_E.B.B. to R.B._
[Post-mark, July 25, 1845.]
Are you any better to-day? and will you say just the truth of it? and
not attempt to do any of the writing which does harm--nor of the
reading even, which may do harm--and something does harm to you, you
see--and you told me not long ago that you knew how to avoid the harm
... now, did you not? and what could it have been last week which you
did not avoid, and which made you so unwell? Beseech you not to think
that I am going to aid and abet in this wronging of yourself, for I
will not indeed--and I am only sorry to have given you my querulous
queries yesterday ... and to have omitted to say in relation to them,
too, how they were to be accepted in any case as just passing thoughts
of mine for _your_ passing thoughts, ... some right, it may be ...
some wrong, it must be ... and none, insisted on even by the thinker!
just impressions, and by no means pretending to be judgments--now
_will_ you understand? Also, I intended (as a proof of my fallacy) to
strike out one or two of my doubts before I gave the paper to you--so
_whichever strikes you as the most foolish of them, of course must be
what I meant to strike out_--(there's ingenuity for you!). The poem
did, for the rest, as will be suggested to you, give me the very
greatest pleasure, and astonish me in two ways ... by the
versification, mechanically considered; and by the successful
evolution of pure beauty from all that roughness and rudeness of the
sin of the boar-pinner--successfully evolved, without softening one
hoarse accent of his voice. But there is to be a pause now--you will
not write any more--no, nor come here on Wednesday, if coming into the
roar of this London should make the pain worse, as I cannot help
thinking it must--and you were not well yesterday morning, you
admitted. You _will_ take care? And if there should be a wisdom in
going away...!
Was it very wrong of me, doing what I told you of yesterday? Very
imprudent, I am afraid--but I never knew how to be prudent--and then,
there is not a sharing of responsibility in any sort of imaginable
measure; but a mere going away of so many thoughts, apart from the
thinker, or of words, apart from the speaker, ... just as I might give
away a pocket-handkerchief to be newly marked and mine no longer. I
did not do--and would not have done, ... one of those papers singly.
It would have been unbecoming of me in every way. It was simply a
writing of notes ... of slips of paper ... now on one subject, and now
on another ... which were thrown into the great cauldron and boiled up
with other matter, and re-translated from my idiom where there seemed
a need for it. And I am not much afraid of being ever guessed
at--except by those Oedipuses who astounded me once for a moment and
were after all, I hope, baffled by the Sphinx--or ever betrayed;
because besides the black Stygian oaths and indubitable honour of the
editor, he has some interest, even as I have the greatest, in being
silent and secret. And nothing _is mine_ ... if something is _of me_
... or _from_ me, rather. Yet it was wrong and foolish, I see
plainly--wrong in all but the motives. How dreadful to write against
time, and with a side-ways running conscience! And then the literature
of the day was wider than his knowledge, all round! And the
booksellers were barking distraction on every side!--I had some of the
mottos to find too! But the paper relating to you I never was
consulted about--or in _one particular way_ it would have been
better,--as easily it might have been. May God bless you, my dear
friend,