Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  I suppose you are by the sea, and I hope you and the dearest nonno are receiving as much good from air and water as you desired. May God bless you both.

  Your ever affectionate Sister,

  Ba.

  To Miss I. Blagden

  Villa Alberti, Siena: Wednesday [July-August 1859].

  My ever dearest, kindest Isa, — I can’t let another day go without writing just a word to you to say that I am alive enough to love you. In fact, dear, I am a great deal better; no longer ground to dust with cough; able to sleep at nights; and preparing to-day to venture on a little minced chicken, which I have resisted all the advances of hitherto. This proves my own opinion of myself, at least. I am extremely weak, reeling when I ought to walk, and glad of an arm to steer by. But the attack is over; the blister to the side, tell Dr. Gresonowsky, conquered the uneasiness there, and did me general good, I think. Now I have only to keep still and quiet, and do nothing useful, or the contrary, if possible, and not speak, and not vex myself more than is necessary on politics. I had a letter from Jessie Mario, dated Bologna, the other day, and feel a little uneasy at what she may be about there. It was a letter not written in very good taste, blowing the trumpet against all Napoleonists. Most absurd for the rest. Cavour had promised L.N. Tuscany for his cousin as the price of his intervention in Italy; and Prince Napoleon, finding on his arrival here that it ‘wouldn’t do,’ the peace was made in a huff.

  Absurd, certainly.

  Robert advises me not to answer, and it may be as well, perhaps.

  I dreamed lately that I followed a mystic woman down a long suite of palatial rooms. She was in white, with a white mask, on her head the likeness of a crown. I knew she was Italy, but I couldn’t see through the mask. All through my illness political dreams have repeated themselves, in inscrutable articles of peace and eternal provisional governments. Walking on the mountains of the moon, hand in hand with a Dream more beautiful than them all, then falling suddenly on the hard earth-ground on one’s head, no wonder that one should suffer. Oh, Isa, the tears are even now in my eyes to think of it!

  And yet I have hope, and the more I consider, the more I hope.

  There will be no intervention to interfere with us in Tuscany, and there is something better behind, which we none of us see yet.

  We read to-day of the Florence elections. May God bless my Florence!

  Dearest Isa, don’t you fancy that you will get off with a day and night here. No, indeed. Also, I would rather you waited till I could talk, and go out, and enjoy you properly; and just now I am a mere rag of a Ba hung on a chair to be out of the way.

  Robert is so very kind as to hear Pen’s lessons, which keeps me easy about the child.

  Heat we have had and have; but there’s a great quantity of air — such blowings as you boast of at your villa — and I like this good open air and the quiet. I have seen nobody yet....

  Dearest Isa, I miss you, and love you. How perfect you are to me always.

  Robert’s true love, with Pen’s. And I may send my love to Miss Field, may I not?

  Yours, in tender affection,

  Ba.

  Do write, and tell me everything.

  Yes, England will do a little dabbling about constitutions and the like where there’s nothing to lose or risk; and why does Mrs. Trollope say ‘God bless them’ for it? I never will forgive England the most damnable part she has taken on Italian affairs, never. The pitiful cry of ‘invasion’ is the continuation of that hound’s cry, observe. Must we live and bear?

  To Miss E.F. Haworth

  Villa Alberti, Siena: August 24, 1859 [postmark].

  Dearest Fanny, — This is only to say that I wrote to you before your letter reached me, directing mine simply to the post-office of Cologne, and that I write now lest what went before should miss for want of the more specific address. Thank you, dear friend, for caring to hear of my health; that, at least, is pleasant. I keep recovering strength by air, quiet, and asses’ milk, and by hope for Italy, which consolidates itself more and more.

  You will wonder at me, but these public affairs have half killed me. You know I can’t take things quietly. Your complaint and mine, Fanny, are just opposite. For weeks and weeks, in my feverish state, I never closed my eyes without suffering ‘punishment’ under eternal articles of peace and unending lists of provisional governments. Do you wonder?

  Observe — I believe entirely in the Emperor. He did at Villafranca what he could not help but do. Since then, he has simply changed the arena of the struggle; he is walking under the earth instead of on the earth, but straight and to unchanged ends.

  This country, meanwhile, is conducting itself nobly. It is worthy of becoming a great nation.

  And God for us all!

  So you go to England really? Which I doubted, till your letter came.

  It is well that you did not spend the summer here, for the heat has been ferocious; hotter, people from Corfu say, than it was ever felt there. Italy, however, is apt to be hottish in the summer, as we know very well.

  The country about here, though not romantic like Lucca, is very pretty, and our windows command sunsets and night winds. I have not stirred out yet after three weeks of it; you may suppose how reduced I must be. I could scarcely stand at one time. The active evil, however, is ended, and strength comes somehow or other. Robert has had the perfect goodness not only to nurse me, but to teach Peni, who is good too, and rides a pony just the colour of his curls, to his pure delight. Then we have books and newspapers, English and Italian — the books from Florence — so we do beautifully.

  Mr. Landor is here. There’s a long story. Absolute revolution and abdication from the Florence villa. He appeared one day at our door of Casa Guidi, with an oath on his soul never to go back. The end of it all is, that Robert has accepted office as Landor’s guardian (!!) and is to ‘see to him’ at the request of his family in England; and there’s to be an arrangement for Wilson to undertake him in a Florence apartment, which she is pleased at. He visited the Storys, who are in a villa here (the only inhabitants), and were very kind to him. Now he is in rooms in a house not far from us, waiting till we return to Florence. I have seen him only once, and then he looked better than he did in Florence, where he seemed dropping into the grave, scarcely able to walk a hundred yards. He longs for England, but his friends do not encourage his return, and so the best that can be done for him must be. Now he is in improved spirits and has taken to writing Latin alcaics on Garibaldi, which is refreshing, I suppose.

  Ask at the post-office for my letter, but don’t fancy that it may be a line more lively than this. No alcaics from me! One soul has gone from me, at least, the soul that writes letters.

  May God bless you, dearest, kindest Fanny. Love me a little. Don’t leave off feeling ‘on private affairs’ too much for that.

  Robert’s best love with that of your loving

  Ba.

  To Mrs. Jameson

  Villa Alberti, Siena: August 26 .

  Dearest friend, what have you thought of me?

  I was no more likely to write to you about the ‘peace’ than about any stroke of personal calamity. The peace fell like a bomb on us all, and for my part, you may still find somewhere on the ground splinters of my heart, if you look hard. But by the time your letter reached me we had recovered the blow spiritually, had understood that it was necessary, and that the Emperor Napoleon, though forced to abandon one arena, was prepared to carry on the struggle for Italy on another.

  Therefore I should have answered your letter at once if I had not been seized with illness. Indeed, my dear, dear friend, you will hear from me no excuses. I have not been unkind, simply incapable.

  I believe it was the violent mental agitation, the reaction from a state of exultation and joy in which I had been walking among the stars so many months; and the grief, anxiety, the struggle, the talking, all coming on me at a moment when the ferocious heat had made the body peculiarly susceptible; but one afternoon I went down to the
Trollopes, had sight of the famous Ducal orders about bombarding Florence, and came home to be ill. Violent palpitations and cough; in fact, the worst attack on the chest I ever had in Italy. For two days and two nights it was more like angina pectoris, as I have heard it described; but this went off, and the complaint ran into its ancient pattern, thank God, and kept me only very ill, with violent cough all night long; my poor Robert, who nursed me like an angel, prevented from sleeping for full three weeks. When there was a possibility I was lifted into a carriage and brought here; stayed two days at the inn in Siena, and then removed to this pleasant airy villa. Very ill I was after coming, and great courage it required to come; but change of air was absolutely a condition of living, and the event justified the risk. For now I am quite myself, have done crying ‘Wolf,’ and end this lamentable history by desiring you to absolve me for my silence. We have been here nearly a month. My strength, which was so exhausted that I could scarcely stand unsupported, is coming back satisfactorily, and the cough has ceased to vex me at all. Still, I am not equal to driving out. I hope to take my first drive in a very few days though, and the very asses are ministering to me — in milk. All the English physicians had found it convenient (the beloved Grand Duke being absent) to leave Florence, and Zanetti was attending the Piedmontese hospitals, so that I had to attend me none of the old oracles — only a Prussian physician (Dr. Gresonowsky), a very intelligent man, of whom we knew a little personally, and who had a strong political sympathy with me. (He and I used to sit together on Isa Blagden’s terrace and relieve ourselves by abusing each other’s country; and whether he expressed most moral indignation against England or I against Prussia, remained doubtful.) Afterwards he came to cure me, and was as generous in his profession as became his politics. People are usually very kind to us, I must say. Think of that man following us to Siena, uninvited, and attending me at the hotel two days, then refusing recompense.

  Well, now let me speak of our Italy and the peace. ‘Immoral,’ you say? Yes, immoral. But not immoral on the part of Napoleon who had his hand forced; only immoral on the part of those who by infamies of speech and intrigue (in England and Germany), against which I for one had been protesting for months, brought about the complicated results which forced his hand. Never was a greater or more disinterested deed intended and almost completed than this French intervention for Italian independence; and never was a baser and more hideous sight than the league against it of the nations. Let me not speak.

  For the rest, if it were not for Venetia (Zurich keeps its secrets so far) the peace would have proved a benefit rather than otherwise. We have had time to feel our own strength, to stand on our own feet. The vain talk about Napoleon’s intervening militarily on behalf of the Grand Duke has simply been the consequence of statements without foundation in the English and German papers; and also in some French Ultramontane papers. Napoleon with his own lips, after the peace, assured our delegates that no force should be used. And he has repeated this on every possible occasion. At Villafranca, when the Emperor of Austria insisted on the return of the Dukes, he acceded, on condition they were recalled. He ‘did not come to Italy to dispossess the sovereigns,’ as he had previously observed, but to give the power of election to the people. Before we left Rome this spring he had said to the French ambassador, ‘If the Tuscans like to recall their Grand Duke, qu’est-ce que cela me fait?’ He simply said the same at Villafranca.

  Count de Reiset was sent to Florence, Modena, and Parma, to ‘constater,’ not to ‘impose,’ and the whole policy of Napoleon has been to draw out a calm and full expression of the popular mind. Nobly have the people of Italy responded. Surely there is not in history a grander attitude than this assumed by a nation half born, half constituted, scarcely named yet, but already capable of self-restraint and dignity, and magnanimous faith. We are full of hope, and should be radiant with joy, except for Venetia.

  Dearest friend, the war did more than ‘give a province to Piedmont.’ The first French charge freed Italy potentially from north to south. At this moment Austria cannot stir anywhere. Here ‘we live, breathe, and have our national being.’ Certainly, if Napoleon did what the ‘Times’ has declared he would do — intervene with armed force against the people, prevent the elections, or tamper with the elections by means of — such means as he was ‘familiar’ with; if he did these things, I should cry aloud, ‘Immoral, vile, a traitor!’ But the facts deny all these imputations. He has walked steadily on along one path, and the development of Italy as a nation is at the end of it.

  Of course the first emotion on the subject of the peace was rage as well as grief. For one day in Florence all his portraits and busts disappeared from the shop windows; and I myself, to Penini’s extreme disgust (who insisted on it that his dear Napoleon couldn’t do anything wrong, and that the fault was in the telegraph), wouldn’t let him wear his Napoleon medal. Afterwards — as Ferdinando said— ‘Siamo stati un po’ troppo furiosi davvero, signora;’ that came to be the general conviction. Out came the portraits again in the sun, and the Emperor’s bust, side by side with Victor Emanuel’s, adorns the room of our ‘General Assembly.’ There are individuals, of course, who think that through whatever amount of difficulty and complication, he should have preserved his first programme. But these are not the wiser thinkers. He had to judge for France as well as for Italy. As Mr. Trollope said to me in almost the first fever, ‘It is upon the cards that he has acted in the wisest and most conscientious manner possible for all, — or it is on the cards etc.’

  The difficulty now is at Naples.

  There will be a Congress, of course. A Congress was in the first programme; after the war, a Congress.

  But, dearest Mona Nina, if you want to get calumniated, hated, lied upon, and spat upon (in a spiritual sense), try and do a good deed from disinterested motives in this world. That’s my lesson.

  I have been told upon rather good authority that Cavour’s retirement is simply a feint, and that he will recover his position presently.

  What weighs on my heart is Venetia. Can they do anything at Zurich to modify that heavy fact?

  You see I am not dead yet, dear, dearest friend. And while alive at all, I can’t help being in earnest on these questions. I am a Ba, you know. Forgive me when I get too much ‘riled’ by your England.

  You will know by this time that the ‘proposition’ you approved of was French.

  What made the very help of Prussia unacceptable to Austria was the circumstance of Prussia’s using that opportunity of Austria’s need to wriggle herself to the military headship of the Confederation. Austria would rather have lost Lombardy (and more) than have accepted such a disadvantage. Hence the coldness, the cause of which is scarcely avowable. Selfish and pitiful nations!

  Dear Isa Blagden writes me all the political news of Florence. She is well, and will come to pay us a visit before long. We remain here till September ends, and then return to Casa Guidi.

  I had a letter from Bologna from Jessie, which threw me into a terror lest the Mazzinians should come to Italy just in time to ruin us. The letter (not unkind to me) was as contrary to facts and reason as possible. I was too ill to write at the time, and Robert would not let me answer it afterwards.

  [The remainder of this letter is missing.]

  To Mrs. Martin

  Villa Alberti, Siena: September .

  My dearest Mrs. Martin, — As you talk of palpitations and the newspapers, and then tell me or imply that you are confined for light and air to the ‘Times’ on the Italian question, I am moved with sympathy and compassion for you, and anxious not to lose a post in answering your letter. My dear, dear friends, I beseech you to believe nothing which you have read, are reading, or are likely to read in the ‘Times’ newspaper, unless it contradicts all that went before. The criminal conduct of that paper from first to last, and the immense amount of injury it has occasioned in the world, make me feel that the hanging of the Smethursts and Ellen Butlers would be irredeemable cruelty while the
se writers are protected by the Law....

  Of course you must feel perplexed. The paper takes up different sets of falsities, quite different and contradictory, and treats them as facts, and writes ‘leaders’ on them, as if they were facts. The reader, at last, falls into a state of confusion, and sees nothing clearly except that somehow or other, for something that he has done or hasn’t done, has intended or hasn’t intended, Louis Napoleon is a rascal, and we ought to hate him and his.

  Well, leave the ‘Times’ — though from the ‘Times’ and the like base human movements in England and Germany resulted, more or less directly, that peace of Villafranca which threw us all here into so deep an anguish, that I, for one, have scarcely recovered from it even to this day.

  Let me tell you. We were living in a glow of triumph and gratitude; and for me, it seemed to me as if I walked among the angels of a new-created world. All faces at Florence shone with one thought and one love. You can scarcely realise to yourself what it was at that time. Friends were more than friends, and strangers were friends. The rapture of the Italians — their gratitude to the French, the simple joy with which the French troops understood (down to the privates) that they had come to deliver their brothers, and to go away with empty hands; all these things, which have been calumniated and denied, were wonderfully beautiful. Scarcely ever in my life was I so happy. I was happy, not only for Italy, but for the world — because I thought that this great deed would beat under its feet all enmities, and lift up England itself (at last) above its selfish and base policy. Then, on a sudden, came the peace. It was as if a thunderbolt fell. For one day, every picture and bust of the Emperor vanished, and the men who would have died for him, before that sun, half articulated a curse on his head. But the next day we were no longer mad, and as the days past, we took up hope again, and the more thoughtful among our politicians began to understand the situation. There was, however, a painful change. Before, difference of opinion was unknown, and there was no sort of anxiety (a doubt of the result of the war never crossing anyone’s mind). Napoleon in the thickest of the fire, with one epaulette shot off, was a symbol intelligible to the whole population. But when he disappeared from the field and entered the region of spirits and diplomats — when he walked under the earth instead of on the surface — though he walked with equal loyalty and uprightness, then people were sanguine or fearful according to their temperament, and the English and Austrian newspapers, attributing the worst motives and designs, troubled the thoughts of many. Still, both the masses (with their blind noble faith), and the leaders with their intelligence, held fast their hopes, and the consequence has been the magnificent spectacle which this nation now offers to Europe, and which for dignity, calm, and unanimous determination may seek in vain for its parallel in history. Now we are very happy again, full of hope and faith....