Thursday.
May 16, 1845.
But how ‘mistrustfulness’? And how ‘that way?’ What have I said or done, I, who am not apt to be mistrustful of anybody and should be a miraculous monster if I began with you! What can I have said, I say to myself again and again.
One thing, at any rate, I have done, ‘that way’ or this way! I have made what is vulgarly called a ‘piece of work’ about little; or seemed to make it. Forgive me. I am shy by nature: — and by position and experience, . . . by having had my nerves shaken to excess, and by leading a life of such seclusion, . . . by these things together and by others besides, I have appeared shy and ungrateful to you. Only not mistrustful. You could not mean to judge me so. Mistrustful people do not write as I write, surely! for wasn’t it a Richelieu or Mazarin (or who?) who said that with five lines from anyone’s hand, he could take off his head for a corollary? I think so.
Well! — but this is to prove that I am not mistrustful, and to say, that if you care to come to see me you can come; and that it is my gain (as I feel it to be) and not yours, whenever you do come. You will not talk of having come afterwards I know, because although I am ‘fast bound’ to see one or two persons this summer (besides yourself, whom I receive of choice and willingly) I cannot admit visitors in a general way — and putting the question of health quite aside, it would be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company-show of an infirmity, and hold a beggar’s hat for sympathy. I should blame it in another woman — and the sense of it has had its weight with me sometimes.
For the rest, . . . when you write, that I do not know how you would value, &c. nor yourself quite, you touch very accurately on the truth . . . and so accurately in the last clause, that to read it, made me smile ‘tant bien que mal.’ Certainly you cannot ‘quite know,’ or know at all, whether the least straw of pleasure can go to you from knowing me otherwise than on this paper — and I, for my part, ‘quite know’ my own honest impression, dear Mr. Browning, that none is likely to go to you. There is nothing to see in me; nor to hear in me — I never learnt to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark. And if I write all this egotism, . . . it is for shame; and because I feel ashamed of having made a fuss about what is not worth it; and because you are extravagant in caring so for a permission, which will be nothing to you afterwards. Not that I am not touched by your caring so at all! I am deeply touched now; and presently, . . . I shall understand. Come then. There will be truth and simplicity for you in any case; and a friend. And do not answer this — I do not write it as a fly trap for compliments. Your spider would scorn me for it too much. Also, . . . as to the how and when. You are not well now, and it cannot be good for you to do anything but be quiet and keep away that dreadful musical note in the head. I entreat you not to think of coming until that is all put to silence satisfactorily. When it is done, . . . you must choose whether you would like best to come with Mr. Kenyon or to come alone — and if you would come alone, you must just tell me on what day, and I will see you on any day unless there should be an unforeseen obstacle, . . . any day after two, or before six. And my sister will bring you up-stairs to me; and we will talk; or you will talk; and you will try to be indulgent, and like me as well as you can. If, on the other hand, you would rather come with Mr. Kenyon, you must wait, I imagine, till June, — because he goes away on Monday and is not likely immediately to return — no, on Saturday, to-morrow.
In the meantime, why I should be ‘thanked,’ is an absolute mystery to me — but I leave it!
You are generous and impetuous; that, I can see and feel; and so far from being of an inclination to mistrust you or distrust you, I do profess to have as much faith in your full, pure loyalty, as if I had known you personally as many years as I have appreciated your genius. Believe this of me — for it is spoken truly.
In the matter of Shakespeare’s ‘poor players’ you are severe — and yet I was glad to hear you severe — it is a happy excess, I think. When men of intense reality, as all great poets must be, give their hearts to be trodden on and tied up with ribbons in turn, by men of masks, there will be torture if there is not desecration. Not that I know much of such things — but I have heard. Heard from Mr. Kenyon; heard from Miss Mitford; who however is passionately fond of the theatre as a writer’s medium — not at all, from Mr. Horne himself, . . . except what he has printed on the subject.
Yes — he has been infamously used on the point of the ‘New Spirit’ — only he should have been prepared for the infamy — it was leaping into a gulph, . . . not to ‘save the republic,’ but ‘pour rire‘: it was not merely putting one’s foot into a hornet’s nest, but taking off a shoe and stocking to do it. And to think of Dickens being dissatisfied! To think of Tennyson’s friends grumbling! — he himself did not, I hope and trust. For you, you certainly were not adequately treated — and above all, you were not placed with your peers in that chapter — but that there was an intention to do you justice, and that there is a righteous appreciation of you in the writer, I know and am sure, — and that you should be sensible to this, is only what I should know and be sure of you. Mr. Horne is quite above the narrow, vicious, hateful jealousy of contemporaries, which we hear reproached, too justly sometimes, on men of letters.
I go on writing as if I were not going to see you — soon perhaps. Remember that the how and the when rest with you — except that it cannot be before next week at the soonest. You are to decide.
Always your friend,
E.B.B.