The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Part 49

Dearest--when, in the next dream, you meet me in the 'landing-place,'

tell me why I am to stand up to be reviewed again. What a fancy, _that_ is of yours, for 'full-lengths'--and what bad policy, if a fancy, to talk of it so! because you would have had the glory and advantage, and privilege, of seeing me on my feet twenty times before now, if you had not impressed on me, in some ineffable manner, that to stand on my head would scarcely be stranger. Nevertheless you shall have it your own way, as you have everything--which makes you so very, very, exemplarily submissive, you know!

Mr. Kenyon does not come--puts it off to _Sat.u.r.day_ perhaps.

The _Daily News_ I have had a glance at. A weak leading article, I thought ... and nothing stronger from Ireland:--but enough advertis.e.m.e.nts to promise a long future. What do you think? or have you not seen the paper? No broad principles laid down. A mere newspaper-support of the 'League.'

May G.o.d bless you. Say how you are--and _do_ walk, and 'care' for yourself,

and, so, for your own

_Ba_.

Have I expressed to you at all how 'Luria' impresses _me_ more and more? You shall see the 'remarks' with the other papers--the details of what strikes me.

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

Thursday Morning.

[Post-mark, January 22, 1846.]

But you did _not_ get the letter last evening--no, for all my good intentions--because somebody came over in the morning and forced me to go out ... and, perhaps, I _knew_ what was coming, and had all my thoughts _there_, that is, _here_ now, with my own letters from you. I think so--for this punishment, I will tell you, came for some sin or other last night. I woke--late, or early--and, in one of those lucid moments when all things are thoroughly _perceived_,--whether suggested by some forgotten pa.s.sage in the past sleep itself, I don't know--but I seem to _apprehend_, comprehend entirely, for the first time, what would happen if I lost you--the whole sense of that _closed door_ of Catarina's came on me at once, and it was _I_ who said--not as quoting or adapting another's words, but spontaneously, unavoidably, '_In that door, you will not enter, I have_'.... And, dearest, the

Unwritten it must remain.

What is on the other leaf, no ill-omen, after all,--because I strengthened myself against a merely imaginary evil--as I do always; and _thus_--I know I never can lose you,--you surely are more mine, there is less for the future to give or take away than in the ordinary cases, where so much less is known, explained, possessed, as with us. Understand for me, my dearest--

And do you think, sweet, that there _is_ any free movement of my soul which your penholder is to secure? Well, try,--it will be yours by every right of discovery--and I, for my part, will religiously report to you the first time I think of you 'which, but for your present I should not have done'--or is it not a happy, most happy way of ensuring a better fifth act to Luria than the foregoing? See the absurdity I write--when it will be more probably the ruin of the whole--for was it not observed in the case of a friend of mine once, who wrote his own part in a piece for private theatricals, and had ends of his own to serve in it,--that he set to work somewhat after this fashion: 'Scene 1st. A breakfast chamber--Lord and Lady A. at table--Lady A./ No more coffee my dear?--Lord A./ One more cup!

(_Embracing her_). Lady A./ I was thinking of trying the ponies in the Park--are you engaged? Lord A./ Why, there's that bore of a Committee at the House till 2. (_Kissing her hand_).' And so forth, to the astonishment of the auditory, who did not exactly see the 'sequitur'

in either instance. Well, dearest, whatever comes of it, the 'aside,'

the bye-play, the digression, will be the best, and only true business of the piece. And though I must smile at your notion of securing _that_ by any fresh appliance, mechanical or spiritual, yet I do thank you, dearest, thank you from my heart indeed--(and I write with Bramahs _always_--not being able to make a pen!)

If you have gone so far with 'Luria,' I fancy myself nearly or altogether safe. I must not tell you, but I wished just these feelings to be in your mind about Domizia, and the death of Luria: the last act throws light back on all, I hope. Observe only, that Luria _would_ stand, if I have plied him effectually with adverse influences, in such a position as to render any other end impossible without the hurt to Florence which his religion is, to avoid inflicting--pa.s.sively awaiting, for instance, the sentence and punishment to come at night, would as surely inflict it as taking part with her foes. His aim is to prevent the harm she will do herself by striking him, so he moves aside from the blow. But I know there is very much to improve and heighten in this fourth act, as in the others--but the right aspect of things seems obtained and the rest of the work is plain and easy.

I am obliged to leave off--the rest to-morrow--and then dear, Sat.u.r.day! I love you utterly, my own best, dearest--

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

Thursday Night.

[Post-mark, January 23, 1846.]

Yes, I understand your 'Luria'--and there is to be more light; and I open the window to the east and wait for it--a little less gladly than for _you_ on Sat.u.r.day, dearest. In the meanwhile you have 'lucid moments,' and 'strengthen' yourself into the wisdom of learning to love me--and, upon consideration, it does not seem to be so hard after all ... there is 'less for the future to take away' than you had supposed--so _that_ is the way? Ah, 'these lucid moments, in which all things are thoroughly _perceived_';--what harm they do me!--And I am to 'understand for you,' you say!--Am I?

On the other side, and to make the good omen complete, I remembered, after I had sealed my last letter, having made a confusion between the ivory and horn gates, the gates of false and true visions, as I am apt to do--and my penholder belongs to the ivory gate, ... as you will perceive in your lucid moments--poor holder! But, as you forget me on Wednesdays, the post testifying, ... the sinecure may not be quite so certain as the Thursday's letter says. And _I_ too, in the meanwhile, grow wiser, ... having learnt something which you cannot do,--you of the 'Bells and Pomegranates': _You cannot make a pen._ Yesterday I looked round the world in vain for it.

Mr. Kenyon does not come--_will_ not perhaps until Sat.u.r.day! Which reminds me--Mr. Kenyon told me about a year ago that he had been painfully employed that morning in _parting_ two--dearer than friends--and he had done it he said, by proving to either, that he or she was likely to mar the prospects of the other. 'If I had spoken to each, of himself or herself,' he said, 'I _never could have done it_.'

Was not _that_ an ingenious cruelty? The remembrance rose up in me like a ghost, and made me ask you once to promise what you promised ... (you recollect?) because I could not bear to be stabbed with my own dagger by the hand of a third person ... _so_! When people have lucid moments themselves, you know, it is different.

And _shall_ I indeed have a letter to-morrow? Or, not having the penholder yet, will you....

Goodnight. May G.o.d bless you--

Ever and wholly your

BA.

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

[Post-mark, January 23, 1846.]

Now, of all perverse interpretations that ever were and never ought to have been, commend me to this of Ba's--after I bade her generosity 'understand me,' too!--which meant, 'let her pick out of my disjointed sentences a general meaning, if she can,--which I very well know their imperfect utterance would not give to one unsupplied with the key of my whole heart's-mystery'--and Ba, with the key in her hand, to pretend and poke feathers and penholders into the key-hole, and complain that the wards are wrong! So--when the poor scholar, one has read of, uses not very dissimilar language and argument--who being threatened with the deprivation of his Virgil learnt the aeneid by heart and then said 'Take what you can now'!--_that_ Ba calls 'feeling the loss would not be so hard after all'!--_I_ do not, at least. And if at any future moment I should again be visited--as I earnestly desire may never be the case--with a sudden consciousness of the entire inutility of all earthly love (since of _my_ love) to hold its object back from the decree of G.o.d, if such should call it away; one of those known facts which, for practical good, we treat as supremely common-place, but which, like those of the uncertainty of life--the very existence of G.o.d, I may say--if they were _not_ common-place, and could they be thoroughly apprehended (except in the chance minutes which make one grow old, not the mere years)--the business of the world would cease; but when you find Chaucer's graver at his work of 'graving smale seles' by the sun's light, you know that the sun's self could not have been _created_ on that day--do you 'understand' that, Ba? And when I am with you, or here or writing or walking--and perfectly happy in the sunshine of you, I very well know I am no wiser than is good for me and that there seems no harm in feeling it impossible this should change, or fail to go on increasing till this world ends and we are safe, I with you, for ever. But when--if only _once_, as I told you, recording it for its very strangeness, I _do_ feel--in a flash--that words are words, and could not alter _that_ decree ... will you tell me how, after all, that conviction and the true woe of it are better met than by the as thorough conviction that, for one blessing, the extreme woe is _impossible_ now--that you _are_, and have been, _mine_, and _me_--one with me, never to be parted--so that the complete separation not being to be thought of, such an incomplete one as is yet in Fate's power may be the less likely to attract her notice? And, dearest, in all emergencies, see, I go to you for help; for your gift of better comfort than is found in myself. Or ought I, if I could, to add one more proof to the Greek proverb 'that the half is greater than the whole'--and only love you for myself (it is absurd; but if I _could_ disentwine you from my soul in that sense), only see my own will, and good (not in _your_ will and good, as I now see them and shall ever see) ... should you say I _did_ love you then? Perhaps. And it would have been better for me, I know--I should not have _written_ this or the like--there being no post in the Siren's isle, as you will see.

And the end of the whole matter is--what? Not by any means what my Ba expects or ought to expect; that I say with a flounce 'Catch me blotting down on paper, again, the first vague impressions in the weakest words and being sure I have only to bid her "understand"!--when I can get "Blair on Rhetoric," and the additional chapter on the proper conduct of a letter'! On the contrary I tell you, Ba, my own heart's dearest, I will provoke you tenfold worse; will tell you all that comes uppermost, and what frightens me or rea.s.sures me, in moments lucid or opaque--and when all the pen-stumps and holders refuse to open the lock, out will come the key perforce; and once put that knowledge--of the entire love and worship of my heart and soul--to its proper use, and all will be clear--tell me to-morrow that it will be clear when I call you to account and exact strict payment for every word and phrase and full-stop and partial stop, and no stop at all, in this wicked little note which got so treacherously the kisses and the thankfulness--written with no penholder that is to belong to me, I hope--but with the feather, possibly, which Sycorax wiped the dew from, as Caliban remembered when he was angry! All but--(that is, all was wrong but)--to be just ...

the old, dear, so dear ending which makes my heart beat now as at first ... and so, pays for all! Wherefore, all is right again, is it not? and you are my own priceless Ba, my very own--and I will have you, if you like that style, and want you, and must have you every day and all day long--much less see you to-morrow _stand_--

... Now, there breaks down my new spirit--and, shame or no, I must pray you, in the old way, _not_ to _receive me standing_--I should not remain master of myself I do believe!

You have put out of my head all I intended to write--and now I slowly begin to remember the matters they seem strangely unimportant--that poor impotency of a Newspaper! No--nothing of that for the present.

To-morrow my dearest! Ba's first comment--'_To-morrow?_ _To-day_ is too soon, it seems--yet it is wise, perhaps, to avoid the satiety &c.

&c. &c. &c. &c.'

Does she feel how I kissed that comment back on her dear self as fit punishment?

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

[Post-mark, January 26, 1846.]

I must begin by invoking my own stupidity! To forget after all the penholder! I had put it close beside me too on the table, and never once thought of it afterwards from first to last--just as I should do if I had a common-place book, the memoranda all turning to obliviscenda as by particular contact. So I shall send the holder with Miss Martineau's books which you can read or not as you like ... they have beauty in pa.s.sages ... but, trained up against the wall of a set design, want room for branching and blossoming, great as her skill is.

I like her 'Playfellow' stories twice as well. Do you know _them_?

Written for children, and in such a fine heroic child-spirit as to be too young and too old for n.o.body. Oh, and I send you besides a most frightful extract from an American magazine sent to me yesterday ...

no, the day before ... on the subject of mesmerism--and you are to understand, if you please, that the Mr. Edgar Poe who stands committed in it, is my dedicator ... whose dedication I forgot, by the way, with the rest--so, while I am sending, you shall have his poems with his mesmeric experience and decide whether the outrageous compliment to E.B.B. or the experiment on M. Vandeleur [Valdemar] goes furthest to prove him mad. There is poetry in the man, though, now and then, seen between the great gaps of bathos.... 'Politian' will make you laugh--as the 'Raven' made _me_ laugh, though with something in it which accounts for the hold it took upon people such as Mr. N.P.

Willis and his peers--it was sent to me from _four_ different quarters besides the author himself, before its publication in this form, and when it had only a newspaper life. Some of the other lyrics have power of a less questionable sort. For the author, I do not know him at all--never heard from him nor wrote to him--and in my opinion, there is more faculty shown in the account of that horrible mesmeric experience (mad or not mad) than in his poems. Now do read it from the beginning to the end. That '_going out_' of the hectic, struck me very much ... and the writhing _away_ of the upper lip. Most horrible!--Then I believe so much of mesmerism, as to give room for the full acting of the story on me ... without absolutely giving full credence to it, understand.

Ever dearest, you could not think me in earnest in that letter? It was because I understood you so perfectly that I felt at liberty for the jesting a little--for had I not thought of _that_ before, myself, and was I not reproved for speaking of it, when I said that I was content, for my part, even _so_? Surely you remember--and I should not have said it if I had not felt with you, felt and known, that 'there is, with us, less for the future to give or take away than in the ordinary cases.' So much less! All the happiness I have known has come to me through you, and it is enough to live for or die in--therefore living or dying I would thank G.o.d, and use that word '_enough_' ... being yours in life and death. And always understanding that if either of us should go, you must let it be this one here who was nearly gone when she knew you, since I could not bear--

Now see if it is possible to write on this subject, unless one laughs to stop the tears. I was more wise on Friday.

Let me tell you instead of my sister's affairs, which are so publicly talked of in this house that there is no confidence to be broken in respect to them--yet my brothers only see and hear, and are told nothing, to keep them as clear as possible from responsibility. I may say of Henrietta that her only fault is, her virtues being written in water--I know not of one other fault. She has too much softness to be able to say 'no' in the right place--and thus, without the slightest levity ... perfectly blameless in that respect, ... she says half a yes or a quarter of a yes, or a yes in some sort of form, too often--but I will tell you. Two years ago, three men were loving her, as they called it. After a few months, and the proper quant.i.ty of interpretations, one of them consoled himself by giving nick-names to his rivals. Perseverance and Despair he called them, and so, went up to the boxes to see out the rest of the play. Despair ran to a crisis, was rejected in so many words, but appealed against the judgment and had his claim admitted--it was all silence and mildness on each side ... a tacit gaining of ground,--Despair 'was at least a gentleman,'

said my brothers. On which Perseverance came on with violent re-iterations,--insisted that she loved him without knowing it, or _should_--elbowed poor Despair into the open streets, who being a gentleman wouldn't elbow again--swore that 'if she married another he would wait till she became a widow, trusting to Providence' ... _did_ wait every morning till the head of the house was out, and sate day by day, in spite of the disinclination of my sisters and the rudeness of all my brothers, four hours in the drawing-room ... let himself be refused once a week and sate all the longer ... allowed everybody in the house (and a few visitors) to see and hear him in fits of hysterical sobbing, and sate on unabashed, the end being that he sits now sole regnant, my poor sister saying softly, with a few tears of remorse for her own instability, that she is 'taken by storm and cannot help it.' I give you only the _resume_ of this military movement--and though I seem to smile, which it was impossible to avoid at some points of the evidence as I heard it from first one person and then another, yet I am woman enough rather to be glad that the decision is made _so_. He is sincerely attached to her, I believe; and the want of refinement and sensibility (for he understood her affections to be engaged to another at one time) is covered in a measure by the earnestness,--and justified too by the event--everybody being quite happy and contented, even to Despair, who has a new horse and takes lessons in music.

That's love--is it not? And that's my answer (if you look for it) to the question you asked me yesterday.