Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  [Post-mark, January 5, 1846.]

  Yesterday, nearly the last thing, I bade you ‘think of me’ — I wonder if you could misunderstand me in that? — As if my words or actions or any of my ineffectual outside-self should be thought of, unless to be forgiven! But I do, dearest, feel confident that while I am in your mind — cared for, rather than thought about — no great harm can happen to me; and as, for great harm to reach me, it must pass through you, you will care for yourself; myself, best self!

  Come, let us talk. I found Horne’s book at home, and have had time to see that fresh beautiful things are there — I suppose ‘Delora’ will stand alone still — but I got pleasantly smothered with that odd shower of wood-spoils at the end, the dwarf-story; cup-masses and fern and spotty yellow leaves, — all that, I love heartily — and there is good sailor-speech in the ‘Ben Capstan’ — though he does knock a man down with a ‘crow-bar’ — instead of a marling-spike or, even, a belaying-pin! The first tale, though good, seems least new and individual, but I must know more. At one thing I wonder — his not reprinting a quaint clever real ballad, published before ‘Delora,’ on the ‘Merry Devil of Edmonton’ — the first of his works I ever read. No, the very first piece was a single stanza, if I remember, in which was this line: ‘When bason-crested Quixote, lean and bold,’ — good, is it not? Oh, while it strikes me, good, too, is that ‘Swineshead Monk’ ballad! Only I miss the old chronicler’s touch on the method of concocting the poison: ‘Then stole this Monk into the Garden and under a certain herb found out a Toad, which, squeezing into a cup,’ &c. something to that effect. I suspect, par parenthèse, you have found out by this time my odd liking for ‘vermin’ — you once wrote ‘your snails’ — and certainly snails are old clients of mine — but efts! Horne traced a line to me — in the rhymes of a ‘‘prentice-hand’ I used to look over and correct occasionally — taxed me (last week) with having altered the wise line ‘Cold as a lizard in a sunny stream’ to ‘Cold as a newt hid in a shady brook’ — for ‘what do you know about newts?’ he asked of the author — who thereupon confessed. But never try and catch a speckled gray lizard when we are in Italy, love, and you see his tail hang out of the chink of a wall, his winter-house — because the strange tail will snap off, drop from him and stay in your fingers — and though you afterwards learn that there is more desperation in it and glorious determination to be free, than positive pain (so people say who have no tails to be twisted off) — and though, moreover, the tail grows again after a sort — yet ... don’t do it, for it will give you a thrill! What a fine fellow our English water-eft is; ‘Triton paludis Linnaei’ — e come guizza (that you can’t say in another language; cannot preserve the little in-and-out motion along with the straightforwardness!) — I always loved all those wild creatures God ‘sets up for themselves’ so independently of us, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them; while we run about and against each other with our great cressets and fire-pots. I once saw a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole; his nest, no doubt; or tomb, perhaps — ’Safe as Oedipus’s grave-place, ‘mid Colone’s olives swart’ — (Kiss me, my Siren!) — Well, it seemed awful to watch that bee — he seemed so instantly from the teaching of God! Ælian says that ... a frog, does he say? — some animal, having to swim across the Nile, never fails to provide himself with a bit of reed, which he bites off and holds in his mouth transversely and so puts from shore gallantly ... because when the water-serpent comes swimming to meet him, there is the reed, wider than his serpent’s jaws, and no hopes of a swallow that time — now fancy the two meeting heads, the frog’s wide eyes and the vexation of the snake!

  Now, see! do I deceive you? Never say I began by letting down my dignity ‘that with no middle flight intends to soar above the Aonian Mount’! —

  My best, dear, dear one, — may you be better, less depressed, ... I can hardly imagine frost reaching you if I could be by you. Think what happiness you mean to give me, — what a life; what a death! ‘I may change’ — too true; yet, you see, as an eft was to me at the beginning so it continues — I may take up stones and pelt the next I see — but — do you much fear that? — Now, walk, move, guizza, anima mia dolce. Shall I not know one day how far your mouth will be from mine as we walk? May I let that stay ... dearest, (the line stay, not the mouth)?

  I am not very well to-day — or, rather, have not been so — now, I am well and with you. I just say that, very needlessly, but for strict frankness’ sake. Now, you are to write to me soon, and tell me all about your self, and to love me ever, as I love you ever, and bless you, and leave you in the hands of God — My own love! —

  Tell me if I do wrong to send this by a morning post — so as to reach you earlier than the evening — when you will ... write to me?

  Don’t let me forget to say that I shall receive the Review to-morrow, and will send it directly.

  E.B.B. to R.B.

  Sunday.

  [Post-mark, January 6, 1846.]

  When you get Mr. Horne’s book you will understand how, after reading just the first and the last poems, I could not help speaking coldly a little of it — and in fact, estimating his power as much as you can do, I did think and do, that the last was unworthy of him, and that the first might have been written by a writer of one tenth of his faculty. But last night I read the ‘Monk of Swineshead Abbey’ and the ‘Three Knights of Camelott’ and ‘Bedd Gelert’ and found them all of different stuff, better, stronger, more consistent, and read them with pleasure and admiration. Do you remember this application, among the countless ones of shadow to the transiency of life? I give the first two lines for clearness —

  Like to the cloud upon the hill

  We are a moment seen

  Or the shadow of the windmill-sail

  Across yon sunny slope of green.

  New or not, and I don’t remember it elsewhere, it is just and beautiful I think. Think how the shadow of the windmill-sail just touches the ground on a bright windy day! the shadow of a bird flying is not faster! Then the ‘Three Knights’ has beautiful things, with more definite and distinct images than he is apt to show — for his character is a vague grand massiveness, — like Stonehenge — or at least, if ‘towers and battlements he sees’ they are ‘bosomed high’ in dusky clouds ... it is a ‘passion-created imagery’ which has no clear outline. In this ballad of the ‘Knights,’ and in the Monk’s too, we may look at things, as on the satyr who swears by his horns and mates not with his kind afterwards, ‘While, holding beards, they dance in pairs — and that is all excellent and reminds one of those fine sylvan festivals, ‘in Orion.’ But now tell me if you like altogether ‘Ben Capstan’ and if you consider the sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry, because I do not indeed. On the same principle we may have Yorkshire and Somersetshire ‘sweet Doric’; and do recollect what it ended in of old, in the Blowsibella heroines. Then for the Elf story ... why should such things be written by men like Mr. Horne? I am vexed at it. Shakespeare and Fletcher did not write so about fairies: — Drayton did not. Look at the exquisite ‘Nymphidia,’ with its subtle sylvan consistency, and then at the lumbering coarse ... ‘machina intersit’ ... Grandmama Grey! — to say nothing of the ‘small dog’ that isn’t the ‘small boy.’ Mr. Horne succeeds better on a larger canvass, and with weightier material; with blank verse rather than lyrics. He cannot make a fine stroke. He wants subtlety and elasticity in the thought and expression. Remember, I admire him honestly and earnestly. No one has admired more than I the ‘Death of Marlowe,’ scenes in ‘Cosmo,’ and ‘Orion’ in much of it. But now tell me if you can accept with the same stretched out hand all these lyrical poems? I am going to write to him as much homage as can come truly. Who combines different faculties as you do, striking the whole octave? No one, at present in the world.

  Dearest, after you went away yesterday and I began to consider, I found that there was nothing to be so over-glad about in the matter of th
e letters, for that, Sunday coming next to Saturday, the best now is only as good as the worst before, and I can’t hear from you, until Monday ... Monday! Did you think of that — you who took the credit of acceding so meekly! I shall not praise you in return at any rate. I shall have to wait ... till what o’clock on Monday, tempted in the meanwhile to fall into controversy against the ‘new moons and sabbath days’ and the pausing of the post in consequence.

  You never guessed perhaps, what I look back to at this moment in the physiology of our intercourse, the curious double feeling I had about you — you personally, and you as the writer of these letters, and the crisis of the feeling, when I was positively vexed and jealous of myself for not succeeding better in making a unity of the two. I could not! And moreover I could not help but that the writer of the letters seemed nearer to me, long ... long ... and in spite of the postmark, than did the personal visitor who confounded me, and left me constantly under such an impression of its being all dream-work on his side, that I have stamped my feet on this floor with impatience to think of having to wait so many hours before the ‘candid’ closing letter could come with its confessional of an illusion. ‘People say,’ I used to think, ‘that women always know, and certainly I do not know, and therefore ... therefore.’ — The logic crushed on like Juggernaut’s car. But in the letters it was different — the dear letters took me on the side of my own ideal life where I was able to stand a little upright and look round. I could read such letters for ever and answer them after a fashion ... that, I felt from the beginning. But you — !

  Monday. — Never too early can the light come. Thank you for my letter! Yet you look askance at me over ‘newt and toad,’ and praise so the Elf-story that I am ashamed to send you my ill humour on the same head. And you really like that? admire it? Grandmama Grey and the night cap and all? and ‘shoetye and blue sky?’ and is it really wrong of me to like certainly some touches and images, but not the whole, ... not the poem as a whole? I can take delight in the fantastical, and in the grotesque — but here there is a want of life and consistency, as it seems to me! — the elf is no elf and speaks no elf-tongue: it is not the right key to touch, ... this, ... for supernatural music. So I fancy at least — but I will try the poem again presently. You must be right — unless it should be your over-goodness opposed to my over-badness — I will not be sure. Or you wrote perhaps in an accidental mood of most excellent critical smoothness, such as Mr. Forster did his last Examiner in, when he gave the all-hail to Mr. Harness as one of the best dramatists of the age!! Ah no! — not such as Mr. Forster’s. Your soul does not enter into his secret — There can be nothing in common between you. For him to say such a word — he who knows — or ought to know! — And now let us agree and admire the bowing of the old ministrel over Bedd Gelert’s unfilled grave —

  The long beard fell like snow into the grave

  With solemn grace

  A poet, a friend, a generous man Mr. Horne is, even if no laureate for the fairies.

  I have this moment a parcel of books via Mr. Moxon — Miss Martineau’s two volumes — and Mr. Bailey sends his ‘Festus,’ very kindly, ... and ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ from America from a Mrs. or a Miss Fuller — how I hate those ‘Women of England,’ ‘Women and their Mission’ and the rest. As if any possible good were to be done by such expositions of rights and wrongs.

  Your letter would be worth them all, if you were less you! I mean, just this letter, ... all alive as it is with crawling buzzing wriggling cold-blooded warm-blooded creatures ... as all alive as your own pedant’s book in the tree. And do you know, I think I like frogs too — particularly the very little leaping frogs, which are so high-hearted as to emulate the birds. I remember being scolded by my nurses for taking them up in my hands and letting them leap from one hand to the other. But for the toad! — why, at the end of the row of narrow beds which we called our gardens when we were children, grew an old thorn, and in the hollow of the root of the thorn, lived a toad, a great ancient toad, whom I, for one, never dared approach too nearly. That he ‘wore a jewel in his head’ I doubted nothing at all. You must see it glitter if you stooped and looked steadily into the hole. And on days when he came out and sate swelling his black sides, I never looked steadily; I would run a hundred yards round through the shrubs, deeper than knee-deep in the long wet grass and nettles, rather than go past him where he sate; being steadily of opinion, in the profundity of my natural history-learning, that if he took it into his toad’s head to spit at me I should drop down dead in a moment, poisoned as by one of the Medici.

  Oh — and I had a field-mouse for a pet once, and should have joined my sisters in a rat’s nest if I had not been ill at the time (as it was, the little rats were tenderly smothered by over-love!): and blue-bottle flies I used to feed, and hated your spiders for them; yet no, not much. My aversion proper ... call it horror rather ... was for the silent, cold, clinging, gliding bat; and even now, I think, I could not sleep in the room with that strange bird-mouse-creature, as it glides round the ceiling silently, silently as its shadow does on the floor. If you listen or look, there is not a wave of the wing — the wing never waves! A bird without a feather! a beast that flies! and so cold! as cold as a fish! It is the most supernatural-seeming of natural things. And then to see how when the windows are open at night those bats come sailing ... without a sound — and go ... you cannot guess where! — fade with the night-blackness!

  You have not been well — which is my first thought if not my first word. Do walk, and do not work; and think ... what I could be thinking of, if I did not think of you ... dear — dearest! ‘As the doves fly to the windows,’ so I think of you! As the prisoners think of liberty, as the dying think of Heaven, so I think of you. When I look up straight to God ... nothing, no one, used to intercept me — now there is you — only you under him! Do not use such words as those therefore any more, nor say that you are not to be thought of so and so. You are to be thought of every way. You must know what you are to me if you know at all what I am, — and what I should be but for you.

  So ... love me a little, with the spiders and the toads and the lizards! love me as you love the efts — and I will believe in you as you believe ... in Ælian — Will that do?

  Your own —

  Say how you are when you write — and write.

  R.B. to E.B.B.

  Tuesday Morning.

  I this minute receive the Review — a poor business, truly! Is there a reason for a man’s wits dwindling the moment he gets into a critical High-place to hold forth? — I have only glanced over the article however. Well, one day I am to write of you, dearest, and it must come to something rather better than that!

  I am forced to send now what is to be sent at all. Bless you, dearest. I am trusting to hear from you —

  Your R.B.

  And I find by a note from a fairer friend and favourer of mine that in the New Quarterly ‘Mr. Browning’ figures pleasantly as ‘one without any sympathy for a human being!’ — Then, for newts and efts at all events!

  R.B. to E.B.B.

  Tuesday Night.

  [Post-mark, January 7, 1846.]

  But, my sweet, there is safer going in letters than in visits, do you not see? In the letter, one may go to the utmost limit of one’s supposed tether without danger — there is the distance so palpably between the most audacious step there, and the next ... which is nowhere, seeing it is not in the letter. Quite otherwise in personal intercourse, where any indication of turning to a certain path, even, might possibly be checked not for its own fault but lest, the path once reached and proceeded in, some other forbidden turning might come into sight, we will say. In the letter, all ended there, just there ... and you may think of that, and forgive; at all events, may avoid speaking irrevocable words — and when, as to me, those words are intensely true, doom-words — think, dearest! Because, as I told you once, what most characterizes my feeling for you is the perfect respect in it, the full belief ... (I shall get presen
tly to poor Robert’s very avowal of ‘owing you all esteem’!). It is on that I build, and am secure — for how should I know, of myself, how to serve you and be properly yours if it all was to be learnt by my own interpreting, and what you professed to dislike you were to be considered as wishing for, and what liking, as it seemed, you were loathing at your heart, and if so many ‘noes’ made a ‘yes,’ and ‘one refusal no rebuff’ and all that horrible bestiality which stout gentlemen turn up the whites of their eyes to, when they rise after dinner and pressing the right hand to the left side say, ‘The toast be dear woman!’ Now, love, with this feeling in me from the beginning, — I do believe, — now, when I am utterly blest in this gift of your love, and least able to imagine what I should do without it, — I cannot but believe, I say, that had you given me once a ‘refusal’ — clearly derived from your own feelings, and quite apart from any fancied consideration for my interests; had this come upon me, whether slowly but inevitably in the course of events, or suddenly as precipitated by any step of mine; I should, believing you, have never again renewed directly or indirectly such solicitation; I should have begun to count how many other ways were yet open to serve you and devote myself to you ... but from the outside, now, and not in your livery! Now, if I should have acted thus under any circumstances, how could I but redouble my endeavours at precaution after my own foolish — you know, and forgave long since, and I, too, am forgiven in my own eyes, for the cause, though not the manner — but could I do other than keep ‘farther from you’ than in the letters, dearest? For your own part in that matter, seeing it with all the light you have since given me (and then, not inadequately by my own light) I could, I do kiss your feet, kiss every letter in your name, bless you with my whole heart and soul if I could pour them out, from me, before you, to stay and be yours; when I think on your motives and pure perfect generosity. It was the plainness of that which determined me to wait and be patient and grateful and your own for ever in any shape or capacity you might please to accept. Do you think that because I am so rich now, I could not have been most rich, too, then — in what would seem little only to me, only with this great happiness? I should have been proud beyond measure — happy past all desert, to call and be allowed to see you simply, speak with you and be spoken to — what am I more than others? Don’t think this mock humility — it is not — you take me in your mantle, and we shine together, but I know my part in it! All this is written breathlessly on a sudden fancy that you might — if not now, at some future time — give other than this, the true reason, for that discrepancy you see, that nearness in the letters, that early farness in the visits! And, love, all love is but a passionate drawing closer — I would be one with you, dearest; let my soul press close to you, as my lips, dear life of my life.