2321. RB to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 262–264.
[London]
Sunday Afternoon. [19 April 1846] [1]
Just now I read again your last note for a particular purpose of thinking about the end of it .. where you say, as you have said so many times, “that your hand was not stretched out to the good,—it came to you sleeping”—etc. [2] I wanted to try and find out and be able to explain to myself, and perhaps to you, why the wrongness in you should be so exquisitely dear to me, dear as the rightness, or dearer, inasmuch as it is the topmost grace of all, seen latest on leaving the contemplation of the others, and first on returning to them—because, Ba, that adorable spirit in all these phrases,—what I should adore without their embodiment in these phrases which fall into my heart and stay there,—that strange unconsciousness of how the love-account really stands between us,—who was giver altogether and who taker,—and, by consequence, what is the befitting virtue for each of us, a generous disposition to forgetfulness on the giver’s part, as of everlasting remembrance and gratitude on the other—this unconsciousness is wrong, my heart’s darling, strangely wrong by the contrast with your marvellous apprehension on other points, every other point I am capable of following you to: I solemnly assure you I cannot imagine any point of view wherein I ought to appear to any rational creature the benefitting party and you the benefitted—nor any matter in which I can be supposed to be even magnanimous, .. (so that it might be said, “there, is a sacrifice”—“that, is to be borne with” &c)—none where such a supposition is not degrading to me, dishonouring and affronting. I know you, my Ba,—not because you are my Ba,—but thro’ the best exercise of whatever power in me you too often praise, I know—that you are immeasurably my superior,—while you talk most eloquently and affectingly to me, I know and could prove you are as much my Poet as my Mistress; if I suspected it before I knew you,—personally,—how is it with me now? I feel it every day. I tell myself every day it is so. Yet you do not feel nor know it .. for you write thus to me. Well,—and this is what I meant to say from the beginning of the letter, I love your inability to know and feel it, in spite of right and justice and rationality. I would, .. I will, at a moment’s notice, give you back your golden words, and lie under your mind’s supremacy as I take unutterable delight in doing under your eye, your hand. So Shakespeare chose to “envy this man’s art and that man’s scope” in the sonnets. [3] But I did not mean to try and explain what is inexplainable, after all—(tho’ I wisely said I would try and explain!) You seem to me altogether .. (if you think my words sounded like flattery, here shall come at the end,—anything but that!),—you do seem, my precious Ba, too entirely mine this minute,—my heart’s, my senses’, my soul’s precise το καλον, [4] —to last!– Too perfect for that! The true power with the ignorance of it,—the real hold of my heart, as you can hold this letter,—yet the fear with it that you may “vex me” by a word,—“makes me angry”– Well,—if one must see an end of all perfection—still, to know one was priveleged to see it! Nay, it is safe now .. for this present, all my future would not pay, whatever your own future turned to!
.. Yet if I had to say, “I shall see her in a month or two,—perhaps”—as this time last year I was saying in a kind of contented feeling!
Thank God I shall see her to-morrow—my dearest, best, only Ba cannot change by to-morrow!– What nonsense! The words break down yet I will be trying to use them!
God bless my dearest, ever bless her.
I shall be with you soon after this reaches you, I trust. Now, I kiss you, however, and now, my Ba!
RB
Letters! [5] Since you bid me send them,—do you not?—see what the longer says of the improved diction[,] freedom from difficulty &c[.] Who is to praise for that, my Ba? [6] Oh, your RB wholly & solely to be sure! [7]
Address: Miss Barrett, / 50 Wimpole St
Postmark: PD 10FN AP20 1846 B.
Docket, in EBB’s hand: 162.
Publication: RB-EBB, pp. 637–639.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Date provided by postmark.
2. See the last three paragraphs of letter 2319.
3. Cf. Shakespeare, “Sonnet 29” (1609), line 7.
4. Literally “the beautiful,” meaning “the true” and “the good.”
5. In response to Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy.
6. An obvious reference to EBB’s criticisms on Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy conveyed in letters, during visits, and in her notes. For the text of the latter, see vol. 11, pp. 393–400.
7. RB has written the postscript diagonally.
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