#190

Sunday.

January 6, 1846.

When you get Mr. Horne’s book you will understand how, after reading just the first and the last poems, I could not help speaking coldly a little of it — and in fact, estimating his power as much as you can do, I did think and do, that the last was unworthy of him, and that the first might have been written by a writer of one tenth of his faculty. But last night I read the ‘Monk of Swineshead Abbey’ and the ‘Three Knights of Camelott’ and ‘Bedd Gelert’ and found them all of different stuff, better, stronger, more consistent, and read them with pleasure and admiration. Do you remember this application, among the countless ones of shadow to the transiency of life? I give the first two lines for clearness —

New or not, and I don’t remember it elsewhere, it is just and beautiful I think. Think how the shadow of the windmill-sail just touches the ground on a bright windy day! the shadow of a bird flying is not faster! Then the ‘Three Knights’ has beautiful things, with more definite and distinct images than he is apt to show — for his character is a vague grand massiveness, — like Stonehenge — or at least, if ‘towers and battlements he sees’ they are ‘bosomed high’ in dusky clouds  . . . it is a ‘passion-created imagery’ which has no clear outline. In this ballad of the ‘Knights,’ and in the Monk’s too, we may look at things, as on the satyr who swears by his horns and mates not with his kind afterwards, ‘While, holding beards, they dance in pairs — and that is all excellent and reminds one of those fine sylvan festivals, ‘in Orion.’ But now tell me if you like altogether ‘Ben Capstan’ and if you consider the sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry, because I do not indeed. On the same principle we may have Yorkshire and Somersetshire ‘sweet Doric’; and do recollect what it ended in of old, in the Blowsibella heroines. Then for the Elf story  . . . why should such things be written by men like Mr. Horne? I am vexed at it. Shakespeare and Fletcher did not write so about fairies: — Drayton did not. Look at the exquisite ‘Nymphidia,’ with its subtle sylvan consistency, and then at the lumbering coarse  . . . ‘machina intersit‘  . . . Grandmama Grey! — to say nothing of the ‘small dog’ that isn’t the ‘small boy.’ Mr. Horne succeeds better on a larger canvass, and with weightier material; with blank verse rather than lyrics. He cannot make a fine stroke. He wants subtlety and elasticity in the thought and expression. Remember, I admire him honestly and earnestly. No one has admired more than I the ‘Death of Marlowe,’ scenes in ‘Cosmo,’ and ‘Orion’ in much of it. But now tell me if you can accept with the same stretched out hand all these lyrical poems? I am going to write to him as much homage as can come truly. Who combines different faculties as you do, striking the whole octave? No one, at present in the world.

Dearest, after you went away yesterday and I began to consider, I found that there was nothing to be so over-glad about in the matter of the letters, for that, Sunday coming next to Saturday, the best now is only as good as the worst before, and I can’t hear from you, until Monday  . . . Monday! Did you think of that — you who took the credit of acceding so meekly! I shall not praise you in return at any rate. I shall have to wait  . . . till what o’clock on Monday, tempted in the meanwhile to fall into controversy against the ‘new moons and sabbath days’ and the pausing of the post in consequence.

You never guessed perhaps, what I look back to at this moment in the physiology of our intercourse, the curious double feeling I had about you — you personally, and you as the writer of these letters, and the crisis of the feeling, when I was positively vexed and jealous of myself for not succeeding better in making a unity of the two. I could not! And moreover I could not help but that the writer of the letters seemed nearer to me, long  . . . long  . . . and in spite of the postmark, than did the personal visitor who confounded me, and left me constantly under such an impression of its being all dream-work on his side, that I have stamped my feet on this floor with impatience to think of having to wait so many hours before the ‘candid’ closing letter could come with its confessional of an illusion. ‘People say,’ I used to think, ‘that women always know, and certainly I do not know, and therefore  . . . therefore.’ — The logic crushed on like Juggernaut’s car. But in the letters it was different — the dear letters took me on the side of my own ideal life where I was able to stand a little upright and look round. I could read such letters for ever and answer them after a fashion  . . . that, I felt from the beginning. But you — !

Monday. — Never too early can the light come. Thank you for my letter! Yet you look askance at me over ‘newt and toad,’ and praise so the Elf-story that I am ashamed to send you my ill humour on the same head. And you really like that? admire it? Grandmama Grey and the night cap and all? and ‘shoetye and blue sky?’ and is it really wrong of me to like certainly some touches and images, but not the whole,  . . . not the poem as a whole? I can take delight in the fantastical, and in the grotesque — but here there is a want of life and consistency, as it seems to me! — the elf is no elf and speaks no elf-tongue: it is not the right key to touch,  . . . this,  . . . for supernatural music. So I fancy at least — but I will try the poem again presently. You must be right — unless it should be your over-goodness opposed to my over-badness — I will not be sure. Or you wrote perhaps in an accidental mood of most excellent critical smoothness, such as Mr. Forster did his last Examiner in, when he gave the all-hail to Mr. Harness as one of the best dramatists of the age!! Ah no! — not such as Mr. Forster’s. Your soul does not enter into his secret — There can be nothing in common between you. For him to say such a word — he who knows — or ought to know! — And now let us agree and admire the bowing of the old ministrel over Bedd Gelert’s unfilled grave —

A poet, a friend, a generous man Mr. Horne is, even if no laureate for the fairies.

I have this moment a parcel of books via Mr. Moxon — Miss Martineau’s two volumes — and Mr. Bailey sends his ‘Festus,’ very kindly,  . . . and ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ from America from a Mrs. or a Miss Fuller — how I hate those ‘Women of England,’ ‘Women and their Mission’ and the rest. As if any possible good were to be done by such expositions of rights and wrongs.

Your letter would be worth them all, if you were less you! I mean, just this letter,  . . . all alive as it is with crawling buzzing wriggling cold-blooded warm-blooded creatures  . . . as all alive as your own pedant’s book in the tree. And do you know, I think I like frogs too — particularly the very little leaping frogs, which are so high-hearted as to emulate the birds. I remember being scolded by my nurses for taking them up in my hands and letting them leap from one hand to the other. But for the toad! — why, at the end of the row of narrow beds which we called our gardens when we were children, grew an old thorn, and in the hollow of the root of the thorn, lived a toad, a great ancient toad, whom I, for one, never dared approach too nearly. That he ‘wore a jewel in his head’ I doubted nothing at all. You must see it glitter if you stooped and looked steadily into the hole. And on days when he came out and sate swelling his black sides, I never looked steadily; I would run a hundred yards round through the shrubs, deeper than knee-deep in the long wet grass and nettles, rather than go past him where he sate; being steadily of opinion, in the profundity of my natural history-learning, that if he took it into his toad’s head to spit at me I should drop down dead in a moment, poisoned as by one of the Medici.

Oh — and I had a field-mouse for a pet once, and should have joined my sisters in a rat’s nest if I had not been ill at the time (as it was, the little rats were tenderly smothered by over-love!): and blue-bottle flies I used to feed, and hated your spiders for them; yet no, not much. My aversion proper  . . . call it horror rather  . . . was for the silent, cold, clinging, gliding bat; and even now, I think, I could not sleep in the room with that strange bird-mouse-creature, as it glides round the ceiling silently, silently as its shadow does on the floor. If you listen or look, there is not a wave of the wing — the wing never waves! A bird without a feather! a beast that flies! and so cold! as cold as a fish! It is the most supernatural-seeming of natural things. And then to see how when the windows are open at night those bats come sailing  . . . without a sound — and go  . . . you cannot guess where! — fade with the night-blackness!

You have not been well — which is my first thought if not my first word. Do walk, and do not work; and think  . . . what I could be thinking of, if I did not think of you  . . . dear — dearest! ‘As the doves fly to the windows,’ so I think of you! As the prisoners think of liberty, as the dying think of Heaven, so I think of you. When I look up straight to God  . . . nothing, no one, used to intercept me — now there is you — only you under him! Do not use such words as those therefore any more, nor say that you are not to be thought of so and so. You are to be thought of every way. You must know what you are to me if you know at all what I am, — and what I should be but for you.

So  . . . love me a little, with the spiders and the toads and the lizards! love me as you love the efts — and I will believe in you as you believe  . . . in Ælian — Will that do?

Your own —

Say how you are when you write — and write.