he said— Your envelope reminds me of—you," he said, and so asked if you were in England still, and meant to write to you. To which I have answered that I believe you to be in England, thinking it strange about the envelope, which, as far as I remember, was one of those long ones, used the more conveniently to enclose to him back again a manuscript of his own I had offered with another of his, by his desire to Colburn's magazine, as the productions of a friend of mine, When he was in Germany, and afraid of his proper fatal onimousness, he had in difficulty how to approach the magazines as a nameless writer.
You will not mention this, of course. And when he was in Germany, I remember, writing just as your first letter came, that I mentioned it to him, and was a little frankly proud of it. But since, your name has not occurred once, not once, certainly. And it is strange. Only he can't have heard of your having been here. And it must have been a chance remark, altogether, taking an imaginary emphasis from my evil conscience, perhaps. Talking of evils, how wrong of you to make that book for me! And how ill I thanked you, after all! Also, I couldn't help feeling more grateful still for the Duchess, who is under ban, and for how long, I wonder. My dear friend, I am ever yours. E.B.B.
Wednesday morning, postmark July 9th, 1845. You are all that is good and kind. I am happy and thankful the beginning, and worst of it, is over, and so well. The Park and Mr. Kenyon's all in good time, and your sister was most prudent. And you mean to try again? God bless you, all to be said or done, but as I say it, no vain word. No doubt it was a mere chance thought, and a propos de botte of horn. Neither he or any other can know, or even fancy how it is. Indeed, though on grounds I should be also proud of being known for your friend by everybody, there's yet no denying the deep delight of playing the Eastern Jews' part here in this London. They go about, you know, by travel books, with the token of extreme destitution and misery, and steal by blind ways and by-paths to some blank dreary house, one obscure door in it, which being well shut behind them, they grope on through a dark corridor or so.
And then a blaze follows the lifting of a curtain or the like, for they are in a palace hall with fountains and light, and marble and gold, of which the envious are never to dream. And I, too, love to have few friends, and to live alone, and to see you from week to week. Do you not suppose I am grateful? And do you like the Duchess as much as you have got of it? That delights me, too, for every reason. But I fear I shall not be able to bring you the rest to-morrow, Thursday, my day, because I have been broken in upon more than one morning. Nor, though much better in my head, can I do anything at night just now. All will come right eventually, I hope, and I shall transcribe the other things you are to judge.
To-morrow, then. Only, and that is why I would write, Do, do know me for what I am, and treat me as I deserve in that one respect, and go out, without a moment's thought or care, if tomorrow should suit you. Leave word to that effect, and I shall be as glad as if I saw you or more, reasoned gladness, you know. Or you can write, though that is not necessary at all. Do think of all this. I am yours ever, dear friend. R.B.
Postmark July 12, 1845. You understand that it was not a resolution passed in favour of formality when I said what I did yesterday about not going out at the time you were coming. Surely you do. Whatever you might signify to a different effect. If it were necessary for me to go out every day, or most days even, it would be otherwise. But as it is, I may certainly keep the day you come free from the fear of carriages, let the sun shine its best or worst, without doing to spite to you or injury to me. And that's all I meant to insist upon, indeed and indeed. You see, Jupiter Tonnans was good enough to come to-day on purpose to deliver me, one evil for another. For I confess with shame and contrition that I never wait to inquire whether it thunders to the left or to the right to be frightened most ingloriously.
Isn't it a disgrace to any one with a pretension to poetry? Dr. Chambers, a part of whose office it is, Papa says, to reconcile foolish women to their follies, Used to take the side of my vanity, and discourse at length on the passive obedience of some nervous systems to electrical influences. But perhaps my faint-heartedness is besides traceable to a half-reasonable terror of a great storm in Herefordshire, where great storms most do congregate, such storms, round the Malvern Hills, those mountains of England. We lived four miles from their roots, through all my childhood and early youth. In a Turkish house my father built himself, crowded with minarets and domes, and crowned with metal spires and crescents, to the provocation, as people used to observe, of every lightning of heaven.
Once a storm of storms happened, and we all thought the house was struck, And a tree was so, really, within two hundred yards of the windows, while I looked out. The bark, rent from the top to the bottom, torn into long ribbons by the dreadful fiery hands, and dashed out into the air, over the heads of other trees, or left twisted in their branches, torn to shreds in a moment, as a flower might be, by a child. Did you ever see a tree after it had been struck by lightning? The whole trunk of that tree was bare and peeled. And up that new whiteness of it ran the finger-mark of the lightning in a bright, beautiful rose-colour, none of your roses brighter or more beautiful. The fever sign of the certain death, though the branches themselves were for the most part untouched, and spread from the peeled trunk in their full summer foliage, and birds singing in them three hours afterwards.
And in that same storm, two young women belonging to a festive party were killed on the Malvern Hills, each sealed to death in a moment with a sign on the chest which a common seal would cover. Only the sign on them was not rose-colored as on our tree, but black as charred wood. So I get possessed sometimes with the effects of these impressions, and so does one at least of my sisters in a lower degree. And, oh, how amusing and instructive all this is to you. When my father came into the room to-day, and found me hiding my eyes from the lightning, he was quite angry, and called it disgraceful to anybody who had ever learnt the alphabet. To which I answered humbly that I knew it was. But if I had been impertinent, I might have added that wisdom does not come by the alphabet, but in spite of it.
Don't you think so, in a measure?" Non obstantibus, Bradbury, and Evans. There's a profane question, and ungrateful, too, after the Duchess. I accept the Duchess and her peers, and be sure she will be the world's Duchess, and received as one of your most striking poems. Full of various power the poem is. I cannot say how deeply it has impressed me. But though I want the conclusion, I don't wish for it. And in this am reasonable for once. You will not write and make yourself ill, will you? Or read Sybil at unlawful hours, even. Are you better at all? What a letter! And how very foolishly today I am yours, E.B.B.
Sunday Morning, Postmark July 14th, 1845. Very well. I shall say no more on the subject, though it was not any piece of formality on your part that I deprecated, nor even your overkindness exactly. I rather wanted you to be really, wisely kind, and do me a greater favour than the next great one in degree. But you must understand this much in me, how you can lay me under deepest obligation. I dare say you think you have some Perhaps many to whom your well-being is of deeper interest than to me. Well, if that be so, do for their sakes make every effort with the remotest chance of proving serviceable to you, nor set yourself against any little irksomeness these carriage drives may bring with them just at the beginning.
And you may say, if you like, how I shall delight those friends if I can make this newest one grateful. And As from the known quantity one reasons out the unknown, this newest friend will be one glow of gratitude. He knows that, if you can warm your fingertips and so do yourself that much real good, by setting light to a dozen duchesses, why ought I not to say this when it is so true? Besides, people profess as much to their merest friends. For I have been looking through a poem book just now, and was told, under the head of album verses alone, that for A the writer would die, and for B die too, but a crueler death, and for C too, and D, and so on. I wonder whether they have since wanted to borrow money of him on the strength of his professions.
But you must remember we are in July, the 13th it is, and summer will go and cold weather stay. Come, forsooth. And now is the time of times. Still I feared the rain would hinder you on Friday, but the thunder did not frighten me, for you. Your father must pardon me for holding most firmly with Dr. Chambers. His theory is quite borne out by my own experience, for I have seen a man it were foolish to call a coward, a great fellow, too, All but die away in a thunderstorm, though he had quite science enough to explain why there is no immediate danger at all. Whereupon his younger brother suggested that he should just go out and treat us to a repetition of Franklin's experiment with the cloud and the kite.
A well-timed proposition, which sent the explainer down with a white face into the cellar. What a grand sight your tree was. Is, for I see it. My father has a print of a tree so struck, torn to ribbons, as you describe, but the rose-mark is striking and new to me. We had a good storm on our last voyage, but I went to bed at the end, as I thought, and only found there had been lightning next day by the bare poles under which we were riding. But the finest mountain fit of a kind I ever saw has an unfortunately ludicrous association. It was at Posanyo, among the Euganean hills, And I was at a poor-house in the town. An old woman was before a little picture of the Virgin, and at every fresh clap she lighted, with the oddest sputtering muttering mouthful of prayer imaginable, an inch of guttery candle, which the instant the last echo had rolled away she constantly blew out again for saving's sake, having, of course, to light the smoke of it about an instant after that.
The expenditure in wax at which the elements might be propitiated, you see, was a matter for curious calculation. I suppose I ought to have bought the whole taper for some four or five centissimi, one hundred of which make eightpence English, and so kept the countryside safe for about a century of bad weather. Lee Hunt tells you a story he had from Byron of kindred philosophy in a Jew who was surprised by a thunderstorm while he was dining on bacon. He tried to eat between whiles, but the flashes were as pertinacious as he, so at last he pushed his plate away, just remarking with a compassionate shrug, all this fuss about a piece of pork. By the way, what a characteristic of an Italian late evening is summer lightning.
It hangs in broad, slow sheets, dropping from cloud to cloud, so long in dropping and dying off. The Bora, which you only get at Trieste, brings wonderful lightning. You are in glorious June weather, fancy, of an evening, under green, shock-headed acacias, so thick and green, with the Cicalos tonning you above, and all about you men, women, rich and poor, sitting, standing, and coming and going, and through all the laughter and screaming and singing, the loud clink of the spoons against the glasses, The way of calling for fresh sorbeti, for all the world is at an open coffee-house at such an hour, when suddenly there is a stop in the sunshine, a blackness drops down, then a great white column of dust drives straight on like a wedge, and you see the acacia-heads snap off, now one, then another, and all the people scream, Labora!
Labora! and you are caught up in their whirl and landed in some interior. The man with the guitar on one side of you, and the boy with a cage full of little brown owls for sale on the other. Meanwhile, the thunder claps, claps with such a persistence, and the rain, for a finale, falls in a mass as if you had knocked out the whole bottom of a huge tank at once. Then there is a second stop. Out comes the sun. Somebody clinks at his glass. All the world bursts out laughing and prepares to pour out again. But you, the stranger, do make the best of your way out, with no preparation at all, whereupon you infallibly put your foot and half your leg into a river, really that of rainwater. That's a borer, and that comment of yours a justifiable pun.
Such things you get in Italy, but better, better, the best of all things you do not. I do not get those. And I shall see you on Wednesday, please remember, and bring you the rest of the poem. That you should like it gratifies me more than I will try to say. But then, do you not be tempted by that pleasure of pleasing which I think is your besetting sin? May it not be? And so cut me off from the other pleasure of being profited. As I told you, I like so much to fancy that you see, and will see, what I do as I see it. While it is doing, As nobody else in the world should, certainly, even while they thought it worthwhile to want. But when I try and build a great building, I shall want you to come with me and judge it, and counsel me before the scaffolding is taken down.
And while you have to make your way over hods and mortar and heaps of lime, and trembling tubs of sighs, and those thin, broad, whitewashing brushes I always had a desire to take up and bespatter with. And now good-bye. I am to see you on Wednesday, I trust, and to hear you say you are better, still better, much better? God grant that, and all else good for you, dear friend, and so for R. B., ever yours.
-
10 10 - July 1845, part 2 35:29
Postmark July 18th, 1845. I suppose nobody is ever expected to acknowledge his or her besetting sin. It would be unnatural, and therefore you will not be surprised to hear me deny the one imputed to me for mine. I deny it quite and directly, and if my denial goes for nothing, which is but reasonable, I might call in a great cloud of witnesses, a thunder-cloud, talking of storms, And even seek no further than this table for a first witness. This letter I had yesterday, which calls me—let me see how many hard names—unbending, disdainful, cold-hearted, arrogant—yes, arrogant as women always are when men grow humble. There's a charge against all possible and probable petticoats beyond mine and through it.
Not that either they or mine deserve the charge. We do not. To the lowest hem of us. I don't pass to the other extreme mind, and adopt besetting sins over the way and in antithesis. It's an undeserved charge, and unprovoked, and in fact the very flower of self-love, self-tormented into ill-temper, and shall remain unanswered, for me, and should even if I could write mortal epigrams as your Lamia speaks them.
Only it serves to help my assertion that people in general who know something of me, my dear friend, are not inclined to agree with you in particular about my having an over-pleasure in pleasing for a besetting sin. If you had spoken of my sister Henrietta, indeed, you would have been right, so right! But for me, alas, my sins are not half as amiable, nor given to lean to virtue's side with half such a grace. And then I have a pretension to speak the truth like a Roman, even in matters of literature, where Mr. Kenyon says falseness is a fashion, and really and honestly I should not be afraid. I should have no reason to be afraid. If all the notes and letters written by my hand for years and years about presentation copies of poems and other sorts of books were brought together and conferred, as they say of manuscripts, before my face, I should not shrink and be ashamed.
Not that I always tell the truth as I see it, but I never do speak falsely with intention and consciousness. Never. And I do not find that people of letters are sooner offended than others are by the truth told in gentleness. I do not remember to have offended anyone in this relation, and by these means. Well, but from me to you. It is all different, you know. You must know how different it is. I can tell you truly what I think of this thing and of that thing in your Duchess, but I must of a necessity hesitate and fall into misgiving of the adequacy of my truth, so called. To judge at all a work of yours, I must look up to it, and far up. Because whatever faculty I have is included in your faculty, and with a great rim all round it besides.
And thus it is not at all from an over-pleasure in pleasing you, not at all from an inclination to depreciate myself, that I speak and feel as I do and must on some occasions. It is simply the consequence of a true comprehension of you and of me. And apart from it, I should not be abler, I think, but less able to assist you in anything. I do wish you would consider all this reasonably, and understand it as a third person would in a moment, and consent not to spoil the real pleasure I have, and am about to have, in your poetry, by nailing me up into a false position with your gold-headed nails of chivalry, which won't hold to the wall through this summer. Now, you will not answer this. You will only understand it and me, and that I am not servile, but sincere, but earnest, but meaning what I say.
And when I say I am afraid, you will believe that I am afraid, and when I say I have misgivings, you will believe that I have misgivings. You will trust me so far, and give me liberty to breathe and feel naturally, according to my own nature. Probably, or certainly, rather. I have one advantage over you, one of which women are not fond of boasting, that of being older by years. For the Essay on Mind, which was the first poem published by me, and rather more printed than published, after all, the work of my earliest youth, half childhood, half womanhood, was published in 1826, I see. And if I told Mr. Kenyon not to let you see that book, it was not for the date, but because Coleridge's daughter was right in calling it a mere girl's exercise, because it is just that and no more—no expression whatever of my nature as it ever was.
Pedantic, and in some things pert, and as such altogether, and to do myself justice, which I would fain to do, of course—I was not in my whole life. Bad books are never like their writers, you know, and those underage books are generally bad. Also, I have found it hard work to get into expression, though I began rhyming from my very infancy much as you did, and this, with no sympathy near to me, I have had to do without sympathy in the full sense, and even in my seraphim days, my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, From leading so conventual recluse a life, perhaps, and all my better poems were written last year, the very best thing to come, if there should be any life or courage to come, I scarcely know.
Sometimes it is the real truth. I have haste to be done with it all. It is the real truth. However, to say so may be an ungrateful return for your kind and generous words, which I do feel gratefully. Let me otherwise feel as I will, or must. But then you know you are liable to such prodigious mistakes about besetting sins, and even besetting virtues, to such a set of small delusions, that are sure to break, one by one, like other bubbles as you draw in your breath. As I see by the law of my own star, my own particular star, the star I was born under, the star Wormwood, on the opposite side of the heavens from the constellation of the lyre and the crown.
In the meantime, it is difficult to thank you, or not to thank you, for all your kindnesses, al goz de cigane. Only Mrs. Jameson told me of Lady Byron's saying that she knows she is burnt every day in effigy by half the world, but that the effigy is so unlike herself as to be inoffensive to her, and just so, or rather just in the converse of so, is it with me and your kindnesses. They are meant for quite another than I, and are too far to be so near. The comfort is— In seeing you throw all those ducats out of the window, and how many ducats go in a figure to a dozen duchesses, it is profane to calculate, the comfort is that you will not be the poorer for it in the end, since the people beneath are honest enough to push them back under the door.
Rather a bleak comfort and occupation, though, and you may find better work for your friends, who are some of them Weary even unto death of the uses of this life. And now, you who are generous, be generous, and take no notice of all this. I speak for myself, not of you, so there is nothing for you to contradict or discuss, and if there were, you would be really kind and give me my way in it. Also you may take courage, for I promise not to vex you by thanking you against your will, more than may be helped.
Some of this letter was written before yesterday, and in reply, of course, to yours, so it is to pass for two letters, being long enough for just six. Yesterday you must have wondered at me for being in such a maze altogether about the poems, and so now I rise to explain that it was assuredly the wine-song and no other, which I read of yours in hoods. And then, what did I say of the Dante and Beatrice? "'Because what I referred to was the exquisite page or two or three on that subject in the Pentameron. I do not remember anything else of Landers with the same bearing, do you?' As to Montaigne, with the threads of my thoughts smoothly disentangled, I can see nothing coloured by him. Nothing. Do bring all the hood poems of your own, inclusive of the toke, because I read it in such haste as to whirl up—' The Duchess is past speaking of here, but you will see how I am delighted.
And we must make speed, only taking care of your head, for I heard today that Papa and my aunt are discussing the question of sending me off either to Alexandria or Malta for the winter. Oh, it is quite a passing talk and thought, I dare say. And it would not be in any case until September or October. Though in every case, I suppose, I should not be much consulted. And all cases and places would seem better to me, if I were, than Madeira, which the physicians used to threaten me with long ago. So take care of your headache, and let us have the bells rung out clear before the summer ends. And pray don't say again anything about clear consciences or unclear ones in granting me the privilege of reading your manuscripts, which is all clear privilege to me, with pride and gladness waiting on it.
May God bless you always, my dear friend. E.B.B. You left behind your sister's little basket, but I hope you did not forget to thank her for my carnations.
No date. I shall just say, at the beginning of a note, as at the end, I am yours ever, and not till summer ends, and my nails fall out, and my breath breaks bubbles, ought you to write thus having restricted me as you once did, and do still. You tie me like a shrove Tuesday fowl to a stake, and then pick the thickest cudgel out of your lot, and at my head it goes. I wonder whether you remembered having predicted exactly the same horror once before. I was to see you, and you were to understand. Do you? Do you understand, my own friend, with that superiority in years, too? For I confess to that, you need not throw that in my teeth, as soon as I read your essay on mind. Which, of course, I managed to do about twelve hours after Mr.
K.'s positive refusal to keep his promise and give me the book. From preface to the vision of fame at the end, and reflected on my own doings about that time, 1826, I did indeed see, and wonder at, your advance over me in years. What then? I have got nearer you considerably. If only nearer since then, and prove it by the remarks I make at favourable times, such as this, for instance, which occurs in a poem you are to see, written some time ago, which advises nobody who thinks nobly of the soul to give, if he or she can help, such a good argument to the materialist as the owning that any great choice of that soul, which it is born to make and which, In its determining, as it must, the whole future course and impulses of that soul, which must endure for ever, even though the object that induced the choice should disappear.
Owning, I say, that such a choice may be scientifically determined and produced, at any operator's pleasure, by a definite number of ingredients, so much youth, so much beauty, so much talent, etc., etc., With the same certainty and precision that another kind of operator will construct you an artificial volcano with so much steel filings and flour of sulphur and what not. There is more in the soul that rises to the surface and meets the eye. Whatever does that is for this world's immediate uses. And were this world all, all in us would be producible and available for use, as it is with the body now. But with the soul, what is to be developed afterward is the main thing, and instinctively asserts its rights, so that when you hate, or love, you shall not be able to explain why.
You is the ordinary creature enough of my poem. He might not be so able. There, I will write no more. You will never drop me off the golden hooks, I dare believe, and the rest is with God. Whose finger I see every minute of my life. Alexandria! Well, and may I not as easily ask leave to come tomorrow at the muezzin as next Wednesday at three. God bless you. Do not be otherwise than kind to this letter, which it cost me pains, great pains to avoid writing better, as truthfuller. This you get is not the first begun. Come. You shall not have the heart to blame me, for, see, I will send all my sins of commission with Hood. Blame them, tell me about them, and meantime let me be, dear friend, yours, R.B.
But I never did strike you or touch you. And you are not in earnest in the complaint you make, and this is really all I am going to say to-day. What I said before was wrung from me by words on your part, while you know far too well how to speak so as to make them go deepest, and which sometimes it becomes impossible, or over-hard, to bear without deprecation. As when, for instance, you talk of being grateful to me. Well, I will try that there shall be no more of it, no more provocation of generosities. And so, this once, as you express it, I will not have the heart to blame you, except for reading my books against my will, which was very wrong indeed. Mr. Kenyon asked me, I remember—he had a mania of sending my copy-book literature round the world to this person and that person, and I was roused at last into binding him by a vow to do so no more—I remember he asked me, Is Mr.
Browning to be accepted? To which I answered that nobody was to be accepted, and thus he was quite right in resisting to the death, or to dinner-time, just as you were quite wrong after dinner. Now could a woman have been more curious? Could the very author of the book have done worse? But I leave my sins and yours gladly to get into the hood poems which have delighted me so, And first to the St. Praxed's, which is, of course, the finest and most powerful, and indeed full of the power of life, and of death. It has impressed me very much. Then the angel and child, with all its beauty and significance, and the garden fancies, some of the stanzas about the name of the flower, with such exquisite music in them, and grace of every kind, and with that beautiful and musical use of the word meandering, Which I never remember having seen used in relation to sound before.
It does to mate with your simmering quiet in sodello, which brings the summer air into the room as sure as you read it. Then I like your burial of the pedant so much. You have quite the damp smell of funguses, and the sense of creeping things through and through it, and the laboratory as hideous as you meant to make it. Only I object a little to your tendency Which is almost a habit, and is very observable in this poem, I think, of making lines difficult for the reader to read. See the opening lines of this poem. Not that music is required everywhere, nor in them, certainly, but that the uncertainty of rhythm throws the reader's mind off the rail, and interrupts his progress with you and your influence with him.
Where we have not direct pleasure from rhythm, and where no peculiar impression is to be produced by the changes in it, we should be encouraged by the poet to forget it altogether, should we not? I am quite wrong, perhaps, but you see how I do not conceal my wrongnesses, where they mix themselves up with my sincere impressions. And how could it be that no one within my hearing ever spoke of these poems? Because it is true that I never saw one of them, never. Except the toke, which is inferior to all, and that I was quite unaware of your having printed so much with hood, or at all except this toke and this duchess. The world is very deaf and dumb, I think, but in the end we need not be afraid of its not learning its lesson.
Could you come, for I am going out in the carriage, and will not stay to write of your poems even any more today, could you come on Thursday or Friday? The day left to your choice, instead of on Wednesday. If I could help it, I would not say so. It is not a caprice. And I leave it to you whether Thursday or Friday. And Alexandria seems discredited just now for Malta. And anything but Madeira, I go on saying to myself. These hood poems are all set to be in the next Bells, of course, of necessity. May God bless you, my dear friend, my ever dear friend. EBB.
Tuesday morning, postmark July 22nd, 1845. I will say, with your leave, Thursday, nor attempt to say anything else without your leave. The temptation of reading the essay was more than I could bear, and a wonderful work it is in every way. The other poems and their music, wonderful. And you go out still. So continue better. I cannot write this morning. I should say too much, and have to be sorry and afraid. Let me be safely yours ever, my own dear friend, R.B. I am but too proud of your praise. When will the blame come? At Malta?
Are you any better today? And will you say just the truth of it, and not attempt to do any of the writing which does harm, nor of the reading, even, which may do harm, and something does harm to you, you see? And you told me not long ago that you knew how to avoid the harm. Now did you not? And what could it have been last week which you did not avoid, and which made you so unwell? Beseech you not to think that I am going to aid and abet in this wronging of yourself, for I will not indeed. And I am only sorry to have given you my querulous queries yesterday, and to have omitted to say in relation to them, too, how they were to be accepted in any case as just passing thoughts of mine for your passing thoughts, some right it may be, some wrong it may be, and none insisted on even by the thinker.
Just impressions, and by no means pretending to be judgments. Now will you understand? Also, I intended, as a proof of my fallacy, to strike out one or two of my doubts before I gave the paper to you, so whichever strikes you as the most foolish of them, of course, must be what I meant to strike out. There's ingenuity for you. The poem did for the rest, as will be suggested to you, give me the very greatest pleasure, and astonish me in two ways. By the versification, mechanically considered, And by the successful evolution of pure beauty from all that roughness and rudeness of the sin of the boar pinner, successfully evolved without softening one hoarse accent of his voice. But there is to be a pause now.
You will not write any more, no, nor come here on Wednesday, if coming into the roar of this London should make the pain worse, as I cannot help thinking it must. And you were not well yesterday morning, you admitted. You will take care. And if there should be a wisdom in going away— Was it very wrong of me, doing what I told you of yesterday? Very imprudent, I am afraid, but I never knew how to be prudent. And then, there is not a sharing of responsibility in any sort of imaginable measure, but a mere going away of so many thoughts apart from the thinker, or of words apart from the speaker. Just as I might give away a pocket-handkerchief, to be newly marked, and mine no longer. I did not do, and would not have done, one of those papers singly.
It would have been unbecoming of me in every way. It was simply a writing of notes, of slips of paper, now on one subject, and now on another, which were thrown into the great cauldron, and boiled up with other matter, and re-translated from my idiom, where there seemed a need for it. And I am not much afraid of being ever guessed at, except by those Oedipuses who astounded me once for a moment, and were after all, I hope, baffled by the Sphinx, or ever betrayed, because, besides the black Stygian oaths and indubitable honour of the editor, he has some interest, even as I have the greatest, in being silent and secret. And nothing is mine if something is of me, or from me, rather. Yet it was wrong, and foolish, I see plainly, wrong in all but the motives.
How dreadful to write against time and with a sideways-running conscience! And then the literature of the day was wider than his knowledge all round, and the booksellers were barking distraction on every side. I had some of the mottoes to find, too. But the paper relating to you I never was consulted about, or, in one particular way, it would have been better. as easily it might have been. May God bless you, my dear friend. E. B. B.
Friday Morning, Postmark, July 25th, 1845. You would let me now, I dare say, call myself grateful to you. Yet such is my jealousy in these matters, so do I hate the material when it puts down, or tries, the immaterial in the offices of friendship, that I could almost tell you I was not grateful, and try if that way I could make you see the substantiality of those other favours you refuse to recognise, and reality of the other gratitude you will not admit. But truth is truth, and you are all generosity, and will draw none but the fair inference. So I thank you as well as I can for this also, this last kindness. And you know its value, too, How if there were another you in the world, who had done all you have done, and whom I merely admired for that—if such a one had sent me such a criticism, so exactly what I want and can use and turn to good, you know how I would have told you—my you—I saw yesterday, all about it, and been sure of your sympathy and gladness.
But the two in one! For the criticism itself—it is all true. Accept the overeating. All the suggestions are to be adopted, the improvements accepted. I so thoroughly understand your spirit in this that, just in this beginning, I should really like to have found some point in which I could cooperate with your intention and help my work by disputing the effect of any alteration proposed. If it ought to be disputed, that would answer your purpose exactly as well as agreeing with you. So that the benefit to me were apparent. But this time I cannot dispute one point. All is for best. So much for this Duchess, which I shall ever rejoice in, wherever was a bud even, in that strip of Maybloom, a live musical bee hangs now.
I shall let it lie, my poem, till just before I print it, and then go over it. Alter at the places, and do something for the places where I really wrote anyhow, almost to get done. It is an odd fact, yet characteristic of my accomplishings one and all in this kind, that of the poem, the real conception of an evening two years ago fully, of that not a line is written. Though perhaps, after all, what I am going to call the accessories in the story are real, though indirect, reflexes of the original idea, and so supersede properly enough the necessity of its personal appearance, so to speak. But as I conceived the poem, it consisted entirely of the gypsy's description of the life the lady was to lead with her future gypsy lover, a real life, not an unreal one like that with the Duke.
And as I meant to write it, all their wild adventures would have come out, and the insignificance of the former vegetation have been deducible only, as the main subject has become now. Of course it comes to the same thing, for one would never show half by half like a cut orange. Will you write to me, caring, though, so much for my best interest as not to write if you can work for yourself, or save yourself fatigue? I think before writing, or just after writing such a sentence, but reflection only justifies my first feeling. I would rather go without your letters, without seeing you at all, if that advantaged you, my dear first and last friend, my friend. And now, surely I might dare say you may, if you please, get well through God's goodness.
With persevering patience, surely, and this next winter abroad, which you must get ready for now, every sunny day, will you not? If I venture to weary you again with all this, is there not the cause of causes, and did not the prophet write that, there was a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the E.B.B., led on to the fortune of your R.B.? Oh! Let me tell you in the bitterness of my heart that it was only four o'clock, that clock I inquired about, and that—no, I shall never say with any grace what I want to say, and now dare not—that you all but owe me an extra quarter of an hour next time. As in the East you give a beggar something for a few days running, then you miss him, and next day he looks indignant when the regular dole falls and murmurs, and for yesterday?
Do I stay too long? I want to know. Too long for the voice and head, and all but the spirit that may not so soon tire, knowing the good it does. If you would but tell me. God bless you.
Saturday. Postmark July 28th, 1845. You say too much indeed in this letter which has crossed mine. And particularly as there is not a word in it of what I most wanted to know, and want to know, how you are. For you must observe, if you please, that the very paper you pour such kindness on was written after your own example and pattern, when, in the matter of my Prometheus, such different, wearying matter, you took trouble for me, and did me good. Judge from this if, even in inferior things, there can be gratitude from you to me. Or rather, do not judge. But listen when I say that I am delighted to have met your wishes in writing as I wrote, only that you are surely wrong in refusing to see a single wrongness in all that heap of weedy thoughts, and that when you look again you must come to the admission of it.
One of the thistles is the suggestion about the line, Was it singing, was it saying? Which you wrote so, and which I propose to amend by an intermediate or. Thinking of it at a distance, it grows clear to me that you were right, and that there should be, and must be, no awe to disturb the listening pause. Now should there? And there was something else, which I forget at this moment, and something more than the something else.
Your account of the production of the poem interests me very much, and proves just what I wanted to make out from your statements the other day, and they refused, I thought, to let me. Let you are more faithful to your first idea than to your first plan. Is it so, or not? Orange is orange, but which half of the orange is not predestinated from all eternity? Is it so?
Sunday. I wrote so much yesterday, and then went out. Not knowing very well how to speak or how to be silent, is it better today? Of some expressions of yours, and of your interest in me, which are deeply affecting to my feelings, whatever else remains to be said of them. And you know that you make great mistakes, of fennel for hemlock, of four o'clock for five o'clock, and of other things of more consequence one for another, and may not be quite right besides, as to my getting well, if I please. Which reminds me a little of what Papa says sometimes when he comes into this room unexpectedly and convicts me of having dry toast for dinner, and declares angrily that obstinacy and dry toast have brought me to my present condition, and that if I please to have porter and beefsteaks instead, I should be as well as ever I was in a month.
But where is the need of talking of it? What I wished to say was this, that if I get better or worse, as long as I live, And to the last moment of life, I shall remember with an emotion which cannot change its character, all the generous interest and feeling you have spent on me. Wasted on me, I was going to write, but I would not provoke any answering. And in one obvious sense it need not be so. I never shall forget these things, my dearest friend, nor remember them more coldly. God's goodness! I believe in it, as in his sunshine here, which makes my head ache a little while it comes in at the window, and makes most other people gayer. It does me good, too, in a different way. And so, may God bless you, and me in this, just this, that I may never have the sense, intolerable in the remotest apprehension of it, of being in any way, directly or indirectly, The means of ruffling your smooth path by so much as one of my flintstones.
In the meantime, you do not tire me, indeed, even when you go later for sooner, and I do not tire myself even when I write longer and duller letters to you, if the last is possible, than the one I am ending now. As the most grateful, leave me that word of your friends. E.B.B.
How could you think that I should speak to Mr. Kenyon of the book? All I ever said to him has been that you had looked through my Prometheus for me, and that I was not disappointed in you, these two things on two occasions. I do trust that your head is better.
How must I feel, and what can or could I say, even if you let me say all? I am most grateful, most happy, most happy, come what will. Will you let me try and answer your note to-morrow, before Wednesday, when I am to see you? I will not hide from you that my head aches now, and I have let the hours go by one after one. I am better all the time, and will write as I say. Am I better, you ask? Yours I am, ever yours, my dear friend, R.B.
Thursday, July 31st, 1845. In all I say to you, write to you, I know very well that I trust your understanding me almost beyond the warrant of any human capacity. But as I began, so I shall end. I shall believe you remember what I am forced to remember, you who do me the superabundant justice on every possible occasion. You will never do me injustice when I sit by you and talk about Italy and the rest. Today I cannot write, though I am very well otherwise, but I shall soon get into my old self-command and write with as much ineffectual fire as before. But meantime you will write to me, I hope, telling me how you are. I have but one greater delight in the world than in hearing from you. God bless you, my best, dearest friend.
Think what I would speak. Ever yours, R. B.
-
11 11 - August 1845, part 1 45:58
Thursday. Postmark August Second, Eighteen Forty Five. Let me write one word, not to have it off my mind, because it is by no means heavily on it, but lest I should forget to write it at all by not writing it at once. What could you mean, I have been thinking since you went away, by applying such a grave expression as having a thing off your mind to that foolish subject of the stupid book, mine? And by making it worth your while to account logically for your wish about my not mentioning it to Mr. Kenyon. You could not fancy for one moment that I was vexed in the matter of the book, or in the other matter of your wish. Now just hear me. I explained to you that I had been silent to Mr. Kenyon, first because the fact was so, and next, and a little, because I wanted to show how I anticipated your wish by a wish of my own, though from a different motive.
Your motive I really did take to be, never suspecting my dear kind cousin of treason, to be a natural reluctancy of being convicted, forgive me, of such an arch-womanly curiosity. For my own motive—motives, they are more than one—you must trust me." and refrain as far as you can from accusing me of an over-love of Eleusinian mysteries, when I ask you to say just as little about your visits here and of me as you find possible, even to Mr. Kenyon, as to every other person whatever. As you know, and yet more than you know, I am in a peculiar position, and it does not follow that you should be ashamed of my friendship, or that I should not be proud of yours. If we avoid making it a subject of conversation in high places or low places.
There. That is my request to you, or commentary on what you put off your mind yesterday. Probably quite unnecessary as either request or commentary, yet said on the chance of its not being so, because you seemed to mistake my remark about Mr. Kenyon. And your head. How is it? And do consider, if it would not be wise and right, on that account of your health, to go with Mr. Chorley. You can neither work nor enjoy while you are subject to attacks of the kind. And besides, and without reference to your present suffering and inconvenience, you ought not to let them master you and gather strength from time and habit. I am sure you ought not. Worse last week than ever, you see. And no prospect, perhaps, of bringing out your bells this autumn, without paying a cost too heavy.
Therefore—the therefore is quite plain and obvious.
Friday. Just as it is how anxious Flush and I are to be delivered from you, by these sixteen heads of the discourse of one of us, written before your letter came. Ah, but I am serious. And you will consider, will you not, what is best to be done, and do it. You could write to me you know from the end of the world, if you could take the thought of me so far. And for me, no, and yet, yes, I will say this much, that I am not inclined to do you injustice, but justice, when you come here, the justice of wondering to myself how you can possibly, possibly care to come. Which is true enough to be unanswerable, if you please, or I should not say it. As I began, so I shall end. Did you, as I hope you did, thank your sister for Flush and for me?
When you were gone, he graciously signified his intention of eating the cakes, brought the bag to me, and emptied it without a drawback from my hand, cake after cake. And I forgot the basket once again.
And talking of Italy and the Cardinals, and thinking of some cardinal points you are ignorant of, did you ever hear that I was one of those schismatiques of Amsterdam, whom your Dr. Dunn would have put into the dykes, unless he meant the Baptists instead of the Independents, the holders of the Independent Church principle? No, not schismatical, I hope, hating as I do from the roots of my heart all that rending of the garment of Christ which Christians are so apt to make the daily weekday of this Christianity so-called, and caring very little for most dogmas and doxies in themselves—too little, as people say to me sometimes, when they send me new testaments to learn from with very kind intentions— And believing that there is only one Church in heaven and earth, with one divine priest to it, let exclusive religionists build what walls they please, and bring out what chrisms.
But I used to go with my father always, when I was able, to the nearest dissenting chapel of the Congregationalists, from liking the simplicity of that praying and speaking without books, and a little too from disliking the theory of state churches. There is a narrowness among the dissenters which is wonderful, an arid, grey puritanism in the clefts of their souls. But it seems to me clear that they know what the liberty of Christ means far better than those do who call themselves churchmen, and stand altogether as a body on higher ground. And so, you see, when I talked of the sixteen points of my discourse, it was the foreshadowing of a coming event, and you have had it at last in the whole length and breadth of it.
But it is not my fault if the wind began to blow so that I could not go out, as I intended, as I shall do to-morrow, and that you have received my dullness in a full libation of it in consequence. My sisters said of the roses you blasphemed yesterday, that they never saw such flowers anywhere, anywhere here in London, and therefore if I had thought so myself before, it was not so wrong of me. I put your roses, you see, against my letter, to make it seem less dull, and yet I do not forget what you say about caring to hear from me. I mean, I do not affect to forget it. May God bless you far longer than I can say so. E.B.B.
Sunday evening, postmark August 4th, 1845. I said what you comment on, about Mr. Kenyon, because I feel I must always tell you the simple truth, and not being quite at liberty to communicate the whole story, though it would at once clear me from the charge of over-curiosity if I much cared for that, I made my first request in order to prevent your getting at any part of it from him, which should make my withholding seem disingenuous for the moment, that is, till my explanation came, if it had an opportunity of coming. And then, when I fancied you were misunderstanding the reason of that request, and supposing I was ambitious of making a higher figure in his eyes than your own, I then felt it on my mind, and so spoke.
A natural mode of relief, surely. For, dear friend, I have once been untrue to you, when and how and why you know, but I thought it pedantry and worse to hold by my words and increase their fault. You have forgiven me that one mistake, and I only refer to it now because if you should ever make that a precedent, and put any least, most trivial word of mine under the same category, you would wrong me as you never wronged human being. And that is done with. For the other matter, the talk of my visits. It is impossible that any hint of them can ooze out of the only three persons in the world to whom I ever speak of them, my father, mother, and sister, to whom my appreciation of your works is no novelty since some years, and whom I made comprehend exactly your position and the necessity for absolute silence I enjoined respecting the permission to see you.
You may depend on them. And Miss Mitford is in your keeping, mind. And dear Mr. Kenyon, if there should be never so gentle a touch of garrulous God-innocence about those kind lips of his. Come, let me snatch at that clue out of the maze, and say how perfect, absolutely perfect, are those three or four pages in the vision which present the poets. A line, a few words, and the man there. One twang of the bow. And the arrowhead in the white. Shelley's white ideal, all statue-blind, is perfect. How can I coin words? And dear deaf old Hesiod, and all, all are perfect, perfect. But the moon's regality will hear no praise. Well, then, will she hear blame? Can it be you? My own you, past putting away, you are a schismatic and a frequenter of independent dissenting chapels.
And you confess this to me, whose father and mother went this morning to the very independent chapel where they took me all those years back, to be baptized, and where they heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very minister who officiated on that other occasion. Now will you be particularly encouraged by this successful instance to bring forward any other point of disunion between us that may occur to you? Please do not, for so sure as you begin proving that there is a gulf fixed between us, so sure shall I end proving that— Anne Radcliffe averted—that you are just my sister, not that I am much frightened, but there are such surprises in novels. Blame the next. Yes, now this is to be the real blame, and I meant to call your attention to it before.
Why, why do you blot out, in that unutterably provoking manner, whole lines, not to say words in your letters? And in the criticism on the Duchess, if it is a fact that you have a second thought, does it cease to be as genuine a fact, that first thought you please to efface? Why give a thing and take a thing? Is there no significance in putting on record that your first impression was to a certain effect, and your next to a certain other, perhaps completely opposite one? If any proceeding of yours could go near to deserve that harsh word, impertinent, which you have twice, in speech and writing, been pleased to apply to your observations on me, certainly this does go as near as can be. As there is but one step to take from Southampton Pier to New York Key for travellers westward.
Now will you lay this to heart and perpend, at least in my righteous indignation I some words effaced here. For my own health it improves, thank you, and I shall go abroad all in good time, never fear. For my bells Mr. Chorley tells me there is no use in the world of printing them before November at earliest, and by that time I shall get done with these romances, and certainly one tragedy that could go to press next week, in proof of which I will bring you, if you let me, a few more hundreds of lines next Wednesday. But, my poet, if I would, as is true, sacrifice all my works to do your fingers even good, What would I not offer up to prevent you staying? Perhaps to correct my very verses? Perhaps read and answer my very letters?
Staying the production of more Bertha's and Catarina's and Geraldine's, more great and beautiful poems of which I shall be—how proud! Do not be punctual in paying tithes of thyme, mint, anise, and cumin, and leaving unpaid the real weighty dues of the law. Nor affect a scrupulous acknowledgment of what you owe me, in petty manners, while you leave me to settle such a charge, as accessory to the hiding the talent, as best I can. I have thought of this again and again, and would have spoken of it to you had I ever felt myself fit to speak of any subject nearer home and me and you than Rome and Cardinal Acton. For, observe, you have not done. Yes, the Prometheus, no doubt, but with that exception have you written much lately, as much as last year when you wrote all your best things, you said, I think.
Yet you are better now than then. Dearest friend, I intend to write more. And very likely be praised more, now I care less than ever for it, but still more do I look to have you ever before me, in your place, and with more poetry and more praise still, and my own heartfelt praise ever on the top, like a flower on the water. I have said nothing of yesterday's storm. Thunder! May you not have been out in it. The evening draws in, and I will walk out. May God bless you, and let you hold me by the hand till the end. Yes, dearest friend, R.B.
Postmark August 8th, 1845. Just to show what may be lost by my crossings out, I will tell you the story of the one in the Duchess, and in fact it is almost worth telling to a metaphysician like you, on other grounds, that you may draw perhaps some psychological good from the absurdity of it. Here, then. When I had done writing the sheet of annotations and reflections on your poem, I took up my pencil to correct the passages reflected on with the reflections by the crosses you may observe, just glancing over the writing as I did so. Well, and where that erasure is, I found a line purporting to be extracted from your Duchess, with sundry acute criticisms and objections quite undeniably strong following after it, only, to my amazement, As I looked and looked, the line so acutely objected to, and purporting, as I say, to be taken from the Duchess, was by no means to be found in the Duchess, nor anything like it.
And I am certain, indeed, that in the Duchess or out of it you never wrote such a bad line in your life. And so it became a proved thing to me that I had been enacting, in a mystery, both poet and critic together. And one so neutralizing the other, that I took all that pains you remark upon to cross myself out in my double capacity, and am now telling the story of it notwithstanding. And there's an obvious moral to the myth, isn't there? For critics who bark the loudest commonly bark at their own shadow in the glass, as my Flush used to do long and loud, Before he gained experience, and learnt the gnoti seauton, in the apparition of the brown dog with the glittering dilating eyes, and as I did, under the erasure.
And another moral springs up of itself in this productive ground, for, you see, quand je me fasse, il n'y a pas grand mal.
And I am to be made to work very hard, am I? But you should remember that if I did as much writing as last summer, I should not be able to do much else. I mean, to go out and walk about, for really I think I could manage to read your poems and write as I am writing now, with ever so much head-work of my own going on at the same time. But the bodily exercise is different, and I do confess that the novelty of living more in the outer life for the last few months than I have done for years before make me idle and inclined to be idle. And everybody is idle sometimes, even you, perhaps. Are you not? For me, you know, I do carpet-work, asked Mrs. Jameson, and I never pretend to be in a perpetual motion of mental industry.
Still, it may not be quite as bad as you think. I have done some work since Prometheus, only it is nothing worth speaking of, and not a part of the romance-poem which is to be some day, if I live for it. Lyrics, for the most part, which lie written illegibly in pure Egyptian. Oh, there is time enough, and too much, perhaps, and so let me be idle a little now, and enjoy your poems while I can. It is pure enjoyment, and must be. But you do not know how much, or you would not talk as you do sometimes, so wide of any possible application.
And do not talk again of what you would sacrifice for me. If you affect me by it, which is true, you cast me from you farther than ever in the next thought. That is true. The poems, yours, which you left with me, are full of various power and beauty and character, and you must let me have my own gladness from them in my own way. Now I must end this letter. Did you go to Chelsea and hear the divine philosophy? Tell me the truth always, will you? I mean such truths as may be painful to me, though truths. May God bless you ever, dear friend. E. B. B.
Friday afternoon, Postmark, August 8th, 1845. Then there is one more thing off my mind. I thought it might be with you as with me, not remembering how different are the causes that operate against us. Different in kind as in degree. So much reading hurts me, for instance, whether the reading be light or heavy, fiction or fact, and so much writing, whether my own, such as you have seen, or the merest compliment returning to the weary tribe that exact it of one. But your health, that before all, as assuring all eventually, and on the other accounts you must know. Never lose one sunny day or propitious hour to go out or walk about. But do not surprise me, one of these mornings, by walking up to me when I am introduced, or I shall infallibly, in spite of all the after-repentance and begging pardon, I shall...
. So here you learn the first painful truth I have it in my power to tell you. I sent you the last of our poor roses this morning. Considering that I fairly owed that kindness to them. Yes, I went to Chelsea and found dear Carlisle alone. His wife is in the country, where he will join her as soon as his book's last sheet returns corrected and fit for press, which will be at the month's end about. He was all kindness, and talked like his own self while he made me tea, and, afterward, brought chairs into the little yard, rather than garden, and smoked his pipe with apparent relish. At night he would walk as far as Vauxhall Bridge on my way home. If I used the word sacrifice you do well to object.
I can imagine nothing ever to be done by me worthy such a name. God bless you, dearest friend. Shall I hear from you before Tuesday? Ever your own, R. B.
Friday, August 8, 1845. It is very kind to send these flowers. Too kind? Why are they sent? And without one single word which is not too kind, certainly. I looked down into the heart of the roses, and turned the carnations over and over to the peril of their leaves, and in vain. Not a word do I deserve to-day, I suppose. And yet if I don't, I don't deserve the flowers, either. There should have been an equal justice done to my demerits, O Zeus with the scales. After all, I do thank you for these flowers, and they are beautiful, and they came just in a right current of time, just when I wanted them, or something like them. So I confess that humbly, and do thank you at last, rather as I ought to do.
Only you ought not to give away all the flowers of your garden to me, and your sister thinks so, be sure, if as silently as you sent them. Now I shall not write any more, not having been written to. What with the Wednesday's flowers, and these, You may think how I, in this room, look down on the gardens of Damascus, that your Jew—'r Benjamin of Tudela added in Robert Browning's handwriting—'say what he pleases of them. And the Wednesday's flowers are as fresh and beautiful, I must explain, as the new ones. They were quite supererogatory, the new ones, in the sense of being flowers. Now the sense of what I am writing seems questionable, does it not? At least, more so than the nonsense of it. Not a word, even under the little blue flowers.
E. B. B.
Sunday afternoon, postmark, August 11th, 1845. How good you are to the smallest thing I try and do! To show I would please you for an instant if I could, rather than from any hope such poor efforts as I am restricted to, can please you or ought, and that you should care for the note that was not there. But I was surprised by the summons to seal and deliver, since time and the carrier were peremptory, and so, I dared divine almost, I should hear from you by the midday post. Which happened, And our answer to that you received on Friday night, did you not? I had to go to Holborn, of all places, not to pluck strawberries in the bishop's garden like Richard Crouchback, but to get a book, and there I carried my note, thinking to expedite its delivery.
This notelet of yours, quite as little in its kind as my blue flowers, this came last evening, and here are my thanks, dear E.B.B., dear friend. In the former note there is a phrase I must not forget to call you to account for, that where it confesses to having done some work, only nothing worth speaking of. Just see, will you be first and only compact-breaker? Nor misunderstand me here, please. As I said, I am quite rejoiced that you go out now, walk about now, and put off the writing that will follow thrice as abundantly, all because of the stopping to gather strength. So I want no new word, not to say poem, not to say the romance poem. Let the finches in the shrubberies grow restless in the dark.
I am inside with the lights and music. But what is done is done, pas vrai? And worth is, my dear friend, pardon me, not in your arbitration quite. Let me tell you an odd thing that happened at Chorley's the other night. I must have mentioned to you that I forget my own verses so surely after they are once on paper that I ought, without affectation, to mend them infinitely better, able as I am to bring fresh eyes to bear upon them. When I say once on paper, that is just what I mean, and no more, for after the sad revising begins they do leave their mark, distinctly or less so according to circumstances. Well, Miss Cushman, the new American actress. Clever and truthful-looking, was talking of a new novel by the Dane Anderson, he of the Improvisatore, which will reach us, it should seem, in translation via America.
She had looked over two or three proofs of the work in the press, and Chorley was anxious to know something about its character. The title, she said, was Capital, only a fiddler, and she enlarged on that word only and its significance, so put. And I quite agreed with her for several minutes, till first one reminiscence flitted to me, then another, and at last I was obliged to stop my praises and say, but now I think of it, I seem to have written something with a similar title. Nay, a play, I believe, yes, and in five acts, only an actress. And from that time, some two years or more ago to this, I have been every way relieved of it. And when I got home next morning, I made a dark pocket in my russet horror of a portfolio give up its dead, and there fronted me only a player-girl, the real title, and the sayings and doings of her, and the others such others.
So I made haste, and just tore out one sample page, being seen the first, and sent it to our friend as earnest and proof I had not been purely dreaming, as might seem to be the case. And what makes me recall it now is that it was Russian, and about a fair on the Neva, and booths and droshkis and fish-pies and so forth, with the palaces in the background. And in Chorley's Athenaeum of yesterday you may read a paper of very simple moony stuff about the death of Alexander, and that, Sir James Wiley, I have seen at St. Petersburg, Where he chose to mistake me for an Italian. Monsieur l'Italien, he said, another time, looking up from his cards. So I think to tell you. Now I may leave off. I shall see you start on Tuesday.
Here, perhaps, something definite about your travelling. Do you know Consuelo wearies me? Oh, wearies! And the fourth volume I have all but stopped at. There lie the three following. But who cares about Consuelo after that horrible evening with the Venetian scamp, where he bullies her, and it does answer, after all, she says, as we say? And Albert wearies, too. It seems all false, all writing. Not the first part, though. And what easy work these novelists have of it! A dramatic poet has to make you love or admire his men and women. They must do and say all that you are to see and hear. Really do it in your face, say it in your ears, and it is holy for you in your power to name, characterise, and so praise or blame what is so said and done.
If you don't perceive of yourself, there is no standing by for the author and telling you. But with these novelists a scrape of the pen, out blurting of a phrase, and the miracle is achieved. Consuelo possessed to perfection this and the other gift. What would you more? Or to leave dear Georgeson, pray think of Bulwer's beginning a character by informing you that Ioni, or somebody in Pompeii, was endowed with perfect genius. Genius! What, though the obliging informer might write his fingers off before he gave the pitifulest proof that the poorest spark of that same, that genius, had ever visited him? Ione has it perfectly, perfectly, and that is enough. Zeus with the scales, with the false weights.
And now, till Tuesday, good-bye, and be willing to get well as, letting me send porter instead of flowers, and beefsteaks too, soon as may be. And may God bless you ever, dear friend, R. B.
Postmark August 11th, 1845. But if it hurts you to read and write ever so little, why should I be asked to write, for instance, before Tuesday? And I did mean to say before to-day that I wish you would never write to me when you are not quite well, as once or twice you have done, if not much oftener, because there is not a necessity, and I do not choose that there should ever be or seem a necessity. Do you understand? And as a matter of personal preference, it is natural for me to like the silence that does not hurt you better than the speech that does, and so remember. And, talking of what may hurt you and me, you would smile, as I have often done in the midst of my vexation, if you knew the persecution I have been subjected to by the people who call themselves, Lucas Arnon Lucendo, the faculty, and set themselves against the exercise of other people's faculties as a sure way to death and destruction.
The modesty and simplicity with which one's physicians tell one not to think or feel, just as they would tell one not to walk out in the dew, would be quite amusing, if it were not too tryingly stupid sometimes. I had a doctor once who thought he had done everything, because he had carried the inkstand out of the room. Now, he said, you will have such a pulse tomorrow. He gravely thought poetry a sort of disease, a sort of fungus of the brain, and held as a serious opinion that nobody could be properly well who exercised it as an art, which was true, he maintained, even of men. He had studied the physiology of poets, but that for women it was a mortal malady and incompatible with any common show of health under any circumstances.
And then came the damnatory clause in his experience, that he had never known a system approaching mine in excitability, except Miss Garros, a young lady who wrote verses for Lady Blessington's annuals, and who was the only other female rhymer he had had the misfortune of attending. And she was to die in two years, though she was dancing quadrilles then, and has lived to do the same by the polka. And I, of course, much sooner, if I did not ponder these things, and amend my ways, and take to reading a course of history. Indeed, I do not exaggerate. And just so, for a long while I was persecuted and pestered, vexed thoroughly sometimes. My own family instructed to sing the burden out all day long, until the time when the subject was suddenly changed, by my heart being broken by that great stone that fell out of heaven.
Afterwards I was let to do anything I could best, which was very little until last year, and the working last year did much for me, in giving me stronger roots down into life—much. But think of that absurd reasoning that went before—the niaisery of it. For granting all the premises all round, it is not the utterance of a thought that can hurt anybody, while only the utterance is dependent on the will. And so what can the taking away of an inkstand do? Those physicians are such meta-physicians. It's curious to listen to them, and it's wise to leave off listening, though I have met with excessive kindness among them, and did not refer to Dr. Chambers in any of this, of course.
I am very glad you went to Chelsea, and it seemed finer afterwards, on purpose to make room for the divine philosophy. Which reminds me, the going to Chelsea, that my brother Henry confessed to me yesterday with shame and confusion of face to having mistaken and taken your umbrella for another belonging to a cousin of ours then in the house. He saw you, without conjecturing just at the moment, who you were. Do you conjecture sometimes that I live all alone here, like Marianna in the moated grange? It is not quite so. But where there are many, as with us, Every one is apt to follow his own devices, and my father is out all day, and my brothers and sisters are in and out, and with too large a public of noisy friends for me to bear, and I see them only at certain hours, except, of course, my sisters.
And then, as you have a reputation, and are opined to talk generally in blank verse, it is not likely that there should be much irreverent rushing into this room while you are known to be in it.
The flowers are So beautiful! Indeed, it was wrong, though, to send me the last. It was not just to the lawful possessors and enjoyers of them. That it was kind to me, I do not forget. You are too teachable a pupil in the art of obliterating, and omne ignotum pro terrifico, and therefore I won't frighten you by walking to meet you, for fear of being frightened myself. So good-bye until Tuesday. I ought not to make you read all this, I know, whether you like to read it or not, and I ought not to have written it, having no better reason than because I like to write on and on. You have better reasons for thinking me very weak, and I too good ones for not being able to reproach you for that natural and necessary opinion.
May God bless you, my dearest friend. E. B. B.
Tuesday evening. Postmark August 13, 1845. What can I say, or hope to say to you, when I see what you do for me? This, for myself, nothing for you, this, that I think the great, great good I get by your kindness strikes me less than that kindness. All is right, too. Come, I will have my fault-finding at last. So you can decipher my utterest hieroglyphic? Now droop the eyes while I triumph. The plains cower, cower beneath the mountains, their masters, and the priests stomp over the clay ridges. A palpable plagiarism for two lines of a legend that delighted my infancy, and now instruct my maturer years in pretty nearly all they boast of the semi-mythologic era referred to. In London town where reigned King Ludd, his lords went stomping through the mud, would all historic records were half as picturesque.
But you know, yes, you know, you are too indulgent by far, and treat these roughnesses as if they were advanced to many a stage. Meantime the pure gain is mine, and better the kind generous spirit is mine, mine to profit by, and best, best, best, The dearest friend is mine, so be happy. R.B.
Postmark August 13th, 1845. Yes, I admit that it was stupid to read that word so wrong. I thought there was a mistake somewhere, but that it was yours who had written one word meaning to write another. Cowher puts it all right, of course. But is there an English word of a significance different from stamp in stomp? Does not the old word King Lud's men stomped withal claim identity with our stamping? The A and O used to change about, you know, in the old English writers. See Chaucer for it. Still, the stomp with the peculiar significance is better, of course, than the stamp, even with a rhyme ready for it. And I dare say you are justified in daring to put this old wine into the new bottle, and we will drink to the health of the poem in it.
It is Italy and England, isn't it? But I understand and understood perfectly, through it all, that it is unfinished, and in a rough state round the edges. I could not help seeing that, even if I were still blinder than when I read lower for cower. But do not, I ask you, speak of my kindness. My kindness, mine! It is wasteful and ridiculous excess, and misapplication to use such words of me. And therefore, talking of compacts and the fas and nefas of them, I entreat you to know for the future that whatever I write of your poetry, if it isn't to be called impertinence, isn't to be called kindness any more, are fortiori, as people say when they are sure of an argument. Now, will you try to understand?
And talking still of compacts, how and where did I break my compact? I do not see. It was very curious, the phenomenon about your only-a-player girl. What an ungodlike indifference to your creatures, though, your worlds, breathed away from you like soap-bubbles, and dropping and breaking into russet portfolios unobserved. Only a god for the epicurean, at best, can you be.
That Miss Cushman went to Three Mile Cross the other day, and visited Miss Mitford, and pleased her a good deal, I fancied from what she said, and with reason from what you say. And only a fiddler, as I forgot to tell you yesterday, is announced, you may see in any newspaper, as about to issue from the English press by Mary Howlett's editorship. So we need not go to America for it. But if you complain of Georges Sand for want of art, how could you bear Anderson? Who can see a thing under his eyes, and place it under yours, and take a thought separately into his soul, and express it insularly, but has no sort of instinct towards wholeness and unity, and writes a book by putting so many pages together, just so.
For the rest, there can be no disagreeing with you about the comparative difficulty of novel writing and drama writing. I disagree a little lower down in your letter. Because I could not deny, in my own convictions, a certain proportion of genius to the author of Ernest Maltravers and Alice. Did you ever read those books? Even if he had more impotently tried, supposing it to be possible, for the dramatic Laurel. In fact, his poetry, dramatic or otherwise, is naught, but for the prose romances, and for Ernest Maltravers above all, I must lift up my voice and cry. And I read the Athenaeum about your Sir James Wiley, who took you for an Italian. Poi vi dirò, signor, che ne fu causa, che ave ho fatto al scriver debita pausa.
Ewa, io e b b.
Friday morning, postmark, August 15, 1845. Do you know, dear friend, it is no good policy to stop up all the vents of my feeling, nor leave one for safety's sake, as you will do. Let me caution you never so repeatedly. I know quite well enough that your kindness is not so apparent even in this instance of correcting my verses, as in many other points, but on such points you lift a finger to me and I am dumb. Am I not to be allowed a word here neither? I remember, in the first season of German opera here, when Fidelio's effects were going, going up to the gallery in order to get the best of the last chorus, get its oneness which you do, and, while perched there an inch under the ceiling, I was amused with the enormous enthusiasm of an elderly German.
We thought, I and a cousin of mine, whose whole body broke out in billow, heaved and swayed in the perfection of his delight, hands, head, feet, all tossing and striving to utter what possessed him. Well, next week we went again to the opera, and again mounted at the proper time, but the crowd was greater, and our mild, great-faced, white-haired, red-cheeked German was not to be seen. Not at first, for as the glory was at its full, My cousin twisted me round and made me see an arm—only an arm, all the body of its owner being amalgamated with a dense crowd on each side—before, and not behind, because they occupied the last benches over which we looked, and this arm waved and exulted as if for the dignity of the whole body, relieved it of its dangerous accumulation of repressed excitability.
When the crowd broke up, all the rest of the man disengaged itself by slow endeavours, and there stood our friend, confessed, as we were sure. Now you would have bade him keep his arm quiet. Lady Geraldine, you would. I have read these novels, but I must keep that word of words, genius, for something different. Talent will do here, surely. There lies Consuelo, done with. I shall tell you frankly that it strikes me as precisely what in conventional language, with the customary silliness, is styled a woman's book, in its merits and defects, and supremely timid in all the points where one wants, and has a right to expect some fruit of all the pretence and Georges-sandism. There are occasions when one does say, in the phrase of her school, Que la femme parle, or, what is better, let her act.
And how does Consuelo comfort herself on such an emergency? Why, she bravely lets the uninspired people throw down, one by one, their dearest prejudices at her feet, and then, like a very actress, picks them up like so many flowers, returning them to the breast of the owners with a smile and a courtesy, and trips off stage with a glance at the pit. Count Christian, Baron Frederick, Baroness... what's her name? All open their arms, and Consuelo will not content to entail disgrace, etc., etc. No, you say. She leaves them in order to solve the problem of her true feeling, whether she can really love Albert. But remember that this is done, that is, so much of it as ever is done, and as determines her to accept his hand at the very last.
This is solved some time about the next morning, or earlier, I forget. And in the meantime, Albert gets the benefit of the doubt of which chapter the last informs you. As for the hesitation and self-examination on the matter of that Anzoletto, the writer is turning over the leaves of the wrong dictionary, seeking help from psychology and pretending to forget there is such a thing as physiology. Then that horrible porpora. If Georges Saint ever gives him a consuelo for absolute master, in consideration of his services specified, and is of opinion that they warrant his conduct, or at least oblige submission to it, then I find her objection to the fatherly rule of Frederick perfectly impertinent, he having a few claims upon the gratitude of Prussia also, in his way, I believe.
If the strong ones will make the weak ones lead them, Then, for heaven's sake, let this dear old all-abused world keep on its course without these outcries and tearings of hair, and don't be for ever goading the Karls and other trodden-down creatures till they get their carbines in order, very rationally, to abate the nuisance. When you make the man a long speech against some enormity he is about to commit, and adjure and beseech and so forth till he throws down the aforesaid carbine, falls on his knees, and lets the Frederick go quietly on his way to keep on killing his thousands after the fashion that moved your previous indignation. Now is that right consequential? That is inferential? Logically deduced?
Going straight to the end? Manly? The accessories are not the principal, the adjuncts, the essence, nor the ornamental incidents, the book's self. So what matters it if the portrait's admirable, the description's eloquent? Eloquent. There it is. That is her characteristic. What she has to speak, she speaks out, speaks volubly forth, too well, inasmuch as you say, advancing a step or two. And now speaker's completely here, and she says nothing. But all that, another could do, as others have done, but la femme qui parle. Ah, that, is this all? So I am not Georgesons. She teaches me nothing. I look to her for nothing. I am ever yours, dearest friend. How I write to you, page on page. But Tuesday, who could wait till then?
Shall I not hear from you? God bless you ever.