The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume I Part 14

You won't be angry with me for my obliquity (as you will consider it) about Ossian. You know I always talk sincerely to you, and you have not made me afraid of telling you the truth--that is, _my_ truth, the truth of my belief and opinions.

I do not defend much in the 'Idiot Boy.' Wordsworth is a great poet, but he does not always write equally.

And that reminds me of a distinction you suggest between Ossian and Homer. _I_ fashion it in this way: Homer sometimes nods, but Ossian _makes his readers nod_.

Ever your affectionate ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

Did I tell you that I had been reading through a ma.n.u.script translation of the 'Gorgias' of Plato, by Mr. Hyman of Oxford, who is a stepson of Mr. Haydon's the artist? It is an excellent translation with learned notes, but it is _not elegant_. He means to try the public upon it, but, as I have intimated to him, the Christians of the present day are not civilised enough for Plato.

Arabel's love.

_To H.S. Boyd_ [About the end of January 1843.]

My very dear Friend,--The image you particularly admire in Ossian, I admire with you, although I am not sure that I have not seen it or its like somewhere in a cla.s.sical poet, Greek or Latin. Perhaps Lord Byron remembered it when in the 'Siege of Corinth' he said of his Francesca's uplifted arm, 'You might have seen the moon shine through.' It reminds me also that Maclise the artist, a man of poetical imagination, gives such a transparency to the ghost of Banquo in his picture of Macbeth's banquet, that we can discern through it the lights of the festival. That is good poetry for a painter, is it not?

I send you the magazines which I have just received from America, and which contain, one of them, 'The Cry of the Human,' and the other, four of my sonnets. My correspondent tells me that the 'Cry' is considered there one of the most successful of my poems, but you probably will not think so. Tell me exactly what you do think. At page 343 of 'Graham's Magazine,' _Editor's Table_, is a review of me, which, however extravagant in its appreciation, will give your kindness pleasure. I confess to a good deal of pleasure myself from these American courtesies, expressed not merely in the magazines, but in the newspapers; a heap of which has been sent to me by my correspondent--the 'New York Tribune,' 'The Union,' 'The Union Flag,'

&c.--all scattered over with extracts from my books and benignant words about their writer. Among the extracts is the whole of the review of Wordsworth from the London 'Athenaeum,' an unconscious compliment, as they do not guess at the authorship, and one which you won't thank them for. Keep the magazines, as I have duplicates.

Dearest Mr. Boyd, since you admit that I am not prejudiced about Ossian, I take courage to tell you what I am thinking of.

_I am thinking_ (this is said in a whisper, and in confidence--of two kinds), _I am thinking that you don't admire him quite as much as you did three weeks ago_.

Ever most affectionately yours, ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

Arabel not being here, I send her love without asking for it.

_To Mrs. Martin_ January 30, 1843.

My dearest Mrs. Martin,--Thank you for your letter and for dear Mr.

Martin's thought of writing one! Ah! _I_ thought he would not write, but not for the reason you say; it was something more palpable and less romantic! Well, I will not grumble any more about not having my letter, since you are coming, and since you seem, my dear Mrs. Martin, something in better spirits than your note from Southampton bore token of. Madeira is the Promised Land, you know; and you should hope hopefully for your invalid from his pilgrimage there. You should hope with those who hope, my dearest Mrs. Martin....

Our '_event_' just now is a new purchase of a 'Holy Family,' supposed to be by Andrea del Sarto. It has displaced the Glover over the chimney-piece in the drawing-room, and dear Stormie and Alfred nearly broke their backs in carrying it upstairs for me to see before the placing. It is probably a fine picture, and I seem to see my way through the dark of my ignorance, to admire the grouping and colouring, whatever doubt as to the expression and divinity may occur otherwise. Well, you will judge. I won't tell you _how_ I think of it.

And you won't care if I do. There is also a new very pretty landscape piece, and you may imagine the local politics of the arrangement and hanging, with their talk and consultation; while _I_, on the storey higher, have my arranging to manage of my pretty new books and my three hyacinths, and a pot of primroses which dear Mr. Kenyon had the good nature to carry himself through the streets to our door. But all the flowers forswear me, and die either suddenly or gradually as soon as they become aware of the want of fresh air and light in my room.

Talking of air and light, what exquisite weather this is! What a summer in winter! It is the fourth day since I have had the fire wrung from me by the heat of temperature, and I sit here _very warm indeed_, notwithstanding that bare grate. Nay, yesterday I had the door thrown open for above an hour, and was warm still! You need not ask, you see, how I am.

Tell me, have you read Mr. d.i.c.kens's 'America;' and what is your thought of it like? If I were an American, it would make me rabid, and certain of the free citizens _are_ furious, I understand, while others 'speak peace and ensue it,' admire as much of the book as deserves any sort of admiration, and attribute the blameable parts to the prejudices of the party with whom the writer 'fell in,' and not to a want of honesty or brotherhood in his own intentions. I admire Mr.

d.i.c.kens as an imaginative writer, and I love the Americans--I cannot possibly admire or love this book. Does Mr. Martin? Do _you_?

Henrietta would send her love to you if I could hear her voice nearer than I do actually, as she sings to the guitar downstairs. And her love is not the only one to be sent. Give mine to dear Mr. Martin, though he can't make up his mind to the bore of writing to me. And remember us all, both of you, as we do you.

Dearest Mrs. Martin, your affectionate BA.

_To James Martin_ February 6, 1843.

You make us out, my dear Mr. Martin, to be such perfect parallel lines that I should be half afraid of completing the definition by our never meeting, if it were not for what you say afterwards, of the coming to London, and of promising to come and see Flush. If you should be travelling while I am writing, it was only what happened to me when I wrote not long ago to dearest Mrs. Martin, and everybody in this house cried out against the fatuity of the coincidence. As if I could know that she was travelling, when n.o.body told me, and I wasn't a witch!

If the same thing happens to-day, believe in the innocence of my ignorance. I shall be consoled if it does--for certain reasons. But for none in the world can I help thanking you for your letter, which gave me so much pleasure from the first sight of the handwriting to the thought of the kindness spent upon me in it, that after all I cannot thank you as I would.

Yet I won't let you fancy me of such an irrational state of simplicity as not to be fully aware that _you_, with your 'nature of the fields and forests,' look down disdainfully and with an inward heat of glorying, upon _me_ who have all my pastime in books--dead and seethed. Perhaps, if it were a little warmer, I might even grant that you are right in your pride. As it is, I grumble feebly to myself something about the definition of _nature_, and how we in the town (which 'G.o.d made' just as He made your hedges) have _our_ share of nature too; and then I have secret thoughts of the state of the thermometer, and wonder how people can breathe out of doors. In the meantime, Flush, who is a better philosopher, pushes deep into my furs, and goes to sleep. Perhaps I should fear the omen for my correspondent.

Oh yes! That picture in 'Boz' is beautiful. For my own part, and by a natural womanly contradiction, I have never cared so much in my life for flowers as since being shut out from gardens--unless, indeed, in the happy days of old when I had a garden of my own, and cut it out into a great Hector of Troy, in relievo, with a high heroic box nose and shoeties of columbine.[72] But that was long ago. Now I count the buds of my primrose with a new kind of interest, and you never saw such a primrose! I begin to believe in Ovid, and look for a metamorphosis. The leaves are turning white and springing up as high as corn. Want of air, and of sun, I suppose. I should be loth to think it--want of friendship to _me_!

Do you know that the royal Boz lives close to us, three doors from Mr.

Kenyon in Harley Place? The new numbers appear to me admirable, and full of life and blood--whatever we may say to the thick rouging and extravagance of gesture. There is a beauty, a tenderness, too, in the organ scene, which is worthy of the gilliflowers. But my admiration for 'Boz' fell from its 'sticking place,' I confess, a good furlong, when I read Victor Hugo; and my creed is, that, _not_ in his tenderness, which is as much his own as his humour, but in his serious powerful Jew-trial scenes, he has followed Hugo closely, and never scarcely looked away from 'Les Trois Jours d'un Cond.a.m.ne.'

If you should not be on the road, I hope you won't be very long before you are, and that dearest Mrs. Martin will put off building her greenhouse--you see I believe she _will_ build it--until she gets home again.

How kind of you and of her to have poor old Mrs. Barker at Colwall!

Do believe me, both of you, with love from all of _us_,

Very affectionately yours, BA.

[Footnote 72: See 'Hector in the Garden' (_Poetical Works_, iii. 37).]

_To H.S. Boyd_ February 21, 1843.

Thank you, my very dear friend, I am as well as the east wind will suffer me to be; and _that_, indeed, is not very well, my heart being fuller of all manner of evil than is necessary to its humanity. But the wind is changed, and the frost is gone, and it is not quite out of my fancy yet that I may see you next summer. _You and summer are not out of the question yet_. Therefore, you see, I cannot be very deep in tribulation. But you may consider it a bad symptom that I have just finished a poem of some five hundred lines in stanzas, called 'The Lost Bower,'[73] and about nothing at all in particular.

As to Arabel, she is not an icicle. There are flowers which blow in the frost--when we brambles are brown with their inward death--and she is of them, dear thing. _You_ are not a bramble, though, and I hope that when you talk of 'feeling the cold,' you mean simply to refer to your sensation, and not to your health. Remember also, dearest Mr.

Boyd, what a glorious winter we have had. Take away the last ten days and a few besides, and call the whole summer rather than winter. Ought we to complain, really? Really, no.

I venture another prophecy upon the shoulders of the ast, though my hand shakes so that n.o.body will read it.

_You can't abide my 'Cry of the Human,' and four sonnets_. They have none of them found favor in your eyes.

In or out of favor,

Ever your affectionate E.B.B.

Do you think that next summer you _might, could_, or _would_ walk across the park to see me--supposing always that I fail in my aspiration to go and see you? I only ask by way of _hypothesis_.

Consider and revolve it so. We live on the verge of the town rather than in it, and our noises are cousins to silence; and you should pa.s.s into a room where the silence is most absolute. Flush's breathing is my loudest sound, and then the watch's tickings, and then my own heart when it beats too turbulently. Judge of the quiet and the solitude!

[Footnote 73: _Poetical Works_, iii. 105.]

_To H.S. Boyd_ April 19, 1843.

My very dear Friend,--The earth turns round, to be sure, and we turn with it, but I never antic.i.p.ated the day and the hour for _you_ to turn round and be guilty of high treason to our Greeks. I cry '_Ai_!

_ai_!' as if I were a chorus, and all vainly. For, you see, arguing about it will only convince you of my obstinacy, and not a bit of Homer's supremacy. Ossian has wrapt you in a cloud, a fog, a true Scotch mist. You have caught cold in the critical faculty, perhaps. At any rate, I can't see a bit more of your reasonableness than I can see of Fingal. _Sic transit_! Homer like the darkened half of the moon in eclipse! You have spoilt for me now the finest image in your Ossian-Macpherson.

My dearest Mr. Boyd, you will find as few believers in the genuineness of these volumes among the most accomplished antiquarians in poetry as in the genuineness of Chatterton's Rowley, and of Ireland's Shakespeare. The latter impostures boasted of disciples in the first instance, but the discipleship perished by degrees, and the place thereof, during this present 1843, knows it no more. So has it been with the belief in Macpherson's Ossian. Of those who believed in the poems at the first sight of them, who kept his creed to the end? And speaking so, I speak of Macpherson's contemporaries whom you respect.

I do not consider Walter Scott a great poet, but he was highly accomplished in matters of poetical antiquarianism, and is certainly citable as an authority on this question.

Try not to be displeased with me. I cannot conceal from you that my astonishment is profound and unutterable at your new religion--your new faith in this pseud-Ossian--and your desecration, in his service, of the old h.e.l.lenic altars. And by the way, my own figure reminds me to inquire of you whether you are not sometimes struck with a _want_ in him--a want very grave in poetry, and very strange in antique poetry--the want of devotional feeling and conscience of G.o.d. Observe, that all antique poets rejoice greatly and abundantly in their divine mythology; and that if this Ossian be both antique and G.o.dless, he is an exception, a discrepancy, a monster in the history of letters and experience of humanity. As such I leave him.