The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume Ii Part 39

Does this advice sound _too_ disinterested on my part? Never think so.

We only stand ourselves on one foot in Florence--forced to go away in the summer; forced to go away in the winter. Robert was so persuaded even last winter (before my illness) of my being better at Rome that he would have taken an apartment there and furnished it, except that I prevented him. Then we have calls from the north, and on most summers we must be in England and Paris. To stay on through the summer in Florence is impossible to us at least. Think of thermometers being a hundred and two in the shade this year! So I consider your case dispa.s.sionately, and conclude _we_ are not worth your consideration in reference to prospects connected with any place. We are rolling stones gathering no moss.

There's no use for anyone to run after us; but we may roll anyone's way.

I say this, penetrated by your affectionate feeling for us. May G.o.d bless you and keep you, my dear friend.

As for me, I have been nearly as ill as possible--that's the truth--suffering so much that the idea of the evil's recurrence makes me feel nervous. All the Italians who came near me gave me up as a lost life; but G.o.d would not have it so this time, and my old vitality proved itself strong still. At present I am remarkably well; I had a return of threatening symptoms a fortnight ago, but they pa.s.sed. I think I had been talking too much. Now I feel quite as free and well as usual about the chest, and 'buoyant' as to general spirits. Affairs in Italy seem going well, and Napoleon does not forget us, whatever his townsfolk of a certain cla.s.s may do. The French newspapers remember us well, I am happy to see, also. But, my dear f.a.n.n.y, who am I to give letters to Garibaldi?

I don't know him, nor does he know _me_. Have you acquaintance with Madame Swartz? _She_ could help Mr. Spicer. But she has just gone to Rome. And _we_ are going to Rome. Did not Sarianna tell you that? We go on my account to avoid the tramontana here. People say we are foolhardy on account of the state of the country; but you are aware we are no more frightened of revolutions than M. Charles is of the tiger. Prices at Rome will be more reasonable at any rate. n.o.body pays high for a probability of being ma.s.sacred. What I'm most afraid of after all is lest the 'Holiness of our Lord' should agree to reform at the last moment. It's too late; it must be too late--it ought to be too late....

Poor Mr. Landor is in perfect health and in rather good spirits, seeming reconciled to his fate of exile. In the summer he moaned over it sadly, 'never could be happy except in England'; and I rather leant to sending him back, I confess. But Mr. Forster and other friends seemed to think that if he went back he could never be kept from the attack, all would come over again; and really that was probable. Still, I feared for him before he went to Siena. It does not do to shake hour-gla.s.ses at his age, and though he had been acclimated here by an eleven years'

residence, still--well; there was nothing for it but to keep him here.

He sighs a little still that it 'does not agree with him,' and that Florence is a 'very ugly town,' and so on; but still he is evidently much stronger than when he went to Siena, can walk for an hour together (instead of failing at the end of the street), and looks quite vigorous with his snow-white beard and moustache, through which the carnivorous laugh runs and rings. He doesn't know yet we are going away. He will miss Robert dreadfully. Robert's goodness to him has really been apostolical. And think of the effect of a goodness which can quote at every turn of a phrase something from an author's book! Isn't it more bewitching than other goodnesses? To certain authors, that is....

Dearest f.a.n.n.y, keep up your spirits, _do_. Write to me to say you are less sad. And love not less your

Affectionate BA.

_To Mr. Chorley_

Casa Guidi: November 25 [1859].

My dear Friend,--I thank you with all my heart for your most graceful and touching dedication,[71] and do a.s.sure you that I feel it both as honour and as pleasure.

And yet, do you know, Robert says that you might peradventure, by the dedication of your book to me, mean a covert lecture, or sarcasm, who knows? Even if you did, the kindness of the personal address would make up for it. Who wouldn't bear both lecture and sarcasm from anyone who begins by speaking _so_? Therefore I am honoured and pleased and grateful all the same--yes, and _will_ be.

But, dear Mr. Chorley, you don't silence me, notwithstanding. The spell of your dedication hasn't fastened me up in an oak for ever. Your book is very clever; your characters very incisively given; princess and patriots admirably cut out (and up!); half truths everywhere, to which one says 'How true!' But one might as well (and better) say 'How false!'

seeing that, dear Mr. Chorley, it does really take two halves to make a whole, and we know it. The whole truth is not here--not even suggested here--and let me add that the half truth on this occasion is cruel.

One thing is ignored in the book. Under all the ridiculousness, under all the wickedness even of such men and women, lies _a cause_, a right inherent, a wrong committed. The cant presupposes a doctrine, and the pretension a real heroism. Your best people (in your book) seem to have no notion of this. Your heroine deserves to be a victim, not because she was rash and ignorant, but because she was selfish and foolish. The world wasn't lost for her because she loved--either a cause or a man--but because she wanted change and excitement. If she had felt on the abstract question as I have known women to feel, even when they have acted like fools, I should pity her more. As it is, the lesson was necessary. If she had not married rashly an Italian _birbante_ she would have married rashly an English blackguard, and I myself see small difference in the kinds. With _you_, however, to your mind, it is different; and in this view of yours seems to me to lie the main fault of your book. You evidently think that G.o.d made only the English. The English are a peculiar people. Their worst is better than the best of the exterior nations. Over the rest of the world He has cast out His shoe. Even supposing that a foreigner does, by extraordinary exception, some good thing, it's only in reaction from having murdered somebody last year, or at least left his children to starve the year before.

Truth, generosity, n.o.bleness of will and mind, these things do not exist beyond the influence of the 'Times' newspaper and the 'Sat.u.r.day Review.'

(By the way, it would be extraordinary if it _were so_.')

Well, I have lived thirteen years on the Continent, and, far as England is from Italy, far as the heavens are from the earth, I dissent from you, dissent from you, dissent from you.

I say so, and there is an end. It is relief to me, and will make no impression on you; but for my sake you permit me to say it, I feel sure.

Dear Mr. Chorley, Robert and I have had true pleasure (in spite of all this fault-finding) in feeling ourselves close to you in your book.

Volume after volume we have exchanged, talking of you, praising you here, blaming you there, but always feeling pleasure in reading your words and speaking your name. Don't say it's the last novel. You, who can do so much. Write us another at once rather, doing justice to our sublime Azeglios and acute Cavours and energetic Farinis. If I could hear an English statesman (Conservative or Liberal) speak out of a large heart and generous comprehension as I did Azeglio this last spring, I should thank G.o.d for it. I fear I never shall. My boy may, perhaps. Red tape has garrotted this political generation....

I persist in being in high hopes for my Italy.

Ever affectionately yours ELIZABETH B. BROWNING.

Early in December the move to Rome took place, and they found rooms at 28 Via del Tritone. During the winter Mrs. Browning was preparing for the press her last volume, the 'Poems before Congress,' while her husband, in a fit of disinclination to write poetry, occupied himself by trying his hand at sculpture.

_To Miss Browning_

[Rome: December 1859.]

Dearest Sarianna,--Robert will have told you of the success of our journey, which the necessities of Mr. Landor very nearly pushed back into the cold too late. We had even resolved that if the wind changed before morning we would accept it 'as a sign' and altogether give up Rome. We were all but run to ground, you see. Happily it didn't end so; and here we are in a very nice sunny apartment, which would have been far beyond our means last year or any year except just now when the Pope's obstinacy and the rumoured departure of the French have left Rome a solitude and called it peace--very problematical peace. (Peni, in despair at leaving Florence, urged on us that 'for mama to have cold air in her chest would be better than to have a cannon-ball in her stomach'; but she was unreasonably more afraid of one than of the other.) Apartments here for which friends of ours paid forty pounds English the month last winter are going for fifteen or under--or rather not going--for n.o.body scarcely comes to take them. The Pope's 'reforms' seem to be limited, in spite of his alarming position, which is breaking his heart, he told a friend of Mrs. Stowe's the other day, and out of which he looks to be relieved only by some special miracle (the American was quite affected to hear the old man bewail himself!), to an edict against crinolines, the same being forbidden to sweep the sacred pavement of St.

Peter's. This is _true_, though it sounds like a joke.

Even Florence has very few English. A crisis is looked for everywhere.

Prices there are rising fast; but one is prepared to pay more for liberty. Carriages are dearer than in Paris by our new tariff, which is an item important to me. We left Mr. Landor in great comfort. I went to see his apartment before it was furnished. Rooms small, but with a look out into a little garden; quiet and cheerful; and he doesn't mind a situation rather out of the way. He pays four pound ten (English) the month. Wilson has _thirty_ pounds a year for taking care of him, which sounds a good deal; but it _is_ a difficult position. He has excellent, generous, affectionate impulses, but the impulses of the tiger every now and then. Nothing coheres in him, either in his opinions, or I fear, affections. It isn't age; he is precisely the man of his youth, I must believe. Still, his genius gives him the right of grat.i.tude on all artists at least, and I must say that my Robert has generously paid the debt. Robert always said that he owed more as a writer to Landor than to any contemporary. At present Landor is very fond of him; but I am quite prepared for his turning against us as he has turned against Forster, who has been so devoted for years and years. Only one isn't kind for what one gets by it, or there wouldn't be much kindness in this world.

I keep well; and of course, at Rome there is more chance for me than there was in Florence; but I hated to inflict an unpopular journey, of which the advantage was solely mine. Poor Peni said that if he had to leave his Florence he would rather go to Paris than to Rome. I dare say he would. Then his Florentines frightened him with ideas of the awful ma.s.sacre we were to be subjected to here. The pony travelled like a glorified Houyhnhnm and we have brought a second male servant to take care of him. It was an economy; for the wages of Rome are inordinate.

Pen's tender love to his nonno and you with that of

Your ever affectionate sister, BA.

_To Miss E.F. Haworth_

[Rome]: 28 Via Tritone: Friday [winter 1859].

My dearest f.a.n.n.y,--Set me down as a wretch, but hear me. I have been ill again, in the first place; then as weak as a rag in consequence, and then with business acc.u.mulated on impotent hands; proofs to see to, and the like. You may have heard in the buzz of newspapers of certain presentation _swords_, subscribed for by twenty thousand Romans, at a franc each, and presented in homage and grat.i.tude to Napoleon III. and Victor Emmanuel. Castellani[72] of course was the artist, and the whole business had to be huddled up at the end, because of his Holiness denouncing all such givers of gifts as traitors to the See. So just as the swords had to be packed up and disappear, some one came with a shut carriage to take me for a sight of these most exquisite works of art. It was five o'clock in the evening and raining, but not cold, so that the whole world here agreed it couldn't hurt me. I went with Robert therefore; we were received at Castellani's most flatteringly as poets and lovers of Italy; were asked for autographs; and returned in a blaze of glory and satisfaction, to collapse (as far as I'm concerned) in a near approach to mortality. You see I can't catch a simple cold. All my bad symptoms came back. Suffocations, singular heart-action, cough tearing one to atoms. A gigantic blister, however, let me crawl out of bed at the end of a week, and the advantage of a Roman climate _told_, I dare say, for the attack was less violent and much less long than the one in the summer. Only I feel myself brittle, and become aware, of increased susceptibility. Dr. Gresonowsky warns me against Florence in the winter. I must be warm, they say. Well, never mind! Now I am well again, and I don't know why I should have whined so to you. I am well, and living on a.s.ses' milk by way of sustaining the mental calibre; yes, and able to have _tete-a-tetes_ with Theodore Parker, who believes nothing, you know, and has been writing a little Christmas book for the young just now, to prove how they should keep Christmas without a Christ, and a Mr. Hazard, a spiritualist, who believes everything, walks and talks with spirits, and impresses Robert with a sense of veracity, which is more remarkable. I like the man much. He holds the subject on high grounds, takes the idea and lives on it above the earth. For years he has given himself to investigation, and has seen the Impossible.

Certainly enough Robert met him and conversed with him, and came back to tell me what an intelligent and agreeable new American acquaintance he had made, without knowing that he was Hazard the spiritualist, rather famous in his department.... Don't fall out of heart with investigation.

It takes patient investigation to establish the number of legs of a newly remarked fly. Nothing _riles_ me so much as the dogmatism of the people who p.r.o.nounce on there being nothing to see, because in half a dozen experiments, perhaps, they have seen nothing conclusive.

'Yet could not all creation pierce Beyond the bottom of his eye.'

Mediums cheat certainly. So do people who are not mediums. I congratulate you on liking anybody better. That's pleasant for _you_ at any rate. My changes are always the other way. I begin by seeing the beautiful in most people, and then comes the disillusion. It isn't caprice or unsteadiness; oh no! it's merely _fate_. _My_ fate, I mean.

Alas, my bubbles, my bubbles!

But I'm growing too original, and will break off. My Emperor at least has not deceived me, and I'm going into the fire for him with a little 'brochure' of political poems, which you shall take at Chapman's with the last edition of 'Aurora' when you go to England. Thank you a hundred times from both Robert and me for the interesting relation of Cobden's sayings on him. If Cobden had not rushed beyond civilisation, I should like to offer him my little book. I should like it. Self-love is the great malady of England, and immortal would the statesman be who could and would tear a wider horizon for the popular mind. As to the rifle cry, _I_ never doubted (for one) that it had its beginning with 'interested persons.' Never was any cry more ign.o.ble. A rescues B from being murdered by C, and E cries out, 'What if _A_ should murder _me_!'

That's the logic of the subject. And the sentiment is worthy of the logic.

I expect to be torn to pieces by English critics for what I have ventured to write....

Write me one of your amusing letters, and take our love, especially

Your ever affectionate BA'S.

There is no Roman news, people are so scarce. The Storys have given a ball, Italians chiefly. We think of little but politics.

_To Mrs. Martin_