Have I your meaning here? In so many words, is it on my account that you bid me ‘leave this subject’? I think if it were so, I would for once call my advantages round me. I am not what your generous self-forgetting appreciation would sometimes make me out — but it is not since yesterday, nor ten nor twenty years before, that I began to look into my own life, and study its end, and requirements, what would turn to its good or its loss — and I know, if one may know anything, that to make that life yours and increase it by union with yours, would render me supremely happy, as I said, and say, and feel. My whole suit to you is, in that sense, selfish — not that I am ignorant that your nature would most surely attain happiness in being conscious that it made another happy — but that best, best end of all, would, like the rest, come from yourself, be a reflection of your own gift.
Dearest, I will end here — words, persuasion, arguments, if they were at my service I would not use them — I believe in you, altogether have faith in you — in you. I will not think of insulting by trying to reassure you on one point which certain phrases in your letter might at first glance seem to imply — you do not understand me to be living and labouring and writing (and not writing) in order to be successful in the world’s sense? I even convinced the people here what was my true ‘honourable position in society,’ &c. &c. therefore I shall not have to inform you that I desire to be very rich, very great; but not in reading Law gratis with dear foolish old Basil Montagu, as he ever and anon bothers me to do; — much less — enough of this nonsense.
‘Tell me what I have a claim to hear’: I can hear it, and be as grateful as I was before and am now — your friendship is my pride and happiness. If you told me your love was bestowed elsewhere, and that it was in my power to serve you there, to serve you there would still be my pride and happiness. I look on and on over the prospect of my love, it is all onwards — and all possible forms of unkindness ... I quite laugh to think how they are behind ... cannot be encountered in the route we are travelling! I submit to you and will obey you implicitly — obey what I am able to conceive of your least desire, much more of your expressed wish. But it was necessary to make this avowal, among other reasons, for one which the world would recognize too. My whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated — and it supposed you, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible — because in calculating one goes upon chances, not on providence — how could I expect you? So for my own future way in the world I have always refused to care — any one who can live a couple of years and more on bread and potatoes as I did once on a time, and who prefers a blouse and a blue shirt (such as I now write in) to all manner of dress and gentlemanly appointment, and who can, if necessary, groom a horse not so badly, or at all events would rather do it all day long than succeed Mr. Fitzroy Kelly in the Solicitor-Generalship, — such an one need not very much concern himself beyond considering the lilies how they grow. But now I see you near this life, all changes — and at a word, I will do all that ought to be done, that every one used to say could be done, and let ‘all my powers find sweet employ’ as Dr. Watts sings, in getting whatever is to be got — not very much, surely. I would print these things, get them away, and do this now, and go to you at Pisa with the news — at Pisa where one may live for some £100 a year — while, lo, I seem to remember, I do remember, that Charles Kean offered to give me 500 of those pounds for any play that might suit him — to say nothing of Mr. Colburn saying confidentially that he wanted more than his dinner ‘a novel on the subject of Napoleon’! So may one make money, if one does not live in a house in a row, and feel impelled to take the Princess’s Theatre for a laudable development and exhibition of one’s faculty.
Take the sense of all this, I beseech you, dearest — all you shall say will be best — I am yours —
Yes, Yours ever. God bless you for all you have been, and are, and will certainly be to me, come what He shall please!
R.B.
E.B.B. to R.B.
[Post-mark, September 16, 1845.]
I scarcely know how to write what is to be written nor indeed why it is to be written and to what end. I have tried in vain — and you are waiting to hear from me. I am unhappy enough even where I am happy — but ungrateful nowhere — and I thank you from my heart — profoundly from the depths of my heart ... which is nearly all I can do.
One letter I began to write and asked in it how it could become me to speak at all if ‘from the beginning and at this moment you never dreamed of’ ... and there, I stopped and tore the paper; because I felt that you were too loyal and generous, for me to bear to take a moment’s advantage of the same, and bend down the very flowering branch of your generosity (as it might be) to thicken a little the fence of a woman’s caution and reserve. You will not say that you have not acted as if you ‘dreamed’ — and I will answer therefore to the general sense of your letter and former letters, and admit at once that I did state to you the difficulties most difficult to myself ... though not all ... and that if I had been worthier of you I should have been proportionably less in haste to ‘bid you leave that subject.’ I do not understand how you can seem at the same moment to have faith in my integrity and to have doubt whether all this time I may not have felt a preference for another ... which you are ready ‘to serve,’ you say. Which is generous in you — but in me, where were the integrity? Could you really hold me to be blameless, and do you think that truehearted women act usually so? Can it be necessary for me to tell you that I could not have acted so, and did not? And shall I shrink from telling you besides ... you, who have been generous to me and have a right to hear it ... and have spoken to me in the name of an affection and memory most precious and holy to me, in this same letter ... that neither now nor formerly has any man been to my feelings what you are ... and that if I were different in some respects and free in others by the providence of God, I would accept the great trust of your happiness, gladly, proudly, and gratefully; and give away my own life and soul to that end. I would do it ... not, I do ... observe! it is a truth without a consequence; only meaning that I am not all stone — only proving that I am not likely to consent to help you in wrong against yourself. You see in me what is not: — that, I know: and you overlook in me what is unsuitable to you ... that I know, and have sometimes told you. Still, because a strong feeling from some sources is self-vindicating and ennobling to the object of it, I will not say that, if it were proved to me that you felt this for me, I would persist in putting the sense of my own unworthiness between you and me — not being heroic, you know, nor pretending to be so. But something worse than even a sense of unworthiness, God has put between us! and judge yourself if to beat your thoughts against the immovable marble of it, can be anything but pain and vexation of spirit, waste and wear of spirit to you ... judge! The present is here to be seen ... speaking for itself! and the best future you can imagine for me, what a precarious thing it must be ... a thing for making burdens out of ... only not for your carrying, as I have vowed to my own soul. As dear Mr. Kenyon said to me to-day in his smiling kindness ... ‘In ten years you may be strong perhaps’ — or ‘almost strong’! that being the encouragement of my best friends! What would he say, do you think, if he could know or guess...! what could he say but that you were ... a poet! — and I ... still worse! Never let him know or guess!
And so if you are wise and would be happy (and you have excellent practical sense after all and should exercise it) you must leave me — these thoughts of me, I mean ... for if we might not be true friends for ever, I should have less courage to say the other truth. But we may be friends always ... and cannot be so separated, that your happiness, in the knowledge of it, will not increase mine. And if you will be persuaded by me, as you say, you will be persuaded thus ... and consent to take a resolution and force your mind at once into another channel. Perhaps I might bring you reasons of the class which you tell me ‘would silence you for ever.’ I might certainly tell you that my own fath
er, if he knew that you had written to me so, and that I had answered you — so, even, would not forgive me at the end of ten years — and this, from none of the causes mentioned by me here and in no disrespect to your name and your position ... though he does not over-value poetry even in his daughter, and is apt to take the world’s measures of the means of life ... but for the singular reason that he never does tolerate in his family (sons or daughters) the development of one class of feelings. Such an objection I could not bring to you of my own will — it rang hollow in my ears — perhaps I thought even too little of it: — and I brought to you what I thought much of, and cannot cease to think much of equally. Worldly thoughts, these are not at all, nor have been: there need be no soiling of the heart with any such: — and I will say, in reply to some words of yours, that you cannot despise the gold and gauds of the world more than I do, and should do even if I found a use for them. And if I wished to be very poor, in the world’s sense of poverty, I could not, with three or four hundred a year of which no living will can dispossess me. And is it not the chief good of money, the being free from the need of thinking of it? It seems so to me.
The obstacles then are of another character, and the stronger for being so. Believe that I am grateful to you — how grateful, cannot be shown in words nor even in tears ... grateful enough to be truthful in all ways. You know I might have hidden myself from you — but I would not: and by the truth told of myself, you may believe in the earnestness with which I tell the other truths — of you ... and of this subject. The subject will not bear consideration — it breaks in our hands. But that God is stronger than we, cannot be a bitter thought to you but a holy thought ... while He lets me, as much as I can be anyone’s, be only yours.
E.B.B.
R.B. to E.B.B.
[Post-mark, September 17, 1845.]
I do not know whether you imagine the precise effect of your letter on me — very likely you do, and write it just for that — for I conceive all from your goodness. But before I tell you what is that effect, let me say in as few words as possible what shall stop any fear — though only for a moment and on the outset — that you have been misunderstood, that the goodness outside, and round and over all, hides all or any thing. I understand you to signify to me that you see, at this present, insurmountable obstacles to that — can I speak it — entire gift, which I shall own, was, while I dared ask it, above my hopes — and wishes, even, so it seems to me ... and yet could not but be asked, so plainly was it dictated to me, by something quite out of those hopes and wishes. Will it help me to say that once in this Aladdin-cavern I knew I ought to stop for no heaps of jewel-fruit on the trees from the very beginning, but go on to the lamp, the prize, the last and best of all? Well, I understand you to pronounce that at present you believe this gift impossible — and I acquiesce entirely — I submit wholly to you; repose on you in all the faith of which I am capable. Those obstacles are solely for you to see and to declare ... had I seen them, be sure I should never have mocked you or myself by affecting to pass them over ... what were obstacles, I mean: but you do see them, I must think, — and perhaps they strike me the more from my true, honest unfeigned inability to imagine what they are, — not that I shall endeavour. After what you also apprise me of, I know and am joyfully confident that if ever they cease to be what you now consider them, you who see now for me, whom I implicitly trust in to see for me; you will then, too, see and remember me, and how I trust, and shall then be still trusting. And until you so see, and so inform me, I shall never utter a word — for that would involve the vilest of implications. I thank God — I do thank him, that in this whole matter I have been, to the utmost of my power, not unworthy of his introducing you to me, in this respect that, being no longer in the first freshness of life, and having for many years now made up my mind to the impossibility of loving any woman ... having wondered at this in the beginning, and fought not a little against it, having acquiesced in it at last, and accounted for it all to myself, and become, if anything, rather proud of it than sorry ... I say, when real love, making itself at once recognized as such, did reveal itself to me at last, I did open my heart to it with a cry — nor care for its overturning all my theory — nor mistrust its effect upon a mind set in ultimate order, so I fancied, for the few years more — nor apprehend in the least that the new element would harm what was already organized without its help. Nor have I, either, been guilty of the more pardonable folly, of treating the new feeling after the pedantic fashions and instances of the world. I have not spoken when it did not speak, because ‘one’ might speak, or has spoken, or should speak, and ‘plead’ and all that miserable work which, after all, I may well continue proud that I am not called to attempt. Here for instance, now ... ‘one’ should despair; but ‘try again’ first, and work blindly at removing those obstacles ( — if I saw them, I should be silent, and only speak when a month hence, ten years hence, I could bid you look where they were) — and ‘one’ would do all this, not for the play-acting’s sake, or to ‘look the character’ ... (that would be something quite different from folly ...) but from a not unreasonable anxiety lest by too sudden a silence, too complete an acceptance of your will; the earnestness and endurance and unabatedness ... the truth, in fact, of what had already been professed, should get to be questioned — But I believe that you believe me — And now that all is clear between us I will say, what you will hear, without fearing for me or yourself, that I am utterly contented ... (‘grateful’ I have done with ... it must go — ) I accept what you give me, what those words deliver to me, as — not all I asked for ... as I said ... but as more than I ever hoped for, — all, in the best sense, that I deserve. That phrase in my letter which you objected to, and the other — may stand, too — I never attempted to declare, describe my feeling for you — one word of course stood for it all ... but having to put down some one point, so to speak, of it — you could not wonder if I took any extreme one first ... never minding all the untold portion that led up to it, made it possible and natural — it is true, ‘I could not dream of that’ — that I was eager to get the horrible notion away from never so flitting a visit to you, that you were thus and thus to me on condition of my proving just the same to you — just as if we had waited to acknowledge that the moon lighted us till we ascertained within these two or three hundred years that the earth happens to light the moon as well! But I felt that, and so said it: — now you have declared what I should never have presumed to hope — and I repeat to you that I, with all to be thankful for to God, am most of all thankful for this the last of his providences ... which is no doubt, the natural and inevitable feeling, could one always see clearly. Your regard for me is all success — let the rest come, or not come. In my heart’s thankfulness I would ... I am sure I would promise anything that would gratify you ... but it would not do that, to agree, in words, to change my affections, put them elsewhere &c. &c. That would be pure foolish talking, and quite foreign to the practical results which you will attain in a better way from a higher motive. I will cheerfully promise you, however, to be ‘bound by no words,’ blind to no miracle; in sober earnest, it is not because I renounced once for all oxen and the owning and having to do with them, that I will obstinately turn away from any unicorn when such an apparition blesses me ... but meantime I shall walk at peace on our hills here nor go looking in all corners for the bright curved horn! And as for you ... if I did not dare ‘to dream of that’ — , now it is mine, my pride and joy prevent in no manner my taking the whole consolation of it at once, now — I will be confident that, if I obey you, I shall get no wrong for it — if, endeavouring to spare you fruitless pain, I do not eternally revert to the subject; do indeed ‘quit’ it just now, when no good can come of dwelling on it to you; you will never say to yourself — so I said — ’the “generous impulse” has worn itself out ... time is doing his usual work — this was to be expected’ &c. &c. You will be the first to say to me ‘such an obstacle has ceased to exist ... or is now become one palpable
to you, one you may try and overcome’ — and I shall be there, and ready — ten years hence as now — if alive.
One final word on the other matters — the ‘worldly matters’ — I shall own I alluded to them rather ostentatiously, because — because that would be the one poor sacrifice I could make you — one I would cheerfully make, but a sacrifice, and the only one: this careless ‘sweet habitude of living’ — this absolute independence of mine, which, if I had it not, my heart would starve and die for, I feel, and which I have fought so many good battles to preserve — for that has happened, too — this light rational life I lead, and know so well that I lead; this I could give up for nothing less than — what you know — but I would give it up, not for you merely, but for those whose disappointment might re-act on you — and I should break no promise to myself — the money getting would not be for the sake of it; ‘the labour not for that which is nought’ — indeed the necessity of doing this, if at all, now, was one of the reasons which make me go on to that last request of all — at once; one must not be too old, they say, to begin their ways. But, in spite of all the babble, I feel sure that whenever I make up my mind to that, I can be rich enough and to spare — because along with what you have thought genius in me, is certainly talent, what the world recognizes as such; and I have tried it in various ways, just to be sure that I was a little magnanimous in never intending to use it. Thus, in more than one of the reviews and newspapers that laughed my ‘Paracelsus’ to scorn ten years ago — in the same column, often, of these reviews, would follow a most laudatory notice of an Elementary French book, on a new plan, which I ‘did’ for my old French master, and he published — ’that was really an useful work’! — So that when the only obstacle is only that there is so much per annum to be producible, you will tell me. After all it would be unfair in me not to confess that this was always intended to be my own single stipulation — ’an objection’ which I could see, certainly, — but meant to treat myself to the little luxury of removing.
Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series Page 328