1314. EBB to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 224–226.
[London]
July 7th, 1843.
The lady’s name is Cockell, Miss Cockell, Katherine Cockell, and she lives in Livonia Cottage, about a mile from Sidmouth, in Devonshire, where we resided once for two years. She was an invalid, poor thing, then, and sent to ask me to go to see her—which I did at great expense of shyness. But that you won’t believe, because, as Mr. Kenyon says, I grow insolent when I have a pen in my hand, and you know me only “by that sign.” [1] I sometimes doubt to myself (do you know, besides) whether if I should ever be face to face with you, the shame and the shyness would not annihilate the pleasure of it to me! I really think they would—but this is not what I was going to say.
Poor Miss C______ was always an interesting person in my eyes. She is full of enthusiasm of heart, which overflows itself over all things—and then I believe her to be very, very solitary in the most painful sense—desolate in her affections—left alone without an answering sympathy. I do not know the particular circumstances; and once, when she was inclined to enter on them, I begged her, observing the pain it gave her, not to go on; this anatomising of life-diseases by retrospection being dreadful and useless. But I see that she is very unhappy—or rather, that she has been much afflicted—and that the shadow of the sorrow and an actual most desolate solitude are with her now. She has a fine apprehension of beauty and greatness, as you perceive, a sensitiveness of the spiritual sense, and a natural exaltation, perfectly unaffected and un-put-on. Once she said to me what I never shall forget. Making an ungenerous inference from the fact of pain being connected with the affections, I had observed that I would refuse to know anybody, man, woman, or child, whom I was likely to love and be loved by intensely. “Oh,” she said, “is it possible you can say so? I would walk like a pilgrim to the end of the world to find one who would love me and whom I could love.” That was the true feeling—generous and worthy of love, and I recognised it when I heard it, just as we recognise the right word in a flowing poem, which the memory had missed, when it is spoken suddenly before us. And she is full of such instincts. I mean to send your note to her, because it is sure to give her pleasure; and as you had hers, it is only fair that she should have yours in turn.
By the way, you have charmed Miss Mitford by your last note of acceptance of her hospitalities.
“A charming note,” she calls it. And so you are going to enact “Orion” with the harp under the bay-tree! I am very glad of it. And by the way, again, you are gracious to our sex in receiving her remark upon what women do in opposition to what men do—and perhaps just. Certainly the discrimination of the beautiful is the art of criticism,—and not the finding of faults. And therefore her remark and your consent to it would prove women to be generally better judges of poetry, because more sensitive to the faculty than men are. Of this I cannot help doubting a little. How many bright eyes, yes, and “beautiful smiles” besides, I have known, to whom poetry is really nothing, startles me when I think of it—it is such a playing at cross-purposes with nature! That “beautiful smile” we both know, which will grow more radiant for music, fades away out of its own gloriole at any talk about poetry. Be sure that the poetical sense, even in apprehension, is a rare thing among men, and among women not less so.
Mr. Kenyon was with me yesterday, and praised “Orion” most admiringly. He had read it only in parts yet, through a press of occupation, but he had from these parts, he said, the same sort of pleasure as from Keats’s “Endymion” or “Hyperion;” and what particularly charmed him was the versification. He accused me of the Athenæum paper, [2] and convicted me against my will; and when I could no longer deny, and began to explain and “pique myself upon my diplomacy,” he threw himself back into his chair, and laughed me to scorn as the least diplomatic of his acquaintance. “You diplomatic!”
Truly yours,
E.B.B.
Mr. Kenyon said, besides the rest, “Orion has very much raised my opinion of Mr. Horne’s power.”
Text: EBB-RHH, I, 63–68.
1. A reference to Constantine’s vision (see letter 718, note 3).
2. The review of Orion in the issue of 24 June.
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