934. EBB to George Goodin Moulton-Barrett
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 289–292.
[London]
March 30th 1842.
My ever dearest George,
I marvel at myself for not having answered your letter with the first breath I drew after receiving it—but I knew that you had letters if not mine—& the last paper tired me so utterly & I had such a heap of letters to answer after the accomplishment of the Athenæum business, & you yourself besides offered me such a pattern of intersectory spaces between writing & writing—, that I being tempted, sinned in my silentness. Forgive it—write directly: I beseech you, George, write!
You have heard of the measles & our dear Set together. This morning he has gone to the baths for purification,—& therefore you may be well assured there is nothing more to be uncomfortable about. I have not seen him yet—because––I dont know why!! for he has been down stairs to breakfast & dinner & might with equal impunity come into my room. Occy complains of nothing up to this now. I hope he may escape it after all.
My dearest George I wd give a whole penny piece to amuse you for one half hour—not knowing however where the amusement is to come from. You have heard, I suppose, all the vibratory movements here upon mirrors, & pictures, & a house in Harley Street (contemplated for purchase!!!) & how “the income tax will prevent many persons from keeping their carriages, who had thought of doing it”—& of the proposal & election by persons unknown of Papa to the Reform Club! [1] The vibratory movements of the house are not much more than such! For the rest there is dining as usual—& breakfasting with the Fortescues [2] —& drinking tea with Trippy. There is nought to tell you that is either ‘curious or improving’.
Uncle James heard you speak—& Bummy gives me the echo of his commendation of the speaking. I will hear you speak too, George, some day,—if I ever have life long enough & strong enough to suit the purpose. In the meantime or otherwise, I fancy the speaking to myself—& clap you with the (wings?) hands of my imagination!
Papa is pleased I think—indeed I am sure—with his election to the Reform Club—inclusive of the privilege of paying forty five guineas entrance fee,—ten annually. He wishes that it had been always so with him since his settlement in London—but the rein upon his neck was a most transcendental fear of being blackballed! Therefore he wdnt be proposed! and was startled by the notice of his election one morning at breakfast, from the propriety of the eating of muffins, into an honor uncourted, unsought, unexpected. I am quite glad too!
Miss Mitford writes to me every two days just as she used– I am not sure that I cd do without it now—not without the missing as of a morning star in any case. I love her better & better certainly—& she does not seem to love me much less—which is more wonderful. Her father seems to have lost both health & hope—the natural result of a strong man in the body only, losing the strength of the body!—, mere animals spirits departing with the animal health, & the soul bending like a reed. Nothing keeps him up, she says, but reading one newspaper after another all through—& she, poor thing, just reversing his condition, she, strengthening her feebler frame by her strong heart, is reading, reading from morning to night—reading her very breath away! It is most lamentable to think of––thinking too what she is! Some of her friends cry aloud, Mr Kenyon tells me, “I wish he was dead!”—but that is a want of faith in the love which is in her! She wd droop lower beneath that stroke than beneath any burden!
Mr Kenyon has multiplied kindnesses lately in coming to see me—three times last week—& promised for today or tomorrow– He brought me the last time my series of papers as marked & remarked upon by Burgess the Grecian & Browning the poet—& Mr Burgess sent me, gave me, a lost scene of the Bacchæ of Euripides, restored by himself & imitated long ago (according to his view) by my Simeon Metaphrastes. [3] He is going to send me moreover a concatenation of his remarks on the Christus Patiens—& rather wished to bring me himself, until that was explained to be out of the question. Mr Kenyon proposed also to introduce to my sofa-side .. Mr Browning the poet .. who was so honor-giving as to wish something of the sort! I was pleased at the thought of his wishing it—for the rest, no! You are aware how I estimate .. admire (what is the sufficient word?) that true poet—however he may prophecy darkly. Mr Kenyon says that he is a little discouraged by his reception with the public—the populace, he shd have said. “Poor Browning,” said Mr Kenyon. “And why poor Browning?”—“Because nobody reads him,” —“Rather then, poor readers!” Mr Carlyle is his friend—a good substitute for a crowd’s shouting!
I have been reading Emerson– [4] He does away with individuality & personality in a most extraordinary manner—teaching that what Cæsar did, we did—(we-everyman), & (which is scarcely so “pretty to observe”) what Cæsar’s bondslave did, we did—& that every man’s being is a kind of Portico to the God Over-soul—with Deity for background– This malformation of philosophy does not, you may be sure, admit other than a malformation of theology in this side—there are heresies thick as blackberries. [5] Still the occasional beauty of thought & expression, & the noble erectness of the thinking faculty gave me “wherewithal to glory”. [6]
Mr Kenyon brought me the book of Mr Crabbe Robinson’s lending– ‘Holla’—quoth Robinson the next morning! [‘]‘You have lent Emerson to Miss Barrett!! You have done very wrong indeed!” To which Mr Kenyon responded that Miss Barrett read “an infinite deal of everything & had a healthy digestion”. “A healthy digestion perhaps—but you shd not on that account overtry it, to the extent of distension &–––”
It was a pretty simile but not over delicate—& so I will stop there. Mr Kenyon on the other hand without stopping at all set off to me, hoping that he had committed no offensive solecism—in lending me a book which he had’nt read!—that “the book in question was in fact “too strong” for Crabbe Robinson himself who leant towards heresy, & might haply prove so to me!” Upon which I begged to keep it one day longer than I shd have done otherwise. And there is a story & a moral for you, both together! I hope they may be profitable.
Dear Mr Hunter was here yesterday for an hour or two—& although it is not certain that he is now on his road to Brighton, it is left to us as a probability. He speaks at once sadly & bitterly of his position at Brighton—& altogether appeared to be in spirits most oppressed & oppressive. He wants abstracting by the exertion of an outward-working energy. The very owl leaves its ruin sometimes or would hoot out its own knell—& a self-conscious heart is a ruin, if old enough. Mary is quite well, I am glad to say besides. He evidently does not like my papers—“they are written, not gravely enough, & with an obvious effort which is fatiguing to the reader”. Otherwise—I mean by other people, they seem favorably received.
Arabel has just come in, having dined with the Bazalgettes– [7] She was at the Suffolk street exhibition, with Occy, two days ago, & very much pleased. [8] In association with which subject—Mr Haydon has stabbed his foot with a javelin. [9]
My dearest George, what shall you do about Frocester. If Miss Hayward [10] or any other person there continues to have the typhus fever, I entreat you not to go! That is my entreating & beseeching to you. Otherwise you will do right to refresh yourself with a little ease, to the uttermost. The weather is delightful & my fire extinguished. I am very tolerably well—& also (tolerably I hope)
your ever & ever attached
Ba
Address: G. Goodin M Barrett Esqr / Barrister at Law / Oxford Circuit.
Publication: B-GB, pp. 79–84.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. The Reform Club was founded in 1836 to promote “the social intercourse of the Reformers of the United Kingdom,” with Edward Ellice (1781–1863), brother-in-law of Earl Grey, the former Whig Prime Minister, as its first chairman. Members included Thackeray, who joined in 1840, and it was from the Reform Club that Phileas Fogg set forth in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).
2. Acquaintances made by EBB and her sisters during their stay in Torquay (see letter 695).
3. See letter 932, note 2.
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), philosopher and poet, had published Nature (1836) and The American Scholar (1837). EBB was probably reading his Essays: First Series (1841), as her comments are similar to those in the mainly-negative review of Essays in The Athenæum of 23 October 1841 (no. 730, pp. 803–804), which said “Denying the relative and the contingent, [Emerson] is forced to deny man’s individuality; to save humanity, he absorbs it into one ‘universal mind’.”
5. Cf. I Henry IV, II, 4, 239.
6. Cf. Romans, 4:2.
7. Acquaintances first mentioned in 1838 (see letter 666).
8. The annual exhibition of the Society of British Artists at the Suffolk St. Gallery had opened to the public on 28 March.
9. Haydon’s diary entry for 22 March read: “Painted 2 hours, finished musket & Bayonet. The musket fell down. I did not see it, & ran my foot against it, & the bayonet right (½ an inch) into my left foot. It bled copiously.” The next day’s entry read “Laid up all day—with my bayonet wound” (Pope, V, 138). He later became one of EBB’s principal correspondents; for details of their friendship, see the biographical sketch, pp. 370–373.
10. Unidentified.
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