Author: EBB

Thursday.

August 2, 1845.

Let me write one word  . . . not to have it off my mind  . . . because it is by no means heavily on it; but lest I should forget to write it at all by not writing it at once. What could you mean,  . . . I have been thinking since you went away  . . . by applying such a grave expression as having a thing ‘off your mind’ to that foolish subject of the stupid book (mine), and by making it worth your while to account logically for your wish about my not mentioning it to Mr. Kenyon? You could not fancy for one moment that I was vexed in the matter of the book? or in the other matter of your wish? Now just hear me. Continue reading “#71”

Saturday.

July 28, 1845

You say too much indeed in this letter which has crossed mine — and particularly as there is not a word in it of what I most wanted to know and want to know  . . . how you are — for you must observe, if you please, that the very paper you pour such kindness on, was written after your own example and pattern, when, in the matter of my ‘Prometheus’ (such different wearying matter!), you took trouble for me and did me good. Judge from this, if even in inferior things, there can be gratitude from you to me! — or rather, do not judge — but listen when I say that I am delighted to have met your wishes in writing as I wrote; only that you are surely wrong in refusing to see a single wrongness in all that heap of weedy thoughts, and that when you look again, you must come to the admission of it. One of the thistles is the suggestion about the line

Was it singing, was it saying,

which you wrote so, and which I proposed to amend by an intermediate ‘or.’ Thinking of it at a distance, it grows clear to me that you were right, and that there should be and must be no ‘or’ to disturb the listening pause. Now should there? And there was something else, which I forget at this moment — and something more than the something else. Your account of the production of the poem interests me very much — and proves just what I wanted to make out from your statements the other day, and they refused, I thought, to let me,  . . . that you are more faithful to your first Idea than to your first plan. Is it so? or not? ‘Orange’ is orange — but which half of the orange is not predestinated from all eternity — : is it so?

Sunday. — I wrote so much yesterday and then went out, not knowing very well how to speak or how to be silent (is it better to-day?) of some expressions of yours  . . . and of your interest in me — which are deeply affecting to my feelings — whatever else remains to be said of them. And you know that you make great mistakes,  . . . of fennel for hemlock, of four o’clocks for five o’clocks, and of other things of more consequence, one for another; and may not be quite right besides as to my getting well ‘if I please!’  . . . which reminds me a little of what Papa says sometimes when he comes into this room unexpectedly and convicts me of having dry toast for dinner, and declares angrily that obstinacy and dry toast have brought me to my present condition, and that if I pleased to have porter and beefsteaks instead, I should be as well as ever I was, in a month! . . . But where is the need of talking of it? What I wished to say was this — that if I get better or worse  . . . as long as I live and to the last moment of life, I shall remember with an emotion which cannot change its character, all the generous interest and feeling you have spent on me — wasted on me I was going to write — but I would not provoke any answering — and in one obvious sense, it need not be so. I never shall forget these things, my dearest friend; nor remember them more coldly. God’s goodness! — I believe in it, as in His sunshine here — which makes my head ache a little, while it comes in at the window, and makes most other people gayer — it does me good too in a different way. And so, may God bless you! and me in this  . . . just this,  . . . that I may never have the sense,  . . . intolerable in the remotest apprehension of it  . . . of being, in any way, directly or indirectly, the means of ruffling your smooth path by so much as one of my flint-stones! — In the meantime you do not tire me indeed even when you go later for sooner  . . . and I do not tire myself even when I write longer and duller letters to you (if the last is possible) than the one I am ending now  . . . as the most grateful (leave me that word) of your friends.

E.B.B.

How could you think that I should speak to Mr. Kenyon of the book? All I ever said to him has been that you had looked through my ‘Prometheus’ for me — and that I was not disappointed in you, these two things on two occasions. I do trust that your head is better.

 

July 25, 1845.

Are you any better to-day? and will you say just the truth of it? and not attempt to do any of the writing which does harm — nor of the reading even, which may do harm — and something does harm to you, you see — and you told me not long ago that you knew how to avoid the harm  . . . now, did you not? and what could it have been last week which you did not avoid, and which made you so unwell? Beseech you not to think that I am going to aid and abet in this wronging of yourself, for I will not indeed — and I am only sorry to have given you my querulous queries yesterday  . . . and to have omitted to say in relation to them, too, how they were to be accepted in any case as just passing thoughts of mine for your passing thoughts,  . . . some right, it may be  . . . some wrong, it must be  . . . and none, insisted on even by the thinker! just impressions, and by no means pretending to be judgments — now will you understand? Also, I intended (as a proof of my fallacy) to strike out one or two of my doubts before I gave the paper to you — so whichever strikes you as the most foolish of them, of course must be what I meant to strike out — (there’s ingenuity for you!). The poem did, for the rest, as will be suggested to you, give me the very greatest pleasure, and astonish me in two ways  . . . by the versification, mechanically considered; and by the successful evolution of pure beauty from all that roughness and rudeness of the sin of the boar-pinner — successfully evolved, without softening one hoarse accent of his voice. But there is to be a pause now — you will not write any more — no, nor come here on Wednesday, if coming into the roar of this London should make the pain worse, as I cannot help thinking it must — and you were not well yesterday morning, you admitted. You will take care? And if there should be a wisdom in going away . . .!

Was it very wrong of me, doing what I told you of yesterday? Very imprudent, I am afraid — but I never knew how to be prudent — and then, there is not a sharing of responsibility in any sort of imaginable measure; but a mere going away of so many thoughts, apart from the thinker, or of words, apart from the speaker,  . . . just as I might give away a pocket-handkerchief to be newly marked and mine no longer. I did not do — and would not have done,  . . . one of those papers singly. It would have been unbecoming of me in every way. It was simply a writing of notes  . . . of slips of paper  . . . now on one subject, and now on another  . . . which were thrown into the great cauldron and boiled up with other matter, and re-translated from my idiom where there seemed a need for it. And I am not much afraid of being ever guessed at — except by those Oedipuses who astounded me once for a moment and were after all, I hope, baffled by the Sphinx — or ever betrayed; because besides the black Stygian oaths and indubitable honour of the editor, he has some interest, even as I have the greatest, in being silent and secret. And nothing is mine  . . . if something is of me  . . . or from me, rather. Yet it was wrong and foolish, I see plainly — wrong in all but the motives. How dreadful to write against time, and with a side-ways running conscience! And then the literature of the day was wider than his knowledge, all round! And the booksellers were barking distraction on every side! — I had some of the mottos to find too! But the paper relating to you I never was consulted about — or in one particular way it would have been better, — as easily it might have been. May God bless you, my dear friend,

E.B.B.

 

Monday.
July 21, 1845.

But I never did strike you or touch you — and you are not in earnest in the complaint you make — and this is really all I am going to say to-day. What I said before was wrung from me by words on your part, while you know far too well how to speak so as to make them go deepest, and which sometimes it becomes impossible, or over-hard to bear without deprecation: — as when, for instance, you talk of being ‘grateful’ to me!! — Well! I will try that there shall be no more of it — no more provocation of generosities — and so, (this once) as you express it, I ‘will not have the heart to blame’ you — except for reading my books against my will, which was very wrong indeed. Mr. Kenyon asked me, I remember, (he had a mania of sending my copybook literature round the world to this person and that person, and I was roused at last into binding him by a vow to do so no more) I remember he asked me  . . . ‘Is Mr. Browning to be excepted?’; to which I answered that nobody was to be excepted — and thus he was quite right in resisting to the death  . . . or to dinner-time  . . . just as you were quite wrong after dinner. Now, could a woman have been more curious? Could the very author of the book have done worse? But I leave my sins and yours gladly, to get into the Hood poems which have delighted me so — and first to the St. Praxed’s which is of course the finest and most powerful  . . . and indeed full of the power of life  . . . and of death. It has impressed me very much. Then the ‘Angel and Child,’ with all its beauty and significance! — and the ‘Garden Fancies’  . . . some of the stanzas about the name of the flower, with such exquisite music in them, and grace of every kind — and with that beautiful and musical use of the word ‘meandering,’ which I never remember having seen used in relation to sound before. It does to mate with your ‘simmering quiet’ in Sordello, which brings the summer air into the room as sure as you read it. Then I like your burial of the pedant so much! — you have quite the damp smell of funguses and the sense of creeping things through and through it. And the ‘Laboratory’ is hideous as you meant to make it: — only I object a little to your tendency  . . . which is almost a habit, and is very observable in this poem I think,  . . . of making lines difficult for the reader to read  . . . see the opening lines of this poem. Not that music is required everywhere, nor in them certainly, but that the uncertainty of rhythm throws the reader’s mind off the rail  . . . and interrupts his progress with you and your influence with him. Where we have not direct pleasure from rhythm, and where no peculiar impression is to be produced by the changes in it, we should be encouraged by the poet to forget it altogether; should we not? I am quite wrong perhaps — but you see how I do not conceal my wrongnesses where they mix themselves up with my sincere impressions. And how could it be that no one within my hearing ever spoke of these poems? Because it is true that I never saw one of them — never! — except the ‘Tokay,’ which is inferior to all; and that I was quite unaware of your having printed so much with Hood — or at all, except this ‘Tokay,’ and this ‘Duchess’! The world is very deaf and dumb, I think — but in the end, we need not be afraid of its not learning its lesson.

Could you come — for I am going out in the carriage, and will not stay to write of your poems even, any more to-day — could you come on Thursday or Friday (the day left to your choice) instead of on Wednesday? If I could help it I would not say so — it is not a caprice. And I leave it to you, whether Thursday or Friday. And Alexandria seems discredited just now for Malta — and ‘anything but Madeira,’ I go on saying to myself. These Hood poems are all to be in the next ‘Bells’ of course — of necessity?

May God bless you my dear friend, my ever dear friend! —

E.B.B.

July 18, 1845.

I suppose nobody is ever expected to acknowledge his or her ‘besetting sin’ — it would be unnatural — and therefore you will not be surprised to hear me deny the one imputed to me for mine. I deny it quite and directly. And if my denial goes for nothing, which is but reasonable, I might call in a great cloud of witnesses,  . . . a thundercloud,  . . . Continue reading “#62”

July 12, 1845.

You understand that it was not a resolution passed in favour of formality, when I said what I did yesterday about not going out at the time you were coming — surely you do; whatever you might signify to a different effect. If it were necessary for me to go out every day, or most days even, it would be otherwise; but as it is, I may certainly keep the day you come, free from the fear of carriages, let the sun shine its best or worst, without doing despite to you or injury to me — and that’s all I meant to insist upon indeed and indeed. Continue reading “#60”

Monday.

July 8, 1845.

Well — I have really been out; and am really alive after it — which is more surprising still — alive enough I mean, to write even so, to-night. But perhaps I say so with more emphasis, to console myself for failing in my great ambition of getting into the Park and of reaching Mr. Kenyon’s door just to leave a card there vaingloriously,  . . . all which I did fail in, and was forced to turn back from the gates of Devonshire Place. The next time it will be better perhaps — Continue reading “#58”

Wednesday-Thursday Evening

July 4, 1845.

Yes — I know the first part of the ‘Duchess’ and have it here — and for the rest of the poem, don’t mind about being very legible, or even legible in the usual sense; and remember how it is my boast to be able to read all such manuscript writing as never is read by people who don’t like caviare. Now you won’t mind? really I rather like blots than otherwise — being a sort of patron-saint of all manner of untidyness  . . . Continue reading “#56”

Monday.

[June 30, 1845.]

I send back the prize poems which have been kept far too long even if I do not make excuses for the keeping — but our sins are not always to be measured by our repentance for them. Then I am well enough this morning to have thought of going out till they told me it was not at all a right day for it  . . . too windy  . . . soft and delightful as the air seems to be — particularly after yesterday, when we had some winter back again in an episode. And the roses do not die; Continue reading “#54”

Friday Evening.

June 28, 1845.

You are very kind and always — but really that does not seem a good reason against your coming to-morrow — so come, if it should not rain. If it rains, it concludes for Monday  . . . or Tuesday; whichever may be clear of rain. I was tired on Wednesday by the confounding confusion of more voices than usual in this room; but the effect passed off, and though Miss Mitford was with me for hours yesterday I am not unwell to-day. And pray speak bona verba about the awful things which are possible between this now and Wednesday. You continue to be better, I do hope? I am forced to the brevity you see, by the post on one side, and my friends on the other, who have so long overstayed the coming of your note — but it is enough to assure you that you will do no harm by coming — only give pleasure.

Ever yours, my dear friend,

E.B.B.