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,