1146. EBB to James Martin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 315–316.
[London]
Feb. 6. 1843–
You make us out my dear Mr Martin, to be such perfect parallel lines that I shd be half afraid of completing the definition by our never meeting, if it were not for what you say afterwards of the coming to London & of promising to come & see Flush– If you shd be travelling while I am writing it was only what happened to me when I wrote not long ago to dearest Mrs Martin—& everybody in this house cried out against the fatuity of the coincidence! As if I could know that she was travelling, when nobody told me, & I was’nt a witch! If the same thing happens today, believe in the innocence of my ignorance– I shall be consoled if it does!.. for certain reasons. But for none in the world can I help thanking you for your letter—which gave me so much pleasure from the first sight of the handwriting to the thought of the kindness spent upon me in it, that after all I cannot thank you as I would!—
Yet I wont let you fancy me of such an irrational state of simplicity as not to be fully aware that you, with your “nature of the fields & forests”, look down disdainfully & with an inward heat of glorying, upon me who have all my pastime in books .. dead & seethed. Perhaps if it were a little warmer I might even grant that you are right in your pride. As it is, I grumble feebly to myself something about the definition of nature, .. & how we in the town (which ‘God made’ just as He made your hedges) have our share of nature too, .. & then I have secret thoughts of state of the thermometer, & wonder how people can breathe out of doors. In the meantime Flush, who is a better philosopher, pushes deep into my furs & goes to sleep– Perhaps I shd fear the omen for my correspondent–
Oh yes! That picture in Boz is beautiful. [1] For my own part, & by a natural womanly contradiction[,] I have never cared so much in my life for flowers, as since being shut out from gardens—unless indeed in the happy days of old when I had a garden of my own [2] & cut it out into a great Hector of Troy, in relievo, with a high heroic box nose & shoe-ties of columbine. But that was long ago– Now I count the buds of my primrose with a new kind of interest—and you never saw such a primrose! I begin to believe in Ovid, or look for a metamorphosis. [3] The leaves are turning white & springing up as high as corn. Want of air, & of sun I suppose! I shd be loth to think it for want of friendship to me!
Do you know that the royal Boz lives close to us—three doors from Mr Kenyon in Harley Place? [4] The new numbers appear to me admirable, & full of life & blood, .. whatever we may say to the thick rouging & extravagance of gesture. There is a beauty, a tenderness, too, in the organ-scene, which is worthy of the gilliflower– [5] But my admiration for Boz fell from its ‘sticking-place’ [6] I confess, a good furlong, when I read Victor Hugo: & my creed is, that, not in his tenderness which is as much his own as his humour, .. but in his serious powerful Jew-trial scenes, [7] he has followed Hugo closely, & never scarcely looked away from ‘Les trois jours d’un condamnè. [8]
If you shd not be on the road, I hope you wont be very long before you are—& that dearest Mrs Martin will put off building her greenhouse .. you see I believe she will build it: .. until she gets home again.
How kind of you & of her to have poor old Mrs Barker at Colwall!
Do believe me, both of you, with love from all of us,
very affectionately yours
Ba–
Address: James Martin Esqr / Colwall / near Ledbury.
Publication: LEBB, I, 122–124.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. i.e., the one praised by Martin in letter 1144.
2. i.e., at Hope End.
3. Ovid’s Metamorphoses comprised a series of mainly mythological and legendary stories, starting with the creation of the world.
4. Dickens had moved to 1 Devonshire Terrace at the end of 1839.
5. Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit was being published in monthly numbers, commencing in January 1843. Tom Pinch, an employé of Seth Pecksniff, was an amateur organist, and chapter V describes his playing the organ of Salisbury Cathedral. The gilliflower scene was mentioned in letter 1144.
6. Macbeth, I, 7, 60.
7. The trial of Fagin in chapter LII of Oliver Twist.
8. Sic, for Les Derniers Jours d’un Condamné (The Last Days of One Condemned), published in 1829. EBB had previously made this comparison to Hugo in letter 1063.
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