1315. EBB to George Goodin Moulton-Barrett
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 226–229.
[London]
July 8th 1843.
My dearest George if you did not receive my letter addressed to you at Cheltenham, you must think me unworthy of all yours, .. to say nothing of the want of gratitude for all yours, which will be equally obvious to you. So I hope you received it. Afterwards I go on to applaud your resolution of taking the rural holiday while you had the opportunity of it, although my own private disappointment upon the occasion cd not be repressed by my consciousness of its utter selfishness & foolishness– To see you again on Saturday was a fixed idea with me—& it was hard to put six weeks more between me & you. There! that is as much groaning as is necessary—& particularly when I recognize the immorality of any groaning at all– Hæc hactenus– [1]
Miss Tennyson is a very radically prosaic sister for the great poet,—& does her best to take away the cadence & rhymes of the sentiment of life. What a disgrace to womanhood! The whole is a climax of badness—! to marry at all .. bad! to keep the annuity, having married .. worse! to conglomerate & perpetuate the infidelity & indelicacy, by giving the sacred name to the offspring of the “lubberly lieutenant” .... worst of all!! That last was a desperate grasp at “a sentiment” .. & missed! I am sorry for Tennyson’s sake, & also for Mr Hallam’s, who behaved nobly both in conferring the annuity & in suffering her to retain it under those changed & grievous circumstances. [2] There wd have been a deficiency in tender consideration for his son’s memory, had he resumed the money … as if he had given it as a special retainer of her fidelity. No—it was right to let her keep it– How she could keep it, is the wonder—& how the lieutenant, lubberly or not, could accept a wife & three hundred a year with an incumbrance of such recollections & a willingness to compound with them by giving the name of her first lover to his own first child, .. is a wonder scarcely of the second class– “Can such things be”? [3] Not without disgusting us, I hope.
Mr Horne has written to Miss Mitford that as she wants him to stay at Three Mile Cross for several days instead of for one, which was the limit he set in his first imagination on the visit, he must delay the period of it until from the second to the fifth of August, when he wd go down to her, prepared to work in her garden, drive her out in Tom Thumb’s chaise, & play for her, if she likes music, in some kind of portable instrument. She has acceded to the whole arrangement & is charmed by the manner of it. Orion is shining expansively; and the poet has offered to let me see the various critical letters he has received on the subject of his work. Of course I said ‘yes’. It was the very thing you know, likely to please me. Mr Kenyon praised the poem warmly when he came to see me two days ago & found me prostrate on the floor in Papa’s room—he praised it warmly, & accused me of the paper in the Athenæum as a matter of course. I struggled vainly for a denial, & he laughed me to scorn– Somebody had observed to him, he told me, in relation to it, that “Miss Barrett’s power & perversity were equally visible in the paper’[’]—a sort of topsy-turvy compliment of which I cannot see the precise application. Mr Kenyon’s brother has not arrived yet—but he is almost ready for him & has received & unpacked & paid the duty & carriage of from abroad to the amount of one hundred & seventy pounds, books & packages belonging to the travellers– This fact delights Mr Kenyon, because it proves that his brother is about earnestly to settle for life in Harley Place.
He told me that an American called upon Carlyle the other day & begged to see him. The philosopher declined the honor upon the plea of being at dinner. The republican walked away to the nearest public-house, called for ink & paper, & addressed to Mr Carlyle the most insolent letter possible, desiring him to consider what wd be his own reflections if upon penetrating to the backermost back settlements of America & calling upon him, the American, he had received for answer that he (the American) wd not see him, being at dinner!!! I dare say the writer flattered himself that he was writing with a dagger—but the analogy between Back settlements & the metropolis of England was scarcely made out clearly. Mr Kenyon, by the way, has himself had an irruption of fourteen new Americans in one week; & finding it what he calls “a social impossibility” to entertain them he has begged Miss Sedgwick not to send him any more– Fancy fourteen Americans coming, each with a letter of introduction in his hand & a modest request to be granted an immediate access to all the “most distinguished persons of Great Britain”!– That was the manner of the irruption!—& I dont wonder, nor will you, that Mr Kenyon fled before the face of the irruptors.
Ah .. dear Sissy [Butler]! I fear she is very ill .. & your account is not re-assuring. And yet that she shd remain for so long a time in a state of suspension of the more dangerous symptoms, helps one to hope for her … & I hope & fear by turns. Uncle Hedley who was vexed to see you only for half an hour, does not confirm your good report about her spirits. On the contrary he seems to think that she is too languid & oppressed, poor thing, to care to say or do anything—but a good appetite & an inclination as well as power of being wheeled about in her chair, she certainly has .. & these things are good as far as they go. The medical man told him, that when he was first called in, he found her in a very dangerous state, & that now she was in a critical state, however decidedly better. The distinction seems more nice than satisfying. ‘It was impossible to say’ (he also observed to uncle Hedley) ‘how it wd end.’ I am afraid. Dearest Georgie when you have an opportunity of seeing her again & poor Bummy, you will not neglect it I am sure–
Dear Mrs Martin tells me that you go to her on tuesday,—& she speaks murmuringly of your giving them only one week instead of two weeks. I told you so!–
The Hedley boys go to the north on Wednesday, uncle Hedley probably, not until the week after next, .. Robin, not at all,—as he prefers spending his English time in London to all your northern ruralities!
I am in a poetical fit just now, which is attended with ominous symptoms of having been beaten all over my body. My ivy is growing triumphantly, & a little sparrow sate & chirped in it “this morning very early.” All this being as dull as possible, you will be not sorry to be rid of me. Dearest Georgie, I love & think of you continually–
Ever your attached Ba–
Give my love dutifully at Kinnersley– I hope that Leonard’s spirits are putting out new shoots– [4]
Address: G G M Barrett Esqr / Kinnersley Castle / Near Hereford.
Publication: B-GB, pp. 98–102.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. “So much for that!” (Cicero, Ad Atticum, XIV, I, 1, 10).
2. Tennyson’s sister Emily had formed an attachment to Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–33) but it was agreed that their marriage be postponed until after he had journeyed abroad with his father; unfortunately, he died suddenly while in Vienna. Henry Hallam (1777–1859) transferred to Emily his son’s allowance of £300 a year, and did not withdraw it when, in January 1842, she married Richard Jesse, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. (See The Life and Times of Tennyson, by Thomas R. Lounsbury, 1962, pp. 602–603.)
3. Macbeth, III, 4, 109.
4. In letter 1395 EBB tells how her cousin, Leonard Graham-Clarke, “cried like a child” in May, when his bride-to-be “locked herself in her bedroom, & would never see him again. The consequence was … the precipitate flight of the Rejected from the neighbourhood of his lady’s bower.” They were reconciled, and married on 1 November 1843.
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