The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Part 59

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 G.o.d bless you. I am your own.

Shall I have the 'Soul's Tragedy' on Sat.u.r.day?--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 n.o.body 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 t.i.tian'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 't.i.tian'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--

But Ba, I call you boldly here, and I dare kiss your dear, dear eyes, till to-morrow--Bless you, my own.

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

Sunday.

[Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]

You never could think that I meant any insinuation against you by a word of what was said yesterday, or that I sought or am likely to seek a 'security'! do you know it was not right of you to use such an expression--indeed no. You were angry with me for just one minute, or you would not have used it--and why? Now what did I say that was wrong or unkind even by construction? If I did say anything, it was three times wrong, and unjust as well as unkind, and wronged my own heart and consciousness of all that you are to me, more than it could _you_.

But you began speaking of yourself just as a woman might speak under the same circ.u.mstances (you remember what you said), and then _I_, remembering that all the men in the world would laugh such an idea to scorn, said something to that effect, you _know_. I once was in company with a man, however, who valued himself very much on his constancy to a woman who was so deeply affected by it that she became his wife at last ... and the whole neighbourhood came out to stare at him on that ground as a sort of monster. And can you guess what the constancy meant? Seven years before, he loved that woman, he said, and she repulsed him. 'And in the meantime, _how many_?' I had the impertinence to ask a female friend who told me the tale. 'Why,' she answered with the utmost simplicity, 'I understand that Miss A. and Miss B. and Mrs. C. would not listen to him, but he took Miss D.'s rejection most to heart.' That was the head and front of his 'constancy' to Miss E., who had been loved, she boasted, for seven years ... that is, once at the beginning and once at the end. It was just a coincidence of the 'premier pas' and the 'pis aller.'

Beloved, I could not mean this for you; you are not made of such stuff, as we both know.

And for myself, it was my compromise with my own scruples, that you should not be 'chained' to me, not in the merest metaphor, that you should not seem to be bound, in honour or otherwise, so that if you stayed with me it should be your free choice to stay, not the _consequence_ of a choice so many months before. That was my compromise with my scruples, and not my doubt of your affection--and least of all, was it an intention of trifling with you sooner or later that made me wish to suspend all _decisions_ as long as possible. I have decided (for me) to let it be as you shall please--now I told you that before. Either we will live on as we are, until an obstacle arises,--for indeed I do not look for a 'security' where you suppose, and the very appearance of it _there_, is what most rebuts me--or I will be yours in the obvious way, to go out of England the next half-hour if possible. As to the steps to be taken (or not taken) before the last step, we must think of those. The worst is that the only question is about a _form_. Virtually the evil is the same all round, whatever we do. Dearest, it was plain to see yesterday evening when he came into this room for a moment at seven o'clock, before going to his own to dress for dinner ... plain to see, that he was not altogether pleased at finding you here in the morning. There was no pretext for objecting gravely--but it was plain that he was not pleased. Do not let this make you uncomfortable, he will forget all about it, and I was not _scolded_, do you understand. It was more manner, but my sisters thought as I did of the significance:--and it was enough to prove to me (if I had not known) what a desperate game we should be playing if we depended on a yielding nerve _there_.

And to-day I went down-stairs (to prove how my promises stand) though I could find at least ten good excuses for remaining in my own room, for our cousin, Sam Barrett, who brought the interruption yesterday and put me out of humour (it wasn't the fault of the dear little cousin, Lizzie ... my 'portrait' ... who was '_so_ sorry,' she said, dear child, to have missed Papa somewhere on the stairs!) the cousin who should have been in Brittany yesterday instead of here, sate in the drawing-room all this morning, and had visitors there, and so I had excellent excuses for never moving from my chair. Yet, the field being clear at _half-past two_! I went for half an hour, just--just for _you_. Did you think of me, I wonder? It was to meet your thoughts that I went, dear dearest.

How clever these sketches are. The expression produced by such apparently inadequate means is quite striking; and I have been making my brothers admire them, and they 'wonder you don't think of employing them in an ill.u.s.trated edition of your works.' Which might be, really!

Ah, you did not ask for 'Luria'! Not that I should have let you have it!--I think I should not indeed. Dearest, you take care of the head ... and don't make that tragedy of the soul one for mine, by letting it make you ill. Beware too of the shower-bath--it plainly does not answer for you at this season. And walk, and think of me for _your_ good, if such a combination should be possible.

And _I_ think of _you_ ... if I do not of Italy. Yet I forget to speak to you of the Dulwich Gallery. I never saw those pictures, but am astonished that the whole world should be wrong in praising them.

'Divine' is a bad word for Murillo in any case--because he is intensely human in his most supernatural subjects. His beautiful Trinity in the National Gallery, which I saw the last time I went out to look at pictures, has no deity in it--and I seem to see it now. And do you remember the visitation of the angels to Abraham (the Duke of Sutherland's picture--is it not?) where the mystic visitors look like shepherds who had not even dreamt of G.o.d? But I always understood that that Dulwich Gallery was famous for great works--you surprise me! And for painters ... their badness is more ostentatious than that of poets--they stare idiocy out of the walls, and set the eyes of sensitive men on edge. For the rest, however, I very much doubt whether they wear their lives more to rags, than writers who mistake their vocation in poetry do. There is a mechanism in poetry as in the other art--and, to men not native to the way of it, it runs hard and heavily. The 'cudgelling of the brain' is as good labour as the grinding of the colours, ... do you not think?

If ever I am in the Sistine Chapel, it will not be with Mrs.

Jameson--no. If ever I should be there, what teaching I shall want, _I_ who have seen so few pictures, and love them only as children do, with an unlearned love, just for the sake of the thoughts they bring.

Wonderfully ignorant I am, to have had eyes and ears so long! There is music, now, which lifts the hair on my head, I feel it so much, ...

yet all I know of it as art, all I have heard of the works of the masters in it, has been the mere sign and suggestion, such as the private piano may give. I never heard an oratorio, for instance, in my life--judge by _that_! It is a guess, I make, at all the greatness and divinity ... feeling in it, though, distinctly and certainly, that a composer like Beethoven _must_ stand above the divinest painter in soul-G.o.dhead, and nearest to the true poet, of all artists. And this I felt in my guess, long before I knew you. But observe how, if I had died in this illness, I should have left a sealed world behind me!

_you_, unknown too--unguessed at, _you_, ... in many respects, wonderfully unguessed at! Lately I have learnt to despise my own instincts. And apart from those--and _you_, ... it was right for me to be melancholy, in the consciousness of pa.s.sing blindfolded under all the world-stars, and of going out into another side of the creation, with a blank for the experience of this ... the last revelation, unread! How the thought of it used to depress me sometimes!

Talking of music, I had a proposition the other day from certain of Mr. Russell's (the singer's) friends, about his setting to music my 'Cry of the Children.' His programme exhibits all the horrors of the world, I see! Lifeboats ... madhouses ... gamblers' wives ... all done to the right sort of moaning. His audiences must go home delightfully miserable, I should fancy. He has set the 'Song of the s.h.i.+rt' ... and my 'Cry of the Children' will be acceptable, it is supposed, as a climax of agony. Do you know this Mr. Russell, and what sort of music he suits to his melancholy? But to turn my 'Cry' to a 'Song,' a burden, it is said, is required--he can't sing it without a burden!

and behold what has been sent 'for my approval'.... I shall copy it _verbatim_ for you....

And the threads twirl, twirl, twirl, Before each boy and girl; And the wheels, big and little, still whirl, whirl, whirl.

... accompaniment _agitato_, imitating the roar of the machinery!

This is not endurable ... ought not to be ... should it now? Do tell me.

May G.o.d bless you, very dearest! Let me hear how you are--and think how I am

Your own....

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

[Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]

Dearest, I have been kept in town and just return in time to say why you have _no_ note ... to-morrow I will write ... so much there is to say on the subject of this letter I find.

Bless you, all beloved--

R.B.

Oh, do not sleep another night on that horrible error I have led you into! The 'Dulwich Gallery'!--!!!--oh, no. Only some pictures to be sold at the Greyhound Inn, Dulwich--'the genuine property of a gentleman deceased.'

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