Your own BA.
_E.B.B. to R.B._
Saturday.
[In the same envelope with the preceding letter.]
Well I have your letter--and I send you the postscript to my last one,
written yesterday you observe ... and being simply a postscript in
some parts of it, _so_ far it is not for an answer. Only I deny the
'flying out'--perhaps you may do it a little more ... in your moments
of starry centrifugal motion.
So you think that dear Mr. Kenyon's opinion of his 'young
relative'--(neither young nor his relative--not very much of either!)
is to the effect that you couldn't possibly 'escape' her--? It looks
like the sign of the Red Dragon, put _so_ ... and your burning
mountain is not too awful for the scenery.
Seriously ... gravely ... if it makes me three times happy that you
should love me, yet I grow uneasy and even saddened when you say
infatuated things such as this and this ... unless after all you mean
a philosophical sarcasm on the worth of Czar diamonds. No--do not say
such things! If you do, I shall end by being jealous of some ideal
Czarina who must stand between you and me.... I shall think that it is
not _I_ whom you look at ... and _pour cause_. 'Flying out,' _that_
would be!
And for Mr. Kenyon, I only know that I have grown the most ungrateful
of human beings lately, and find myself almost glad when he does not
come, certainly uncomfortable when he does--yes, _really_ I would
rather not see him at all, and when you are not here. The sense of
which and the sorrow for which, turn me to a hypocrite, and make me
ask why he does not come &c. ... questions which never came to my lips
before ... till I am more and more ashamed and sorry. Will it end, I
wonder, by my ceasing to care for any one in the world, except,
except...? or is it not rather that I feel trodden down by either his
too great penetration or too great unconsciousness, both being
overwhelming things from him to me. From a similar cause I hate
writing letters to any of my old friends--I feel as if it were the
merest swindling to attempt to give the least account of myself to
anybody, and when their letters come and I know that nothing very
fatal has happened to them, scarcely I can read to an end afterwards
through the besetting care of having to answer it all. Then I am
ignoble enough to revenge myself on people for their stupidities ...
which never in my life I did before nor felt the temptation to do ...
and when they have a distaste for your poetry through want of
understanding, I have a distaste for _them_ ... cannot help it--and
you need not say it is wrong, because I know the whole iniquity of it,
persisting nevertheless. As for dear Mr. Kenyon--with whom we began,
and who thinks of you as appreciatingly and admiringly as one man can
think of another,--do not imagine that, if he _should_ see anything,
he can 'approve' of either your wisdom or my generosity, ... _he_,
with his large organs of caution, and his habit of looking right and
left, and round the corner a little way. Because, you know, ... if I
should be ill _before_ ... why there, is a conclusion!--but if
_afterward_ ... what? You who talk wildly of my generosity, whereas I
only and most impotently tried to be generous, must see how both
suppositions have their possibility. Nevertheless you are the master
to run the latter risk. You have overcome ... to your loss
perhaps--unless the judgment is revised. As to taking the half of my
prison ... I could not even smile at _that_ if it seemed probable ...
I should recoil from your affection even under a shape so fatal to you
... dearest! No! There is a better probability before us I hope and
believe--in spite of the _possibility_ which it is impossible to deny.
And now we leave this subject for the present.
_Sunday._--You are 'singularly well.' You are very seldom quite well,
I am afraid--yet 'Luria' seems to have done no harm this time, as you
are singularly well the day _after_ so much writing. Yet do not hurry
that last act.... I won't have it for a long while yet.
Here I have been reading Carlyle upon Cromwell and he is very fine,
very much himself, it seems to me, everywhere. Did Mr. Kenyon make you
understand that I had said there was nothing in him but _manner_ ... I
thought he said so--and I am confident that he never heard such an
opinion from me, for good or for evil, ever at all. I may have
observed upon those vulgar attacks on account of the so-called
_mannerism_, the obvious fact, that an individuality, carried into the
medium, the expression, is a feature in all men of genius, as Buffon
teaches ... 'Le style, c'est _l'homme_.' But if the _whole man_ were
style, if all Carlyleism were manner--why there would be no man, no
Carlyle worth talking of. I wonder that Mr. Kenyon should misrepresent
me so. Euphuisms there may be to the end of the world--affected
parlances--just as a fop at heart may go without shoestrings to mimic
the distractions of some great wandering soul--although _that_ is a
bad comparison, seeing that what is called Carlyle's mannerism, is not
his dress, but his physiognomy--or more than _that_ even.
But I do not forgive him for talking here against the 'ideals of
poets' ... opposing their ideal by a mis-called _reality_, which is
another sort, a baser sort, of ideal after all. He sees things in
broad blazing lights--but he does not analyse them like a
philosopher--do you think so? Then his praise for dumb heroic action
as opposed to speech and singing, what is _that_--when all earnest
thought, passion, belief, and their utterances, are as much actions
surely as the cutting off of fifty heads by one right hand. As if
Shakespeare's actions were not greater than Cromwell's!--
But I shall write no more. Once more, may God bless you.