2360. EBB to Anna Brownell Jameson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 326–328.
[London]
Thursday morning. [14 May 1846] [1]
I cannot let you tire yourself with waiting here today dear Mrs Jameson, when I can get no good by it——which is so generous, that to bear to be written down it must be very true besides. I am engaged for all today, & though I may keep the hope of you for tomorrow, I dare not keep the proof at the risk of inconveniencing you.
Let me say how I have been charmed with it. It seems to me in your best manner; & seldom if ever, that you have risen above the expression of these eloquent truths, when most true & most eloquent. I am at Venice with you while I read—& which is still better, at one with you in every thought nearly .. the sympathy is so alive & close. The single exception is in the observation you make about Art—about Art generally being not the medium of expression for the present Age. You said so in this room I remember .. & whenever you say it, I feel myself set fixedly against you—because I hold that wherever man is man, .. “to unfold the human into beauty” [2] which is art (as you have adopted that truth by your motto,) is an aim natural to him. If I could believe in an age without souls, .. of a lopped, straightened humanity, .. I might believe in an age to which Art in the high sense .. is not an adapted medium. That is the only thought in your essay which I fall off from– All the rest I love & live by– I see that you have not looked over the latter part as a corrector—& the printer is astray in the Italian quotations in several places. Once or twice I have marked mere oversights in the English with a pencil—& have ventured to suggest where you speak of Titian’s portrait in his old age, that you should alter the collocation & mention the “furrowed brow” before the ‘piercing eye’ [3] which last is so little a characteristic of old age.
And now, dear Mrs Jameson may you be better! & keep quiet so as to be so!– I am very sorry that your visit to London should be marred to you & us all, by your being unwell.
Affectionately yours
EBB.
I doubtfully ask you whether thought would be more correctly opposed to ‘life’ than ‘soul’?. [4] You will see my pencil sign on the early page? I only doubt, understand, & meant to ask it as a question of you yesterday.
Then in the motto .. would it be better if you wrote simply “That also is Art,” not “his art”– [5] You see what I mean.
Publication: Gerardine Macpherson, Memoirs of The Life of Anna Jameson (1878), pp. 219–220 (in part).
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference in letter 2363 to Mrs. Jameson’s visit.
2. Part of the second motto for “The House of Titian,” the first chapter in Mrs. Jameson’s Memoirs and Essays (1846). This motto (see note 5 below) is taken from Adam Gottlob Oelenschläger’s tragedy, Corregio (Copenhagen, 1811), III, 344–346.
3. Apparently Mrs. Jameson took EBB’s advice. The passage in “The House of Titian” reads: “Old, we say, in speaking of him; for we see him ever with that furrowed brow, piercing eye, aquiline nose, and ample flowing beard, which his portraits exhibit” (Memoirs and Essays, 1846, p. 33).
4. EBB is referring to the opening paragraph of “The House of Titian,” in which Mrs. Jameson compares Raphael with the Venetian painter: “The former as the most perfect example of all that has been accomplished in the expression of thought through the medium of form: the latter, of all that has been accomplished in the expression of life through the medium of colour” (p. 3). Presumably, Mrs. Jameson had originally written “soul” for “life.”
5. The second motto for “The House of Titian” reads:
“For the Painter
Is not the Painter only, but the man;
And to unfold the human into beauty,
That also is art” (p.1).
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