The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume I Part 20

I am thinking of writing to Moxon, as there does not seem much to arrange. The type and size of Tennyson's books seem, upon examination, to suit my purpose excellently.

_To John Kenyan_ March 21, 1844.

No, you never sent me back Miss Martineau's letter, my dear cousin; but you will be sure, or rather Mr. Crabb Robinson will, to find it in some too safe a place; and then I shall have it. In the meantime here are the other letters back again. You will think that I was keeping them for a deposit, a security, till I 'had my ain again,' but I have only been idle and busy together. They are the most interesting that can be, and have quite delighted me. By the way, _I_, who saw nothing to object to in the 'Life in the Sick Room,' object very much to her argument in behalf of it--an argument certainly founded on a miserable misapprehension of the special doctrine referred to in her letter.

There is nothing so elevating and enn.o.bling to the nature and mind of man as the view which represents it raised into communion with G.o.d Himself, by the justification and purification of G.o.d Himself. Plato's dream brushed by the gate of this doctrine when it walked highest, and won for him the t.i.tle of 'Divine.' That it is vulgarised sometimes by narrow-minded teachers in theory, and by hypocrites in action, might be an argument (if admitted at all) against all truth, poetry, and music!

On the other hand, I was glad to see the leaning on the Education question; in which all my friends the Dissenters did appear to me so painfully wrong and so unworthily wrong at once.

And Southey's letters! I did quite delight in _them_! They are more _personal_ than any I ever saw of his; and have more warm every-day life in them.

The particular Paul Pry in question (to come down to _my_ life) never 'intrudes.' It is his peculiarity. And I put the stop exactly where I was bid; and was going to put Gabriel's speech,[93] only--with the pen in my hand to do it--I found that the angel was a little too exclamatory altogether, and that he had cried out, 'O ruined earth!'

and 'O miserable angel!' just before, approaching to the habit of a mere caller of names. So I altered the pa.s.sage otherwise; taking care of your full stop after 'despair.' Thank you, my dear Mr. Kenyon.

Also I sent enough ma.n.u.script for the first sheet, and a note to Moxon yesterday, last night, thanking him for his courtesy about Leigh Hunt's poems; and following your counsel in every point. 'Only last night,' you will say! But I have had _such_ a headache--and some very painful vexation in the prospect of my maid's leaving me, who has been with me throughout my illness; so that I am much attached to her, with the best reasons for being so, while the idea of a stranger is scarcely tolerable to me under my actual circ.u.mstances.

The 'Palm Leaves'[94] are full of strong thought and good thought--thought expressed excellently well; but of poetry, in the true sense, and of imagination in any, I think them bare and cold--somewhat wintry leaves to come from the East, surely, surely!

May the change of air be rapid in doing you good--the weather seems to be softening on purpose for you. May G.o.d bless you, dear Mr. Kenyon; I never can thank you enough. When you return I shall be rustling my 'proofs' about you, to prove my faith in your kindness.

Ever affectionately yours, E.B.B.

[Footnote 93: In the 'Drama of Exile,' near the beginning (_Poetical Works_, i. 7).]

[Footnote 94: By Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton.]

_To H.S. Boyd_ March 22, 1844.

My dearest Mr. Boyd,--I heard that once I wrote three times too long a letter to you; I am aware that nine times too long a silence is scarcely the way to make up for it. Forgive me, however, as far as you can, for every sort of fault. When I once begin to write to you, I do not know how to stop; and I have had so much to do lately as scarcely to know how to begin to write to you. _Hence these_ faults--not quite tears--in spite of my penitence and the quotation.

At last my book is in the press. My great poem (in the modest comparative sense), my 'Masque of Exile' (as I call it at last[95]), consists of some nineteen hundred or two thousand lines, and I call it 'Masque of _Exile_' because it refers to Lucifer's exile, and to that other mystical exile of the Divine Being which was the means of the return homewards of my Adam and Eve. After the exultation of boldness of composition, I fell into one of my deepest fits of despondency, and at last, at the end of most painful vacillations, determined not to print it. Never was a ma.n.u.script so near the fire as my 'Masque' was.

I had not even the instinct of applying for help to anybody. In the midst of this Mr. Kenyon came in by accident, and asked about my poem.

I told him that I had given it up, despairing of my republic. In the kindest way he took it into his hands, and proposed to carry it home and read it, and tell me his impression. 'You know,' he said, 'I have a prejudice against these sacred subjects for poetry, but then I have another prejudice _for you_, and one may neutralise the other.' The next day I had a letter from him with the returned ma.n.u.script--a letter which I was absolutely certain, before I opened it, would counsel _against_ the publication. On the contrary! His impression is clearly in favour of the poem, and, while he makes sundry criticisms on minor points, he considers it very superior as a whole to anything I ever did before--more sustained, and fuller in power. So my nerves are braced, and I grow a man again; and the ma.n.u.script, as I told you, is in the press. Moreover, you will be surprised to hear that I think of bringing out _two volumes of poems_ instead of one, by advice of Mr. Moxon, the publisher. Also, the Americans have commanded an American edition, to come out in numbers, either a little before or simultaneously with the English one, and provided with a separate preface for themselves.

There now! I have told you all this, knowing your kindness, and that you will care to hear of it.

It has given me the greatest concern to hear of dear Annie's illness, and I do hope, both for your sake and for all our sakes, that we may have better news of her before long.

But I don't mean to fall into another sc.r.a.pe to-day by writing too much. May G.o.d bless you, my very dear friend!

I am ever your affectionate E.B.B.

[Footnote 95: There was, however, a still later last, when it became the 'Drama of Exile.']

_To H.S. Boyd_ April I, 1844.

My very dear Friend,--Your kind letter I was delighted to receive. You mistake a good deal the capacities in judgment of 'the man.'[96] The 'man' is highly refined in his tastes, and leaning to the cla.s.sical (I was going to say to _your_ cla.s.sical, only suddenly I thought of Ossian) a good deal more than I do. He has written satires in the manner of Pope, which admirers of Pope have praised warmly and deservedly. If I had hesitated about the conclusiveness of his judgments, it would have been because of his confessed indisposition towards subjects religious and ways mystical, and his occasional insufficient indulgence for rhymes and rhythms which he calls '_Barrettian_.' But these things render his favourable inclination towards my 'Drama of Exile' still more encouraging (as you will see) to my hopes for it.

Still, I do tremble a good deal inwardly when I come to think of what your own thoughts of my poem, and poems in their two-volume development, may finally be. I am afraid of you. You will tell me the truth as it appears to you--upon _that_ I may rely; and I should not wish you to suppress a single disastrous thought for the sake of the unpleasantness it may occasion to me. My own faith is that I have made progress since 'The Seraphim,' only it is too possible (as I confess to myself and you) that your opinion may be exactly contrary to it.

You are very kind in what you say about wishing to have some conversation, as the medium of your information upon architecture, with Octavius--Occy, as we call him. He is very much obliged to you, and proposes, if it should not be inconvenient to you, to call upon you on Friday, with Arabel, at about one o'clock. Friday is mentioned because it is a holiday, no work being done at Mr. Barry's. Otherwise he is engaged every day (except, indeed, Sunday) from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon. May G.o.d bless you, dearest Mr. Boyd.

I am ever

Your affectionate ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

[Footnote 96: John Kenyon: see the last letter.]

_To Mr. Westwood_ April 16, 1844.

... Surely, surely, it was not likely I should lean to utilitarianism in the notice on Carlyle, as I remember the writer of that article leans somewhere--_I_, who am reproached with trans-trans-transcendentalisms, and not without reason, or with insufficient reason.

Oh, and I should say also that Mr. Home, in his kindness, has enlarged considerably in his annotations and reflections on me personally.[97]

My being in correspondence with all the Kings of the East, for instance, is an exaggeration, although literary work in one way will bring with it, happily, literary a.s.sociation in others.... Still, I am not a great letter writer, and I don't write 'elegant Latin verses,'

as all the G.o.ds of Rome know, and I have not been shut up in the dark for seven years by any manner of means. By the way, a barrister said to my barrister brother the other day, 'I suppose your sister is dead?' 'Dead?' said he, a little struck; 'dead?' 'Why, yes. After Mr.

Home's account of her being sealed up hermetically in the dark for so many years, one can only calculate upon her being dead by this time.'

ELIZABETH BARRETT.

Several of the letters to Mr. Boyd which follow refer to that celebrated gift of Cyprus wine which led to the composition of one of Miss Barrett's best known and most quoted poems.

[Footnote 97: In _The New Spirit of the Age_.]

_To H.S. Boyd_ June 18, 1844.

Thank you, my very dear friend! I write to you drunk with Cyprus.

Nothing can be worthier of either G.o.ds or demi-G.o.ds; and if, as you say, Achilles did not drink of it, I am sorry for him. I suppose Jupiter had it instead, just then--Hebe pouring it, and Juno's ox-eyes bellowing their splendour at it, if you will forgive me that broken metaphor, for the sake of Aeschylus's genius, and my own particular intoxication.

Indeed, there _never was_, in modern days, such wine. Flush, to whom I offered the last drop in my gla.s.s, felt it was supernatural, and ran away. I have an idea that if he had drunk that drop, he would have talked afterwards--either Greek or English.

Never was such wine! The very taste of ideal nectar, only stiller, from keeping. If the bubbles of eternity were on it, _we_ should run away, perhaps, like Flush.

Still, the thought comes to me, ought I to take it from you? Is it right of me? are you not too kind in sending it? and should you be allowed to be too kind? In any case, you must, not think of sending me more than you have already sent. It is more than enough, and I am not less than very much obliged to you.

I have pa.s.sed the middle of my second volume, and I only hope that critics may say of the rest that it smells of Greek wine. Dearest Mr.

Boyd's

Ever affectionate E.B. BARRETT.

_To Mr. Westwood_ June 28, 1844.

My dear Mr. Westwood,--I have certainly and considerably increased the evidence of my own death by the sepulchral silence of the last few days. But after all I am not dead, not even _at heart_, so as to be insensible to your kind anxiety, and I can a.s.sure you of this, upon very fair authority, neither is the book dead yet. It has turned the corner of the _felo de se_, and if it is to die, it will be by the critics. The mystery of the long delay, it would not be very easy for me to explain, notwithstanding I hear Mr. Moxon says: 'I suppose Miss Barrett is not in a hurry about her publication;' and _I_ say: 'I suppose Moxon is not in a hurry about the publication.' There may be a little fault on my side, when I have kept a proof a day beyond the hour, or when 'copy' has put out new buds in my hands as I pa.s.sed it to the printer's. Still, in my opinion, it is a good deal more the fault of Mr. Moxon's not being in a hurry, than in the excessive virtue of my patience, or vice of my indolence. Miss Mitford says, as you do, that she never heard of so slow-footed a book.