Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  I do not find it take away from my feeling of the magnanimity of Prometheus that he should, in truth, complain (as he does from beginning to end) of what he finds himself suffering. He could have prevented all, and can stop it now — of that he never thinks for a moment. That was the old Greek way — they never let an antagonistic passion neutralise the other which was to influence the man to his praise or blame. A Greek hero fears exceedingly and battles it out, cries out when he is wounded and fights on, does not say his love or hate makes him see no danger or feel no pain. Æschylus from first word to last (ιδεσθε με, οια πασχω12 to εσορας με, ως εκδικα πασχω13) insists on the unmitigated reality of the punishment which only the sun, and divine ether, and the godhead of his mother can comprehend; still, still that is only what I suppose Æschylus to have done — in your poem you shall make Prometheus our way.

  And now enough of Greek, which I am fast forgetting (for I never look at books I loved once) — it was your mention of the translation that brought out the old fast fading outlines of the Poem in my brain — the Greek poem, that is. You think — for I must get to you — that I ‘unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me.’ Now, you don’t know what that is, nor can I very well tell you, because the language with which I talk to myself of these matters is spiritual Attic, and ‘loves contractions,’ as grammarians say; but I read it myself, and well know what it means, that’s why I told you I was self-conscious — I meant that I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another — there! Of what use is talking? Only do you stay here with me in the ‘House’ these few short years. Do you think I shall see you in two months, three months? I may travel, perhaps. So you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think? For me, I always hated it — have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me, in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that I have done most of what is to be done, any lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me! I don’t even care about reading now — the world, and pictures of it, rather than writings about the world! But you must read books in order to get words and forms for ‘the public’ if you write, and that you needs must do, if you fear God. I have no pleasure in writing myself — none, in the mere act — though all pleasure in the sense of fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other! But I think you like the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or making music, do you not? After all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work — but — I don’t know why — my heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it. Yet but for what I have written you would never have heard of me — and through what you have written, not properly for it, I love and wish you well! Now, will you remember what I began my letter by saying — how you have promised to let me know if my wishing takes effect, and if you still continue better? And not even ... (since we are learned in magnanimity) don’t even tell me that or anything else, if it teases you, — but wait your own good time, and know me for ... if these words were but my own, and fresh-minted for this moment’s use!...

  Yours ever faithfully,

  R. Browning.

  E.B.B. to R.B.

  50 Wimpole Street: March 20, 1845.

  Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr. Browning, it is not, be sure, that I take my ‘own good time,’ but submit to my own bad time. It was kind of you to wish to know how I was, and not unkind of me to suspend my answer to your question — for indeed I have not been very well, nor have had much heart for saying so. This implacable weather! this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and moon! who can be well in such a wind? Yet for me, I should not grumble. There has been nothing very bad the matter with me, as there used to be — I only grow weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a corner — and then all this must end! April is coming. There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may. And as to seeing you besides, I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such a secluded life as mine — notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about social duties and the like — well — if you have such knowledge or if you have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth ‘to rights’ again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible. For if you think that I shall not like to see you, you are wrong, for all your learning. But I shall be afraid of you at first — though I am not, in writing thus. You are Paracelsus, and I am a recluse, with nerves that have been all broken on the rack, and now hang loosely — quivering at a step and breath.

  And what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of your life and mine. You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full, with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly; or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country — had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle — and but for one, in my own house — but of this I cannot speak. It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in — and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. And so time passed, and passed — and afterwards, when my illness came and I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done, and no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave — that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact. I was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? Why, if I live on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages — that I am, in a manner, as a blind poet? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some....

  But all grumbling is a vile thing. We should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us. I write so, that you may not mistake what I wrote before in relation to society, although you do not see from my point of view; and that you may understand what I mean fully when I say, that I have lived all my chief joys, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that name and relate to myself personally, in poetry and in poetry alone. Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write — it is life, for me. Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe, — but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully. And thus, one lives in composition surely — not always — but when the wheel goes round and the procession is uninterrupted. Is it not so with you? oh — it must be so. For the rest, there will be necessarily a reaction; and, in my own particular case, whenever I see a poem of mine in print, or even smoothly transcribed, the reaction is most painful. The pleasure, the sense of power, without which I could not write a line, is gone in a moment
; and nothing remains but disappointment and humiliation. I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment! I have a seasonable humility, I do assure you.

  How delightful to talk about oneself; but as you ‘tempted me and I did eat,’ I entreat your longsuffering of my sin, and ah! if you would but sin back so in turn! You and I seem to meet in a mild contrarious harmony ... as in the ‘si no, si no’ of an Italian duet. I want to see more of men, and you have seen too much, you say. I am in ignorance, and you, in satiety. ‘You don’t even care about reading now.’ Is it possible? And I am as ‘fresh’ about reading, as ever I was — as long as I keep out of the shadow of the dictionaries and of theological controversies, and the like. Shall I whisper it to you under the memory of the last rose of last summer? I am very fond of romances; yes! and I read them not only as some wise people are known to do, for the sake of the eloquence here and the sentiment there, and the graphic intermixtures here and there, but for the story! just as little children would, sitting on their papa’s knee. My childish love of a story never wore out with my love of plum cake, and now there is not a hole in it. I make it a rule, for the most part, to read all the romances that other people are kind enough to write — and woe to the miserable wight who tells me how the third volume endeth. Have you in you any surviving innocence of this sort? or do you call it idiocy? If you do, I will forgive you, only smiling to myself — I give you notice, — with a smile of superior pleasure! Mr. Chorley made me quite laugh the other day by recommending Mary Hewitt’s ‘Improvisatore,’ with a sort of deprecating reference to the descriptions in the book, just as if I never read a novel — I! I wrote a confession back to him which made him shake his head perhaps, and now I confess to you, unprovoked. I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio’s stories; and I am not ashamed of it. I do not even ‘see the better part,’ I am so silly.

  Ah! you tempt me with a grand vision of Prometheus! I, who have just escaped with my life, after treading Milton’s ground, you would send me to Æschylus’s. No, I do not dare. And besides ... I am inclined to think that we want new forms, as well as thoughts. The old gods are dethroned. Why should we go back to the antique moulds, classical moulds, as they are so improperly called? If it is a necessity of Art to do so, why then those critics are right who hold that Art is exhausted and the world too worn out for poetry. I do not, for my part, believe this: and I believe the so-called necessity of Art to be the mere feebleness of the artist. Let us all aspire rather to Life, and let the dead bury their dead. If we have but courage to face these conventions, to touch this low ground, we shall take strength from it instead of losing it; and of that, I am intimately persuaded. For there is poetry everywhere; the ‘treasure’ (see the old fable) lies all over the field. And then Christianity is a worthy myth, and poetically acceptable.

  I had much to say to you, or at least something, of the ‘blind hopes’ &c., but am ashamed to take a step into a new sheet. If you mean ‘to travel,’ why, I shall have to miss you. Do you really mean it? How is the play going on? and the poem?

  May God bless you!

  Ever and truly yours,

  E.B.B.

  R.B. to E.B.B.

  Monday Morning.

  [Post-mark, March 31, 1845.]

  When you read Don Quixote, my dear romance-reader, do you ever notice that flower of an incident of good fellowship where the friendly Squire of Him of the Moon, or the Looking glasses, (I forget which) passes to Sancho’s dry lips, (all under a cork-tree one morning) — a plump wine-skin, — and do you admire dear brave Miguel’s knowledge of thirsty nature when he tells you that the Drinker, having seriously considered for a space the Pleiads, or place where they should be, fell, as he slowly returned the shrivelled bottle to its donor, into a deep musing of an hour’s length, or thereabouts, and then ... mark ... only then, fetching a profound sigh, broke silence with ... such a piece of praise as turns pale the labours in that way of Rabelais and the Teian (if he wasn’t a Byzantine monk, alas!) and our Mr. Kenyon’s stately self — (since my own especial poet à moi, that can do all with anybody, only ‘sips like a fly,’ she says, and so cares not to compete with these behemoths that drink up Jordan) — Well, then ... (oh, I must get quick to the sentence’s end, and be brief as an oracle-explainer!) — the giver is you and the taker is I, and the letter is the wine, and the star-gazing is the reading the same, and the brown study is — how shall I deserve and be grateful enough to this new strange friend of my own, that has taken away my reproach among men, that have each and all their friend, so they say (... not that I believe all they say — they boast too soon sometimes, no doubt, — I once was shown a letter wherein the truth stumbled out after this fashion ‘Dere Smith, — I calls you “dere” ... because you are so in your shop!’) — and the great sigh is, — there is no deserving nor being grateful at all, — and the breaking silence is, and the praise is ... ah, there, enough of it! This sunny morning is as if I wished it for you — 10 strikes by the clock now — tell me if at 10 this morning you feel any good from my heart’s wishes for you — I would give you all you want out of my own life and gladness and yet keep twice the stock that should by right have sufficed the thin white face that is laughing at me in the glass yonder at the fancy of its making anyone afraid ... and now, with another kind of laugh, at the thought that when its owner ‘travels’ next, he will leave off Miss Barrett along with port wine — Dii meliora piis, and, among them to

  Yours every where, and at all times yours

  R. Browning.

  I have all to say yet — next letter. R.B.

  APRIL, 1845

  R.B. to E.B.B.

  Tuesday Night.

  [Post-mark, April 16, 1845.]

  I heard of you, dear Miss Barrett, between a Polka and a Cellarius the other evening, of Mr. Kenyon — how this wind must hurt you! And yesterday I had occasion to go your way — past, that is, Wimpole Street, the end of it, — and, do you know, I did not seem to have leave from you to go down it yet, much less count number after number till I came to yours, — much least than less, look up when I did come there. So I went on to a viperine she-friend of mine who, I think, rather loves me she does so hate me, and we talked over the chances of certain other friends who were to be balloted for at the ‘Athenæum’ last night, — one of whom, it seems, was in a fright about it — ’to such little purpose’ said my friend — ’for he is so inoffensive — now, if one were to style you that — ’ ‘Or you’ — I said — and so we hugged ourselves in our grimness like tiger-cats. Then there is a deal in the papers to-day about Maynooth, and a meeting presided over by Lord Mayor Gibbs, and the Reverend Mr. Somebody’s speech. And Mrs. Norton has gone and book-made at a great rate about the Prince of Wales, pleasantly putting off till his time all that used of old to be put off till his mother’s time; — altogether, I should dearly like to hear from you, but not till the wind goes, and sun comes — because I shall see Mr. Kenyon next week and get him to tell me some more. By the way, do you suppose anybody else looks like him? If you do, the first room full of real London people you go among you will fancy to be lighted up by a saucer of burning salt and spirits of wine in the back ground.