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 —
Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series Page 359