The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
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.
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.