I have been long hoping for a letter from you: it has come this morning,
and repays me for all waiting. While you and Morton write to me about
Italy I shall never go to see it. And yet your account of Cicero's
villa, I confess, gives me a twinge. But of this I am sure: if I saw all
these fine things with the bodily eye, I should but see them as a scene
in a play, with the additional annoyance of being bitten with fleas
perhaps, and being in a state of transition which is not suitable to me:
whereas while you see them, and will represent them to me, I see them
through your imagination, and that is better than any light of my own.
This is very true, I assure you: and you and Morton have given me quite a
different view of Italy to what I had before: a much more enchanting one,
but not the more likely to seduce me into making the false step of trying
to realize it for myself. . . . In the mean time how tired and bored
would you be to take one of my travels--a voyage of eight miles from
Bedford perhaps--travelled twenty times before--every winding of the
river, every church-spire, every country pot house and the quality of its
beer, well known. No surprise at all. Nil admirari--I find that old
Horace is a good fellow-traveller in England: so is Virgil. It is odd
that those fellows living in the land they did live in should have talked
so coldly about it. As to Alfred's book, I believe it has sold well: but
I have not seen him for a long while, and have had no means of hearing
about the matter except from Thompson, who told me that very many copies
had been sold at Cambridge, which indeed will be the chief market for
them. Neither have I seen any notice of them in print except that in the
Examiner; and that seemed so quiet that I scarce supposed it was by
Forster. Alfred himself is, I believe, in Kent at present. And now, my
dear Frederic, why do you think of returning to England? Depend upon it
you are better off as you are. You will never turn magistrate nor bean-
dibbler, nor make yourself of use in the country, and therefore why
should you not live where you like to live best? When I read of your
laughing and singing and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying
beakers full of the warm South I am sure you had best stay where you are.
I should indeed be very glad to see you again: but then I should miss
hearing from you: and you would only come here to abuse us all and go
back again. You Tennysons are born for warm climates. As to poor
England, I never see a paper, but I think with you that she is on the go.
I used to dread this: but somehow I now contemplate it as a necessary
thing, and, till the shoe begins to pinch me sorely, walk on with some
indifference. It seems impossible the manufacturers can go on as they
are: and impossible that the demand for our goods can continue as of old
in Europe: and impossible but that we must get a rub and licking in some
of our colonies: and if all these things come at once, why then the
devil's in it. I used to think as you do about France and the French:
and we all agreed in London that France should be divided among the other
powers as Poland was: but Donne has given me pause: he says that France
is the great counteracting democratic principle to Russia. This may be:
though I think Russia is too unwieldly and rotten-ripe ever to make a
huge progress in conquest. What is to be thought of a nation where the
upper classes speak the language of another country, and have varnished
over their honest barbarism with the poorest French profligacy and
intrigue? Russia does not seem a whole to me. In the mean time, all
goes on toward better and better, as is my firm belief: and humanity
grows clear by flowing, (very little profited by any single sage or
hero), and man shall have wings to fly and something much better than
that in the end. . . .
I draw a very little, and think of music as I walk in the fields: but
have no piano in this part of the world. . . . I hear there is a fine
new Symphony by Mendelssohn, who is by far our best writer now, and in
some measure combines Beethoven and Handel. I grow every day more and
more to love only the old God save the King style: the common chords,
those truisms of music, like other truisms so little understood in the
full. Just look at the mechanism of Robin Adair.
Now pray write to me again when you can. You don't know how much I
rejoice in your letters.
_To S. Laurence_.
BEDFORD, _Thursday_,
[_August_, 1842.]