Thursday.
May 2, 1845.
People say of you and of me, dear Mr. Browning, that we love the darkness and use a sphinxine idiom in our talk; and really you do talk a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from ‘Vivian Grey.’ Once I sate up all night to read ‘Vivian Grey’; but I never drew such an argument from him. Not that I give it up (nor you up) for a mere mystery. Nor that I can ‘see what you have got in you,’ from a mere guess. But just observe! If I ask questions about novels, is it not because I want to know how much elbow-room there may be for our sympathies . . . and whether there is room for my loose sleeves, and the lace lappets, as well as for my elbows; and because I want to see you by the refracted lights as well as by the direct ones; and because I am willing for you to know me from the beginning, with all my weaknesses and foolishnesses, . . . as they are accounted by people who say to me ‘no one would ever think, without knowing you, that you were so and so.’ Now if I send all my idle questions to Colburn’s Magazine, with other Gothic literature, and take to standing up in a perpendicular personality like the angel on the schoolman’s needle, in my letters to come, without further leaning to the left or the right — why the end would be that you would take to ‘running after the butterflies,’ for change of air and exercise. And then . . . oh . . . then, my ‘small neatly written manuscripts’ might fall back into my desk . . .! (Not a ‘full stop’!.)
Indeed . . . I do assure you . . . I never for a moment thought of ‘making conversation’ about the ‘Improvisatore’ or novels in general, when I wrote what I did to you. I might, to other persons . . . perhaps. Certainly not to you. I was not dealing round from one pack of cards to you and to others. That’s what you meant to reproach me for you know, — and of that, I am not guilty at all. I never could think of ‘making conversation’ in a letter to you — never. Women are said to partake of the nature of children — and my brothers call me ‘absurdly childish’ sometimes: and I am capable of being childishly ‘in earnest’ about novels, and straws, and such ‘puppydogs’ tails’ as my Flush’s! Also I write more letters than you do, . . . I write in fact almost as you pay visits, . . . and one has to ‘make conversation’ in turn, of course. But — give me something to vow by — whatever you meant in the ‘Vivian Grey’ argument, you were wrong in it! and you never can be much more wrong — which is a comfortable reflection.
Yet you leap very high at Dante’s crown — or you do not leap, . . . you simply extend your hand to it, and make a rustling among the laurel leaves, which is somewhat prophane. Dante’s poetry only materials for the northern rhymers! I must think of that . . . if you please . . . before I agree with you. Dante’s poetry seems to come down in hail, rather than in rain — but count me the drops congealed in one hailstone! Oh! the ‘Flight of the Duchess’ — do let us hear more of her! Are you (I wonder) . . . not a ‘self-flatterer,’ . . . but . . . a flatterer.
Ever yours,
E.B.B.