1876.5. EBB to Thomas Westwood
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 10.
[London]
April, 1845.
Starve Flush! Starve Flush! My dear Mr. Westwood, [1] what are you thinking of! And besides, if the crime were lawful and possible, I deny the necessity. He is fat, certainly—but he has been fatter; as I say, sometimes, with a sigh of sentiment—he has been fatter, and he may therefore become thinner. And then he does not eat after the manner of dogs. I never saw a dog with such a ladylike appetite, nor knew one by tradition. To eat two small biscuits in succession is generally more than he is inclined to do. When he has meat it is only once a day, and it must be so particularly well cut up and offered to him on a fork, and he is so subtly discriminative as to differences between boiled mutton and roast mutton, and roast chicken and boiled chicken, that often he walks away in disdain, and “will have none of it.” He makes a point, indeed, of taking his share of my muffin and of my coffee, and a whole queen’s-cake when he can get it; but it is a peculiar royalty of his to pretend to be indifferent even to these; to refuse them when offered to him—to refuse them once, twice, and thrice—only to keep his eye on them that they should not vanish from the room, by any means, as it is his intention to have them at last. My father is quite vexed with me sometimes, and given to declare that I have instructed Flush in the “art of giving himself airs,” and otherwise that no dog in the world could be, of his own accord and instinct, so like a woman. But I never did so instruct him. The “airs” came, as the wind blows. He surprises me, just as he surprises other people—and more, because I see more of him. His sensibility on the matter of vanity strikes me most amusingly. To be dressed up in necklaces and a turban is an excessive pleasure to him; and to have the glory of eating everything that he sees me eat, is to be glorious indeed. Because I offered him cream-cheese on a bit of toast, and forgot the salt, he refused at once. It was Bedreddin and the unsalted cheesecake over again. [2] And this, although he hates salt, and is conscious of his hatred of salt;—but his honour was in the salt, according to his view of the question, and he insisted on its being properly administered. Now tell me if Flush’s notion of honour, and the modern world’s, are not much on a par. In fact, he thought I intended, by my omission, to place him below the salt.
My nearest approach to starving Flush (to come to an end of the subject) is to give general instructions to the servant who helps him to his dinner, “not to press him to eat.” I know he ought not to be fat—I know it too well—and his father being, according to Miss Mitford’s account, “square,” at this moment, there is an hereditary reason for fear. So he is not to be “pressed”—and, in the meantime, with all the incipient fatness, he is as light at a jump, and as quick of spirits as ever, and quite well. <***>
Text:, Thomas Westwood. “Mrs. Browning’s Dog ‘Flush.’” Notes and Queries, 11 (11 January 1873), 29.
1. In the head note to this letter, Westwood writes: “It was my privilege to keep up a correspondence with that lady during a period of many years, and Flush’s name found frequent mention in her letters. On one occasion she had expressed her regret at his growing plumpness, and I suppose I must have been cruel enough to suggest starvation as a remedy, for her next letter opens with an indignant protest.”
2. In The Arabian Nights, “The History of Noureddin Ali, and Bedreddin Hassan,” Bedreddin is condemned to death for omitting pepper from cheescakes.
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