Monday — last night when I could do nothing else I began to write to you, such writing as you have seen — strange! The proper time and season for good sound sensible and profitable forms of speech — when ought it to have occurred, and how did I evade it in these letters of mine? For people begin with a graceful skittish levity, lest you should be struck all of a heap with what is to come, and that is sure to be the stuff and staple of the man, full of wisdom and sorrow, — and then again comes the fringe of reeds and pink little stones on the other side, that you may put foot on land, and draw breath, and think what a deep pond you have swum across. But you are the real deep wonder of a creature, — and I sail these paper-boats on you rather impudently. But I always mean to be very grave one day, — when I am in better spirits and can go fuori di me.
And one thing I want to persuade you of, which is, that all you gain by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and have done rightly in trusting to your innate ideas — or not rightly in distrusting them, as the case may be. You get, too, a little ... perhaps a considerable, good, in finding the world’s accepted moulds everywhere, into which you may run and fix your own fused metal, — but not a grain Troy-weight do you get of new gold, silver or brass. After this, you go boldly on your own resources, and are justified to yourself, that’s all. Three scratches with a pen,14 even with this pen, — and you have the green little Syrenusa where I have sate and heard the quails sing. One of these days I shall describe a country I have seen in my soul only, fruits, flowers, birds and all.
Ever yours, dear Miss Barrett,
R. Browning.
E.B.B. to R.B.
Thursday Morning.
[Post-mark, April 18, 1845.]
If you did but know dear Mr. Browning how often I have written ... not this letter I am about to write, but another better letter to you, ... in the midst of my silence, ... you would not think for a moment that the east wind, with all the harm it does to me, is able to do the great harm of putting out the light of the thought of you to my mind; for this, indeed, it has no power to do. I had the pen in my hand once to write; and why it fell out, I cannot tell you. And you see, ... all your writing will not change the wind! You wished all manner of good to me one day as the clock struck ten; yes, and I assure you I was better that day — and I must not forget to tell you so though it is so long since. And therefore, I was logically bound to believe that you had never thought of me since ... unless you thought east winds of me! That was quite clear; was it not? or would have been; if it had not been for the supernatural conviction, I had above all, of your kindness, which was too large to be taken in the hinge of a syllogism. In fact I have long left off thinking that logic proves anything — it doesn’t, you know.
But your Lamia has taught you some subtle ‘viperine’ reasoning and motiving, for the turning down one street instead of another. It was conclusive.
Ah — but you will never persuade me that I am the better, or as well, for the thing that I have not. We look from different points of view, and yours is the point of attainment. Not that you do not truly say that, when all is done, we must come home to place our engines, and act by our own strength. I do not want material as material; no one does — but every life requires a full experience, a various experience — and I have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage. Can you, speaking for yourself, separate the results in you from the external influences at work around you, that you say so boldly that you get nothing from the world? You do not directly, I know — but you do indirectly and by a rebound. Whatever acts upon you, becomes you — and whatever you love or hate, whatever charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you and becomes you. Have you read the ‘Improvisatore’? or will you? The writer seems to feel, just as I do, the good of the outward life; and he is a poet in his soul. It is a book full of beauty and had a great charm to me.
As to the Polkas and Cellariuses I do not covet them of course ... but what a strange world you seem to have, to me at a distance — what a strange husk of a world! How it looks to me like mandarin-life or something as remote; nay, not mandarin-life but mandarin manners, ... life, even the outer life, meaning something deeper, in my account of it. As to dear Mr. Kenyon I do not make the mistake of fancying that many can look like him or talk like him or be like him. I know enough to know otherwise. When he spoke of me he should have said that I was better notwithstanding the east wind. It is really true — I am getting slowly up from the prostration of the severe cold, and feel stronger in myself.
But Mrs. Norton discourses excellent music — and for the rest, there are fruits in the world so over-ripe, that they will fall, ... without being gathered. Let Maynooth witness to it! if you think it worth while!
Ever yours,
Elizabeth B. Barrett.
And is it nothing to be ‘justified to one’s self in one’s resources?’ ‘That’s all,’ indeed! For the ‘soul’s country’ we will have it also — and I know how well the birds sing in it. How glad I was by the way to see your letter!
R.B. to E.B.B.
Wednesday Morning.
[Post-mark, April 30, 1845.]
If you did but know, dear Miss Barrett, how the ‘full stop’ after ‘Morning’ just above, has turned out the fullest of stops, — and how for about a quarter of an hour since the ink dried I have been reasoning out the why and wherefore of the stopping, the wisdom of it, and the folly of it....
By this time you see what you have got in me — You ask me questions, ‘if I like novels,’ ‘if the “Improvisatore” is not good,’ ‘if travel and sightseeing do not effect this and that for one,’ and ‘what I am devising — play or poem,’ — and I shall not say I could not answer at all manner of lengths — but, let me only begin some good piece of writing of the kind, and ... no, you shall have it, have what I was going to tell you stops such judicious beginnings, — in a parallel case, out of which your ingenuity shall, please, pick the meaning — There is a story of D’Israeli’s, an old one, with an episode of strange interest, or so I found it years ago, — well, you go breathlessly on with the people of it, page after page, till at last the end must come, you feel — and the tangled threads draw to one, and an out-of-door feast in the woods helps you ... that is, helps them, the people, wonderfully on, — and, lo, dinner is done, and Vivian Grey is here, and Violet Fane there, — and a detachment of the party is drafted off to go catch butterflies, and only two or three stop behind. At this moment, Mr. Somebody, a good man and rather the lady’s uncle, ‘in answer to a question from Violet, drew from his pocket a small neatly written manuscript, and, seating himself on an inverted wine-cooler, proceeded to read the following brief remarks upon the characteristics of the Moeso-gothic literature’ — this ends the page, — which you don’t turn at once! But when you do, in bitterness of soul, turn it, you read — ’On consideration, I’ (Ben, himself) ‘shall keep them for Mr. Colburn’s New Magazine’ — and deeply you draw thankful breath! (Note this ‘parallel case’ of mine is pretty sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings — you will ask what it means — and this it means, or should mean, all of it, instance and reasoning and all, — that I am naturally earnest, in earnest about whatever thing I do, and little able to write about one thing while I think of another) —
I think I will really write verse to you some day — this day, it is quite clear I had better give up trying.
No, spite of all the lines in the world, I will make an end of it, as Ophelia with her swan’s-song, — for it grows too absurd. But remember that I write letters to nobody but you, and that I want method and much more. That book you like so, the Danish novel, must be full of truth and beauty, to judge from the few extracts I have seen in Reviews. That a Dane should write so, confirms me in an old belief — that Italy is stuff for the use of the North, and no more — pure Poetry there is none, nearly as possible none, in Dante even — material for Poetry in the pitifullest romancist of their thousands,
on the contrary — strange that those great wide black eyes should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them! Alfieri, with even grey eyes, and a life of travel, writes you some fifteen tragedies as colourless as salad grown under a garden glass with matting over it — as free, that is, from local colouring, touches of the soil they are said to spring from, — think of ‘Saulle,’ and his Greek attempts!
I expected to see Mr. Kenyon, at a place where I was last week, but he kept away. Here is the bad wind back again, and the black sky. I am sure I never knew till now whether the East or West or South were the quarter to pray for — But surely the weather was a little better last week, and you, were you not better? And do you know — but it’s all self-flattery I believe, — still I cannot help fancying the East wind does my head harm too!
Ever yours faithfully,
R. Browning.
MAY, 1845
E.B.B. to R.B.
Thursday.
[Post-mark, May 2, 1845.]
People say of you and of me, dear Mr. Browning, that we love the darkness and use a sphinxine idiom in our talk; and really you do talk a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from ‘Vivian Grey.’ Once I sate up all night to read ‘Vivian Grey’; but I never drew such an argument from him. Not that I give it up (nor you up) for a mere mystery. Nor that I can ‘see what you have got in you,’ from a mere guess. But just observe! If I ask questions about novels, is it not because I want to know how much elbow-room there may be for our sympathies ... and whether there is room for my loose sleeves, and the lace lappets, as well as for my elbows; and because I want to see you by the refracted lights as well as by the direct ones; and because I am willing for you to know me from the beginning, with all my weaknesses and foolishnesses, ... as they are accounted by people who say to me ‘no one would ever think, without knowing you, that you were so and so.’ Now if I send all my idle questions to Colburn’s Magazine, with other Gothic literature, and take to standing up in a perpendicular personality like the angel on the schoolman’s needle, in my letters to come, without further leaning to the left or the right — why the end would be that you would take to ‘running after the butterflies,’ for change of air and exercise. And then ... oh ... then, my ‘small neatly written manuscripts’ might fall back into my desk...! (Not a ‘full stop’!.)
Indeed ... I do assure you ... I never for a moment thought of ‘making conversation’ about the ‘Improvisatore’ or novels in general, when I wrote what I did to you. I might, to other persons ... perhaps. Certainly not to you. I was not dealing round from one pack of cards to you and to others. That’s what you meant to reproach me for you know, — and of that, I am not guilty at all. I never could think of ‘making conversation’ in a letter to you — never. Women are said to partake of the nature of children — and my brothers call me ‘absurdly childish’ sometimes: and I am capable of being childishly ‘in earnest’ about novels, and straws, and such ‘puppydogs’ tails’ as my Flush’s! Also I write more letters than you do, ... I write in fact almost as you pay visits, ... and one has to ‘make conversation’ in turn, of course. But — give me something to vow by — whatever you meant in the ‘Vivian Grey’ argument, you were wrong in it! and you never can be much more wrong — which is a comfortable reflection.
Yet you leap very high at Dante’s crown — or you do not leap, ... you simply extend your hand to it, and make a rustling among the laurel leaves, which is somewhat prophane. Dante’s poetry only materials for the northern rhymers! I must think of that ... if you please ... before I agree with you. Dante’s poetry seems to come down in hail, rather than in rain — but count me the drops congealed in one hailstone! Oh! the ‘Flight of the Duchess’ — do let us hear more of her! Are you (I wonder) ... not a ‘self-flatterer,’ ... but ... a flatterer.
Ever yours,
E.B.B.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Saturday Morning.
[Post-mark, May 3, 1845.]
Now shall you see what you shall see — here shall be ‘sound speech not to be reproved,’ — for this morning you are to know that the soul of me has it all her own way, dear Miss Barrett, this green cool nine-in-the-morning time for my chestnut tree over there, and for me who only coaxed my good-natured — (really) — body up, after its three-hours’ night-rest on condition it should lounge, or creep about, incognito and without consequences — and so it shall, all but my right-hand which is half-spirit and ‘cuts’ its poor relation, and passes itself off for somebody (that is, some soul) and is doubly active and ready on such occasions — Now I shall tell you all about it, first what last letter meant, and then more. You are to know, then that for some reason, that looked like an instinct, I thought I ought not to send shaft on shaft, letter-plague on letter, with such an uninterrupted clanging ... that I ought to wait, say a week at least having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs — but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, ... ωμοι, let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to) when I turned again you had grown formidable somehow — though that’s not the word, — nor are you the person, either, — it was my fortune, my privilege of being your friend this one way, that it seemed a shame for me to make no better use of than taking it up with talk about books and I don’t know what. Write what I will, you would read for once, I think — well, then, — what I shall write shall be — something on this book, and the other book, and my own books, and Mary Hewitt’s books, and at the end of it — good bye, and I hope here is a quarter of an hour rationally spent. So the thought of what I should find in my heart to say, and the contrast with what I suppose I ought to say ... all these things are against me. But this is very foolish, all the same, I need not be told — and is part and parcel of an older — indeed primitive body of mine, which I shall never wholly get rid of, of desiring to do nothing when I cannot do all; seeing nothing, getting, enjoying nothing, where there is no seeing and getting and enjoying wholly — and in this case, moreover, you are you, and know something about me, if not much, and have read Bos on the art of supplying Ellipses, and (after, particularly, I have confessed all this, why and how it has been) you will subaudire when I pull out my Mediæval-Gothic-Architectural-Manuscript (so it was, I remember now,) and instruct you about corbeils and ogives ... though, after all, it was none of Vivian’s doing, that, — all the uncle kind or man’s, which I never professed to be. Now you see how I came to say some nonsense (I very vaguely think what) about Dante — some desperate splash I know I made for the beginning of my picture, as when a painter at his wits’ end and hunger’s beginning says ‘Here shall the figure’s hand be’ — and spots that down, meaning to reach it naturally from the other end of his canvas, — and leaving off tired, there you see the spectral disjoined thing, and nothing between it and rationality. I intended to shade down and soften off and put in and leave out, and, before I had done, bring Italian Poets round to their old place again in my heart, giving new praise if I took old, — anyhow Dante is out of it all, as who knows but I, with all of him in my head and heart? But they do fret one, those tantalizing creatures, of fine passionate class, with such capabilities, and such a facility of being made pure mind of. And the special instance that vexed me, was that a man of sands and dog-roses and white rock and green sea-water just under, should come to Italy where my heart lives, and discover the sights and sounds ... certainly discover them. And so do all Northern writers; for take up handfuls of sonetti, rime, poemetti, doings of those who never did anything else, — and try and make out, for yourself, what ... say, what flowers they tread on, or trees they walk under, — as you might bid them, those tree and flower loving creatures, pick out of our North poetry a notion of what our daisies and harebells and furze bushes and brambles are — ’Odorosi fioretti, rose porporine, bianchissi
mi gigli.’ And which of you eternal triflers was it called yourself ‘Shelley’ and so told me years ago that in the mountains it was a feast
When one should find those globes of deep red gold —
Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,
Suspended in their emerald atmosphere.
so that when my Uncle walked into a sorb-tree, not to tumble sheer over Monte Calvano, and I felt the fruit against my face, the little ragged bare-legged guide fairly laughed at my knowing them so well — ’Niursi — sorbi!’ No, no, — does not all Naples-bay and half Sicily, shore and inland, come flocking once a year to the Piedigrotta fête only to see the blessed King’s Volanti, or livery servants all in their best; as though heaven opened; and would not I engage to bring the whole of the Piano (of Sorrento) in likeness to a red velvet dressing gown properly spangled over, before the priest that held it out on a pole had even begun his story of how Noah’s son Shem, the founder of Sorrento, threw it off to swim thither, as the world knows he did? Oh, it makes one’s soul angry, so enough of it. But never enough of telling you — bring all your sympathies, come with loosest sleeves and longest lace-lappets, and you and yours shall find ‘elbow room,’ oh, shall you not! For never did man, woman or child, Greek, Hebrew, or as Danish as our friend, like a thing, not to say love it, but I liked and loved it, one liking neutralizing the rebellious stir of its fellow, so that I don’t go about now wanting the fixed stars before my time; this world has not escaped me, thank God; and — what other people say is the best of it, may not escape me after all, though until so very lately I made up my mind to do without it; — perhaps, on that account, and to make fair amends to other people, who, I have no right to say, complain without cause. I have been surprised, rather, with something not unlike illness of late — I have had a constant pain in the head for these two months, which only very rough exercise gets rid of, and which stops my ‘Luria’ and much besides. I thought I never could be unwell. Just now all of it is gone, thanks to polking all night and walking home by broad daylight to the surprise of the thrushes in the bush here. And do you know I said ‘this must go, cannot mean to stay, so I will not tell Miss Barrett why this and this is not done,’ — but I mean to tell you all, or more of the truth, because you call me ‘flatterer,’ so that my eyes widened again! I, and in what? And of whom, pray? not of you, at all events, — of whom then? Do tell me, because I want to stand with you — and am quite in earnest there. And ‘The Flight of the Duchess,’ to leave nothing out, is only the beginning of a story written some time ago, and given to poor Hood in his emergency at a day’s notice, — the true stuff and story is all to come, the ‘Flight,’ and what you allude to is the mere introduction — but the Magazine has passed into other hands and I must put the rest in some ‘Bell’ or other — it is one of my Dramatic Romances. So is a certain ‘Saul’ I should like to show you one day — an ominous liking — for nobody ever sees what I do till it is printed. But as you do know the printed little part of me, I should not be sorry if, in justice, you knew all I have really done, — written in the portfolio there, — though that would be far enough from this me, that wishes to you now. I should like to write something in concert with you, how I would try!
Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series Page 313