The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Part 57

As my sisters did not dine at home yesterday and I see n.o.body else in the evening, I never heard till just now and _from Papa himself_, that 'George was invited to meet Mr. Browning and Mr. Procter.' How surprised you will be. It must have been a sudden thought of Mr.

Kenyon's.

And I have been thinking, thinking since last night that I wrote you then a letter all but ... insolent ... which, do you know, I feel half ashamed to look back upon this morning--particularly what I wrote about 'missions of humanity'--now was it not insolent of me to write so? If I could take my letter again I would dip it into Lethe between the lilies, instead of the post office:--but I can't--so if you wondered, you must forget as far as possible, and understand how it was, and that I was in br.i.m.m.i.n.g spirits when I wrote, from two causes ... first, because I had your letter which was a pure goodness of yours, and secondly because you were 'noticeably' better you said, or 'noticeably well' rather, to mind my quotations. So I wrote what I wrote, and gave it to Arabel when she came in at midnight, to give it to Henrietta who goes out before eight in the morning and often takes charge of my letters, and it was too late, at the earliest this morning, to feel a little ashamed. Miss Thomson told me that she had determined to change the type of the few pages of her letterpress which had been touched, and that therefore Mr. Burges's revisions of my translations should be revised back again. She appears to be a very acute person, full of quick perceptions--naturally quick, and carefully trained--a little over anxious perhaps about mental lights, and opening her eyes still more than she sees, which is a common fault of clever people, if one must call it a fault. I like her, and she is kind and cordial. Will she ask you to help her book with a translation or two, I wonder. Perhaps--if the courage should come. Dearest, how I shall think of you this evening, and how near you will seem, not to be here. I had a letter from Mr. Mathews the other day, and smiled to read in it just what I had expected, that he immediately sent Landor's verses on you to a _few editors_, friends of his, in order to their communication to the public. He received my apology for myself with the utmost graciousness. A kind good man he is.

After all, do you know, I am a little vexed that I should have even _seemed_ to do wrong in my speech about the letters. It must have been wrong, if it seemed so to you, I fancy now. Only I really did no more mean to try your letters ... mine ... such as they are to me now, by the common critical measure, than the shepherds praised the pure tenor of the angels who sang 'Peace upon earth' to them. It was enough that they knew it for angels' singing. So do _you_ forgive me, beloved, and put away from you the thought that I have let in between us any miserable stuff 'de metier,' which I hate as you hate. And I will not say any more about it, not to run into more imprudences of mischief.

On the other hand I warn you against saying again what you began to say yesterday and stopped. Do not try it again. What may be quite good sense from me, is from _you_ very much the reverse, and pray observe that difference. Or did you think that I was making my own road clear in the the thing I said about--'jilts'? No, you did not. Yet I am ready to repeat of myself as of others, that if I ceased to love you, I certainly would act out the whole consequence--but _that_ is an impossible 'if' to my nature, supposing the conditions of it otherwise to be probable. I never loved anyone much and ceased to love that person. Ask every friend of mine, if I am given to change even in friends.h.i.+p! _And to you...!_ Ah, but you never think of such a thing seriously--and you are conscious that you did not say it very sagely.

You and I are in different positions. Now let me tell you an apologue in exchange for your Wednesday's stories which I liked so, and mine perhaps may make you 'a little wiser'--who knows?

It befell that there stood in hall a bold baron, and out he spake to one of his serfs ... 'Come thou; and take this baton of my baronie, and give me instead thereof that sprig of hawthorn thou holdest in thine hand.' Now the hawthorn-bough was no larger a thing than might be carried by a wood-pigeon to the nest, when she flieth low, and the baronial baton was covered with fine gold, and the serf, turning it in his hands, marvelled greatly.

And he answered and said, 'Let not my lord be in haste, nor jest with his servant. Is it verily his will that I should keep his golden baton? Let him speak again--lest it repent him of his gift.'

And the baron spake again that it was his will. 'And I'--he said once again--'shall it be lawful for me to keep this sprig of hawthorn, and will it not repent thee of thy gift?'

Then all the servants who stood in hall, laughed, and the serf's hands trembled till they dropped the baton into the rushes, knowing that his lord did but jest....

Which mine did not. Only, _de te fabula narratur_ up to a point.

And I have your letter. 'What did I expect?' Why I expected just _that_, a letter in turn. Also I am graciously pleased (yes, and very much pleased!) to '_let_ you write to-morrow.' How you spoil me with goodness, which makes one 'insolent' as I was saying, now and then.

The worst is, that I write 'too kind' letters--I!--and what does that criticism mean, pray? It reminds me, at least, of ... now I will tell you what it reminds me of.

A few days ago Henrietta said to me that she was quite uncomfortable.

She had written to somebody a not kind enough letter, she thought, and it might be taken ill. 'Are _you_ ever uncomfortable, Ba, after you have sent letters to the post?' she asked me.

'Yes,' I said, 'sometimes, but from a reason just the very reverse of your reason, _my_ letters, when they get into the post, seem too kind,--rather.' And my sisters laughed ... laughed.

But if _you_ think so beside, I must seriously set to work, you see, to correct that flagrant fault, and shall do better in time _dis faventibus_, though it will be difficult.

Mr. Kenyon's dinner is a riddle which I cannot read. _You_ are invited to meet Miss Thomson and Mr. Bayley and '_no one else_.'

George is invited to meet Mr. Browning and Mr. Procter and '_no one else_'--just those words. The '_absolu_' (do you remember Balzac's beautiful story?) is just _you_ and 'no one else,' the other elements being mere uncertainties, s.h.i.+fting while one looks for them.

Am I not writing nonsense to-night? I am not 'too _wise_' in any case, which is some comfort. It puts one in spirits to hear of your being 'well,' ever and ever dearest. Keep so for _me_. May G.o.d bless you hour by hour. In every one of mine I am your own

BA.

For Miss Mitford ...

But people are not angels quite ...

and she sees the whole world in stripes of black and white, it is her way. I feel very affectionately towards her, love her sincerely. She is affectionate to _me_ beyond measure. Still, always I feel that if I were to vex her, the lower deep below the lowest deep would not be low enough for _me_. I always feel _that_. She would advertise me directly for a wretch proper.

Then, for all I said about never changing, I have ice enough over me just now to hold the sparrows!--in respect to a great crowd of people, and she is among them--for reasons--for reasons.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Sat.u.r.day Morning.

[Post-mark, February 23, 1846.]

So all was altered, my love--and, instead of Miss T. and the other friend, I had your brother and Procter--to my great pleasure. After, I went to that place, and soon got away, and am very well this morning in the suns.h.i.+ne; which I feel with you, do I not? Yesterday after dinner we spoke of Mrs. Jameson, and, as my wont is--(Here your letter reaches me--let me finish this sentence now I have finished kissing you, dearest beyond all dearness--My own heart's Ba!)--oh, as I am used, I left the talking to go on by itself, with the thought busied elsewhere, till at last my own voice startled me for I heard my tongue utter 'Miss Barrett ... that is, Mrs. Jameson says' ... or 'does ...

or does not.' I forget which! And if anybody noticed the _gaucherie_ it must have been just your brother!

Now to these letters! I do solemnly, unaffectedly wonder how you can put so much pure felicity into an envelope so as that I shall get it as from the fount head. This to-day, those yesterday--there is, I see, and know, thus much goodness in line after line, goodness to be scientifically appreciated, _proved there_--but over and above, is it in the writing, the dots and traces, the seal, the paper--here does the subtle charm lie beyond all rational accounting for? The other day I stumbled on a quotation from J. Baptista Porta--wherein he avers that any musical instrument made out of wood possessed of medicinal properties retains, being put to use, such virtues undiminished,--and that, for instance, a sick man to whom you should pipe on a pipe of elder-tree would so receive all the advantage derivable from a decoction of its berries. From whence, by a parity of reasoning, I may discover, I think, that the very ink and paper were--ah, what were they? Curious thinking won't do for me and the wise head which is mine, so I will lie and rest in my ignorance of content and understand that without any magic at all you simply wish to make one person--which of your free goodness proves to be your R.B.--to make me supremely happy, and that you have your wish--you _do_ bless me! More and more, for the old treasure is piled undiminished and still the new comes glittering in. Dear, dear heart of my heart, life of my life, _will this last_, let _me_ begin to ask? Can it be meant I shall live this to the end? Then, dearest, care also for the life beyond, and put in my mind how to testify here that I have felt, if I could not deserve that a gift beyond all gifts! I hope to work hard, to prove I do feel, as I say--it would be terrible to accomplish nothing now.

With which conviction--renewed conviction time by time, of your extravagance of kindness to me unworthy,--will it seem characteristically consistent when I pray you not to begin frightening me, all the same, with threats of writing _less_ kindly? That must not be, love, for _your_ sake now--if you had not thrown open those windows of heaven I should have no more imagined than that Syrian lord on whom the King leaned 'how such things might be'--but, once their influence showered, I should know, too soon and easily, if they shut up again! You have committed your dear, dearest self to that course of blessing, and blessing on, on, for ever--so let all be as it is, pray, _pray_!

No--not _all_. No more, ever, of that strange suspicion--'insolent'--oh, what a word!--nor suppose I shall particularly wonder at its being fancied applicable to _that_, of all other pa.s.sages of your letter! It is quite as reasonable to suspect the existence of such a quality _there_ as elsewhere: how _can_ such a thing, _could_ such a thing come from you to me? But, dear Ba, _do_ you know me better! _Do_ feel that I know you, I am bold to believe, and that if you were to run at me with a pointed spear I should be sure it was a golden sanative, Machaon's touch, for my entire good, that I was opening my heart to receive! As for words, written or spoken--I, who sin forty times in a day by light words, and untrue to the thought, I am certainly not used to be easily offended by other peoples' words, people in the world. But _your_ words! And about the 'mission'; if it had not been a thing to jest at, I should not have begun, as I did--as you felt I did. I know now, what I only suspected then, and will tell you all the matter on Monday if you care to hear.

The 'humanity' however, would have been unquestionable if I had chosen to exercise it towards the poor weak incapable creature that wants _somebody_, and urgently, I can well believe.

As for your apologue, it is naught--as you felt, and so broke off--for the baron knew well enough it was a spray of the magical tree which once planted in his domain would shoot up, and out, and all round, and be glorious with leaves and musical with birds' nests, and a fairy safeguard and blessing thenceforward and for ever, when the foolish baton had been broken into ounces of gold, even if gold it _were_, and spent and vanished: for, he said, such gold lies in the highway, men pick it up, more of it or less; but this one slip of the flowering tree is all of it on this side Paradise. Whereon he laid it to his heart and was happy--in spite of his disastrous chase the night before, when so far from catching an unicorn, he saw not even a respectable prize-heifer, worth the oil-cake and rape-seed it had doubtless cost to rear her--'insolence!'

I found no opportunity of speaking to Mr. K. about Monday, but nothing was said of last Wednesday, and he must know I did not go yesterday.

So, Monday is laughing in suns.h.i.+ne surely! Bless you, my sweetest. I love you with my whole heart; ever shall love you.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

[Post-mark, February 24, 1846.]

Ever dearest, it is only when you go away, when you are quite gone, out of the house and the street, that I get up and think properly, and with the right grat.i.tude of your flowers. Such beautiful flowers you brought me this time too! looking like summer itself, and smelling!

Doing the 'honour due' to the flowers, makes your presence a little longer with me, the sun s.h.i.+nes back over the hill just by that time, and then drops, till the next letter.

If I had had the letter on Sat.u.r.day as ought to have been, no, I could _not_ have answered it so that you should have my answer on Sunday--no, I should still have had to write first.

Now you understand that I do not object to the writing first, but only to the hearing second. I would rather write than not--I! But to be written to is the chief gladness of course; and with all you say of liking to have my letters (which I like to hear quite enough indeed) you cannot pretend to think that _yours_ are not more to _me_, most to _me_! Ask my guardian-angel and hear what he says! Yours will look another way for shame of measuring joys with him! Because as I have said before, and as he says now, you are all to me, all the light, all the life; I am living for you now. And before I knew you, what was I and where? What was the world to me, do you think? and the meaning of life? And now, when you come and go, and write and do not write, all the hours are chequered accordingly in so many squares of white and black, as if for playing at fox and goose ... only there is no fox, and I will not agree to be goose for one ... _that_ is _you_ perhaps, for being 'too easily' satisfied.

So my claim is that you are more to me than I can be to you at any rate. Mr. Fox said on Sunday that I was a 'religious hermit' who wrote 'poems which ought to be read in a Gothic alcove'; and religious hermits, when they care to see visions, do it better, they all say, through fasting and flagellation and seclusion in dark places. St.

Theresa, for instance, saw a clearer glory by such means, than your Sir Moses Montefiore through his hundred-guinea telescope. Think then, how every shadow of my life has helped to throw out into brighter, fuller significance, the light which comes to me from you ... think how it is the one light, seen without distractions.

_I_ was thinking the other day that certainly and after all (or rather before all) I had loved you all my life unawares, that is, the idea of you. Women begin for the most part, (if ever so very little given to reverie) by meaning, in an aside to themselves, to love such and such an ideal, seen sometimes in a dream and sometimes in a book, and forswearing their ancient faith as the years creep on. I say a book, because I remember a friend of mine who looked everywhere for the original of Mr. Ward's 'Tremaine,' because nothing would do for _her_, she insisted, except just _that_ excess of so-called refinement, with the book-knowledge and the conventional manners, (_loue qui peut_, Tremaine), and ended by marrying a lieutenant in the Navy who could not spell. Such things happen every day, and cannot be otherwise, say the wise:--and _this_ being otherwise with _me_ is miraculous compensation for the trials of many years, though such abundant, overabundant compensation, that I cannot help fearing it is too much, as I know that you are too good and too high for me, and that by the degree in which I am raised up you are let down, for us two to find a level to meet on. One's ideal must be above one, as a matter of course, you know. It is as far as one can reach with one's eyes (soul-eyes), not reach to touch. And here is mine ... shall I tell you? ... even to the visible outward sign of the black hair and the complexion (why you might ask my sisters!) yet I would not tell you, if I could not tell you afterwards that, if it had been red hair quite, it had been the same thing, only I prove the coincidence out fully and make you smile half.

Yet indeed I did not fancy that I was to love _you_ when you came to see me--no indeed ... any more than I did your caring on your side. My ambition when we began our correspondence, was simply that you should forget I was a woman (being weary and _blasee_ of the empty written gallantries, of which I have had my share and all the more perhaps from my peculiar position which made them so without consequence), that you should forget _that_ and let us be friends, and consent to teach me what you knew better than I, in art and human nature, and give me your sympathy in the meanwhile. I am a great hero-wors.h.i.+pper and had admired your poetry for years, and to feel that you liked to write to me and be written to was a pleasure and a pride, as I used to tell you I am sure, and then your letters were not like other letters, as I must not tell you again. Also you _influenced_ me, in a way in which no one else did. For instance, by two or three half words you made me see you, and other people had delivered orations on the same subject quite without effect. I surprised everybody in this house by consenting to see you. Then, when you came, you never went away. I mean I had a sense of your presence constantly. Yes ... and to prove how free that feeling was from the remotest presentiment of what has occurred, I said to Papa in my unconsciousness the next morning ...

'it is most extraordinary how the idea of Mr. Browning does beset me--I suppose it is not being used to see strangers, in some degree--but it haunts me ... it is a persecution.' On which he smiled and said that 'it was not grateful to my friend to use such a word.'

When the letter came....

Do you know that all that time I was frightened of you? frightened in this way. I felt as if you had a power over me and meant to use it, and that I could not breathe or speak very differently from what you chose to make me. As to my thoughts, I had it in my head somehow that you read _them_ as you read the newspaper--examined them, and fastened them down writhing under your long entomological pins--ah, do you remember the entomology of it all?

But the power was used upon _me_--and I never doubted that you had mistaken your own mind, the strongest of us having some exceptional weakness. Turning the wonder round in all lights, I came to what you admitted yesterday ... yes, I saw _that_ very early ... that you had come here with the intention of trying to love whomever you should find, ... and also that what I had said about exaggerating the amount of what I could be to you, had just operated in making you more determined to justify your own presentiment in the face of mine.

Well--and if that last clause was true a little, too ... why should I be sorry now ... and why should you have fancied for a moment, that the first could make me sorry. At first and when I did not believe that you really loved me, when I thought you deceived yourself, _then_, it was different. But now ... now ... when I see and believe your attachment for me, do you think that any cause in the world (except what diminished it) could render it less a source of joy to me? I mean as far as I myself am considered. Now if you ever fancy that I am _vain_ of your love for me, you will be unjust, remember. If it were less dear, and less above me, I might be vain perhaps. But I may say _before_ G.o.d and you, that of all the events of my life, inclusive of its afflictions, nothing has humbled me so much as your love. Right or wrong it may be, but true it _is_, and I tell you. Your love has been to me like G.o.d's own love, which makes the receivers of it kneelers.

Why all this should be written, I do not know--but you set me thinking yesterday in that backward line, which I lean back to very often, and for once, as you made me write directly, why I wrote, as my thoughts went, that way.

Say how you are, beloved--and do not brood over that 'Soul's Tragedy,'

which I wish I had here with 'Luria,' because, so, you should not see it for a month at least. And take exercise and keep well--and remember how many letters I must have before Sat.u.r.day. May G.o.d bless you. Do you want to hear me say