Your own.
_R.B. to E.B.B._
Saturday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 7, 1846.]
You call me 'kind'; and by this time I have no heart to call you such
names--I told you, did I not once? that 'Ba' had got to convey
infinitely more of you to my sense than 'dearest,' 'sweetest,' all or
any epithets that break down with their load of honey like bees--to
say you are 'kind,' you that so entirely and unintermittingly bless
me,--it will never do now, 'Ba.' All the same, one way there is to
make even 'Ba' dearer,--'_my_ Ba,' I say to myself!
About my _fears_--whether of opening doors or entering people--one
thing is observable and prevents the possibility of any
misconception--I desire, have been in the habit of desiring, to
_increase_ them, far from diminishing--they relate, of course,
entirely to _you_--and only through _you_ affect me the least in the
world. Put your well-being out of the question, so far as I can
understand it to be involved,--and the pleasure and pride I should
immediately choose would be that the whole world knew our position.
What pleasure, what pride! But I endeavour to remember on all
occasions--and perhaps succeed in too few--that it is very easy for me
to go away and leave you who cannot go. I only allude to this because
some people are 'naturally nervous' and all that--and I am quite of
another kind.
Last evening I went out--having been kept at home in the afternoon to
see somebody ... went walking for hours. I am quite well to-day and,
now your letter comes, my Ba, most happy. And, as the sun shines, you
are perhaps making the perilous descent now, while I write--oh, to
meet you on the stairs! And I shall really see you on Monday, dearest?
So soon, it ought to feel, considering the dreary weeks that now get
to go between our days! For music, I made myself melancholy just now
with some 'Concertos for the Harpsichord by Mr. Handel'--brought home
by my father the day before yesterday;--what were light, modern things
once! Now I read not very long ago a French memoir of 'Claude le
Jeune' called in his time the Prince of Musicians,--no,
'_Phoenix_'--the unapproachable wonder to all time--that is, twenty
years after his death about--and to this pamphlet was prefixed as
motto this startling axiom--'In Music, the Beau Ideal changes every
thirty years'--well, is not that _true_? The _Idea_, mind,
changes--the general standard ... so that it is no answer that a
single air, such as many one knows, may strike as freshly as
ever--they were _not_ according to the Ideal of their own time--just
now, they drop into the ready ear,--next hundred years, who will be
the Rossini? who is no longer the Rossini even I remember--his early
overtures are as purely Rococo as Cimarosa's or more. The sounds
remain, keep their character perhaps--the scale's proportioned notes
affect the same, that is,--the major third, or minor seventh--but the
arrangement of these, the sequence the law--for them, if it _should_
change every thirty years! To Corelli nothing seemed so conclusive in
Heaven or earth as this
[Illustration: Music]
I don't believe there is one of his sonatas wherein that formula does
not do duty. In these things of Handel that seems replaced by
[Illustration: Music]
--that was the only true consummation! Then,--to go over the hundred
years,--came Rossini's unanswerable coda:
[Illustration: Music]
which serves as base to the infinity of songs, gone, gone--_so_ gone
by! From all of which Ba draws _this_ 'conclusion' that these may be
worse things than Bartoli's Tuscan to cover a page with!--yet, yet the
pity of it! Le Jeune, the Phoenix, and Rossini who directed his
letters to his mother as 'mother of the famous composer'--and Henry
Lawes, and Dowland's Lute, ah me!
Well, my conclusion is the best, the everlasting, here and I trust
elsewhere--I am your own, my Ba, ever your