The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Part 16

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Friday Afternoon.

[Post-mark, August 8, 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 a.s.suring all eventually ... and on the other accounts you must know! Never, pray, _pray_, 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 [words effaced].

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 Carlyle 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.

G.o.d bless you, dearest friend--shall I hear from you before Tuesday?

Ever your own

R.B.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Friday.

[Post-mark, 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, let _your Jew_[1] 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.

[Footnote 1: 'R. Benjamin of Tudela' added in Robert Browning's handwriting.]

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Sunday Afternoon.

[Post-mark, August 11, 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 our mid-day post--which happened--and the 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 on 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, dear my 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 on 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 circ.u.mstances).

Well, Miss Cushman, the new American actress (clever and truthful-looking) was talking of a new novel by the Dane Andersen, 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 t.i.tle, 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 t.i.tle--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 t.i.tle) and the sayings and doings of her, and the others--such others! So I made haste and just tore out one sample-page, being Scene 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 droshkies and fish-pies and so forth, with the Palaces in the back ground. 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 Wylie I have seen at St. Petersburg (where he chose to mistake me for an Italian--'M. 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--hear 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 wholly for _you_, in _your_ power, to _name_, characterize 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 George Sand, pray think of Bulwer's beginning a 'character' by informing you that lone, or somebody in 'Pompeii,' 'was endowed with _perfect_ genius'--'genius'! What though the obliging informer might write his fingers off before he gave the pitifullest 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 G.o.d bless you, ever dear friend.

R.B.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

[Post-mark, August 11, 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 never would 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 (_lucus a non 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 to-morrow.' He gravely thought poetry a sort of disease--a sort of fungus of the brain--and held as a serious opinion, that n.o.body 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, 'quotha'--but that for women, it was a mortal malady and incompatible with any common show of health under any circ.u.mstances.

And then came the d.a.m.natory clause in his experience ... that he had never known 'a system' approaching mine in 'excitability' ... except Miss Garrow's ... 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 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 _niaiserie_ 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 metaphysicians! 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 do 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 Mariana 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 when 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 G.o.d bless you my dearest friend.

E.B.B.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday Evening.

[Post-mark, 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.