The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Part 21

One reason against printing the tragedies now, is your not being well enough for the necessary work connected with them, ... a sure reason and strong ... nay, chiefest of all. Plainly you are unfit for work now--and even to complete the preparation of the lyrics, and take them through the press, may be too much for you, I am afraid; and if so, why you will not do it--will you?--you will wait for another year,--or at least be satisfied for this, with bringing out a number of the old size, consisting of such poems as are fairly finished and require no retouching. 'Saul' for instance, you might leave--! You will not let me hear when I am gone, of your being ill--you will take care ... will you not? Because you see ... or rather _I_ see ... you are _not_ looking well at all--no, you are not! and even if you do not care for that, you should and must care to consider how unavailing it will be for you to hold those golden keys of the future with a more resolute hand than your contemporaries, should you suffer yourself to be struck down before the gate ... should you lose the physical power while keeping the heart and will. Heart and will are great things, and sufficient things in your case--but after all we carry a barrow-full of clay about with us, and we must carry it a little carefully if we mean to keep to the path and not run zigzag into the border of the garden. A figure which reminds me ... and I wanted no figure to remind me ... to ask you to thank your sister for me and from me for all her kindness about the flowers. Now you will not forget? you must not.

When I think of the repeated trouble she has taken week after week, and all for a stranger, I must think again that it has been very kind--and I take the liberty of saying so moreover ... _as I am not thanking you_. Also these flowers of yesterday, which yesterday you disdained so, look full of summer and are full of fragrance, and when they seem to say that it is not September, I am willing to be lied to just _so_. For I wish it were not September. I wish it were July ...

or November ... two months before or after: and that this journey were thrown behind or in front ... anywhere to be out of sight. You do not know the courage it requires to hold the intention of it fast through what I feel sometimes. If it (the courage) had been prophesied to me only a year ago, the prophet would have been laughed to scorn.

Well!--but I want you to see. George's letter, and how he and Mrs.

Hedley, when she saw Papa's note of consent to me, give unhesitating counsel. Burn it when you have read it. It is addressed to me ...

which you will doubt from the address of it perhaps ... seeing that it goes [Greek: ba ... rbarizon]. We are famous in this house for what are called nick-names ... though a few of us have escaped rather by a caprice than a reason: and I am never called anything else (never at all) except by the nom de _paix_ which you find written in the letter:--proving as Mr. Kenyon says, that I am just 'half a Ba-by' ...

no more nor less;--and in fact the name has that precise definition.

Burn the note when you have read it.

And then I take it into my head, as you do not distinguish my sisters, you say, one from the other, to send you my own account of them in these enclosed 'sonnets' which were written a few weeks ago, and though only pretending to be 'sketches,' pretend to be like, as far as they go, and _are_ like--my brothers thought--when I 'showed them against' a profile drawn in pencil by Alfred, on the same subjects. I was laughing and maintaining that mine should be as like as his--and he yielded the point to me. So it is mere portrait-painting--and you who are in 'high art,' must not be too scornful. Henrietta is the elder, and the one who brought you into this room first--and Arabel, who means to go with me to Pisa, has been the most with me through my illness and is the least wanted in the house here, ... and perhaps ...

perhaps--is my favourite--though my heart smites me while I write that unlawful word. They are both affectionate and kind to me in all things, and good and lovable in their own beings--very unlike, for the rest; one, most caring for the Polka, ... and the other for the sermon preached at Paddington Chapel, ... _that_ is Arabel ... so if ever you happen to know her you must try not to say before her how 'much you hate &c.' Henrietta always 'managed' everything in the house even before I was ill, ... because she liked it and I didn't, and I waived my right to the sceptre of dinner-ordering.

I have been thinking much of your 'Sordello' since you spoke of it--and even, I _had_ thought much of it before you spoke of it yesterday; feeling that it might be thrown out into the light by your hand, and greatly justify the additional effort. It is like a n.o.ble picture with its face to the wall just now--or at least, in the shadow. And so worthy as it is of you in all ways! individual all through: you have _made_ even the darkness of it! And such a work as it might become if you chose ... if you put your will to it! What I meant to say yesterday was not that it wanted more additional verses than the 'ten per cent' you spoke of ... though it does perhaps ... so much as that (to my mind) it wants drawing together and fortifying in the connections and a.s.sociations ... which hang as loosely every here and there, as those in a dream, and confound the reader who persists in thinking himself awake.

How do you mean that I am 'lenient'? Do you not believe that I tell you what I think, and as I think it? I may _think wrong_, to be sure--but _that_ is not my fault:--and so there is no use reproaching me generally, unless you can convict me definitely at the same time:--is there, now?

And I have been reading and admiring these letters of Mr. Carlyle, and receiving the greatest pleasure from them in every way. He is greatly _himself always_--which is the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps.

And what his appreciation of you is, it is easy to see--and what he expects from you--notwithstanding that prodigious advice of his, to write your next work in prose! Also Mrs. Carlyle's letter--thank you for letting me see it. I admire _that_ too! It is as ingenious 'a case' against poor Keats, as could well be drawn--but n.o.body who knew very deeply what poetry _is_, _could_, you know, draw any case against him. A poet of the senses, he may be and is, just as she says--but then it is of the senses idealized; and no dream in a 'store-room'

would ever be like the 'Eve of St. Agnes,' unless dreamed by some 'animosus infans,' like Keats himself. Still it is all true ... isn't it?... what she observes of the want of thought as thought. He was a _seer_ strictly speaking. And what n.o.ble oppositions--(to go back to Carlyle's letters) ... he writes to the things you were speaking of yesterday! These letters are as good as Milton's picture for convicting and putting to shame. Is not the difference between the men of our day and 'the giants which were on the earth,' less ... far less ... in the faculty ... in the gift, ... or in the general intellect, ... than in the stature of the soul itself? Our inferiority is not in what we can do, but in what we are. We should write poems like Milton if [we] lived them like Milton.

I write all this just to show, I suppose, that I am not industrious as you did me the honour of apprehending that I was going to be ...

packing trunks perhaps ... or what else in the way of 'active usefulness.'

Say how you are--will you? And do take care, and walk and do what is good for you. I shall be able to see you twice before I go. And oh, this going! Pray for me, dearest friend. May G.o.d bless you.

E.B.B.

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

Thursday Morning.

[Post-mark, September 11, 1845.]

Here are your beautiful, and I am sure _true_ sonnets; they look true--I remember the light hair, I find. And who paints, and dares exhibit, E.B.B.'s self? And surely 'Alfred's' pencil has not foregone its best privilege, not left _the_ face unsketched? Italians call such an 'effect defective'--'l'andar a Roma senza vedere il Papa.' He must have begun by seeing his Holiness, I know, and ... _he_ will not trust me with the result, that my sister may copy it for me, because we are strangers, he and I, and I could give him nothing, nothing like the proper price for it--but _you_ would lend it to me, I think, nor need I do more than thank you in my usual effective and very eloquent way--for I have already been allowed to visit you seventeen times, do you know; and this last letter of yours, fiftieth is the same! So all my pride is gone, pride in that sense--and I mean to take of you for ever, and reconcile myself with my lot in this life. Could, and would, you give me such a sketch? It has been on my mind to ask you ever since I knew you if nothing in the way of _good_ portrait existed--and this occasion bids me speak out, I dare believe: the more, that you have also quieted--have you not?--another old obstinate and very likely impertinent questioning of mine--as to the little name which was neither Orinda, nor Sacharissa (for which thank providence) and is never to appear in books, though you write them. Now I know it and write it--'Ba'--and thank you, and your brother George, and only burned his kind letter because you bade me who know best. So, wish by wish, one gets one's wishes--at least I do--for one instance, you will go to Italy

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music followed by ?]

Why, 'lean and harken after it' as Donne says--

Don't expect Neapolitan Scenery at Pisa, quite in the North, remember.

Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley found Italy for the first time, real Italy, at Sorrento, she says. Oh that book--does one wake or sleep? The 'Mary dear' with the brown eyes, and G.o.dwin's daughter and Sh.e.l.ley's wife, and who surely was something better once upon a time--and to go through Rome and Florence and the rest, after what I suppose to be Lady Londonderry's fashion: the intrepidity of the commonplace quite astounds me. And then that way, when she and the like of her are put in a new place, with new flowers, new stones, faces, walls, all new--of looking wisely up at the sun, clouds, evening star, or mountain top and wisely saying 'who shall describe _that_ sight!'--Not _you_, we very well see--but why don't you tell us that at Rome they eat roasted chestnuts, and put the sh.e.l.ls into their ap.r.o.ns, the women do, and calmly empty the whole on the heads of the pa.s.sengers in the street below; and that at Padua when a man drives his waggon up to a house and stops, all the mouse-coloured oxen that pull it from a beam against their foreheads sit down in a heap and rest. But once she travelled the country with Sh.e.l.ley on arm; now she plods it, Rogers in hand--to such things and uses may we come at last! Her remarks on art, once she lets go of Rio's skirts, are amazing--Fra Angelico, for instance, only painted Martyrs, Virgins &c., she had no eyes for the divine _bon-bourgeoisie_ of his pictures; the dear common folk of his crowds, those who sit and listen (spectacle at nose and bent into a comfortable heap to hear better) at the sermon of the Saint--and the children, and women,--divinely pure they all are, but fresh from the streets and market place--but she is wrong every where, that is, not right, not seeing what is to see, speaking what one expects to hear--I quarrel with her, for ever, I think.

I am much better, and mean to be well as you desire--shall correct the verses you have seen, and make them do for the present.

Sat.u.r.day, then! And one other time only, do you say?

G.o.d bless you, my own, best friend.

Yours ever

R.B.

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

Thursday.

[Post-mark, September 11, 1845.]

Will you come on Friday ... to-morrow ... instead of Sat.u.r.day--will it be the same thing? Because I have heard from Mr. Kenyon, who is to be in London on Friday evening he says, and therefore may mean to visit me on Sat.u.r.day I imagine. So let it be Friday--if you should not, for any reason, prove Monday to be better still.

May G.o.d bless you--

Ever yours,

E.B.B.

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

Sat.u.r.day Morning.

[Post-mark, September 13, 1845.]

Now, dearest, I will try and write the little I shall be able, in reply to your letter of last week--and first of all I have to entreat you, now more than ever, to help me and understand from the few words the feelings behind them--(should _speak_ rather more easily, I think--but I dare not run the risk: and I know, after all, you will be just and kind where you can.) I have read your letter again and again. I will tell you--no, not _you_, but any imaginary other person, who should hear what I am going to avow; I would tell that person most sincerely there is not a particle of fatuity, shall I call it, in that avowal; cannot be, seeing that from the beginning and at this moment I never dreamed of winning your _love_. I can hardly write this word, so incongruous and impossible does it seem; such a change of our places does it imply--nor, next to that, though long after, _would_ I, if I _could_, supplant one of any of the affections that I know to have taken root in you--_that_ great and solemn one, for instance. I feel that if I could get myself _remade_, as if turned to gold, I WOULD not even then desire to become more than the mere setting to _that_ diamond you must always wear. The regard and esteem you now give me, in this letter, and which I press to my heart and bow my head upon, is all I can take and all too embarra.s.sing, using _all_ my grat.i.tude. And yet, with that contented pride in being infinitely your debtor as it is, bound to you for ever as it is; when I read your letter with all the determination to be just to us both; I dare not so far withstand the light I am master of, as to refuse seeing that whatever is recorded as an objection to your disposing of that life of mine I would give you, has reference to some supposed good in that life which your accepting it would destroy (of which fancy I shall speak presently)--I say, wonder as I may at this, I cannot but find it there, surely there. I could no more 'bind _you_ by words,' than you have bound me, as you say--but if I misunderstand you, one a.s.surance to that effect will be but too intelligible to me--but, as it _is_, I have difficulty in imagining that while one of so many reasons, which I am not obliged to repeat to myself, but which any one easily conceives; while _any one_ of those reasons would impose silence on me _for ever_ (for, as I observed, I love you as you now are, and _would_ not remove one affection that is already part of you,)--_would_ you, being able to speak _so_, only say _that you_ desire not to put 'more sadness than I was born to,' into my life?--that you 'could give me only what it were ungenerous to give'?

Have I your meaning here? In so many words, is it on my account that you bid me 'leave this subject'? I think if it were so, I would for once call my advantages round me. I am not what your generous self-forgetting appreciation would sometimes make me out--but it is not since yesterday, nor ten nor twenty years before, that I began to look into my own life, and study its end, and requirements, what would turn to its good or its loss--and I _know_, if one may know anything, that to make that life yours and increase it by union with yours, would render me _supremely happy_, as I said, and say, and feel. My whole suit to you is, in that sense, _selfish_--not that I am ignorant that _your_ nature would most surely attain happiness in being conscious that it made another happy--but _that best, best end of all_, would, like the rest, come from yourself, be a reflection of your own gift.

Dearest, I will end here--words, persuasion, arguments, if they were at my service I would not use them--I believe in you, altogether have faith in you--in you. I will not think of insulting by trying to rea.s.sure you on one point which certain phrases in your letter might at first glance seem to imply--you do not understand me to be living and labouring and writing (and _not_ writing) in order to be successful in the world's sense? I even convinced the people _here_ what was my true 'honourable position in society,' &c. &c. therefore I shall not have to inform _you_ that I desire to be very rich, very great; but not in reading Law gratis with dear foolish old Basil Montagu, as he ever and anon bothers me to do;--much less--enough of this nonsense.

'Tell me what I have a claim to hear': I can hear it, and be as grateful as I was before and am now--your friendship is my pride and happiness. If you told me your love was bestowed elsewhere, and that it was in my power to serve you _there_, to serve you there would still be my pride and happiness. I look on and on over the prospect of my love, it is all _on_wards--and all possible forms of unkindness ...

I quite laugh to think how they are _behind_ ... cannot be encountered in the route we are travelling! I submit to you and will obey you implicitly--obey what I am able to conceive of your least desire, much more of your expressed wish. But it was necessary to make this avowal, among other reasons, for one which the world would recognize too. My whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated--and it supposed _you_, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible--because in calculating one goes upon _chances_, not on providence--how could I expect you? So for my own future way in the world I have always refused to care--any one who can live a couple of years and more on bread and potatoes as I did once on a time, and who prefers a blouse and a blue shirt (such as I now write in) to all manner of dress and gentlemanly appointment, and who can, if necessary, groom a horse not so badly, or at all events would rather do it all day long than succeed Mr. Fitzroy Kelly in the Solicitor-Generalship,--such an one need not very much concern himself beyond considering the lilies how they grow. But now I see you near this life, all changes--and at a word, I will do all that ought to be done, that every one used to say could be done, and let 'all my powers find sweet employ' as Dr. Watts sings, in getting whatever is to be got--not very much, surely. I would print these things, get them away, and do this now, and go to you at Pisa with the news--at Pisa where one may live for some 100 a year--while, lo, I seem to remember, I _do_ remember, that Charles Kean offered to give me 500 of those pounds for any play that might suit him--to say nothing of Mr. Colburn saying confidentially that he wanted more than his dinner 'a novel on the subject of _Napoleon_'! So may one make money, if one does not live in a house in a row, and feel impelled to take the Princess's Theatre for a laudable development and exhibition of one's faculty.

Take the sense of all this, I beseech you, dearest--all you shall say will be best--I am yours--

Yes, Yours ever. G.o.d bless you for all you have been, and are, and will certainly be to me, come what He shall please!

R.B.

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

[Post-mark, September 16, 1845.]

I scarcely know how to write what is to be written nor indeed why it is to be written and to what end. I have tried in vain--and you are waiting to hear from me. I am unhappy enough even where I am happy--but ungrateful nowhere--and I thank you from my heart--profoundly from the depths of my heart ... which is nearly all I can do.

One letter I began to write and asked in it how it could become me to speak at all if '_from the beginning and at this moment you never dreamed of_' ... and there, I stopped and tore the paper; because I felt that you were too loyal and generous, for me to bear to take a moment's advantage of the same, and bend down the very flowering branch of your generosity (as it might be) to thicken a little the fence of a woman's caution and reserve. You will not say that you have not acted as if you 'dreamed'--and I will answer therefore to the general sense of your letter and former letters, and admit at once that I _did_ state to you the difficulties most difficult to myself ... though not all ... and that if I had been worthier of you I should have been proportionably less in haste to 'bid you leave that subject.' I do not understand how you can seem at the same moment to have faith in my integrity and to have doubt whether all this time I may not have felt a preference for another ... which you are ready 'to serve,' you say. Which is generous in you--but in _me_, where were the integrity? Could you really hold me to be blameless, and do you think that truehearted women act usually so? Can it be necessary for me to tell you that I could not have acted so, and did not? And shall I shrink from telling you besides ... you, who have been generous to me and have a right to hear it ... and have spoken to me in the name of an affection and memory most precious and holy to me, in this same letter ... that neither now nor formerly has any man been to my feelings what you are ... and that if I were different in some respects and free in others by the providence of G.o.d, I would accept the great trust of your happiness, gladly, proudly, and gratefully; and give away my own life and soul to that end. I _would_ do it ...

_not, I do_ ... observe! it is a truth without a consequence; only meaning that I am not all stone--only proving that I am not likely to consent to help you in wrong against yourself. You see in me what is not:--_that_, I know: and you overlook in me what is unsuitable to you ... _that_ I know, and have sometimes told you. Still, because a strong feeling from some sources is self-vindicating and enn.o.bling to the object of it, I will not say that, if it were proved to me that you felt this for me, I would persist in putting the sense of my own unworthiness between you and me--not being heroic, you know, nor pretending to be so. But something worse than even a sense of unworthiness, _G.o.d_ has put between us! and judge yourself if to beat your thoughts against the immovable marble of it, can be anything but pain and vexation of spirit, waste and wear of spirit to you ...