Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  We are expecting a visit from Lamartine, who does a great deal of honour to both of us, it appears, in the way of appreciation, and is kind enough to propose to come. I will tell you all about it.

  But now tell me. Oh, I want so to hear how you are. Better, stronger, I hope and trust. How does the new house and garden look in the spring? Prettier and prettier, I dare say....

  The dotation of the President is enormous certainly, and I wish for his own sake it had been rather more moderate. Now I must end here. Post hour strikes. God bless you.

  Do love me as much as you can, always, and think how I am your ever affectionate

  Ba.

  Our darling is well; thank God.

  To Mrs. Jameson

  [Paris]: 138 Avenue des Ch.-Elysées:

  April 12, Monday, 1852.

  Your letter was pleasant and not so pleasant, dearest Monna Nina; for it was not so pleasant indeed to hear how ill you had been — and yet to be lifted into the hope, or rather certainty, of seeing you next week pleased us extremely of course, and the more that your note through Lady Lyell had thrown us backward into a slough of despond and made me sceptical as to your coming here at all....

  What a beautiful Paris it is! I walked out a little yesterday with Robert, and we both felt penetrated with the sentiment of southern life as we watched men, women, and children sitting out in the sun, taking wine and coffee, and enjoying their fête day with good happy faces. The mixture of classes is to me one of the most delicious features of the South, and you have it here exactly as in Italy. The colouring too, the brightness, even the sun — oh, come and enjoy it all with us. We have had a most splendid spring beginning with February. Still, I have been out very seldom, being afraid of treacherous winds combined with burning sunshine, but I have enjoyed the weather in the house and by opening the windows, and have been revived and strengthened much by it, and shall soon recover my summer power of walking, I dare say. What do you think I did the other night? Went to the Vaudeville to see the ‘Dame aux Camélias’ on above the fiftieth night of the representation. I disagree with the common outcry about its immorality. According to my view, it is moral and human. But I never will go to see it again, for it almost broke my heart and split my head. I had a headache afterwards for twenty-four hours. Even Robert, who gives himself out for blasé on dramatic matters, couldn’t keep the tears from rolling down his cheeks. The exquisite acting, the too literal truth to nature everywhere, was exasperating — there was something profane in such familiar handling of life and death. Art has no business with real graveclothes when she wants tragic drapery — has she? It was too much altogether like a bull fight. There’s a caricature at the shop windows of the effect produced, the pit protecting itself with multitudinous umbrellas from the tears of the boxes. This play is by Alexandre Dumas fils — and is worthy by its talent of Alexandre Dumas père.

  Only that once have I been in a Parisian theatre. I couldn’t go even to see ‘Les Vacances de Pandolphe’ when George Sand had the goodness to send us tickets for the first night. She failed in it, I am sorry to say — it did not ‘draw,’ as the phrase is. Now she has left Paris, but is likely to return.

  I am sure it will do you great good to have change and liberty and distraction in various ways. The ‘anxiety’ you speak of — oh, I do hope it does not relate to Gerardine. I always think of her when you seem anxious.

  I shall be very glad if, when you come, you should be inclined to give your attention, you with your honest and vigorous mind, to the facts of the political situation, not the facts as you hear them from the English, or from our friend Madme Mohl, who confessed to me one day that she liked exaggerations because she hated the President. She is a clever shrewd woman, but most eminently and on all subjects a woman; her passions having her thoughts inside them, instead of her thoughts her passions. That’s the common distinction between women and men, is it not?

  Robert, too, will tell you that he hates all Buonapartes, past, present, or to come, but then he says that in his self-willed, pettish way, as a manner of dismissing a subject he won’t think about — and knowing very well that he doesn’t think about it, not mistaking a feeling for a reason, not for a moment. There’s the difference between women and men.

  Well, but you won’t come here to knit your brows about politics, but rather to forget all sorts of anxieties and distresses, and be well and happy, I do hope. You deserve a holiday after all that work. God bless you, dear friend.

  Our united love goes to you and stays with you.

  Your ever affectionate

  Ba.

  To Miss Mulock

  [Paris]: 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysées:

  April 27, .

  I am afraid you must think me — what can you have thought of me for not immediately answering a letter which brought the tears both to my eyes and my husband’s? I was going to write just so, but he said: ‘No, do not write yet; wait till we get the book and then you can speak of it with knowledge.’ And I waited.

  But the misfortune is that Messrs. Chapman & Hall waited too, and that up to the present time ‘The Head of the Family’ has not arrived. Mr. Chapman is slow in finding what he calls his opportunities.

  Therefore I can’t wait any more, no indeed. The voice which called ‘Dinah’ in the garden — which was true, because certainly I did call from Florence with my whole heart to the writer of these verses (how deeply they moved me!) — will have seemed to you by this time as fabulous as the garden itself. And we had no garden at Florence, I must confess to you, only a terrace facing the grey wall of San Felice church, where we used to walk up and down on the moonlight nights. But San Felice was always a good saint to me, and when I had read and cried over those verses from the ‘Athenæum’ (my husband wrote them out for me at the reading room) and when I had vainly written to England to find out the poet, and when I had all as vainly, on our visit to England last summer, inquired of this person and that person, it turns out after all that ‘Dinah’ answers me. Do you not think I am glad?

  The beautiful verses touched me to the quick, so does your letter. We shall be in London again perhaps in two months for a few weeks, and then you will let us see you, I hope, will you not? And, in the meanwhile, you will believe that we do not indeed think of you as a stranger. Ah, your dream flattered me in certain respects! Yet there was some truth in it, as I have told you, even though you saw in the dreamlight more roses than were growing.

  Certainly Mr. Chapman will at last send me ‘The Head of the Family,’ and then I will write again of course.

  Dear Miss Mulock, may I write myself down now, because I must,

  Affectionately yours and gratefully,

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  To Miss Mitford

  [Paris],138 Avenue des Ch.-Elysées:

  May 9, .

  I began a long letter to you in the impulse left by yours upon me, and then destroyed it by accident. That hindered me from writing as soon as I should have done, for indeed I am anxious to have other news of you, my dearest dear Miss Mitford, and to know, if possible, that you are a little better.... Tell me everything. Why, you looked really well last summer; and I want to see you looking well this summer, for we shall probably be in London in June — more’s the pity, perhaps! The gladness I have in England is so leavened through and through with sadness that I incline to do with it as one does with the black bread of the monks of Vallombrosa, only pretend to eat it and drop it slyly under the table. If it were not for some ties I would say ‘Farewell, England,’ and never set foot on it again. There’s always an east wind for me in England, whether the sun shines or not — the moral east wind which is colder than any other. But how dull to go on talking of the weather: Sia come vuole, as we say in Italy.

  To-morrow is the great fête of your Louis Napoleon, the distribution of the eagles. We have done our possible and impossible to get tickets, because I had taken strongly into my head to want to go, and because Robert, who didn’t care for it himself,
cared for it for me; but here’s the eleventh hour and our prospects remain gloomy. We did not apply sufficiently soon, I am afraid, and the name of the applicants has been legion. It will be a grand sight, and full of significances. Nevertheless, the empire won’t come so; you will have to wait a little for the Empire. Who were your financial authorities who praised Louis Napoleon? and do the same approve of the late measure about the three per cents.? I am so absolutely bête upon such subjects that I don’t even pretend to be intelligent; but I heard yesterday from a direct source that Rothschild expressed a high admiration of the President’s financial ability. A friend of that master in Israel said it to our friend Lady Elgin. Commerce is reviving, money is pouring in, confidence is being restored on all sides. Even the Press palpitates again — ah, but I wish it were a little freer of the corset. This Government is not after my heart after all. I only tolerate what appear to me the necessities of an exceptional situation. The masses are satisfied and hopeful, and the President stronger and stronger — not by the sword, may it please the English Press, but by the democracy.

  I am delighted to see that the French Government has protested against the reactionary iniquities of the Tuscan Grand Duke, and every day I expect eagerly some helping hand to be stretched out to Rome. I have looked for this from the very first, and certainly it is significant that the Prince of Canino, the late President of the Roman Republic, should be in favour at the Elysée. Pio Nono’s time is but short, I fancy — that is, reforms will be forced upon him.

  When George Sand had audience with the President, he was very kind; did I tell you that? At the last he said: ‘Vous verrez, vous serez contente de moi.’ To which she answered, ‘Et vous, vous serez content de moi.’ It was repeated to me as to the great dishonour of Madame Sand, and as a proof that she could not resist the influence of power and was a bad republican. I, on the contrary, thought the story quite honourable to both parties. It was for the sake of her rouge friends that she approached the President at all, and she has used the hand he stretched out to her only on behalf of persons in prison and distress. The same, being delivered, call her gratefully a recreant.

  Victor Cousin and Villemain refuse to take the oath, and lose their situations in the Academy accordingly; but they retire on pensions, and it’s their own fault of course. Michelet and Quinet should have an equivalent, I think, for what they have lost; they are worthy, as poets, orators, dreamers, speculative thinkers — as anything, in fact, but instructors of youth.

  No, there is a brochure, or a little book somewhere, pretending to be a memoir of Balzac, but I have not seen it. Some time before his death he had bought a country place, and there was a fruit tree in the garden — I think a walnut tree — about which he delighted himself in making various financial calculations after the manner of César Birotteau. He built the house himself, and when it was finished there was just one defect — it wanted a staircase. They had to put in the staircase afterwards. The picture gallery, however, had been seen to from the first, and the great writer had chalked on the walls, ‘Mon Raffaelle,’ ‘Mon Corrège,’ ‘Mon Titien,’ ‘Mon Léonard de Vinci,’ the pictures being yet unattained. He is said to have been a little loth to spend money, and to have liked to dine magnificently at the restaurant at the expense of his friends, forgetting to pay for his own share of the entertainment. For the rest, the ‘idée fixe’ of the man was to be rich one day, and he threw his subtle imagination and vital poetry into pounds, shillings, and pence with such force that he worked the base element into spiritual splendours. Oh! to think of our having missed seeing that man. It is painful. A little book is published of his ‘thoughts and maxims,’ the sweepings of his desk I suppose; broken notes, probably, which would have been wrought up into some noble works, if he had lived. Some of these are very striking.

  Lamartine has not yet paid us the promised visit. Just as we were beginning to feel vexed we heard that the intermediate friend who was to have brought him had been caught up by the Government and sent off to Saint-Germain to ‘faire le mort,’ on pain of being sent farther. I mean Eugène Belleton. If he talked in many places as he talked in this room, I can’t be very much surprised, but I am really very sorry. He is one of those amiable domestic men who delight in talking ‘battle, murder, and sudden death.’

  [The end of this letter is wanting]

  To Miss Mulock

  [Paris], 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysées:

  June 2, .

  My husband went directly to Rue Vivienne and came back without the book. We waited and waited, but at last it reached us, and we have read it, and since then I have let some days go by through having been unwell. You seemed to let me sit still in my chair and do nothing; you did not call too loud. So was it with most other things in the universe. Now, having awakened from my somnolency, recovered from ‘La Grippe’ (or what mortal Londoners call the influenza), the first person and first book I think of must naturally be you and yours.

  So I thank you much, much, for the book. It has interested me, dear Miss Mulock, as a book should, and I am delighted to recognise everywhere undeniable talent and faculty, combined with high and pure aspiration. A clever book, a graceful book, and with the moral grace besides — thank you. Many must have thanked you as well as myself.

  At the same time, precisely because I feel particularly obliged to you, I mean to tell you the truth. Your hero is heroic from his own point of view — accepting his own view of the situation, which I, for one, cannot accept, do you know, for I am of opinion that both you and he are rather conventional on the subject of his marriage. I don’t in the least understand, at this moment, why he should not have married in the first volume; no, not in the least. It was a matter of income, he would tell me, and of keeping two establishments; and I would answer that it ought rather to have been a matter of faith in God and in the value of God’s gifts, the greatest of which is love. I am romantic about love — oh, much more than you are, though older than you. A man’s life does not develop rightly without it, and what is called an ‘improvident marriage’ often appears to me a noble, righteous, and prudent act. Your Ninian was a man before he was a brother. I hold that he had no right to sacrifice a great spiritual good of his own to the worldly good of his family, however he made it out. He should have said: ‘God gives me this gift, He will find me energy to work for it and suffer for it. We will all live together, struggle together if it is necessary, a little more poorly, a little more laboriously, but keeping true to the best aims of life, all of us.’

  That’s what my Ninian would have said. I don’t like to see noble Ninians crushed flat under family Juggernauts, from whatever heroic motives — not I. Do you forgive me for being so candid?

  I must tell you that Mrs. Jameson, who is staying in this house, read your book in England and mentioned it to me as a good book, ‘very gracefully written,’ before I read it, quite irrespectively, too, of my dedication, which was absent from the copy she saw at Brighton. It was mentioned as one of the novels which had pleased her most lately.

  I shall like to show you my child, as you like children, and as I am vain — oh, past endurance vain, about him. You won’t understand a word he says, though, for he speaks three languages at once, and most of the syllables of each wrong side foremost.

  No, don’t call me a Bonapartist. I am not a Bonapartist indeed. But I am a Democrat and singularly (in these days) consequent about universal suffrage. Also, facts in England have been much mis-stated; but there’s no room for politics to-day.

  When I thank you, remember that my husband thanks you. We both hope to see you before this month shall be quite at an end, and then you will know me better, I hope; and though I shall lose a great deal by your knowing me, of course, yet you won’t, after that, make such mistakes as you ‘confess’ in this note which I have just read over again. Did I think you ‘sentimental’? Won’t you rather think me sentimental to-day? Through it all,

  Your affectionate

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
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br />   To Mrs. Martin

  [Paris], 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysées:

  June 16, .

  My first word must be to thank you, my dearest kind friend, for your affectionate words to me and mine, which always, from you, sink deeply. It was, on my part, great gratification to see you and talk to you and hear you talk, and, above all, perhaps, to feel that you loved me still a little. May God bless you both! And may we meet again and again in Paris and elsewhere; in London this summer to begin with! As the Italians would say in relation to any like pleasure: ‘Sarebbe una benedizione.’

  We are waiting for the English weather to be reported endurable in order to set out. Mrs. Streatfield, who has been in England these twelve days, writes to certify that it is past the force of a Parisian imagination to imagine the state of the skies and the atmosphere; yet, even in Paris, we have been moaning the last four days, because really, since then, we have gone back to April, and a rather cool April, with alternate showers and sunshine — a crisis, however, which does not call for fires, nor inflict much harm on me. It was the thunder, we think, that upset the summer.

  You seem to have had a sort of inkling about my brittleness when you were here. It was the beginning of a bad attack of cough and pain in the side, the consequence of which was that I turned suddenly into the likeness of a ghost and frightened Robert from his design of going to England. About that I am by no means regretful; he was not wanted, as the event proved abundantly. The worst was that he was annoyed by the number of judicious observers and miserable comforters who told him I was horribly changed and ought to be taken back to Italy forthwith. I knew it was nothing but an accidental attack, and that the results would pass away, as they did. I kept quiet, applied mustard poultices, and am now looking again (tell dear Mr. Martin) ‘as if I had shammed.’ So all these misfortunes are strictly historical, you are to understand. To-night we are going to Ary Scheffer’s to hear music and to see ever so many celebrities. Oh, and let me remember to tell you that M. Thierry, the blind historian, has sent us a message by his physician to ask us to go to see him, and as a matter of course we go. Madame Viardot, the prima donna, and Leonard, the first violin player at the Conservatoire, are to be at M. Scheffer’s.