The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume Ii Part 47

126 Via Felice, Rome: Tuesday, [January 1861].

Ever dearest Isa,--I wrote a long letter, which you have received, I do hope, and am waiting for a long one from you to tell me that you are not suffering any more. This is on business merely--that is, it is merely to give you trouble, the customary way for me to do business in these latter days. Will you, dear, without putting yourself to too much inconvenience by overhaste, direct the 'n.a.z.ione' people to send the journal, to which we must subscribe for three months, to _S.E. le General Comte de Noue, Comandante della piazza di Roma. No other name._ The General, who can do what he pleases, pleases to receive our paper (our kind Abbe mediating) on condition that we do not talk of it, and so at last I shall attain to getting out of this dark into the free upper air. It is insufferable to be instructed by the 'Giornale di Roma' as to how Cialdini writes to Turin that his Piedmontese are perfectly demoralised, and that the besieged dance for triumph each time an Italian cannon is fired into the vague. On the other hand, I hear regularly every morning from the Romans that Gaeta is taken,[96] with the most minute particulars, which altogether is exasperating. The last rumour is of typhus fever in the fortress, but I have grown sceptical, and believe nothing on either side now. One thing is clear, that it wasn't only the French fleet which prevented our triumph....

Robert came home this morning between three and four. A great ball at Mrs. Hooker's--magnificent, he says. All the princes in Rome (and even cardinals) present. The rooms are splendid, and the preparations were in the best taste. The Princess Ruspoli (a Buonaparte) appeared in the tricolor. She is most beautiful, Robert says.

So you see our Americans can dance even while the Republic goes to pieces. I think I would not do it. Not that I despair of America--G.o.d forbid! If the North will be faithful to its conscience there will be only an increase of greatness after a few years, even though it may rain blood betwixt then and now. Mr. Story takes it all very quietly. He would be content to let the South go, and accept the isolation of the North as final. 'We should do better without the South,' said he. I don't agree in this. I think that the unity of the State should be a.s.serted with a strong hand, and the South forced to pay taxes and submit to law.

Mdme. Swab [Schwabe] told me that a friend of hers had travelled with Klapka from Constantinople, and that K. had said, 'there would not be war till next year,--diplomacy would take its course for the present year.' Perhaps he did not speak sincerely. I can't understand how the Austrian provinces will hold out in mere talk for twelve months more. Do you mark the tone of the 'Opinion Nationale' on Austria, and about Hungary being a natural ally of France, and also what is said in the 'Morning Chronicle,' which always more or less reflects the face of the French Government? Then it seems to me that the Emperor's speech is not eminently pacific, though he 'desires peace.' I hear from rather good authority what I hope is possible, that Teliki accepted as a condition of his liberation, not simply that he would not personally act against Austria, but that he would use his endeavours to prevent any action on the part of his compatriots. Men are base.

Mr. Prinsep[97] is here. Last autumn he made a walking tour into Cornwall with Alfred Tennyson, to tread in the steps of King Arthur.

Tennyson was dreadfully afraid of being recognised and mobbed, and desired to be called 'the other gentleman,' which straightway became convertible now and then into 'the old gentleman,' much to his vexation. But Mr. Prinsep is in the roses and lilies of youth, and comparatively speaking, of course, the great Laureate was an ancient. He is in considerable trouble, too by their building a fort in front of his house on the southern coast of the Isle of Wight. I couldn't help saying that he deserved it for having written 'Riflemen, arm!' It's a piece of pure poetical justice, really.

Here I end.

Write to me, my Isa, and do me good with your tender, warm thoughts. Do you think I have no comfort in feeling them stroke me softly through the dark and distance?

May G.o.d love you, dearest Isa!

Always your loving BA.

Robert's true love, and Pen's.

The weather is wonderfully warm. In fact, the winter has been very mild--milder than usual for even Rome.

_To Miss E.F. Haworth_

126 Via Felice, Rome: Tuesday, [about January 1861].

You really astonish me, dearest f.a.n.n.y, so much by your letter, that I must reply to it at once. I ask myself under what new influence (strictly clerical) is she now, that she should write so? And has she forgotten me, never read 'Aurora Leigh,' never heard of me or from me that, before 'Spiritualism' came up in America, I have been called orthodox by infidels, and heterodox by church-people; and gone on predicting to such persons as came near enough to me in speculative liberty of opinion to justify my speaking, that the present churches were in course of dissolution, and would have to be followed by a reconstruction of Christian essential verity into other than these middle-age scholastic forms. Believing in Christ's divinity, which is the life of Christianity, I believed this. Otherwise, if the end were here--if we were to be covered over and tucked in with the Thirty-nine Articles or the like, and good-night to us for a sound sleep in 'sound doctrine'--I should fear for a revealed religion incapable of expansion according to the needs of man. What comes from G.o.d has life in it, and certainly from all the growth of living things, spiritual growth cannot be excepted. But I shun religious controversy--it is useless. I never 'disturb anybody's mind,' as it is called--let those sleep who can. If I had not known that _your_ mind was broken up rather broadly by truths out of Swedenborg, I should not have mooted the subject, be sure. (Have you given up Swedenborg? this by the way.) Having done so, I am anxious to set you right about Mrs. Stowe. As the author of the most successful book printed by man or woman, perhaps I a little under-rated her. The book has genius, but did not strike _me_ as it did some other readers.

Her 'Sunny Memories,' I liked very little. When she came to us in Florence some years ago, I did not think I should like her, nor did Robert, but we were both of us surprised and charmed with her simplicity and earnestness. At Rome last year she brought her inner nature more in contact with mine, and I, who had looked for what one usually finds in women, was startled into much admiration and sympathy by finding in her a largeness and fearlessness of thought which, coming out of a clerical and puritan _cul-de-sac_, and combined with the most devout and reverent emotions, really is fine. So you think that since 'Uncle Tom' she has turned infidel, because of her interest in Spiritualism. Her last words to me when we parted, were, 'Those who love the Lord Jesus Christ never see one another for the last time.' That's the att.i.tude of the mind which you stigmatise as corrupting.

With regard to 'Spiritualism,' so called, you might as well say '_books_' are dangerous, without specifying the books. Surely you _know_ that every sort of doctrine is enjoined by these means, from Church of Englandism to Free Love. A lady was with me this very morning, who was converted from infidelity to Christianity solely by these means, and I am told that thousands declare the same. As far as I am concerned, I never heard or read a single communication which impressed me in the least: what does impress me is the probability of there being communications at all. I look at the movement. What _are_ these intelligences, separated yet relating and communicating? What is their state? what their aspiration? have we had part or shall we have part with them? is this the corollary of man's life on the earth? or are they unconscious echoes of his embodied soul? That anyone should admit a fact (such as a man being lifted into the air, for instance), and not be interested in it, is so foreign to the habits of my mind (which can't insulate a fact from an inference, and rest there) that I have not a word to say. Only I _see_ that if this cla.s.s of facts, however grotesque, be recognised among thinkers, our reigning philosophy will modify itself; scientific men will conceive differently from Humboldt (for instance) of the mystery of life; the materialism which stifles the higher instincts of men will be dislodged, and the rationalism which divides Oxford with Romanism (_nothing between_, we hear!) will receive a blow.

_No truth can be dangerous._ What if Jesus Christ be taken for a medium, do you say? Well, what then? As perfect man, He possessed, I conclude, the full complement of a man's faculties. But if He walked on the sea as a medium, if the virtue went out of Him as a mesmeriser, He also spoke the words which never man spoke, was born for us, and died for us, and rose from the dead as the Lord G.o.d our Saviour. But the whole theory of spiritualism, all the phenomena, are strikingly _confirmatory_ of revelation; nothing strikes me more than that. Hume's argument against miracles (a strong argument) disappears before it, and Strauss's conclusions from _a priori_ a.s.sertion of impossibility fall in pieces at once.

Now I have done with this subject. Upon the whole, it seems to me better really that you should not mix yourself up with it any more. Also I wish you joy of the dismissal of M. Pierart. There was no harm that he took away your headache, if he did not presume on that. You tell me not to bid you to beware of counting on us in Paris. And yet, dearest f.a.n.n.y, I must. The future in this shifting world, what is it? As for me, whom you recognise as 'so much myself,' dear, I have a stout pen, and till its last blot, it will write, perhaps, with its 'usual insolence' (as a friend once said), but if you laid your hand on this heart, you would feel how it stops, and staggers, and fails. I have not been out yet, and am languid in spirits, I gather myself up by fits and starts, and then fall back. Do you know, I think with positive terror sometimes, less of the journey than of having to speak and look at people. If it were possible to persuade Robert, I should send him with Pen; but he wouldn't go alone, and he must go this year. Oh, I daresay I shall feel more up to the friction of things when once I have been out; it's stupid to give way. Also my sister Arabel talks of meeting me in France, though I might have managed that difficulty, but that Robert should see his father is absolutely necessary. Meanwhile we don't talk of it, and by May or June I shall be feeling another woman probably....

So you are going to work hard in Germany: that is well. Only beware of the English periodicals. There's a rage for new periodicals, and because the 'Cornhill' answers, other speculations crowd the market, overcrowd it: there will be failures presently.

I have written a long letter when I meant to write a short one. May G.o.d keep you, and love you, and make you happy! Your ever affectionate

BA.

I am anxious about America, fearing a compromise in the North. All other dangers are comparatively null.

_To Miss E.F. Haworth_

126 Via Felice, Rome: Sat.u.r.day, [about January 1861].

Ah, dearest f.a.n.n.y, I can't rest without telling you that I am sorry at your receiving such an impression from my letter. May G.o.d save me from such a sin as arrogance! I have not generally a temptation to it, through knowing too well what I am myself. At the same time, I do not dispute my belief in what you have so often confessed, that you don't hold your attainments and opinions sufficiently 'irrespectively of persons.' Believing which of you, I said, 'under what new influence?'

and if I said anything with too much vivacity, forgive me with that sweetness of nature which is at least as characteristic of you as the intellectual impressionability. Really I would not wound you for the world--but I myself perhaps may have been over-excitable, irritable just then, who knows? and, in fact, I _was_ considerably vexed at the moment that, from anything said by me, you would infer what was so injurious and unjust to a woman like Mrs. Stowe. I named her in this relation because she struck me as a remarkable example of the compatibility of freedom of thought with reverence of sentiment. You generally get one or the other; the one excluding the other. I never considered her a deep thinker, but singularly large and unshackled, considering the a.s.sociations of her life, she certainly is. When I hinted at her stepping beyond Swedenborg in certain of her ideas, I referred to her belief that the process called 'regeneration,' may _commence_ in certain cases beyond the grave, and in her leaning to universal salvation views, which you don't get at through Swedenborg.

For the rest, I don't think, if you will allow of my saying so, that you apprehend Swedenborg's meaning very accurately always. If Swedenborg saw sin and danger in certain communications, for instance, why did he consider it privilege on his own part to live in the world of spirits as he did. True, he spoke of 'danger,' but it was to those who, themselves weak and unclean, did not hold 'by the Lord.' He distinctly said that in the first unfallen churches there was incessant communion, and that the 'new church, as it grew, would approximate more and more to that earlier condition. There is a distinct prospect given in Swedenborg of an increasing apt.i.tude in the bodies and souls of men towards communication with the Disembodied. I consider that he foresaw not only what we are seeing (if these manifestations be veritable) but greater and more frequent phenomena of the same cla.s.s,--which does not in any way exclude considerable danger to some persons in the meanwhile. And do you think I doubt _that_? No indeed. Unsettled minds, especially when under affliction, will lose their balance at moments,--there is danger. It is not the occasion for pa.s.sion and fanaticism of sentiment, but for calm and reasonable inquiry into facts. Let us establish the facts first, and then '_try the spirits_' as the apostle directs; afterwards remains the difficulty of a.s.suring oneself of the personalities. I don't think you should complain of the subject being unsatisfactory to you, because you don't get 'a sublime communication,' or a characteristic evidence of some spirit known to you. Much less would satisfy _me_. But it seemed to me that the consideration of the subject disturbed you, made you uncomfortable, and that you didn't approach any conclusion, and with that impression and not because of 'contempt,' be sure, I advised you to let it rest. Why should we beat our heads against an obstacle which we can't walk through? Then your liability to influence is against you here as much as your attraction towards such high speculations is in your favour. You have an 'open mind,' yes, but you leave all the doors open, and you let people come in every now and then, and lock them, and keep them locked as long as said people stand by. The teachings of Spiritualism are much like the teachings in the world. There are excellent things taught, and iniquitous things taught. Only the sublime communications are, as far as I know, decidedly absent. Swedenborg directs you to give no more weight to what is said by a spirit-man than by a man in the body, and there's room for the instruction. 'Heralds of Progress' on one side, 'Heralds of Light' on the other, if a right thing is said, 'judge ye.' If infidels are here, there are devout, yes, and very orthodox Christians there.

I beg to say that when I speak of 'old cerements' being put off, I pre-suppose a living body in resurrection. Also, I don't call _marriage_, for instance, an old cerement. We must distinguish. With regard to the common notion of a 'h.e.l.l,' as you ask me, I don't believe in it. I don't believe in any such thing as arbitrary reward or punishment, but in consequences and logical results. That seems to me G.o.d's way of working. The Scriptural phrases are simply symbolical, it seems to me, and Swedenborg helps you past the symbol. Then as to the Redemption and its mode--let us receive the thing simply. Dr. Adam Clarke, whose piety was never doubted, used to say, 'Vicarious suffering is vicarious nonsense.' Which does not hinder the fact that the suffering of the Lord was necessary, in order that we should not suffer, and that through His work and incarnation His worlds recovered the possibility of good. It comes to the same thing. The manner in which preachers a.n.a.lyse the Infinite, pa.s.s the Divine through a sieve, has ceased to be endurable to thinking men. You speak of Luther. We all speak of Luther. Did you ever _read_ any of his theological treatises.

He was a schoolman of the most scholastic sect; most offensive, most absurd, presenting my idea of 'old cerements' to the uttermost. We are entering on a Reformation far more interior than Luther's; and the misfortune is, that if we don't enter we must drop under the lintel. Do you hear of the storms in England about 'Essays and Reviews'? I have seen the book simply by reviews in abstract and extract. I should agree with the writers in certain things, but certainly not in all. I have no sort of sympathy with what is called 'rationalism,' which is positivism in a form. The vulgar idea of miracles being put into solution, leaves you with the higher law and spiritual causation; which the rationalists deny, and which you and I hold faithfully. But whatever one holds, free discussion has become necessary. That it is full of danger; that, in consequence of it, many minds will fall into infidelity, doubt, and despair, is certain; but through this moral crisis men must pa.s.s, or the end will be worse still. That's my belief, I have seen it coming for years back.

'The hungry flock looks up and is not fed,' except with chopped hay of the schools. Go into any church in England, or out of England, and you hear men preaching 'in pattens,' walking gingerly, lest a speck of natural moisture touch a stocking; seeking what's 'sound,' not what's 'true.' Now if only on theology they must not think, there will be soon a close for theologians. Educated men disbelieve to a degree quite unsuspected. That, I know of knowledge.

No! Swedenborg does not hold the existence of _devils_ in the ordinary meaning. Spiritual temptation comes, he says, through disembodied corrupt spirits, out of this or _other earths_. The word Satan, remember, he conceives to represent a company of such evil spirits.

Now in what spirit have I written all this? Gently, this time, I do hope. If you knew in what an agonised state of humiliation I am sometimes, you would not suspect me of 'despising' you? Oh no, indeed.

But I am much in earnest, and can't 'prophesy smooth things,' at moments of strong conviction. Who can?

Indeed, indeed, yes. I am very anxious about what pa.s.ses in Paris. Do you know that Keller's infamous discourse was _corrected by Guizot's own hand_? Mr. Pentland (who was with the Prince of Wales) knows G. and this. He (P.) has just come from Paris. He knows the 'sommites' there, and considers that, though there is danger, yet on the whole the Emperor dominates the situation. Prince N.'s speech, in its general outline, was submitted to the E. and had his full sympathy, _Persigny said to_ P. or in his presence. Let no one ever speak ill of Prince N. before me; I read all the seventeen columns in the 'Moniteur,' and most magnificent was the discourse. Rome is greatly excited, but hopeful. There may be delay, however.

Surely you don't think the large head of Robert bad. Why, it is exquisite.... I can't read over, and send this scratch that you may pardon me before you go (not to lose the post).

Sarianna says that Squires carries about his own table. In which case, I give him up. Don't _you_ write.

_To Miss I. Blagden_

126 Via Felice, [Rome: early in 1861].

Dearest dear Isa,--We don't get the paper. Will you ask why? Here's a special address enclosed.

I have just heard from what seems excellent authority (_F.P._ Zanetti has been here) that a French company is to be withdrawn from Rome to-day, and that _all_ the troops will be immediately withdrawn from the R.S., except Rome and Civita Vecchia. The French generals, however, were not aware of this yesterday morning, though prepared for much, and thus I can't help a certain scepticism. There is an impression in French quarters, that the delay arises from a fear of a '_coup_' on the part of Austria, if she didn't see France hereabouts. But Gorgon means to try to get away before the crisis, which isn't in his tastes at all. De Noue has gone--went yesterday.

I heard yesterday of Sir John Bowring telling somebody that _the time_ had resolved itself now into an affair of _days_. Still, there are people I suppose who hold fast their opinions of the antique form, like Mr. Ma.s.sy Dawson, for instance, who called on me yesterday with moustaches and a bride, but otherwise unchanged. He still maintains that Napoleon will perish in defence of the Papacy, and that (from first to last) he has been thwarted in Italy. 'I know that Sir John Bowring, Diomed Pantaleone, Mrs. Browning' (bowing graciously to me in that complimentary frame of body which befits disputants with female creatures), 'and other persons better informed than I am, think differently. And, in fact, if I looked only _at facts_ and at the worldly circ.u.mstances of the case, I should agree with you all. But reading the "Apocalypse" as I do, I find myself before a fixed conclusion!' Imagine this, dearest Isa mine, his bride sitting in a delicate dove-coloured silk on the sofa, as tame as any dove, and not venturing to coo even. I suppose she thought it quite satisfactory. What a woman with a brain could be made to suffer under certain casualties!

He quoted simply St. John and Mr. Kinglake! Mr. Kinglake plainly running a little with St. John. 'Wasn't he (Kinglake) a member of Parliament, and a lawyer?' And if his allegation wasn't true, and if Napoleon did not propose to Francis Joseph to swap Lombardy for the Rhine provinces, why was there no contradiction on the part of the French Emperor?

Now do mark the necessity of Napoleon's saying, 'I didn't really pick Mr. Jones's pocket of his best foulard last Monday--no, though it hung out a tempting end. Pray don't let the volunteers think so ill of me.'

That would have been '_like_' our Emperor--wouldn't it?

By the way, I had yesterday a crowd of people, and all at once, so that I was in a flutter of weakness, and didn't get over it quickly. Mrs.

Bruen brought Miss Sewell (Amy Herbert) and Lady Juliana Knox, whom Annunziata takes in as a h.o.m.oeopathic dose, 'e molto curioso questo cognome, precisamente come la medicina--_nux_ (tale quale).' She (Lady Juliana) had just been presented to the Pope, just before his illness, and was much touched, when at the close of the reception of indiscriminately Catholics and Protestants, he prayed a simple prayer in French and gave them all his benediction, ending in a sad humble voice, '_Priez pour le pape._'

It _was_ touching--was it not? Poor old man! When you feel the human flesh through the ecclesiastical robe, you get into sympathy with him at once.