1900. EBB to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 188–189.
[London]
Thursday– [1 May 1845] [1]
People say of you & of me, dear Mr Browning, that we love the darkness & use a sphinxine idiom in our talk,—& really you do talk a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from Vivian Grey. Once I sate up all night to read Vivian Grey,—but I never drew such an argument from him. Not that I give it up (nor you up) for a mere mystery. Nor that I can “see what you have got in you,” from a mere guess. But just observe! If I ask questions about novels, is it not because I want to know how much elbow-room there may be for our sympathies .. & whether there is room for my loose sleeves, & the lace lappets, as well as for my elbows,—& because I want to see you by the refracted lights as well as by the direct ones,—& because I am willing for you to know me from the beginning, with all my weaknesses & foolishnesses, .. as they are accounted by people who say to me “no one would ever think, without knowing you, that you were so & so.” Now if I send all my idle questions to Colburn’s magazine, with other Gothic literature, & take to standing up in a perpendicular personality like the angel on the schoolman’s needle, [2] in my letters to come, without further leaning to the left or the right—why the end would be that you wd take to ‘running after the butterflies,’ for change of air & exercise. And then .. oh .. then, my “small neatly written manuscripts” might fall back into my desk …! (Not a ‘full stop’!.)
Indeed .. I do assure you .. I never for a moment thought of ‘making conversation’ about the Improvisatore or novels in general, when I wrote what I did to you. I might, to other persons .. perhaps. Certainly not to you. I was not dealing round from one pack of cards to you & to others. That’s what you meant to reproach me for, you know—& of that, I am not guilty at all. I never could think of ‘making conversation’ in a letter to you—never. Women are said to partake of the nature of children—& my brothers call me ‘absurdly childish’ sometimes: & I am capable of being childishly “in earnest” about novels, & straws, & such ‘puppydogs tails’ as my Flush’s! Also I write more letters than you do, .. I write in fact almost as you pay visits, .. & one has to ‘make conversation’ in turn, of course. But——give me something to vow by——whatever you meant in the Vivian Grey argument, you were wrong in it! & you never can be much more wrong—which is a comfortable reflection.
Yet you leap very high at Dante’s crown—or you do not leap, .. you simply extend your hand to it, & make a rustling among the laurel-leaves, which is somewhat prophane. Dante’s poetry only materials for the northern rhymers!– I must think of that .. if you please .. before I agree with you. Dante’s poetry seems to come down in hail, rather than in rain—but count me the drops congealed in one hail stone!– Oh! the ‘Flight of the Duchess’ [3] —do let us hear more of her!– Are you (I wonder) … not a “self-flatterer,” … but .. a flatterer?——
Ever yours
EBB–
Address: Robert Browning Esqre / New Cross / Hatcham / Surrey.
Postmark: 8NT8 MY2 1845 A.
Docket, in RB’s hand: 9.
Publication: RB-EBB, pp. 51–52.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Date provided by postmark.
3. The first 215 lines of the poem had appeared in the April 1845 issue of Hood’s Magazine.
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