R.B. to E.B.B.
Tuesday.
[Post-mark, February 24, 1846.]
Ah, sweetest, in spite of our agreement, here is the note that sought not to go, but must—because, if there is no speaking of Mrs. Jamesons and such like without bringing in your dear name (not dearest name, my Ba!) what is the good of not writing it down, now, when I, though possessed with the love of it no more than usual, yet may speak, and to a hearer? And I have to thank you with all my heart for the good news of the increasing strength and less need for the opium—how I do thank you, my dearest—and desire to thank God through whose goodness it all is! This I could not but say now, to-morrow I will write at length, having been working a little this morning, with whatever effect. So now I will go out and see your elm-trees and gate, and think the thoughts over again, and coming home I shall perhaps find a letter.
Dearest, dearest—my perfect blessing you are!
May God continue his care for us. R.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Wednesday Morning.
[Post-mark, February 25, 1846.]
Once you were pleased to say, my own Ba, that 'I made you do as I would.' I am quite sure, you make me speak as you would, and not at all as I mean—and for one instance, I never surely spoke anything half so untrue as that 'I came with the intention of loving whomever I should find'—No! wreathed shells and hollows in ruins, and roofs of caves may transform a voice wonderfully, make more of it or less, or so change it as to almost alter, but turn a 'no' into a 'yes' can no echo (except the Irish one), and I said 'no' to such a charge, and still say 'no.' I did have a presentiment—and though it is hardly possible for me to look back on it now without lending it the true colours given to it by the event, yet I can put them aside, if I please, and remember that I not merely hoped it would not be so (not that the effect I expected to be produced would be less than in anticipation, certainly I did not hope that, but that it would range itself with the old feelings of simple reverence and sympathy and friendship, that I should love you as much as I supposed I could love, and no more) but in the confidence that nothing could occur to divert me from my intended way of life, I made—went on making arrangements to return to Italy. You know—did I not tell you—I wished to see you before I returned? And I had heard of you just so much as seemed to make it impossible such a relation could ever exist. I know very well, if you choose to refer to my letters you may easily bring them to bear a sense in parts, more agreeable to your own theory than to mine, the true one—but that was instinct, Providence—anything rather than foresight. Now I will convince you! yourself have noticed the difference between the letters and the writer; the greater 'distance of the latter from you,' why was that? Why, if not because the conduct began with him, with one who had now seen you—was no continuation of the conduct, as influenced by the feeling, of the letters—else, they, if near, should have enabled him, if but in the natural course of time and with increase of familiarity, to become nearer—but it was not so! The letters began by loving you after their way—but what a world-wide difference between that love and the true, the love from seeing and hearing and feeling, since you make me resolve, what now lies blended so harmoniously, into its component parts. Oh, I know what is old from what is new, and how chrystals may surround and glorify other vessels meant for ordinary service than Lord N's! But I don't know that handling may not snap them off, some of the more delicate ones; and if you let me, love, I will not again, ever again, consider how it came and whence, and when, so curiously, so pryingly, but believe that it was always so, and that it all came at once, all the same; the more unlikelinesses the better, for they set off the better the truth of truths that here, ('how begot? how nourished?')—here is the whole wondrous Ba filling my whole heart and soul; and over-filling it, because she is in all the world, too, where I look, where I fancy. At the same time, because all is so wondrous and so sweet, do you think that it would be so difficult for me to analyse it, and give causes to the effects in sufficiently numerous instances, even to 'justify my presentiment?' Ah, dear, dearest Ba, I could, could indeed, could account for all, or enough! But you are unconscious, I do believe, of your power, and the knowledge of it would be no added grace, perhaps! So let us go on—taking a lesson out of the world's book in a different sense. You shall think I love you for—(tell me, you must, what for) while in my secret heart I know what my 'mission of humanity' means, and what telescopic and microscopic views it procures me. Enough—Wait, one word about the 'too kind letters'—could not the same Montefiore understand that though he deserved not one of his thousand guineas, yet that he is in disgrace if they bate him of his next gift by merely ten? It is all too kind—but I shall feel the diminishing of the kindness, be very sure! Of that there is, however, not too alarming a sign in this dearest, because last of all—dearest letter of all—till the next! I looked yesterday over the 'Tragedy,' and think it will do after all. I will bring one part at least next time, and 'Luria' take away, if you let me, so all will be off my mind, and April and May be the welcomer? Don't think I am going to take any extraordinary pains. There are some things in the 'Tragedy' I should like to preserve and print now, leaving the future to spring as it likes, in any direction, and these half-dead, half-alive works fetter it, if left behind.
Yet one thing will fetter it worse, only one thing—if you, in any respect, stay behind? You that in all else help me and will help me, beyond words—beyond dreams—if, because I find you, your own works stop—'then comes the Selah and the voice is hushed.' Oh, no, no, dearest, so would the help cease to be help—the joy to be joy, Ba herself to be quite Ba, and my own Siren singing song for song. Dear love, will that be kind, and right, and like the rest? Write and promise that all shall be resumed, the romance-poem chiefly, and I will try and feel more yours than ever now. Am I not with you in the world, proud of you—and vain, too, very likely, which is all the sweeter if it is a sin as you teach me. Indeed dearest, I have set my heart on your fulfilling your mission—my heart is on it! Bless you, my Ba—
Your R.B.
I am so well as to have resumed the shower-bath (this morning)—and I walk, especially near the elms and stile—and mean to walk, and be very well—and you, dearest?
E.B.B. to R.B.
[Post-mark, February 26, 1846.]
I confess that while I was writing those words I had a thought that they were not quite yours as you said them. Still it comes to something in their likeness, but we will not talk of it and break off the chrystals—they are so brittle, then? do you know that by an 'instinct.' But I agree that it is best not to talk—I 'gave it up' as a riddle long ago. Let there be 'analysis' even, and it will not be solution. I have my own thoughts of course, and you have yours, and the worst is that a third person looking down on us from some snow-capped height, and free from personal influences, would have his thoughts too, and he would think that if you had been reasonable as usual you would have gone to Italy. I have by heart (or by head at least) what the third person would think. The third person thundered to me in an abstraction for ever so long, and at intervals I hear him still, only you shall not to-day, because he talks 'damnable iterations' and teazes you. Nay, the first person is teazing you now perhaps, without going any further, and yet I must go a little further, just to say (after accepting all possible unlikelinesses and miracles, because everything was miraculous and impossible) that it was agreed between us long since that you did not love me for anything—your having no reason for it is the only way of your not seeming unreasonable. Also for my own sake. I like it to be so—I cannot have peace with the least change from it. Dearest, take the baron's hawthorn bough which, in spite of his fine dream of it is dead since the other day, and so much the worse than when I despised it last—take that dead stick and push it upright into the sand as the tide rises, and the whole blue sea draws up its glittering breadth and length towards and around it. But what then? What does that prove? ... as the philosopher said of the poem. So we ought not to talk of such things; and we get warned off even in the accidental illustrations taken up to light us. Still, the stick certainly did not draw the sea.
Dearest and best you were yesterday, to write me the little note! You are better than the imaginations of my heart, and they, as far as they relate to you (not further) are not desperately wicked, I think. I always expect the kindest things from you, and you always are doing some kindness beyond what is expected, and this is a miracle too, like the rest, now isn't it? When the knock came last night, I knew it was your letter, and not another's. Just another little leaf of my Koran! How I thank you ... thank you! If I write too kind letters, as you say, why they may be too kind for me to send, but not for you to receive; and I suppose I think more of you than of me, which accounts for my writing them, accounts and justifies. And that is my reflection not now for the first time. For we break rules very often—as that exegetical third person might expound to you clearly out of the ninety-sixth volume of the 'Code of Conventions,' only you are not like another, nor have you been to me like another—you began with most improvident and (will you let me say?) unmasculine generosity, and Queen Victoria does not sit upon a mat after the fashion of Queen Pomare, nor should.
But ... but ... you know very fully that you are breaking faith in the matter of the 'Tragedy' and 'Luria'—you promised to rest—and you rest for three days. Is it so that people get well? or keep well? Indeed I do not think I shall let you have 'Luria.' Ah—be careful, I do beseech you—be careful. There is time for a pause, and the works will profit by it themselves. And you! And I ... if you are ill!—
For the rest I will let you walk in my field, and see my elms as much as you please ... though I hear about the shower bath with a little suspicion. Why, if it did you harm before, should it not again? and why should you use it, if it threatens harm? Now tell me if it hasn't made you rather unwell since the new trial!—tell me, dear, dearest.
As for myself, I believe that you set about exhorting me to be busy, just that I might not reproach you for the over-business. Confess that that was the only meaning of the exhortation. But no, you are quite serious, you say. You even threaten me in a sort of underground murmur, which sounds like a nascent earthquake; and if I do not write so much a day directly, your stipendiary magistrateship will take away my license to be loved ... I am not to be Ba to you any longer ... you say! And is this right? now I ask you. Ever so many chrystals fell off by that stroke of the baton, I do assure you. Only you did not mean quite what you said so too articulately, and you will unsay it, if you please, and unthink it near the elms.
As for the writing, I will write ... I have written ... I am writing. You do not fancy that I have given up writing?—No. Only I have certainly been more loitering and distracted than usual in what I have done, which is not my fault—nor yours directly—and I feel an indisposition to setting about the romance, the hand of the soul shakes. I am too happy and not calm enough, I suppose, to have the right inclination. Well—it will come. But all in blots and fragments there are verses enough, to fill a volume done in the last year.
And if there were not ... if there were none ... I hold that I should be Ba, and also your Ba ... which is 'insolence' ... will you say?
R.B. to E.B.B.
Thursday.
[Post-mark, February 26, 1846.]
As for the 'third person,' my sweet Ba, he was a wise speaker from the beginning; and in our case he will say, turning to me—'the late Robert Hall—when a friend admired that one with so high an estimate of the value of intellectuality in woman should yet marry some kind of cook-maid animal, as did the said Robert; wisely answered, "you can't kiss Mind"! May you not discover eventually,' (this is to me) 'that mere intellectual endowments—though incontestably of the loftiest character—mere Mind, though that Mind be Miss B's—cannot be kissed—nor, repent too late the absence of those humbler qualities, those softer affections which, like flowerets at the mountain's foot, if not so proudly soaring as, as, as!...' and so on, till one of us died, with laughing or being laughed at! So judges the third person! and if, to help him, we let him into your room at Wimpole Street, suffered him to see with Flush's eyes, he would say with just as wise an air 'True, mere personal affections may be warm enough, but does it augur well for the durability of an attachment that it should be wholly, exclusively based on such perishable attractions as the sweetness of a mouth, the beauty of an eye? I could wish, rather, to know that there was something of less transitory nature co-existent with this—some congeniality of Mental pursuit, some—' Would he not say that? But I can't do his platitudes justice because here is our post going out and I have been all the morning walking in the perfect joy of my heart, with your letter, and under its blessing—dearest, dearest Ba—let me say more to-morrow—only this now, that you—ah, what are you not to me! My dearest love, bless you—till to-morrow when I will strengthen the prayer; (no, lengthen it!)
Ever your own.
'Hawthorn'25—to show how Spring gets on!
E.B.B. to R.B.
Thursday Evening.
[Post-mark, February 27, 1846.]
If all third persons were as foolish as this third person of yours, ever dearest, first and second persons might follow their own devices without losing much in the way of good counsel. But you are unlucky in your third person as far as the wits go, he talks a great deal of nonsense, and Flush, who is sensible, will have nothing to do with him, he says, any more than you will with Sir Moses:—he is quite a third person singular for the nonsense he talks!
So, instead of him, you shall hear what I have been doing to-day. The sun, which drew out you and the hawthorns, persuaded me that it was warm enough to go down-stairs—and I put on my cloak as if I were going into the snow, and went into the drawing-room and took Henrietta by surprise as she sate at the piano singing. Well, I meant to stay half an hour and come back again, for I am upon 'Tinkler's ground' in the drawing-room and liable to whole droves of morning visitors—and Henrietta kept me, kept me, because she wanted me, besought me, to stay and see the great sight of Capt. Surtees Cook—plus his regimentals—fresh from the royal presence at St. James's, and I never saw him in my life, though he is a sort of cousin. So, though I hated it as you may think, ... not liking to be unkind to my sister, I stayed and stayed one ten minutes after another, till it seemed plain that he wasn't coming at all (as I told her) and that Victoria had kept him to dinner, enchanted with the regimentals. And half laughing and half quarrelling, still she kept me by force, until a knock came most significantly ... and 'There is Surtees' said she ... 'now you must and shall stay! So foolish,' (I had my hand on the door-handle to go out) 'he, your own cousin too! who always calls you Ba, except before Papa.' Which might have encouraged me perhaps, but I can't be sure of it, as the very next moment apprized us both that no less a person than Mrs. Jameson was standing out in the passage. The whole 36th. regiment could scarcely have been more astounding to me. As to staying to see her in that room, with the prospect of the military descent in combination, I couldn't have done it for the world! so I made Henrietta, who had drawn me into the scrape, take her up-stairs, and followed myself in a minute or two—and the corollary of this interesting history is, that being able to talk at all after all that 'fuss,' and after walking 'up-stairs and down-stairs' like the ancestor of your spider, proves my gigantic strength—now doesn't it?
For the rest, 'here be proofs' that the first person can be as foolish as any third person in the world. What do you think?
And Mrs. Jameson was kind beyond speaking of, and talked of taking me to Italy. What do you say? It is somewhere about the fifth or sixth proposition of the sort which has come to me. I shall be embarrassed, it seems to me, by the multitude of escorts to Italy. But the kindness, one cannot laugh at so much kindness.
I wanted to hear her speak of you, and was afraid. I could not name you. Yet I did want to hear the last 'Bell' praised.
She goes to Ireland for two months soon, but prints a book first, a collection of essays. I have not seen Mr. Kenyon, with whom she dined yesterday. The Macreadys were to be there, and he told me a week ago that he very nearly committed himself in a 'social mistake' by inviting you to meet them.
Ah my hawthorn spray! Do you know, I caught myself pitying it for being gathered, with that green promise of leaves on it! There is room too on it for the feet of a bird! Still I shall keep it longer than it would have stayed in the hedge, that is certain!
The first you ever gave me was a yellow rose sent in a letter, and shall I tell you what that means—the yellow rose? 'Infidelity,' says the dictionary of flowers. You see what an omen, ... to begin with!
Also you see that I am not tired with the great avatar to-day—the 'fell swoop' rather—mine, into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Jameson's on me.
And I shall hear to-morrow again, really? I 'let' you. And you are best, kindest, dearest, every day. Did I ever tell you that you made me do what you choose? I fancied that I only thought so. May God bless you. I am your own.
Shall I have the 'Soul's Tragedy' on Saturday?—any of it? But do not work—I beseech you to take care.
R.B. to E.B.B.
[Post-mark, February 27, 1846.]
To be sure my 'first person' was nonsensical, and, in that respect made speak properly, I hope, only he was cut short in the middle of his performance by the exigencies of the post. So, never mind what such persons say, my sweetest, because they know nothing at all—quod erat demonstrandum. But you, love, you speak roses, and hawthorn-blossoms when you tell me of the cloak put on, and the descent, and the entry, and staying and delaying. I will have had a hand in all that; I know what I wished all the morning, and now this much came true! But you should have seen the regimentals, if I could have so contrived it, for I confess to a Chinese love for bright red—the very names 'vermilion' 'scarlet' warm me, yet in this cold climate nobody wears red to comfort one's eye save soldiers and fox hunters, and old women fresh from a Parish Christmas Distribution of cloaks. To dress in floating loose crimson silk, I almost understand being a Cardinal! Do you know anything of Nat Lee's Tragedies? In one of them a man angry with a Cardinal cries—
Stand back, and let me mow this poppy down,
This rank red weed that spoils the Churches' corn.
Is not that good? and presently, when the same worthy is poisoned (that is the Cardinal)—they bid him—'now, Cardinal, lie down and roar!'
Think of thy scarlet sins!
Of the justice of all which, you will judge with no Mrs. Jameson for guide when we see the Sistina together, I trust! By the way, yesterday I went to Dulwich to see some pictures, by old Teniers, Murillo, Gainsborough, Raphael!—then twenty names about, and last but one, as if just thought of, 'Correggio.' The whole collection, including 'a divine picture by Murillo,' and Titian's Daughter (hitherto supposed to be in the Louvre)—the whole I would, I think, have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing—so execrable as sign-paintings even! 'Are there worse poets in their way than painters?' Yet the melancholy business is here—that the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards—but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities as these, and to what other good do his acquisitions go? This short minute of life our one chance, an eternity on either side! and a man does not walk whistling and ruddy by the side of hawthorn hedges in spring, but shuts himself up and conies out after a dozen years with 'Titian's Daughter' and, there, gone is his life, let somebody else try!
I have tried—my trial is made too!
To-morrow you shall tell me, dearest, that Mrs. Jameson wondered to see you so well—did she not wonder? Ah, to-morrow! There is a lesson from all this writing and mistaking and correcting and being corrected; and what, but that a word goes safely only from lip to lip, dearest? See how the cup slipped from the lip and snapped the chrystals, you say! But the writing is but for a time—'a time and times and half a time!'—would I knew when the prophetic weeks end! Still, one day, as I say, no more writing, (and great scandalization of the third person, peeping through the fringes of Flush's ears!) meanwhile, I wonder whether if I meet Mrs. Jameson I may practise diplomacy and say carelessly 'I should be glad to know what Miss B. is like—' No, that I must not do, something tells me, 'for reasons, for reasons'—
I do not know—you may perhaps have to wait a little longer for my 'divine Murillo' of a Tragedy. My sister is copying it as I give the pages, but—in fact my wise head does ache a little—it is inconceivable! As if it took a great storm to topple over some stone, and once the stone pushed from its right place, any bird's foot, which would hardly bend the hawthorn spray, may set it trembling! The aching begins with reading the presentation-list at the Drawing-room quite naturally, and with no shame at all! But it is gentle, well-behaved aching now, so I do care, as you bid me, Ba, my Ba, whom I call Ba to my heart but could not, I really believe, call so before another, even your sister, if—if—
But Ba, I call you boldly here, and I dare kiss your dear, dear eyes, till to-morrow—Bless you, my own.
E.B.B. to R.B.
Sunday.
[Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]
You never could think that I meant any insinuation against you by a word of what was said yesterday, or that I sought or am likely to seek a 'security'! do you know it was not right of you to use such an expression—indeed no. You were angry with me for just one minute, or you would not have used it—and why? Now what did I say that was wrong or unkind even by construction? If I did say anything, it was three times wrong, and unjust as well as unkind, and wronged my own heart and consciousness of all that you are to me, more than it could you. But you began speaking of yourself just as a woman might speak under the same circumstances (you remember what you said), and then I, remembering that all the men in the world would laugh such an idea to scorn, said something to that effect, you know. I once was in company with a man, however, who valued himself very much on his constancy to a woman who was so deeply affected by it that she became his wife at last ... and the whole neighbourhood came out to stare at him on that ground as a sort of monster. And can you guess what the constancy meant? Seven years before, he loved that woman, he said, and she repulsed him. 'And in the meantime, how many?' I had the impertinence to ask a female friend who told me the tale. 'Why,' she answered with the utmost simplicity, 'I understand that Miss A. and Miss B. and Mrs. C. would not listen to him, but he took Miss D.'s rejection most to heart.' That was the head and front of his 'constancy' to Miss E., who had been loved, she boasted, for seven years ... that is, once at the beginning and once at the end. It was just a coincidence of the 'premier pas' and the 'pis aller.'
Beloved, I could not mean this for you; you are not made of such stuff, as we both know.
And for myself, it was my compromise with my own scruples, that you should not be 'chained' to me, not in the merest metaphor, that you should not seem to be bound, in honour or otherwise, so that if you stayed with me it should be your free choice to stay, not the consequence of a choice so many months before. That was my compromise with my scruples, and not my doubt of your affection—and least of all, was it an intention of trifling with you sooner or later that made me wish to suspend all decisions as long as possible. I have decided (for me) to let it be as you shall please—now I told you that before. Either we will live on as we are, until an obstacle arises,—for indeed I do not look for a 'security' where you suppose, and the very appearance of it there, is what most rebuts me—or I will be yours in the obvious way, to go out of England the next half-hour if possible. As to the steps to be taken (or not taken) before the last step, we must think of those. The worst is that the only question is about a form. Virtually the evil is the same all round, whatever we do. Dearest, it was plain to see yesterday evening when he came into this room for a moment at seven o'clock, before going to his own to dress for dinner ... plain to see, that he was not altogether pleased at finding you here in the morning. There was no pretext for objecting gravely—but it was plain that he was not pleased. Do not let this make you uncomfortable, he will forget all about it, and I was not scolded, do you understand. It was more manner, but my sisters thought as I did of the significance:—and it was enough to prove to me (if I had not known) what a desperate game we should be playing if we depended on a yielding nerve there.
And to-day I went down-stairs (to prove how my promises stand) though I could find at least ten good excuses for remaining in my own room, for our cousin, Sam Barrett, who brought the interruption yesterday and put me out of humour (it wasn't the fault of the dear little cousin, Lizzie ... my 'portrait' ... who was 'so sorry,' she said, dear child, to have missed Papa somewhere on the stairs!) the cousin who should have been in Brittany yesterday instead of here, sate in the drawing-room all this morning, and had visitors there, and so I had excellent excuses for never moving from my chair. Yet, the field being clear at half-past two! I went for half an hour, just—just for you. Did you think of me, I wonder? It was to meet your thoughts that I went, dear dearest.
How clever these sketches are. The expression produced by such apparently inadequate means is quite striking; and I have been making my brothers admire them, and they 'wonder you don't think of employing them in an illustrated edition of your works.' Which might be, really! Ah, you did not ask for 'Luria'! Not that I should have let you have it!—I think I should not indeed. Dearest, you take care of the head ... and don't make that tragedy of the soul one for mine, by letting it make you ill. Beware too of the shower-bath—it plainly does not answer for you at this season. And walk, and think of me for your good, if such a combination should be possible.
And I think of you ... if I do not of Italy. Yet I forget to speak to you of the Dulwich Gallery. I never saw those pictures, but am astonished that the whole world should be wrong in praising them. 'Divine' is a bad word for Murillo in any case—because he is intensely human in his most supernatural subjects. His beautiful Trinity in the National Gallery, which I saw the last time I went out to look at pictures, has no deity in it—and I seem to see it now. And do you remember the visitation of the angels to Abraham (the Duke of Sutherland's picture—is it not?) where the mystic visitors look like shepherds who had not even dreamt of God? But I always understood that that Dulwich Gallery was famous for great works—you surprise me! And for painters ... their badness is more ostentatious than that of poets—they stare idiocy out of the walls, and set the eyes of sensitive men on edge. For the rest, however, I very much doubt whether they wear their lives more to rags, than writers who mistake their vocation in poetry do. There is a mechanism in poetry as in the other art—and, to men not native to the way of it, it runs hard and heavily. The 'cudgelling of the brain' is as good labour as the grinding of the colours, ... do you not think?
If ever I am in the Sistine Chapel, it will not be with Mrs. Jameson—no. If ever I should be there, what teaching I shall want, I who have seen so few pictures, and love them only as children do, with an unlearned love, just for the sake of the thoughts they bring. Wonderfully ignorant I am, to have had eyes and ears so long! There is music, now, which lifts the hair on my head, I feel it so much, ... yet all I know of it as art, all I have heard of the works of the masters in it, has been the mere sign and suggestion, such as the private piano may give. I never heard an oratorio, for instance, in my life—judge by that! It is a guess, I make, at all the greatness and divinity ... feeling in it, though, distinctly and certainly, that a composer like Beethoven must stand above the divinest painter in soul-godhead, and nearest to the true poet, of all artists. And this I felt in my guess, long before I knew you. But observe how, if I had died in this illness, I should have left a sealed world behind me! you, unknown too—unguessed at, you, ... in many respects, wonderfully unguessed at! Lately I have learnt to despise my own instincts. And apart from those—and you, ... it was right for me to be melancholy, in the consciousness of passing blindfolded under all the world-stars, and of going out into another side of the creation, with a blank for the experience of this ... the last revelation, unread! How the thought of it used to depress me sometimes!
Talking of music, I had a proposition the other day from certain of Mr. Russell's (the singer's) friends, about his setting to music my 'Cry of the Children.' His programme exhibits all the horrors of the world, I see! Lifeboats ... madhouses ... gamblers' wives ... all done to the right sort of moaning. His audiences must go home delightfully miserable, I should fancy. He has set the 'Song of the Shirt' ... and my 'Cry of the Children' will be acceptable, it is supposed, as a climax of agony. Do you know this Mr. Russell, and what sort of music he suits to his melancholy? But to turn my 'Cry' to a 'Song,' a burden, it is said, is required—he can't sing it without a burden! and behold what has been sent 'for my approval'.... I shall copy it verbatim for you....
And the threads twirl, twirl, twirl,
Before each boy and girl;
And the wheels, big and little, still whirl, whirl, whirl.
... accompaniment agitato, imitating the roar of the machinery!
This is not endurable ... ought not to be ... should it now? Do tell me.
May God bless you, very dearest! Let me hear how you are—and think how I am
Your own....
R.B. to E.B.B.
[Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]
Dearest, I have been kept in town and just return in time to say why you have no note ... to-morrow I will write ... so much there is to say on the subject of this letter I find.
Bless you, all beloved—
R.B.
Oh, do not sleep another night on that horrible error I have led you into! The 'Dulwich Gallery'!—!!!—oh, no. Only some pictures to be sold at the Greyhound Inn, Dulwich—'the genuine property of a gentleman deceased.'
R.B. to E.B.B.
Sunday Evening.
[Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]
One or two words, if no more, I must write to dearest Ba, the night would go down in double blackness if I had neither written nor been written to! So here is another piece of 'kindness' on my part, such as I have received praise for of late! My own sweetest, there is just this good in such praise, that by it one comes to something pleasantly definite amid the hazy uncertainties of mere wishes and possibilities—while my whole heart does, does so yearn, love, to do something to prove its devotion for you; and, now and then, amuses itself with foolish imaginings of real substantial services to which it should be found equal if fortune so granted; suddenly you interpose with thanks, in such terms as would all too much reward the highest of even those services which are never to be; and for what?—for a note, a going to Town, a ——! Well, there are definite beginnings certainly, if you will recognise them—I mean, that since you do accept, far from 'despising this day of small things,' then I may take heart, and be sure that even though none of the great achievements should fall to my happy chance, still the barrenest, flattest life will—must of needs produce in its season better fruits than these poor ones—I keep it, value it, now, that it may produce such.
Also I determine never again to 'analyse,' nor let you analyse if the sweet mouth can be anyway stopped: the love shall be one and indivisible—and the Loves we used to know from
One another huddled lie ...
Close beside Her tenderly—
(which is surely the next line). Now am I not anxious to know what your father said? And if anybody else said or wondered ... how hould I know? Of all fighting—the warfare with shadows—what a work is there. But tell me,—and, with you for me—
Bless me dearest ever, as the face above mine blesses me—
Your own
Sir Moses set off this morning, I hear—somebody yesterday called the telescope an 'optical delusion,' anticipating many more of the kind! So much for this 'wandering Jew.'
E.B.B. to R.B.
Monday Evening.
[Post-mark, March 3, 1846.]
Upon the whole, I think, I am glad when you are kept in town and prevented from writing what you call 'much' to me. Because in the first place, the little from you, is always much to me—and then, besides, the letter comes, and with it the promise of another! Two letters have I had from you to-day, ever dearest! How I thank you!—yes, indeed! It was like yourself to write yesterday ... to remember what a great gap there would have been otherwise, as it looked on this side—here. The worst of Saturday is (when you come on it) that Sunday follows—Saturday night bringing no letter. Well, it was very good of you, best of you!
For the 'analyzing' I give it up willingly, only that I must say what altogether I forgot to say in my last letter, that it was not I, if you please, who spoke of the chrystals breaking away! And you, to quote me with that certainty! "The chrystals are broken off," you say.' I say!! When it was in your letter, and not at all in mine!!
The truth is that I was stupid, rather, about the Dulwich collection—it was my fault. I caught up the idea of the gallery out of a heap of other thoughts, and really might have known better if I had given myself a chance, by considering.
Mr. Kenyon came to-day, and has taken out a licence, it seems to me, for praising you, for he praised and praised. Somebody has told him (who had spent several days with you in a house with a large library) that he came away 'quite astounded by the versatility of your learning'—and that, to complete the circle, you discoursed as scientifically on the training of greyhounds and breeding of ducks as if you had never done anything else all your life. Then dear Mr. Kenyon talked of the poems; and hoped, very earnestly I am sure, that you would finish 'Saul'—which you ought to do, must do—only not now. By the way Mrs. Coleridge had written to him to enquire whether you had authority for the 'blue lilies,' rather than white. Then he asked about 'Luria' and 'whether it was obscure'; and I said, not unless the people, who considered it, began by blindfolding themselves.
And where do you think Mr. Kenyon talks of going next February—a long while off to be sure? To Italy of course. Everybody I ever heard of seems to be going to Italy next winter. He visits his brother at Vienna, and 'may cross the Alps and get to Pisa'—it is the shadow of a scheme—nothing certain, so far.
I did not go down-stairs to-day because the wind blew and the thermometer fell. To-morrow, perhaps I may. And you, dearest dearest, might have put into the letters how you were when you wrote them. You might—but you did not feel well and would not say so. Confess that that was the reason. Reason or no reason, mention yourself to-morrow, and for the rest, do not write a long letter so as to increase the evil. There was nothing which I can remember as requiring an answer in what I wrote to you, and though I will have my letter of course, it shall be as brief as possible, if briefness is good for you—now always remember that. Why if I, who talk against 'Luria,' should work the mischief myself, what should I deserve? I should be my own jury directly and not recommend to mercy ... not to mine. Do take care—care for me just so much.
And, except that taking care of your health, what would you do for me that you have not done? You have given me the best of the possible gifts of one human soul to another, you have made my life new, and am I to count these things as small and insufficient? Ah, you know, you know that I cannot, ought not, will not.
May God bless you. He blesses me in letting me be grateful to you as your Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Tuesday.
[Post-mark, March 3, 1846.]
First and most important of all,—dearest, 'angry'—with you, and for that! It is just as if I had spoken contemptuously of that Gallery I so love and so am grateful to—having been used to go there when a child, far under the age allowed by the regulations—those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob's vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music-lesson group, all the Poussins with the 'Armida' and 'Jupiter's nursing'—and—no end to 'ands'—I have sate before one, some one of those pictures I had predetermined to see, a good hour and then gone away ... it used to be a green half-hour's walk over the fields. So much for one error, now for the second like unto it; what I meant by charging you with seeing, (not, not 'looking for')—seeing undue 'security' in that, in the form,—I meant to say 'you talk about me being 'free' now, free till then, and I am rather jealous of the potency attributed to the form, with all its solemnity, because it is a form, and no more—yet you frankly agree with me that that form complied with, there is no redemption; yours I am then sure enough, to repent at leisure &c. &c.' So I meant to ask, 'then, all now said, all short of that particular form of saying it, all goes for comparatively nothing'? Here it is written down—you 'wish to suspend all decisions as long as possible'—that form effects the decision, then,—till then, 'where am I'? Which is just what Lord Chesterfield cautions people against asking when they tell stories. Love, Ba, my own heart's dearest, if all is not decided now—why—hear a story, à propos of storytelling, and deduce what is deducible. A very old Unitarian minister met a still older evangelical brother—John Clayton (from whose son's mouth I heard what you shall hear)—the two fell to argument about the true faith to be held—after words enough, 'Well,' said the Unitarian, as winding up the controversy with an amicable smile—'at least let us hope we are both engaged in the pursuit of Truth!'—'Pursuit do you say?' cried the other, 'here am I with my years eighty and odd—if I haven't found Truth by this time where is my chance, pray?' My own Ba, if I have not already decided, alas for me and the solemn words that are to help! Though in another point of view there would be some luxurious feeling, beyond the ordinary, in knowing one was kept safe to one's heart's good by yet another wall than the hitherto recognised ones. Is there any parallel in the notion I once heard a man deliver himself of in the street—a labourer talking with his friends about 'wishes'—and this one wished, if he might get his wish, 'to have a nine gallon cask of strong ale set running that minute and his own mouth to be tied under it'—the exquisiteness of the delight was to be in the security upon security,—the being 'tied.' Now, Ba says I shall not be 'chained' if she can help!
But now—here all the jesting goes. You tell me what was observed in the 'moment's' visit; by you, and (after, I suppose) by your sisters. First, I will always see with your eyes there—next, what I see I will never speak, if it pain you; but just this much truth I ought to say, I think. I always give myself to you for the worst I am,—full of faults as you will find, if you have not found them. But I will not affect to be so bad, so wicked, as I count wickedness, as to call that conduct other than intolerable—there, in my conviction of that, is your real 'security' and mine for the future as the present. That a father choosing to give out of his whole day some five minutes to a daughter, supposed to be prevented from participating in what he, probably, in common with the whole world of sensible men, as distinguished from poets and dreamers, consider every pleasure of life, by a complete foregoing of society—that he, after the Pisa business and the enforced continuance, and as he must believe, permanence of this state in which any other human being would go mad—I do dare say, for the justification of God, who gave the mind to be used in this world,—where it saves us, we are taught, or destroys us,—and not to be sunk quietly, overlooked, and forgotten; that, under these circumstances, finding ... what, you say, unless he thinks he does find, he would close the door of his house instantly; a mere sympathizing man, of the same literary tastes, who comes good-naturedly, on a proper and unexceptionable introduction, to chat with and amuse a little that invalid daughter, once a month, so far as is known, for an hour perhaps,—that such a father should show himself 'not pleased plainly,' at such a circumstance ... my Ba, it is shocking! See, I go wholly on the supposition that the real relation is not imagined to exist between us. I so completely could understand a repugnance to trust you to me were the truth known, that, I will confess, I have several times been afraid the very reverse of this occurrence would befall; that your father would have at some time or other thought himself obliged, by the usual feeling of people in such cases, to see me for a few minutes and express some commonplace thanks after the customary mode (just as Capt. Domett sent a heap of unnecessary thanks to me not long ago for sending now a letter now a book to his son in New Zealand—keeping up the spirits of poor dear Alfred now he is cut off from the world at large)—and if this had been done, I shall not deny that my heart would have accused me—unreasonably I know but still, suppression, and reserve, and apprehension—the whole of that is horrible always! But this way of looking on the endeavour of anybody, however humble, to just preserve your life, remedy in some degree the first, if it was the first, unjustifiable measure,—this being 'displeased'—is exactly what I did not calculate upon. Observe, that in this only instance I am able to do as I shall be done by; to take up the arms furnished by the world, the usages of society—this is monstrous on the world's showing! I say this now that I may never need recur to it—that you may understand why I keep such entire silence henceforth.
Get but well, keep but as well, and all is easy now. This wonderful winter—the spring—the summer—you will take exercise, go up and down stairs, get strong. I pray you, at your feet, to do this, dearest! Then comes Autumn, with the natural expectations, as after rouge one expects noir: the likelihood of a severe winter after this mild one, which to prevent, you reiterate your demand to go and save your life in Italy, ought you not to do that? And the matters brought to issue, (with even, if possible, less shadow of ground for a refusal than before, if you are well, plainly well enough to bear the voyage) there I will bid you 'be mine in the obvious way'—if you shall preserve your belief in me—and you may in much, in all important to you. Mr. Kenyon's praise is undeserved enough, but yesterday Milnes said I was the only literary man he ever knew, tenax propositi, able to make out a life for himself and abide in it—'for,' he went on, 'you really do live without any of this titillation and fussy dependence upon adventitious excitement of all kinds, they all say they can do without.' That is more true—and I intend by God's help to live wholly for you; to spend my whole energies in reducing to practice the feeling which occupies me, and in the practical operation of which, the other work I had proposed to do will be found included, facilitated—I shall be able—but of this there is plenty time to speak hereafter—I shall, I believe, be able to do this without even allowing the world to very much misinterpret—against pure lying there is no defence, but all up to that I hope to hinder or render unimportant—as you shall know in time and place.
I have written myself grave, but write to me, dear, dearest, and I will answer in a lighter mood—even now I can say how it was yesterday's hurry happened. I called on Milnes—who told me Hanmer had broken a bone in his leg and was laid up, so I called on him too—on Moxon, by the way, (his brother telling me strangely cheering news, from the grimmest of faces, about my books selling and likely to sell ... your wishes, Ba!)—then in Bond Street about some business with somebody, then on Mrs. Montagu who was out walking all the time, and home too. I found a letter from Mr. Kenyon, perfectly kind, asking me to go on Monday to meet friends, and with yours to-day comes another confirming the choice of the day. How entirely kind he is!
I am very well, much better, indeed—taking that bath with sensibly good effect, to-night I go to Montagu's again; for shame, having kept away too long.
And the rest shall answer yours—dear! Not 'much to answer?' And Beethoven, and Painting and—what is the rest and shall be answered! Bless you, now, my darling—I love you, ever shall love you, ever be your own.