The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Part 62

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

Sat.u.r.day Morning.

[Post-mark, March 7, 1846.]

You call me 'kind'; and by this time I have no heart to call you such names--I told you, did I not once? that 'Ba' had got to convey infinitely more of you to my sense than 'dearest,' 'sweetest,' all or any epithets that break down with their load of honey like bees--to say you are 'kind,' you that so entirely and unintermittingly bless me,--it will never do now, 'Ba.' All the same, one way there is to make even 'Ba' dearer,--'_my_ Ba,' I say to myself!

About my _fears_--whether of opening doors or entering people--one thing is observable and prevents the possibility of any misconception--I desire, have been in the habit of desiring, to _increase_ them, far from diminis.h.i.+ng--they relate, of course, entirely to _you_--and only through _you_ affect me the least in the world. Put your well-being out of the question, so far as I can understand it to be involved,--and the pleasure and pride I should immediately choose would be that the whole world knew our position.

What pleasure, what pride! But I endeavour to remember on all occasions--and perhaps succeed in too few--that it is very easy for me to go away and leave you who cannot go. I only allude to this because some people are 'naturally nervous' and all that--and I am quite of another kind.

Last evening I went out--having been kept at home in the afternoon to see somebody ... went walking for hours. I am quite well to-day and, now your letter comes, my Ba, most happy. And, as the sun s.h.i.+nes, you are perhaps making the perilous descent now, while I write--oh, to meet you on the stairs! And I shall really see you on Monday, dearest?

So soon, it ought to feel, considering the dreary weeks that now get to go between our days! For music, I made myself melancholy just now with some 'Concertos for the Harpsichord by Mr. Handel'--brought home by my father the day before yesterday;--what were light, modern things once! Now I read not very long ago a French memoir of 'Claude le Jeune' called in his time the Prince of Musicians,--no, '_Phoenix_'--the unapproachable wonder to all time--that is, twenty years after his death about--and to this pamphlet was prefixed as motto this startling axiom--'In Music, the Beau Ideal changes every thirty years'--well, is not that _true_? The _Idea_, mind, changes--the general standard ... so that it is no answer that a single air, such as many one knows, may strike as freshly as ever--they were _not_ according to the Ideal of their own time--just now, they drop into the ready ear,--next hundred years, who will be the Rossini? who is no longer the Rossini even I remember--his early overtures are as purely Rococo as Cimarosa's or more. The sounds remain, keep their character perhaps--the scale's proportioned notes affect the same, that is,--the major third, or minor seventh--but the arrangement of these, the sequence the law--for them, if it _should_ change every thirty years! To Corelli nothing seemed so conclusive in Heaven or earth as this

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music]

I don't believe there is one of his sonatas wherein that formula does not do duty. In these things of Handel that seems replaced by

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music]

--that was the only true consummation! Then,--to go over the hundred years,--came Rossini's unanswerable coda:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music]

which serves as base to the infinity of songs, gone, gone--_so_ gone by! From all of which Ba draws _this_ 'conclusion' that these may be worse things than Bartoli's Tuscan to cover a page with!--yet, yet the pity of it! Le Jeune, the Phoenix, and Rossini who directed his letters to his mother as 'mother of the famous composer'--and Henry Lawes, and Dowland's Lute, ah me!

Well, my conclusion is the best, the everlasting, here and I trust elsewhere--I am your own, my Ba, ever your

R.

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

Tuesday Morning.

[Post-mark, March 10, 1846.]

Now I shall know what to believe when you talk of very bad and very indifferent doings of yours. Dearest, I read your 'Soul's Tragedy'

last night and was quite possessed with it, and fell finally into a mute wonder how you could for a moment doubt about publis.h.i.+ng it. It is very vivid, I think, and vital, and impressed me more than the first act of 'Luria' did, though I do not mean to compare such dissimilar things, and for pure n.o.bleness 'Luria' is unapproachable--will prove so, it seems to me. But this 'Tragedy'

shows more heat from the first, and then, the words beat down more closely ... well! I am struck by it all as you see. If you keep it up to this pa.s.sion, if you justify this high key-note, it is a great work, and worthy of a place next 'Luria.' Also do observe how excellently balanced the two will be, and how the tongue of this next silver Bell will swing from side to side. And _you_ to frighten me about it. Yes, and the worst is (because it was stupid in me) the worst is that I half believed you and took the ma.n.u.script to be something inferior--for _you_--and the adviseableness of its publication, a doubtful case. And yet, after all, the really worst is, that you should prove yourself such an adept at deceiving! For can it be possible that the same

'Robert Browning'

who (I heard the other day) said once that he could 'wait three hundred years,' should not feel the life of centuries in this work too--can it be? Why all the pulses of the life of it are beating in even _my_ ears!

Tell me, beloved, how you are--I shall hear it to-night--shall I not?

To think of your being unwell, and forced to go here and go there to visit people to whom your being unwell falls in at best among the secondary evils!--makes me discontented--which is one shade more to the uneasiness I feel. Will you take care, and not give away your life to these people? Because I have a better claim than they ... and shall put it in, if provoked ... _shall_. Then you will not use the shower-bath again--you promise? I dare say Mr. Kenyon observed yesterday how unwell you were looking--tell me if he didn't! Now do not work, dearest! Do not think of Chiappino, leave him behind ... he has a good strong life of his own, and can wait for you. Oh--but let me remember to say of him, that he and the other personages appear to me to articulate with perfect distinctness and clearness ... you need not be afraid of having been obscure in this first part. It is all as lucid as noon.

Shall I go down-stairs to-day? 'No' say the privy-councillors, 'because it is cold,' but I _shall_ go peradventure, because the sun brightens and brightens, and the wind has gone round to the west.

George had come home yesterday before you left me, but the stars were favourable to us and kept him out of this room. Now he is at Worcester--went this morning, on those never ending 'rounds,' poor fellow, which weary him I am sure.

And why should music and the philosophy of it make you 'melancholy,'

ever dearest, more than the other arts, which each has the seal of the age, modifying itself after a fas.h.i.+on and _to_ one? Because it changes more, perhaps. Yet all the Arts are mediators between the soul and the Infinite, ... s.h.i.+fting always like a mist, between the Breath on this side, and the Light on that side ... s.h.i.+fted and coloured; mediators, messengers, projected from the Soul, to go and feel, for Her, _out there_!

You don't call me 'kind' I confess--but then you call me 'too kind'

which is nearly as bad, you must allow on your part. Only you were not in earnest when you said _that_, as it appeared afterward. _Were_ you, yesterday, in pretending to think that I owed you nothing ... _I_?

May G.o.d bless you. He knows that to give myself to you, is not to pay you. Such debts are not so paid.

Yet I am your

BA.

_People's Journal_ for March 7th.

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

Tuesday Morning.

[Post-mark, March 10, 1846.]

Dear, dear Ba, if you were here I should not much _speak_ to you, not at first--nor, indeed, at last,--but as it is, sitting alone, only words can be spoken, or (worse) written, and, oh how different to look into the eyes and imagine what _might_ be said, what ought to be said, though it never can be--and to sit and say and write, and only imagine who looks above me, looks down, understanding and pardoning all! My love, my Ba, the fault you found once with some expressions of mine about the amount of imperishable pleasures already h.o.a.rded in my mind, the indestructible memories of you; that fault, which I refused to acquiesce under the imputation of, at first, you remember--well, _what_ a fault it was, by this better light! If all stopped here and now; horrible! complete oblivion were the thing to be prayed for, rather! As it is, _now_, I must go on, must live the life out, and die yours. And you are doing your utmost to advance the event of events,--the exercise, and consequently (is it not?) necessarily improved sleep, and the projects for the fine days, the walking ... a pure bliss to think of! Well, now--I think I shall show seamans.h.i.+p of a sort, and 'try another tack'--do not be over bold, my sweetest; the cold _is_ considerable,--taken into account the previous mildness. One ill-advised (I, the _adviser_, I should remember!) too early, or too late descent to the drawing-room, and all might be ruined,--thrown back so far ... seeing that our flight is to be prayed for 'not in the winter'--and one would be called on to wait, wait--in this world where nothing waits, rests, as can be counted on. Now think of this, too, dearest, and never mind the slowness, for the sureness' sake! How perfectly happy I am as you stand by me, as yesterday you stood, as you seem to stand now!

I will write to-morrow more: I came home last night with a head rather worse; which in the event was the better, for I took a little medicine and all is very much improved to-day. I shall go out presently, and return very early and take as much care as is proper--for I thought of Ba, and the sublimities of Duty, and that gave myself airs of importance, in short, as I looked at my mother's inevitable arrow-root this morning. So now I am well; so now, is dearest Ba well? I shall hear to-night ... which will have its due effect, that circ.u.mstance, in quickening my retreat from Forster's Rooms. All was very pleasant last evening--and your letter &c. went _a qui de droit_, and Mr. W.

_Junior_ had to smile good-naturedly when Mr. Burges began laying down this general law, that the sons of all men of genius were poor creatures--and Chorley and I exchanged glances after the fas.h.i.+on of two Augurs meeting at some street-corner in Cicero's time, as he says.

And Mr. Kenyon was kind, kinder, kindest, as ever, 'and thus ends a wooing'!--no, a dinner--my wooing ends never, never; and so prepare to be asked to give, and give, and give till all is given in Heaven!

And all I give _you_ is just my heart's blessing; G.o.d bless you, my dearest, dearest Ba!

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

Tuesday Evening.

[Post-mark, March 11, 1846.]

You find my letter I trust, for it was written this morning in time; and if these two lines should not be flattery ... oh, rank flattery!

... why happy letter is it, to help to bring you home ten minutes earlier, when you never ought to have left home--no, indeed! I knew how it would be yesterday, and how you would be worse and not better.

You are not fit to go out, dear dearest, to sit in the glare of lights and talk and listen, and have the knives and forks to rattle all the while and remind you of the chains of necessity. Oh--should I bear it, do you think? I was thinking, when you went away--_after_ you had quite gone. You would laugh to see me at my dinner--Flush and me--Flush placing in me such an heroic confidence, that, after he has cast one discriminating glance on the plate, and, in the case of 'chicken,' wagged his tail with an emphasis, ... he goes off to the sofa, shuts his eyes and allows a full quarter of an hour to pa.s.s before he returns to take his share. Did you ever hear of a dog before who did not persecute one with beseeching eyes at mealtimes? And remember, this is not the effect of _discipline_. Also if another than myself happens to take coffee or break bread in the room here, he teazes straightway with eyes and paws, ... teazes like a common dog and is put out of the door before he can be quieted by scolding. But with _me_ he is sublime! Moreover he has been a very useful dog in his time (in the point of capacity), causing to disappear supererogatory dinners and impossible breakfasts which, to do him justice, is a feat accomplished without an objection on his side, always.

So, when you write me such a letter, I write back to you about Flush.

Dearest beloved, but I have read the letter and felt it in my heart, through and through! and it is as wise to talk of Flush foolishly, as to fancy that I _could say how_ it is felt ... this letter! Only when you spoke last of breaking off with such and such recollections, it was the melancholy of the breaking off which I protested against, was it not? and _not_ the insufficiency of the recollections. There might have been something besides in jest. Ah, but _you_ remember, if you please, that _I_ was the first to wish (wis.h.i.+ng for my own part, if I could wish exclusively) to break off in the middle the silken thread, and you told me, not--you forbade me--do you remember? For, as happiness goes, the recollections were enough, ... _are_ enough for _me_! I mean that I should acknowledge them to be full compensation for the bitter gift of life, _such as it was_, to me! if that subject-matter were broken off here! 'Bona verba' let me speak nevertheless. You mean, you say, to run all risks with me, and I don't mean to draw back from my particular risk of ... what am I to do to you hereafter to make you vexed with me? What is there in marriage to make all these people on every side of us, (who all began, I suppose, by talking of love,) look askance at one another from under the silken mask ... and virtually hate one another through the tyranny of the stronger and the hypocrisy of the weaker party. It never could be so with _us_--_I know that_. But you grow awful to me sometimes with the very excess of your goodness and tenderness, and still, I think to myself, if you do not keep lifting me up quite off the ground by the strong faculty of love in you, I shall not help falling short of the hope you have placed in me--it must be 'supernatural' of you, to the end! or I fall short and disappoint you. Consider this, beloved. Now if I could put my soul out of my body, just to stand up before you and make it clear.

I did go to the drawing-room to-day ... would ... should ... did. The sun came out, the wind changed ... where was the obstacle? I spent a quarter of an hour in a fearful solitude, listening for knocks at the door, as a ghost-fearer might at midnight, and 'came home' none the worse in any way. Be sure that I shall 'take care' better than you do, and there, is the worst of it all--for _you_ let people make you ill, and do it yourself upon occasion.

You know from my letter how I found you out in the matter of the 'Soul's Tragedy.' Oh! so bad ... so weak, so unworthy of your name! If some other people were half a quarter as much the contrary!

And so, good-night, dear dearest. In spite of my fine speeches about 'recollections,' I should be unhappy enough to please you, with _only those_ ... without you beside! I could not take myself back from being

Your own--