1881. EBB to Thomas Westwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 152–153.
50 Wimpole Street.
April 9th 1845.
My dear Mr Westwood,
I should have written to thank you (oh, I am not blind to my sins) for your goodnatured solution of the riddle of the Metropolitan, long ago—days on days ago—but I am asking you to forgive my negligence, instead. You surprised me very much—& I almost wonder how I cd have helped an ejaculation by return of post, if the gratitude within me remained dumb. Mr Grant! [1] Of all the birds in the air & fishes in the sea, I never shd have guessed Mr Grant!—never, never. It is to me, wonderful– Oh no—I am not acquainted with him,—I am not acquainted even with an acquaintance of an acquaintance of his—but it is not this that makes all the surprise– Well!—it is very kind of him, and I am very grateful to him. In the way of praise, it is the most unblinking of all my reviews, I fancy—the most unmodifying & resolute. And this from Mr Grant!
Poor Hood—ah—I had feared that the scene was closing for him. [2] And I am glad that a little of the poor gratitude of the world is laid down at his door just now, to muffle to his dying ear the harsher sounds of life. I forgive much to Sir Robert for the sake of that letter——though after all, the minister is not high-hearted or made of heroic stuff. But he is too learned in expediencies, not to know something of the worth of genius & of the honour due to it. Would, that he could teach our queen that a man of genius was as worthy of sitting at her table as a post captain or a banker. If Shakespeare were alive now & went to Windsor, he wd be admitted by the back stairs. Do you know that? It is one of our disgraces through Europe——not alone, since the letter question “in re Mazzini.’[’] [3]
I am delighted that you shd appreciate Mr Browning’s high power—very high, according to my view,—very high, & various. Yes—“Paracelsus,” you should have– “Sordello” has many fine things in it, but having been thrown down by many hands as unintelligible, & retained in mine as certainly of the Sphinxine literature, with all its power, .. I hesitate to be imperious to you in my recommendations of it– Still the book is worth being studied— Study is necessary to it; as indeed, though in a less degree, to all the works of this poet: Study is peculiarly necessary to it. He is a true poet; & a poet, I believe, of a large “future in rus, [4] about to be.” He is only growing to the heights he will attain.
I have mislaid your letter, & cannot remember if there was another question in it. I am better, in proportion to the weather—but the east winds have not given us up I fear[.]
May I ask what “drawings” you make? Or is it rank impertinence?. I was under the delusion that your occupations were mercantile. [5]
Ever most truly yours
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett.
Publication: LEBB, I, 253–254 (in part).
Manuscript: British Library.
2. Hood’s death was less than a month away at this time. Peel had written to Hood on 10 November 1844, and, on 16 November 1844, Hood received an official notification from Peel that Jane Hood would receive a grant of £100 per annum for life to be effective from the preceding June. However, on 17 January 1845, Jane Hood found herself making a urgent plea to Peel for additional assistance, which Peel gave in the form of an outright gift of £100. See Thomas Hood (1963), by J.C. Reid, pp. 223–224 and pp. 226–228.
3. In 1844, after Mazzini and others complained, it was discovered that Sir James Graham, acting on the request of the foreign secretary, had acted legally in authorising letters to be opened in the post office. Despite the damage to Graham’s reputation and the embarrassment caused to the government, the law was not changed (DNB).
4. Literally, “future in the country”; EBB’s exact meaning here is unclear.
5. We have been unable to identify the “drawings” referred to by EBB. In a letter dated 6 April 1872, Westwood wrote about this period in his life: “We (three of us) had been living in the country under a sort of charm, and the charm held us for years. We read each other’s books, and exchanged each other’s thoughts, as E.B.B. supposed, and she was our oracle and divinity. But it chanced, by some stress of circumstance, I forget what, we looked up one day from our mirror, like the Lady of Shalott, and the spell was broken, the mirror cracked from side to side, and we saw Sir Lancelot by the river, and heard his ‘tirra-lirra.’ A few days later we were all scattered. Business caught me in its whirl …” (A Literary Friendship: Letters to Lady Alwyne Compton, 1869–1881, From Thomas Westwood (1914), p. 62. In the “Introductory Memoir” written by Westwood’s wife, she states that “he came to Brussels at the age of thirty [ca. 1845], appointed there, as Secretary and afterwards Director, to an Anglo-Belgian railway company” (p. vii).
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