Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Sir John Bowring has been to see us. Yes, he speaks with great authority and conviction, and it carries the more emphasis because he is not without Antigallican prejudice, I observed. He told me that the panic in England about invasion had reached, at one time, a point of phrenzy which would be scarcely credible to anyone who had not witnessed it. People were in terrors, expecting their houses to be burnt and sacked directly. Placards of the most inflammatory character, calling passionately on the riflemen to arm, arm, arm! He himself was hissed at Edinburgh for venturing to say that the rifle-locks would be very rusty if only used against invading Napoleons.

  He told me that the Emperor’s intentions towards Italy had been undeviatingly ignored, and that whatever had seemed equivocal had been misunderstood, or was the consequence of misunderstanding, or of the press of some otherwise great difficulty. The Italian question was only beginning to be understood in England. I said (in my sarcastic way) that at first they had seemed to understand it upside down. To which he replied that when, at the opening of the Revolution, he came over with several English officers from India, they were all prepared (in case England didn’t fight on the Hapsburg side) to enter the Austrian army as volunteers to help them to keep down Italy.

  But men like Mr. Trollope find it easy to ignore all this. It is we who have done the most for Italy — we who did nothing! Yes, I admit so far. We abstained from helping the Austrians with an open force.

  That now we wish well to the Italian cause is true, I hope, but, at best, it is a noble inconsistency; and that we should set up a claim to a nation’s gratitude on these grounds seems to me worse than absurd. The more we are in earnest now, the more ashamed we should be for what has been.

  I have been sorry about Gaeta; but there is somewhere a cause, and, perhaps, not hard to find. That the Emperor is ready to do for Italy whatever will not sacrifice France, I am convinced more than ever. And even the Romans (who have benefited least) think so. One of the patriots here, a watchmaker, was saying to Ferdinando the other day that he had subscribed to Garibaldi’s fund, and had given his name for Viterbo, but that there was one man in whom he believed most, and never ceased to believe — Louis Napoleon. And this is the common feeling. Mr. Trollope said that they only ventured to unbosom themselves to the English. Now my belief is that the Italians seldom do this to the English, as far as Napoleon is concerned. The Italians are furbi assai, and wish to conciliate us, and are perfectly aware of our national jealousies. I myself have observed the difference in an Italian when speaking to my own husband before me and speaking to me alone.

  Since we came here I have had a letter from Ruskin, written in a very desponding state about his work, and life, and the world....

  Life goes on heavily with me, but it goes on: it has rolled into the ruts again and goes....

  Write to me, my Isa, and love me.

  I am your ever loving Ba.

  To Miss I. Blagden

  [Rome: November-December 1860.]

  ... Now while I remember it let me tell you what I quite forgot yesterday. If through Kate’s dealing with American papers you get to hear of a lyric of mine called ‘De Profundis,’ you are to understand that it was written by me nearly twenty years ago, before I knew Robert; you will observe it is in my ‘early manner,’ as they say of painters. It is a personal poem, of course, but was written even so, in comparatively a state of retrospect, catching a grief in the rebound a little. (You know I never can speak or cry, so it isn’t likely I should write verses.) The poem (written, however, when I was very low) lay unprinted all those years, till it turned up at Florence just when poor Mrs. Howard’s bereavement and Mr. Beecher’s funeral sermon in the ‘Independent’ suggested the thought of it — on which, by an impulse, I enclosed it to the editor, who wanted more verses from me. Now you see it comes out just when people will suppose the motive to be an actual occasion connected with myself. Don’t let anyone think so, dear Isa. In the first place, there would be great exaggeration; and in the second, it’s not my way to grind up my green griefs to make bread of. But that poem exaggerates nothing — represents a condition from which the writer had already partly emerged, after the greatest suffering; the only time in which I have known what absolute despair is.

  Don’t notice this when you write.

  Write. Take the love of us three. Yes, I love you, dearest Isa, and shall for ever.

  Ba.

  To Mrs. Martin

  126 Via Felice, Rome:

  Friday, [about December 1860].

  I have not had courage to write, my dearest friend, but you will not have been severe on me. I have suffered very much — from suspense as well as from certainty. If I could open my heart to you it would please me that your sympathy should see all; but I can’t write, and I couldn’t speak of that. It is well for those who in their griefs can speak and write. I never could.

  But to you after all it is not needful. You understand and have understood.

  My husband has been very good to me, and saved me all he could, so that I have had solitude and quiet, and time to get into the ruts of the world again where one has to wheel on till the road ends. In this respect it has been an advantage being at Rome rather than Florence. Now I can read, and have seen a few faces. One must live; and the only way is to look away from oneself into the larger and higher circle of life in which the merely personal grief or joy forgets itself.

  For the rest even I ought to have comfort, I know. I believe that love in its most human relations is an eternal thing. I do believe it, only through inconsistency and much weakness I falter.

  Also there are other beliefs with me with regard to the spiritual world and the measuring of death, which ought, if I had ordinary logic, to rescue me from what people in general suffer in circumstances like these. Only I am weak and foolish; and when the tender past came back to me day by day, I have dropped down before it as one inconsolable.

  Dearest Mr. Martin — give him my grateful love for every kind thought, and to yourself.

  Now that page is turned.

  I wish I knew that you were stronger, and at Pau. It is unfortunate that just on this bitter winter you have been unable to get away from England.

  Here, though there was snow once, we have fared mildly as to climate. And our rooms are very warm. Penini has his pony and rides, and studies with his Abbé, and looks very rosy and well. I help him to prepare his lessons, but that is all, except hearing him read a little German now and then, and Robert sees to the music, and the getting up of the arithmetic. For the first time I have had pain in looking into his face lately — which you will understand.

  I saw a man from Naples two days since, an Englishman of intelligence and impartiality, who has resided there for months in the heart of the politics. He told me that the exaggeration of evils was great. Evils there were certainly; and no government succeeding Garibaldi’s could have satisfied a public trained to expect the impossible. Our poor Garibaldi, hero as he is, and an honest hero, is in truth the weakest and most malleable of men, and had become at last the mere mouthpiece of the Mazzinians. If the Bourbons’ fall had not been a little delayed, north and south Italy would have broken in two. So I was assured by my friend, who gave reasons and showed facts.

  That the Neapolitans are not equal to the other Italians is too plain; and if corrupt governments did not corrupt the government they would be less hateful to all of us, of course. But a little time will give smoothness to the affairs of Italy, and none of my old hopes are in the meanwhile disturbed.

  The design as to Rome seems to be to starve out the Pope by the financial question; to let the rotten fruit fall at last as much by its own fault as possible, and by the gentlest shake of the tree. I hear of those who doubted most in the Emperor’s designs beginning to confess that he can’t mean ill by Italy.

  Possibly you and dear Mr. Martin think more just now of America than of this country, which I can understand. The crisis has come earlier than anyone expected. It is a crisis; and if the
north accepts such a compromise as has been proposed the nation perishes morally, which would be sadder than the mere dissolution of States, however sad. It is the difference between the death of the soul and of the body.

  There might and ought to be a pecuniary compromise; but a compromise of principle would be fatal.

  I am anxious that before we go too far with the Minghetti project here (separate administration of provinces) we should learn from America that a certain degree of centralisation (not carried out too far) is necessary to a strong and vital government. And Italy will want a strong government for some years to come. There is much talk of war in the spring, and if Austria will not cede Venetia war must be, even if she should satisfy her other provinces, which she will probably fail to do.

  This is a dull lecture, but you will pardon it and me.

  I know all your goodness and sympathy. Do not think that I think that any bond is broken, or that anything is lost. We have been fed on the hillside, and now there are twelve baskets full of fragments remaining.

  May God bless you and love you both!

  Your ever affectionate and grateful

  Ba.

  To Miss I. Blagden

  126 Via Felice, Rome: Tuesday, [January 1861].

  Ever dearest Isa, — I wrote a long letter, which you have received, I do hope, and am waiting for a long one from you to tell me that you are not suffering any more. This is on business merely — that is, it is merely to give you trouble, the customary way for me to do business in these latter days. Will you, dear, without putting yourself to too much inconvenience by overhaste, direct the ‘Nazione’ people to send the journal, to which we must subscribe for three months, to S.E. le Général Comte de Noue, Comandante della piazza di Roma. No other name. The General, who can do what he pleases, pleases to receive our paper (our kind Abbé mediating) on condition that we do not talk of it, and so at last I shall attain to getting out of this dark into the free upper air. It is insufferable to be instructed by the ‘Giornale di Roma’ as to how Cialdini writes to Turin that his Piedmontese are perfectly demoralised, and that the besieged dance for triumph each time an Italian cannon is fired into the vague. On the other hand, I hear regularly every morning from the Romans that Gaeta is taken, with the most minute particulars, which altogether is exasperating. The last rumour is of typhus fever in the fortress, but I have grown sceptical, and believe nothing on either side now. One thing is clear, that it wasn’t only the French fleet which prevented our triumph....

  Robert came home this morning between three and four. A great ball at Mrs. Hooker’s — magnificent, he says. All the princes in Rome (and even cardinals) present. The rooms are splendid, and the preparations were in the best taste. The Princess Ruspoli (a Buonaparte) appeared in the tricolor. She is most beautiful, Robert says.

  So you see our Americans can dance even while the Republic goes to pieces. I think I would not do it. Not that I despair of America — God forbid! If the North will be faithful to its conscience there will be only an increase of greatness after a few years, even though it may rain blood betwixt then and now. Mr. Story takes it all very quietly. He would be content to let the South go, and accept the isolation of the North as final. ‘We should do better without the South,’ said he. I don’t agree in this. I think that the unity of the State should be asserted with a strong hand, and the South forced to pay taxes and submit to law.

  Mdme. Swab [Schwabe] told me that a friend of hers had travelled with Klapka from Constantinople, and that K. had said, ‘there would not be war till next year, — diplomacy would take its course for the present year.’ Perhaps he did not speak sincerely. I can’t understand how the Austrian provinces will hold out in mere talk for twelve months more. Do you mark the tone of the ‘Opinion Nationale’ on Austria, and about Hungary being a natural ally of France, and also what is said in the ‘Morning Chronicle,’ which always more or less reflects the face of the French Government? Then it seems to me that the Emperor’s speech is not eminently pacific, though he ‘desires peace.’ I hear from rather good authority what I hope is possible, that Teliki accepted as a condition of his liberation, not simply that he would not personally act against Austria, but that he would use his endeavours to prevent any action on the part of his compatriots. Men are base.

  Mr. Prinsep is here. Last autumn he made a walking tour into Cornwall with Alfred Tennyson, to tread in the steps of King Arthur. Tennyson was dreadfully afraid of being recognised and mobbed, and desired to be called ‘the other gentleman,’ which straightway became convertible now and then into ‘the old gentleman,’ much to his vexation. But Mr. Prinsep is in the roses and lilies of youth, and comparatively speaking, of course, the great Laureate was an ancient. He is in considerable trouble, too by their building a fort in front of his house on the southern coast of the Isle of Wight. I couldn’t help saying that he deserved it for having written ‘Riflemen, arm!’ It’s a piece of pure poetical justice, really.

  Here I end.

  Write to me, my Isa, and do me good with your tender, warm thoughts. Do you think I have no comfort in feeling them stroke me softly through the dark and distance?

  May God love you, dearest Isa!

  Always your loving

  Ba.

  Robert’s true love, and Pen’s.

  The weather is wonderfully warm. In fact, the winter has been very mild — milder than usual for even Rome.

  To Miss E.F. Haworth

  126 Via Felice, Rome:

  Tuesday, [about January 1861].

  You really astonish me, dearest Fanny, so much by your letter, that I must reply to it at once. I ask myself under what new influence (strictly clerical) is she now, that she should write so? And has she forgotten me, never read ‘Aurora Leigh,’ never heard of me or from me that, before ‘Spiritualism’ came up in America, I have been called orthodox by infidels, and heterodox by church-people; and gone on predicting to such persons as came near enough to me in speculative liberty of opinion to justify my speaking, that the present churches were in course of dissolution, and would have to be followed by a reconstruction of Christian essential verity into other than these middle-age scholastic forms. Believing in Christ’s divinity, which is the life of Christianity, I believed this. Otherwise, if the end were here — if we were to be covered over and tucked in with the Thirty-nine Articles or the like, and good-night to us for a sound sleep in ‘sound doctrine’ — I should fear for a revealed religion incapable of expansion according to the needs of man. What comes from God has life in it, and certainly from all the growth of living things, spiritual growth cannot be excepted. But I shun religious controversy — it is useless. I never ‘disturb anybody’s mind,’ as it is called — let those sleep who can. If I had not known that your mind was broken up rather broadly by truths out of Swedenborg, I should not have mooted the subject, be sure. (Have you given up Swedenborg? this by the way.) Having done so, I am anxious to set you right about Mrs. Stowe. As the author of the most successful book printed by man or woman, perhaps I a little under-rated her. The book has genius, but did not strike me as it did some other readers. Her ‘Sunny Memories,’ I liked very little. When she came to us in Florence some years ago, I did not think I should like her, nor did Robert, but we were both of us surprised and charmed with her simplicity and earnestness. At Rome last year she brought her inner nature more in contact with mine, and I, who had looked for what one usually finds in women, was startled into much admiration and sympathy by finding in her a largeness and fearlessness of thought which, coming out of a clerical and puritan cul-de-sac, and combined with the most devout and reverent emotions, really is fine. So you think that since ‘Uncle Tom’ she has turned infidel, because of her interest in Spiritualism. Her last words to me when we parted, were, ‘Those who love the Lord Jesus Christ never see one another for the last time.’ That’s the attitude of the mind which you stigmatise as corrupting.

  With regard to ‘Spiritualism,’ so called, you might as well say ‘books’ a
re dangerous, without specifying the books. Surely you know that every sort of doctrine is enjoined by these means, from Church of Englandism to Free Love. A lady was with me this very morning, who was converted from infidelity to Christianity solely by these means, and I am told that thousands declare the same. As far as I am concerned, I never heard or read a single communication which impressed me in the least: what does impress me is the probability of there being communications at all. I look at the movement. What are these intelligences, separated yet relating and communicating? What is their state? what their aspiration? have we had part or shall we have part with them? is this the corollary of man’s life on the earth? or are they unconscious echoes of his embodied soul? That anyone should admit a fact (such as a man being lifted into the air, for instance), and not be interested in it, is so foreign to the habits of my mind (which can’t insulate a fact from an inference, and rest there) that I have not a word to say. Only I see that if this class of facts, however grotesque, be recognised among thinkers, our reigning philosophy will modify itself; scientific men will conceive differently from Humboldt (for instance) of the mystery of life; the materialism which stifles the higher instincts of men will be dislodged, and the rationalism which divides Oxford with Romanism (nothing between, we hear!) will receive a blow.

  No truth can be dangerous. What if Jesus Christ be taken for a medium, do you say? Well, what then? As perfect man, He possessed, I conclude, the full complement of a man’s faculties. But if He walked on the sea as a medium, if the virtue went out of Him as a mesmeriser, He also spoke the words which never man spoke, was born for us, and died for us, and rose from the dead as the Lord God our Saviour. But the whole theory of spiritualism, all the phenomena, are strikingly confirmatory of revelation; nothing strikes me more than that. Hume’s argument against miracles (a strong argument) disappears before it, and Strauss’s conclusions from a priori assertion of impossibility fall in pieces at once.