Book: The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845 1846

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THE LETTERS

OF

ROBERT BROWNING

AND

ELIZABETH BARRETT BARRETT

1845-1846


_WITH PORTRAITS AND FACSIMILES_


IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I.


FOURTH IMPRESSION

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

1900


[Illustration: Robert Browning

from an oil painting by Gordigiani]




NOTE


In considering the question of publishing these letters, which are all
that ever passed between my father and mother, for after their
marriage they were never separated, it seemed to me that my only
alternatives were to allow them to be published or to destroy them. I
might, indeed, have left the matter to the decision of others after my
death, but that would be evading a responsibility which I feel that I
ought to accept.

Ever since my mother's death these letters were kept by my father in a
certain inlaid box, into which they exactly fitted, and where they
have always rested, letter beside letter, each in its consecutive
order and numbered on the envelope by his own hand.

My father destroyed all the rest of his correspondence, and not long
before his death he said, referring to these letters: 'There they are,
do with them as you please when I am dead and gone!'

A few of the letters are of little or no interest, but their omission
would have saved only a few pages, and I think it well that the
correspondence should be given in its entirety.

I wish to express my gratitude to my father's friend and mine, Mrs.
Miller Morison, for her unfailing sympathy and assistance in
deciphering some words which had become scarcely legible owing to
faded ink.

R.B.B.

1898.




ADVERTISEMENT


The correspondence contained in these volumes is printed exactly as it
appears in the original letters, without alteration, except in respect
of obvious slips of the pen. Even the punctuation, with its
characteristic dots and dashes, has for the most part been preserved.
The notes in square brackets [] have been added mainly in order to
translate the Greek phrases, and to give the references to Greek
poets. For these, thanks are due to Mr. F.G. Kenyon, who has revised
the proofs with the assistance of Mr. Roger Ingpen, the latter being
responsible for the Index.




ILLUSTRATIONS


PORTRAIT OF ROBERT BROWNING _Frontispiece_
_After the picture by Gordigiani_

FACSIMILE OF LETTER OF ROBERT BROWNING _To face p. 578_




THE LETTERS OF

ROBERT BROWNING

AND

ELIZABETH BARRETT BARRETT

1845-1846



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

New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.
[Post-mark, January 10, 1845.]

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,--and this is
no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,--whatever else,
no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a
graceful and natural end of the thing. Since the day last week when I
first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been
turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you
of their effect upon me, for in the first flush of delight I thought I
would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when
I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration--perhaps even,
as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some
little good to be proud of hereafter!--but nothing comes of it all--so
into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living
poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew--Oh, how
different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat, and prized
highly, and put in a book with a proper account at top and bottom,
and shut up and put away ... and the book called a 'Flora,' besides!
After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time;
because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason
for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music,
the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave
thought; but in this addressing myself to you--your own self, and for
the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love
these books with all my heart--and I love you too. Do you know I was
once not very far from seeing--really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to
me one morning 'Would you like to see Miss Barrett?' then he went to
announce me,--then he returned ... you were too unwell, and now it is
years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if
I had been close, so close, to some world's-wonder in chapel or crypt,
only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some
slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission,
and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles,
and the sight was never to be?

Well, these Poems were to be, and this true thankful joy and pride
with which I feel myself,

Yours ever faithfully,

ROBERT BROWNING.

Miss Barrett,[1]
50 Wimpole St.
R. Browning.

[Footnote 1: With this and the following letter the addresses on the
envelopes are given; for all subsequent letters the addresses are the
same. The correspondence passed through the post.]



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

50 Wimpole Street: Jan. 11, 1845.

I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant
to give me pleasure by your letter--and even if the object had not
been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly
answered. Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear--very dear
to me: but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the
quintessence of sympathy to me! Will you take back my gratitude for
it?--agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from
Tyre to Carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most
princely thing!

For the rest you draw me on with your kindness. It is difficult to get
rid of people when you once have given them too much pleasure--_that_
is a fact, and we will not stop for the moral of it. What I was going
to say--after a little natural hesitation--is, that if ever you emerge
without inconvenient effort from your 'passive state,' and will _tell_
me of such faults as rise to the surface and strike you as important
in my poems, (for of course, I do not think of troubling you with
criticism in detail) you will confer a lasting obligation on me, and
one which I shall value so much, that I covet it at a distance. I do
not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism and it is
possible enough that I might not be altogether obedient to yours. But
with my high respect for your power in your Art and for your
experience as an artist, it would be quite impossible for me to hear a
general observation of yours on what appear to you my master-faults,
without being the better for it hereafter in some way. I ask for only
a sentence or two of general observation--and I do not ask even for
_that_, so as to tease you--but in the humble, low voice, which is so
excellent a thing in women--particularly when they go a-begging! The
most frequent general criticism I receive, is, I think, upon the
style,--'if I _would_ but change my style'! But _that_ is an objection
(isn't it?) to the writer bodily? Buffon says, and every sincere
writer must feel, that '_Le style c'est l'homme_'; a fact, however,
scarcely calculated to lessen the objection with certain critics.

Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure and honour of
making your acquaintance? and can it be true that you look back upon
the lost opportunity with any regret? _But_--you know--if you had
entered the 'crypt,' you might have caught cold, or been tired to
death, and _wished_ yourself 'a thousand miles off;' which would have
been worse than travelling them. It is not my interest, however, to
put such thoughts in your head about its being 'all for the best'; and
I would rather hope (as I do) that what I lost by one chance I may
recover by some future one. Winters shut me up as they do dormouse's
eyes; in the spring, _we shall see_: and I am so much better that I
seem turning round to the outward world again. And in the meantime I
have learnt to know your voice, not merely from the poetry but from
the kindness in it. Mr. Kenyon often speaks of you--dear Mr.
Kenyon!--who most unspeakably, or only speakably with tears in my
eyes,--has been my friend and helper, and my book's friend and helper!
critic and sympathiser, true friend of all hours! You know him well
enough, I think, to understand that I must be grateful to him.

I am writing too much,--and notwithstanding that I am writing too
much, I will write of one thing more. I will say that I am your
debtor, not only for this cordial letter and for all the pleasure
which came with it, but in other ways, and those the highest: and I
will say that while I live to follow this divine art of poetry, in
proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, I must be a devout
admirer and student of your works. This is in my heart to say to
you--and I say it.

And, for the rest, I am proud to remain

Your obliged and faithful

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

Robert Browning, Esq.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.



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

New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.
Jan. 13, 1845.

Dear Miss Barrett,--I just shall say, in as few words as I can, that
you make me very happy, and that, now the beginning is over, I dare
say I shall do better, because my poor praise, number one, was nearly
as felicitously brought out, as a certain tribute to no less a
personage than Tasso, which I was amused with at Rome some weeks ago,
in a neat pencilling on the plaister-wall by his tomb at
Sant'Onofrio--'Alla cara memoria--di--(please fancy solemn interspaces
and grave capital letters at the new lines) di--Torquato Tasso--il
Dottore Bernardini--offriva--il seguente Carme--_O tu_'--and no
more,--the good man, it should seem, breaking down with the overload
of love here! But my 'O tu'--was breathed out most sincerely, and now
you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come after.
Only,--and which is why I write now--it looks as if I have introduced
some phrase or other about 'your faults' so cleverly as to give
exactly the opposite meaning to what I meant, which was, that in my
first ardour I had thought to tell you of _everything_ which impressed
me in your verses, down, even, to whatever 'faults' I could find,--a
good earnest, when I had got to _them_, that I had left out not much
between--as if some Mr. Fellows were to say, in the overflow of his
first enthusiasm of rewarded adventure: 'I will describe you all the
outer life and ways of these Lycians, down to their very
sandal-thongs,' whereto the be-corresponded one rejoins--'Shall I get
next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs'? Yes, and a
little about the 'Olympian Horses,' and God-charioteers as well!

What 'struck me as faults,' were not matters on the removal of which,
one was to have--poetry, or high poetry,--but the very highest poetry,
so I thought, and that, to universal recognition. For myself, or any
artist, in many of the cases there would be a positive loss of time,
peculiar artist's pleasure--for an instructed eye loves to see where
the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly
along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow; for these
'too muches' for the everybody's picture are so many helps to the
making out the real painter's picture as he had it in his brain. And
all of the Titian's Naples Magdalen must have once been golden in its
degree to justify that heap of hair in her hands--the _only_ gold
effected now!

But about this soon--for night is drawing on and I go out, yet cannot,
quiet at conscience, till I report (to _myself_, for I never said it
to you, I think) that your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely
more to me than mine to you--for you _do_ what I always wanted, hoped
to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. You speak
out, _you_,--I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken
into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in
me, but I am going to try; so it will be no small comfort to have your
company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women
aforesaid, you are busied with them, whereas it seems bleak,
melancholy work, this talking to the wind (for I have begun)--yet I
don't think I shall let _you_ hear, after all, the savage things about
Popes and imaginative religions that I must say.

See how I go on and on to you, I who, whenever now and then pulled, by
the head and hair, into letter-writing, get sorrowfully on for a line
or two, as the cognate creature urged on by stick and string, and then
come down 'flop' upon the sweet haven of page one, line last, as
serene as the sleep of the virtuous! You will never more, I hope, talk
of 'the honour of my acquaintance,' but I will joyfully wait for the
delight of your friendship, and the spring, and my Chapel-sight after
all!

Ever yours most faithfully,

R. BROWNING.

For Mr. Kenyon--I have a convenient theory about _him_, and his
otherwise quite unaccountable kindness to me; but 'tis quite night
now, and they call me.




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

50 Wimpole Street: Jan. 15, 1845.

Dear Mr. Browning,--The fault was clearly with me and not with you.

When I had an Italian master, years ago, he told me that there was an
unpronounceable English word which absolutely expressed me, and which
he would say in his own tongue, as he could not in mine--'_testa
lunga_.' Of course, the signor meant _headlong_!--and now I have had
enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall.
But you see I do not. Headlong I was at first, and headlong I
continue--precipitously rushing forward through all manner of nettles
and briars instead of keeping the path; guessing at the meaning of
unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary--tearing open
letters, and never untying a string,--and expecting everything to be
done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning. And
so, at your half word I flew at the whole one, with all its possible
consequences, and wrote what you read. Our common friend, as I think
he is, Mr. Horne, is often forced to entreat me into patience and
coolness of purpose, though his only intercourse with me has been by
letter. And, by the way, you will be sorry to hear that during his
stay in Germany _he_ has been 'headlong' (out of a metaphor) twice;
once, in falling from the Drachenfels, when he only just saved himself
by catching at a vine; and once quite lately, at Christmas, in a fall
on the ice of the Elbe in skating, when he dislocated his left
shoulder in a very painful manner. He is doing quite well, I believe,
but it was sad to have such a shadow from the German Christmas tree,
and he a stranger.

In art, however, I understand that it does not do to be headlong, but
patient and laborious--and there is a love strong enough, even in me,
to overcome nature. I apprehend what you mean in the criticism you
just intimate, and shall turn it over and over in my mind until I get
practical good from it. What no mere critic sees, but what you, an
artist, know, is the difference between the thing desired and the
thing attained, between the idea in the writer's mind and the [Greek:
eidolon] cast off in his work. All the effort--the quick'ning of the
breath and beating of the heart in pursuit, which is ruffling and
injurious to the general effect of a composition; all which you call
'insistency,' and which many would call superfluity, and which _is_
superfluous in a sense--_you_ can pardon, because you understand. The
great chasm between the thing I say, and the thing I would say, would
be quite dispiriting to me, in spite even of such kindnesses as yours,
if the desire did not master the despondency. 'Oh for a horse with
wings!' It is wrong of me to write so of myself--only you put your
finger on the root of a fault, which has, to my fancy, been a little
misapprehended. I do not _say everything I think_ (as has been said of
me by master-critics) but I _take every means to say what I think_,
which is different!--or I fancy so!

In one thing, however, you are wrong. Why should you deny the full
measure of my delight and benefit from your writings? I could tell you
why you should not. You have in your vision two worlds, or to use the
language of the schools of the day, you are both subjective and
objective in the habits of your mind. You can deal both with abstract
thought and with human passion in the most passionate sense. Thus, you
have an immense grasp in Art; and no one at all accustomed to consider
the usual forms of it, could help regarding with reverence and
gladness the gradual expansion of your powers. Then you are
'masculine' to the height--and I, as a woman, have studied some of
your gestures of language and intonation wistfully, as a thing beyond
me far! and the more admirable for being beyond.

Of your new work I hear with delight. How good of you to tell me. And
it is not dramatic in the strict sense, I am to understand--(am I
right in understanding so?) and you speak, in your own person 'to the
winds'? no--but to the thousand living sympathies which will awake to
hear you. A great dramatic power may develop itself otherwise than in
the formal drama; and I have been guilty of wishing, before this hour
(for reasons which I will not thrust upon you after all my tedious
writing), that you would give the public a poem unassociated directly
or indirectly with the stage, for a trial on the popular heart. I
reverence the drama, but--

_But_ I break in on myself out of consideration for you. I might have
done it, you will think, before. I vex your 'serene sleep of the
virtuous' like a nightmare. Do not say 'No.' I am _sure_ I do! As to
the vain parlance of the world, I did not talk of the 'honour of your
acquaintance' without a true sense of honour, indeed; but I shall
willingly exchange it all (and _now_, if you please, at this moment,
for fear of worldly mutabilities) for the 'delight of your
friendship.'

Believe me, therefore, dear Mr. Browning,

Faithfully yours, and gratefully,

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

For Mr. Kenyon's kindness, as _I_ see it, no theory will account. I
class it with mesmerism for that reason.



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

New Cross, Hatcham, Monday Night.
[Post-mark, January 28, 1845.]

Dear Miss Barrett,--Your books lie on my table here, at arm's length
from me, in this old room where I sit all day: and when my head aches
or wanders or strikes work, as it now or then will, I take my chance
for either green-covered volume, as if it were so much fresh trefoil
to feel in one's hands this winter-time,--and round I turn, and,
putting a decisive elbow on three or four half-done-with 'Bells' of
mine, read, read, read, and just as I have shut up the book and walked
to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there,
and that, in an unwise hour, I engaged to do so. Meantime, the days
go by (the whitethroat is come and sings now) and as I would not have
you 'look down on me from your white heights' as promise breaker,
evader, or forgetter, if I could help: and as, if I am very candid and
contrite, you may find it in your heart to write to me again--who
knows?--I shall say at once that the said faults cannot be lost, must
be _somewhere_, and shall be faithfully brought you back whenever they
turn up,--as people tell one of missing matters. I am rather exacting,
myself, with my own gentle audience, and get to say spiteful things
about them when they are backward in their dues of appreciation--but
really, _really_--could I be quite sure that anybody as good as--I
must go on, I suppose, and say--as myself, even, were honestly to feel
towards me as I do, towards the writer of 'Bertha,' and the 'Drama,'
and the 'Duchess,' and the 'Page' and--the whole two volumes, I should
be paid after a fashion, I know.

One thing I can do--pencil, if you like, and annotate, and dissertate
upon that I love most and least--I think I can do it, that is.

Here an odd memory comes--of a friend who,--volunteering such a
service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality
in a side-column of short criticisms on sonnet the First, and starting
off the beginning three lines with, of course, 'bad, worse,
worst'--made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run of
his epithets, 'worser, worserer, worserest' pay off the second terzet
in full--no 'badder, badderer, badderest' fell to the _Second's_
allowance, and 'worser' &c. answered the demands of the Third;
'worster, worsterer, worsterest' supplied the emergency of the Fourth;
and, bestowing his last 'worserestest and worstestest' on lines 13 and
14, my friend (slapping his forehead like an emptied strong-box)
frankly declared himself bankrupt, and honourably incompetent, to
satisfy the reasonable expectations of the rest of the series!

What an illustration of the law by which opposite ideas suggest
opposite, and contrary images come together!

See now, how, of that 'Friendship' you offer me (and here Juliet's
word rises to my lips)--I feel sure once and for ever. I have got
already, I see, into this little pet-handwriting of mine (not anyone
else's) which scratches on as if theatrical copyists (ah me!) and
BRADBURY AND EVANS' READER were not! But you shall get something
better than this nonsense one day, if you will have patience with
me--hardly better, though, because this does me real good, gives real
relief, to write. After all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me,
and that stops me. Spring is to come, however!

If you hate writing to me as I hate writing to nearly everybody, I
pray you never write--if you do, as you say, care for anything I have
done. I will simply assure you, that meaning to begin work in deep
earnest, _begin_ without affectation, God knows,--I do not know what
will help me more than hearing from you,--and therefore, if you do not
so very much hate it, I know I _shall_ hear from you--and very little
more about your 'tiring me.'

Ever yours faithfully,

ROBERT BROWNING.


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

50 Walpole Street: Feb. 3, 1845.
[Transcriber's Note: So in original. Should be "Wimpole Street."]

Why how could I hate to write to you, dear Mr. Browning? Could you
believe in such a thing? If nobody likes writing to everybody (except
such professional letter writers as you and I are _not_), yet
everybody likes writing to somebody, and it would be strange and
contradictory if I were not always delighted both to hear from _you_
and to write to _you_, this talking upon paper being as good a social
pleasure as another, when our means are somewhat straitened. As for
me, I have done most of my talking by post of late years--as people
shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls. Not
that I write to many in the way of regular correspondence, as our
friend Mr. Horne predicates of me in his romances (which is mere
romancing!), but that there are a few who will write and be written to
by me without a sense of injury. Dear Miss Mitford, for instance. You
do not know her, I think, personally, although she was the first to
tell me (when I was very ill and insensible to all the glories of the
world except poetry), of the grand scene in 'Pippa Passes.' _She_ has
filled a large drawer in this room with delightful letters, heart-warm
and soul-warm, ... driftings of nature (if sunshine could drift like
snow), and which, if they should ever fall the way of all writing,
into print, would assume the folio shape as a matter of course, and
take rank on the lowest shelf of libraries, with Benedictine editions
of the Fathers, [Greek: k.t.l.]. I write this to you to show how I can
have pleasure in letters, and never think them too long, nor too
frequent, nor too illegible from being written in little 'pet hands.'
I can read any MS. except the writing on the pyramids. And if you will
only promise to treat me _en bon camarade_, without reference to the
conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen,' taking no thought for
your sentences (nor for mine), nor for your blots (nor for mine), nor
for your blunt speaking (nor for mine), nor for your badd speling (nor
for mine), and if you agree to send me a blotted thought whenever you
are in the mind for it, and with as little ceremony and less
legibility than you would think it necessary to employ towards your
printer--why, _then_, I am ready to sign and seal the contract, and to
rejoice in being 'articled' as your correspondent. Only _don't_ let us
have any constraint, any ceremony! _Don't_ be civil to me when you
feel rude,--nor loquacious when you incline to silence,--nor yielding
in the manners when you are perverse in the mind. See how out of the
world I am! Suffer me to profit by it in almost the only profitable
circumstance, and let us rest from the bowing and the courtesying,
you and I, on each side. You will find me an honest man on the whole,
if rather hasty and prejudging, which is a different thing from
prejudice at the worst. And we have great sympathies in common, and I
am inclined to look up to you in many things, and to learn as much of
everything as you will teach me. On the other hand you must prepare
yourself to forbear and to forgive--will you? While I throw off the
ceremony, I hold the faster to the kindness.

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