_R.B. to E.B.B._
Sunday Night.
[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; _my_self, 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 the 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?