Day: March 7, 2018

Saturday Morning.

March 7, 1846.

You call me ‘kind’; and by this time I have no heart to call you such names  – – I told you, did I not once? that ‘Ba’ had got to convey infinitely more of you to my sense than ‘dearest,’ ‘sweetest,’ all or any epithets that break down with their load of honey like bees  – – to say you are ‘kind,’ you that so entirely and unintermittingly bless me,  – – it will never do now, ‘Ba.’ All the same, one way there is to make even ‘Ba’ dearer,  – – ‘my Ba,’ I say to myself!

About my fears  – – whether of opening doors or entering people  – – one thing is observable and prevents the possibility of any misconception  – – I desire, have been in the habit of desiring, to increase them, far from diminishing  – – they relate, of course, entirely to you  – – and only through you affect me the least in the world. Put your well-being out of the question, so far as I can understand it to be involved,  – – and the pleasure and pride I should immediately choose would be that the whole world knew our position. What pleasure, what pride! But I endeavour to remember on all occasions  – – and perhaps succeed in too few  – – that it is very easy for me to go away and leave you who cannot go. I only allude to this because some people are ‘naturally nervous’ and all that  – – and I am quite of another kind.

Last evening I went out  – – having been kept at home in the afternoon to see somebody  . . . went walking for hours. I am quite well to-day and, now your letter comes, my Ba, most happy. And, as the sun shines, you are perhaps making the perilous descent now, while I write  – – oh, to meet you on the stairs! And I shall really see you on Monday, dearest? So soon, it ought to feel, considering the dreary weeks that now get to go between our days! For music, I made myself melancholy just now with some ‘Concertos for the Harpsichord by Mr. Handel’  – – brought home by my father the day before yesterday;  – – what were light, modern things once! Now I read not very long ago a French memoir of ‘Claude le Jeune’ called in his time the Prince of Musicians,  – – no, ‘Phoenix‘  – – the unapproachable wonder to all time  – – that is, twenty years after his death about  – – and to this pamphlet was prefixed as motto this startling axiom  – – ‘In Music, the Beau Ideal changes every thirty years’  – – well, is not that true? The Idea, mind, changes  – – the general standard  . . . so that it is no answer that a single air, such as many one knows, may strike as freshly as ever  – – they were not according to the Ideal of their own time  – – just now, they drop into the ready ear,  – – next hundred years, who will be the Rossini? who is no longer the Rossini even I remember  – – his early overtures are as purely Rococo as Cimarosa’s or more. The sounds remain, keep their character perhaps  – – the scale’s proportioned notes affect the same, that is,  – – the major third, or minor seventh  – – but the arrangement of these, the sequence the law  – – for them, if it should change every thirty years! To Corelli nothing seemed so conclusive in Heaven or earth as this

I don’t believe there is one of his sonatas wherein that formula does not do duty. In these things of Handel that seems replaced by

 – – that was the only true consummation! Then,  – – to go over the hundred years,  – – came Rossini’s unanswerable coda:

which serves as base to the infinity of songs, gone, gone  – – so gone by! From all of which Ba draws this ‘conclusion’ that these may be worse things than Bartoli’s Tuscan to cover a page with!  – – yet, yet the pity of it! Le Jeune, the Phoenix, and Rossini who directed his letters to his mother as ‘mother of the famous composer’  – – and Henry Lawes, and Dowland’s Lute, ah me!

Well, my conclusion is the best, the everlasting, here and I trust elsewhere  – – I am your own, my Ba, ever your

R.

 

Friday Evening.

March 7, 1846.

Always you, is it, who torments me? always you? Well! I agree to bear the torments as Socrates his persecution by the potters: — and by the way he liked those potters, as Plato shows, and was fain to go to them for his illustrations  . . . as I to you for all my light. Also, while we are on the subject, I will tell you another fault of your Bartoli  . . . his ‘choice Tuscan’ filled one of my pages, in the place of my English better than Tuscan.

For the letter you mentioned, I meant to have said in mine yesterday, that I was grateful to you for telling me of it — that was one of the prodigalities of your goodness to me  . . . not thrown away, in one sense, however superfluous. Do you ever think how I must feel when you overcome me with all this generous tenderness, only beloved! I cannot say it.

Because it is colder to-day I have not been down-stairs but let to-morrow be warm enough — facilis descensus. There’s something infernal to me really, in the going down, and now too that our cousin is here! Think of his beginning to attack Henrietta the other day . . .. ‘So Mr. C. has retired and left the field to Surtees Cook. Oh  . . . you needn’t deny  . . . it’s the news of all the world except your father. And as to him, I don’t blame you — he never will consent to the marriage of son or daughter. Only you should consider, you know, because he won’t leave you a shilling, &c. &c . . ..’ You hear the sort of man. And then in a minute after  . . . ‘And what is this about Ba?’ ‘About Ba’ said my sisters, ‘why who has been persuading you of such nonsense?’ ‘Oh, my authority is very good, — perfectly unnecessary for you to tell any stories, Arabel, — a literary friendship, is it?’  . . . and so on  . . . after that fashion! This comes from my brothers of course, but we need not be afraid of its passing beyond, I think, though I was a good deal vexed when I heard first of it last night and have been in cousinly anxiety ever since to get our Orestes safe away from those Furies his creditors, into Brittany again. He is an intimate friend of my brothers besides the relationship, and they talk to him as to each other, only they oughtn’t to have talked that, and without knowledge too.

I forgot to tell you that Mr. Kenyon was in an immoderate joy the day I saw him last, about Mr. Poe’s ‘Raven’ as seen in the Athenæum extracts, and came to ask what I knew of the poet and his poetry, and took away the book. It’s the rhythm which has taken him with ‘glamour’ I fancy. Now you will stay on Monday till the last moment, and go to him for dinner at six.

Who ‘looked in at the door?’ Nobody. But Arabel a little way opened it, and hearing your voice, went back. There was no harm — is no fear of harm. Nobody in the house would find his or her pleasure in running the risk of giving me pain. I mean my brothers and sisters would not.

Are you trying the music to charm the brain to stillness? Tell me. And keep from that ‘Soul’s Tragedy’ which did so much harm — oh, that I had bound you by some Stygian oath not to touch it.

So my rock  . . . may the birds drop into your crevices the seeds of all the flowers of the world — only it is not for those, that I cling to you as the single rock in the salt sea.

Ever I am

Your own.