Day: April 21, 2018

[Postmark: April 21, 1846]

My dearest Ba, my sweetest, only love must sit, if she
please, in the gondola chair and let me talk to-day, not
write to her — for my head aches, — from pure perversity, —
and a little from my morning spent over a novel of Balzac’s —
that is it, not any real illness, I know — however, the effect
is the same. Beside I got tired with the long walk from
Carlyle’s last night — for I went and saw him to heart’s
content — and he talked characteristically and well, and
constringingly, bracingly. He has been in the country a
little, — that is, has gone down to see his wife occasionally
who was on a visit at Croydon, whence she only returned
on Saturday. He told me he had read my last number ;
and that he had ‘been read to’ — some good reader had
recited ‘The Duchess ‘ to him. Altogether he said wonder-
fully kind things and was pleased to prophesy in the same
spirit ; God bless him ! We talked for three or four hours
— he asked me to come again soon, and I will.

Here are two letters — Chorley’s, one — and the other
from quite another kind of man, an old friend who ‘ docks ‘
ships or something like it ; a great lover of ‘ intelligibility in
writing,’ and heretofore a sufferer from my poetry.

My love, I lend you such things with exactly as much
vanity as . . no comparison will serve ! it is the French
vulgarism — comme . . n’importe quoi ! Celui me pousse à
la vanité comme — n’importe quoi !

Will you have a significative ‘ comme ‘ of another kind ?

‘ je me trouve bête ce matin comme . . trente-six oies ! ‘
— (I assure you this is no flower culled from Balzac this
morning — but a little ‘souvenir’ of an old play.)

Now, if I were to say to myself something is dear as

‘ thirty-six Bas ‘ — I should be scared, as when looking into a
mirror cut into façettes one is met on every side by the
same face, twenty times repeated. Nothing can add to my
conception of the one Ba — my one, only — ever dear,
dearest Ba — ‘what perfect nonsense’ says Ba — and nonsensical
I will be— —all she pleases so long as let live and
die her very own.

[Postmark: April 21, 1846]

I would not say to you yesterday, perhaps could not,
that you wrote ever so much foolishness to me in the
morning, dearest, and that I knew it ever so well. There is
no use, no help, in discussing certain questions, — some sorts
of extravagance grow by talking of, — shake this elixir, and
you have more and more bubbles on the surface of it. So
I would not speak — nor will I write much. Only I protest,
from my understanding, from my heart — and besides I do
assert the truth — clear of any ‘affectation,’ this time, —
and it is that you always make me melancholy by using
such words. It seems to me as if you were in the dark
, altogether, and held my hand for another’s : let the shutter
be opened suddenly ; and the hand . . is dropped perhaps
. . . must I not think such thoughts, when you speak
such words? I ask you if it is not reasonable. No, I do
not ask you. We will not argue whether eagles creep, or
worms fly. And see if it is distrust on my part ! Love, I
have learnt to believe in. I see the new light which
Reichenbach shows pouring forth visibly from these chrystals
tossed out. But when you say that the blue, I see, is red,
and that the little chrystals are the fixed stars of the
Heavens, how am I to think of you but that you are
deluded, mistaken? — and in what? in love itself? Ah,
— if you could know — if you could but know for a full
moment of conviction, how you depress and alarm me by
saying such things, you never would say them afterwards, I
know. So trust to me, even as I trust to you, and do
not say them ever again, . . you, who ‘never flatter’. Is it
not enough that you love me ? Is there anything greater?
And will you run the risk of ruining that great wonder by
bringing it to the test of an ‘argumentum ad absurdum’
such as I might draw from your letter ? Have pity on me,
my own dearest, and consider how I must feel to see myself
idealized away, little by little, like Ossian’s spirits into the
mist . . till . . ‘Gone is the daughter of Morven’! And
what if it is mist or moon-glory, if I stretch out my hands
to you in vain, and must still fade away farther ? Now you
will not any more. When the world comes to judge between
us two, or rather over us both, the world will say (even the
purblind world, as I myself with wide-open eyes !) that I
have not been generous with my gifts — no ; you are in a
position to choose . . and you might have chosen better —
. . that is my immoveable conviction. It has been only
your love for me, — which I believe in perfectly as love —
and which, being love, does not come by pure logic, as the
world itself may guess . . it has been only, wholly and
purely your love for me which has made a level for us two
to meet and stand together. There is my fact against your
fiction ! Now let us talk no more. We cannot agree,
because we stand in different positions . . . ‘I hear a
voice you cannot hear’ ! . . I am on the black side of the
knight’s shield. Presently you will hear perhaps, and see.
Shall you love me then? When the ideal breaks off, when
the light is gone, . . will you love me then for the love
which I shall bear you then as now, . . the only real thing ?

In the meantime I did but jest about the letters — I
know you care for mine . . because I care for yours so
infinitely : . it is a lesson learnt by heart. To-night I shall
write again ! —

Your own

Ba.