_E.B.B. to R.B._
Tuesday.
[Post-mark, August 20, 1845.]
I fancied it was just _so_--as I did not hear and did not see you on
Monday. Not that you were expected particularly--but that you would
have written your own negative, it appeared to me, by some post in the
day, if you had received my note in time. It happened well too,
altogether, as you have a friend with you, though Mr. Kenyon does not
come, and will not come, I dare say; for he spoke like a doubter at
the moment; and as this Tuesday wears on, I am not likely to have any
visitors on it after all, and may as well, if the rain quite ceases,
go and spend my solitude on the park a little. Flush wags his tail at
that proposition when I speak it loud out. And I am to write to you
before Friday, and so, am writing, you see ... which I should not,
should not have done if I had not been told; because it is not my turn
to write, ... did you think it was?
Not a word of Malta! except from Mr. Kenyon who talked homilies of it
last Sunday and wanted to speak them to Papa--but it would not do in
any way--now especially--and in a little time there will be a
decision for or against; and I am afraid of _both_ ... which is a
happy state of preparation. Did I not tell you that early in the
summer I did some translations for Miss Thomson's 'Classical Album,'
from Bion and Theocritus, and Nonnus the author of that large (not
great) poem in some forty books of the 'Dionysiaca' ... and the
paraphrases from Apuleius? Well--I had a letter from her the other
day, full of compunction and ejaculation, and declaring the fact that
Mr. Burges had been correcting all the proofs of the poems; leaving
out and emending generally, according to his own particular idea of
the pattern in the mount--is it not amusing? I have been wicked enough
to write in reply that it is happy for her and all readers ... _sua si
bona norint_ ... if during some half hour which otherwise might have
been dedicated by Mr. Burges to patting out the lights of Sophocles
and his peers, he was satisfied with the humbler devastation of E.B.B.
upon Nonnus. You know it is impossible to help being amused. This
correcting is a mania with that man! And then I, who wrote what I did
from the 'Dionysiaca,' with no respect for 'my author,' and an
arbitrary will to 'put the case' of Bacchus and Ariadne as well as I
could, for the sake of the art-illustrations, ... those subjects Miss
Thomson sent me, ... and did it all with full liberty and persuasion
of soul that nobody would think it worth while to compare English with
Greek and refer me back to Nonnus and detect my wanderings from the
text!! But the critic was not to be cheated so! And I do not doubt
that he has set me all 'to rights' from beginning to end; and combed
Ariadne's hair close to her cheeks for me. Have _you_ known Nonnus,
... _you_ who forget nothing? and have known everything, I think? For
it is quite startling, I must tell you, quite startling and
humiliating, to observe how you combine such large tracts of
experience of outer and inner life, of books and men, of the world and
the arts of it; curious knowledge as well as general knowledge ... and
deep thinking as well as wide acquisition, ... and you, looking none
the older for it all!--yes, and being besides a man of genius and
working your faculty and not wasting yourself over a surface or away
from an end. Dugald Stewart said that genius made naturally a
lop-sided mind--did he not? He ought to have known _you_. And _I_ who
do ... a little ... (for I grow more loth than I was to assume the
knowledge of you, my dear friend)--_I_ do not mean to use that word
'humiliation' in the sense of having felt the thing myself in any
_painful_ way, ... because I never for a moment did, or _could_, you
know,--never could ... never did ... except indeed when you have over
praised me, which forced another personal feeling in. Otherwise it has
always been quite pleasant to me to be 'startled and humiliated'--and
more so perhaps than to be startled and exalted, if I might choose....
Only I did not mean to write all this, though you told me to write to
you. But the rain which keeps one in, gives one an example of pouring
on ... and you must endure as you can or will. Also ... as you have a
friend with you 'from Italy' ... 'from Rome,' and commended me for my
'kindness and considerateness' in changing Tuesday to Friday ...
(wasn't it?...) shall I still be more considerate and put off the
visit-day to next week? mind, you let it be as you like it best to
be--I mean, as is most convenient 'for the nonce' to you and your
friend--because all days are equal, as to that matter of convenience,
to your other friend of this ilk,