What is a poor devil to do? You tell me quite truly that my letters have
not two ideas in them, and yet you tell me to write my two ideas as soon
as I can. So indeed it is so far easy to write down one's two ideas, if
they are not very abstruse ones; but then what the devil encouragement is
it to a poor fellow to expose his nakedness so? All I can say is, to say
again that if you lived in this place, you would not write so long a
letter as you have done, full of capital description and all good things;
though without any compliment I am sure you would write a better than I
shall. But you see the original fault in me is that I choose to be in
such a place as this at all; that argues certainly a talent for dullness
which no situation nor intercourse of men could much improve. It is
true; I really do like to sit in this doleful place with a good fire, a
cat and dog on the rug, and an old woman in the kitchen. This is all my
live stock. The house is yet damp as last year; and the great event of
this winter is my putting up a trough round the eaves to carry off the
wet. There was discussion whether the trough should be of iron or of
zinc: iron dear and lasting; zinc the reverse. It was decided for iron;
and accordingly iron is put up.
Why should I not live in London and see the world? you say. Why then _I_
say as before, I don't like it. I think the dullness of country people
is better than the impudence of Londoners; and the fresh cold and wet of
our clay fields better than a fog that stinks _per se_; and this room of
mine, clean at all events, better than a dirty room in Charlotte St. If
you, Morton, and Alfred, were more in London, I should be there more; but
now there is but Spedding and Allen whom I care a straw about. I have
written two notes to Alfred to ask him just to notify his existence to
me; but you know he is obstinate on that point. I heard from Carlyle
that he (Alfred) had passed an evening at Chelsea much to C.'s delight;
who has opened the gates of his Valhalla to let Alfred in. {181}
Thackeray is at Malta, where I am told he means to winter. . . .
As I have no people to tell you of, so have I very few books, and know
nothing of what is stirring in the literary world. I have read the Life
of Arnold of Rugby, who was a noble fellow; and the letters of Burke,
which do not add to, or detract from, what I knew and liked in him
before. I am meditating to begin Thucydides one day; perhaps this
winter. . . . Old Seneca, I have no doubt, was a great humbug in deed,
and his books have plenty of it in word; but he had got together a vast
deal of what was not humbug from others; and, as far as I see, the old
philosophers are available now as much as two thousand years back.
Perhaps you will think that is not saying much. Don't suppose I think it
good philosophy in myself to keep here out of the world, and sport a
gentle Epicurism; I do not; I only follow something of a natural
inclination, and know not if I could do better under a more complex
system. It is very smooth sailing hitherto down here. No velvet
waistcoat and ever-lustrous pumps to be considered; no bon mots got up;
no information necessary. There is a pipe for the parsons to smoke, and
quite as much bon mots, literature, and philosophy as they care for
without any trouble at all. If we could but feed our poor! It is now
the 8th of December; it has blown a most desperate East wind, all razors;
a wind like one of those knives one sees at shops in London, with 365
blades all drawn and pointed; the wheat is all sown; the fallows cannot
be ploughed. What are all the poor folks to do during the winter? And
they persist in having the same enormous families they used to do; a
woman came to me two days ago who had seventeen children! What farmers
are to employ all these? What Landlord can find room for them? The law
of Generation must be repealed. The London press does nothing but rail
at us poor country folks for our cruelty. I am glad they do so; for
there is much to be set right. But I want to know if the Editor of the
Times is more attentive to his devils, their wives and families, than our
squires and squiresses and parsons are to their fellow parishioners.
Punch also assumes a tone of virtuous satire, from the mouth of Mr.
Douglas Jerrold! It is easy to sit in arm chairs at a club in Pall Mall
and rail on the stupidity and brutality of those in High Suffolk.
Come, I have got more than two ideas into this sheet; but I don't know if
you won't dislike them worse than mere nothing. But I was determined to
fill my letter. Yes, you are to know that I slept at Woodbridge last
night, went to church there this morning, where every one sat with a
purple nose, and heard a dismal well-meant sermon; and the organ blew us
out with one grand idea at all events, one of old Handel's Coronation
Anthems; that I dined early, also in Woodbridge; and walked up here with
a tremendous East wind blowing sleet in my face from over the German Sea,
that I found your letter when I entered my room; and reading it through,
determined to spin you off a sheet incontinently, and lo! here it is! Now
or never! I shall now have my tea in, and read over your letter again
while at it. You are quite right in saying that Gravesend excursions
with you do me good. When did I doubt it? I remember them with great
pleasure; few of my travels so much so. I like a short journey in good
company; and I like you all the better for your Englishman's humours. One
doesn't find such things in London; something more like it here in the
country, where every one, with whatever natural stock of intellect
endowed, at least grows up his own way, and flings his branches about
him, not stretched on the espalier of London dinner-table company.
P.S. Next morning. Snow over the ground. We have our wonders of
inundation in Suffolk also, I can tell you. For three weeks ago such
floods came, that an old woman was carried off as she was retiring from a
beer house about 9 p.m., and drowned. She was probably half seas over
before she left the beer house.
And three nights ago I looked out at about ten o'clock at night, before
going to bed. It seemed perfectly still; frosty, and the stars shining
bright. I heard a continuous moaning sound, which I knew to be, not that
of an infant exposed, or female ravished, but of the sea, more than ten
miles off! What little wind there was carried to us the murmurs of the
waves circulating round these coasts so far over a flat country. But
people here think that this sound so heard is not from the waves that
break, but a kind of prophetic voice from the body of the sea itself
announcing great gales. Sure enough we have got them, however heralded.
Now I say that all this shows that we in this Suffolk are not so
completely given over to prose and turnips as some would have us. I
always said that being near the sea, and being able to catch a glimpse of
it from the tops of hills, and of houses, redeemed Suffolk from dullness;
and at all events that our turnip fields, dull in themselves, were at
least set all round with an undeniably poetic element. And so I see
Arnold says; he enumerates five inland counties as the only parts of
England for which nothing could be said in praise. Not that I agree with
him there neither; I cannot allow the valley of the Ouse about which some
of my pleasantest recollections hang to be without its great charm. W.
Browne, whom you despised, is married, and I shall see but little of him
for the future. I have laid by my rod and line by the willows of the
Ouse for ever. 'He is married and cannot come.' This change is the true
meaning of those verses, {185}
Friend after friend departs;
Who has not lost a friend?
and so on. If I were conscious of being stedfast and good humoured
enough, I would marry to-morrow. But a humourist is best by himself.
_To Bernard Barton_.
19 CHARLOTTE ST., RATHBONE PLACE,
_Jany_. 4/45.