2730. EBB to John Kenyon
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 66–69.
[Florence]
May 1– [1848] [1]
My dearest Mr Kenyon, surely it is quite wrong that we three, Robert you & I, should be satisfied with writing little dry notes, as short as so many proclamations .. & those of the order of your anti-chartist magistracy– “Whereas certain evil disposed persons &c &c”, .. instead of our anti-austrian Grand duchy’s “O figli amati” [2] —(how characteristic of the north & the south, to be sure, is this contrast! Yet after all they might have managed it rather better in England!) .. little dry notes as brief & business-like as an anti Chartist proclamation! And indeed two of us are by no means satisfied, whatever the third may be. The other day we were looking over some of the dear delightful letters you used to write to us. Real letters, those were, & not little dry notes at all. Robert said, [‘]‘When I write to dear Mr Kenyon I really do feel overcome by the sense of what I owe to him—& so, as it is beyond words to say, why generally I say as little as possible of anything, keeping myself to matters of business.” An alternative very objectionable, I told him; for to have “a dumb devil” [3] from ever such grateful & sentimental reasons, when the Alps stand betwixt friends, is damnatory in the extreme. Then as you are not ‘too grateful’ to us, why dont you write? Pray do, my dear friend– Let us all write as we used to do– And to make sure of it, I begin.
Since I ended last, the world has turned over on its other side, in order, one must hope, to some happy change in the dream. Our friend—Miss Bayley, in that very kind letter which has just reached me & shall be answered directly, .. (will you tell her with my thankful love?) asks if Robert & I are communists, & then half draws back her question into a discreet reflection that I, at least, was never much celebrated for acumen on political œconomy. Most true indeed! And therefore & on that very ground is it not the more creditable to me that I dont set up for a communist immediately? In proportion to the ignorance might be the stringency of the embrace of “la verité sociale”: [4] —so I claim a little credit that it is’nt. For really we are not communists .. farther than to admit the wisdom of voluntary association in matters of material life, among the poorer classes. And to legislate even on such points, seems as objectionable as possible—all intermeddlings of government with domesticities, from Lacedæmon to Peru, were & must be objectionable & of the growth of absolutism, let us theorize as we choose. I would have the government educate the people absolutely,—& then give room for the individual to develop himself into life freely– Nothing can be more hateful to me than this communist idea of quenching individualities in the mass. As if the hope of the world did not always consist in the eliciting of the individual man from the background of the masses .. in the evolvement of individual genius, virtue, magnanimity.–
Do you know how I love France & the French? Robert laughs at me for the mania of it, or used to laugh .. long before this revolution. When I was a prisoner, my other mania for imaginative literature, used to be ministered to through the prison-bars by Balzac, George Sand & the like immortal improprieties– They kept the colour in my life to some degree & did good service in their time to me, I can assure you—though in dear discreet England women ought’nt to confess to such reading, I believe, as you told me so yourself one day. Well—but through reading the books I grew to love France in a mania too .. & the interest, which all must feel in the late occurrences there, has been with me & is quite painful. I read the newspapers as I never did in my life, & hope & fear in paroxysms; yes, & am guilty of thinking far more of Paris than of Lombardy itself—& try to understand financial difficulties & social theories with the best will in the world, .. much as Flush tries to understand me when I tell him that barking & jumping may be unseasonable things. Both of us open our eyes a good deal .. but the comprehension is questionable, after all– What however I do seem least of all to comprehend, is your hymn of triumph in England .. just because you have a lower ideal of liberty than the French people have. See if in Louis Phillipe’s time, France was not in many respects more advanced than England is now—property better divided, .. hereditary privelege, abolished! Are we to blow with the trumpet because we respect the ruts while everywhere else they are mending the roads? I do not comprehend. As to the Chartists, it is only a pity, in my mind, that you have not more of them. That’s their fault. Mine you will say, is being pert about politics when you would rather have anything else in a letter from Italy. You have heard of my illness, & will have been sorry for me, I am certain .. but with blessings hedging me round, I need not catch at a thistle in a hedge to make a “sorrowful complaynte” [5] of. Our plans have floated round & round, in & out of all the bays & creeks of the Happy islands. We were all but gone to the Baths of Lucca, to Siena, to Fano, to Perugia, .. & to Pratolino, the Grand Duke’s villa, for the summer months. We were all but settled for life in the Frescobaldi palace [6] .. all but off to Rome, to wait at Frascati till it was time to enter the city– The only thing quite impossible for this year, has seemed just .. England—dear England, where my dearest sisters are holding out their hands—& dear Miss Bayley must not be angry with them neither, seeing that my hands too go out involuntarily, .. even while I know how wrong & foolish it would be to yield to the impulse at the present moment. Next year we certainly shall spend the summer in England .. that is our fixed intention, in every case. As to living altogether there, you know it is scarcely possible & still less desirable, with our income & my tendencies as to health. With such a purse & such a chest, how should we manage with your taxation & north east winds? Even my sisters, I think, would not wish us to try. Sometimes I fear that Robert’s mother must have to struggle against the instinct of hating me, affectionate & unselfish as she is!—because it must appear to her that, but for me, she wd still have her son at New Cross—oh, I fear that sometimes .. & my strongest wish on any account wd be to go every summer to England, returning to Italy in the autumn. Also, we dont despair of being able to compass it, or nearly the equivalent– We turn the matter over in all ways. Meanwhile here we are—& when do you mean to come to see us, pray!– Mind, I hold by the skirts of the vision for next winter– Why, surely you wont talk of “disturbances” & “revolutions” & the like disloyal reasons which send our brave countrymen flying on all sides, as if every separate individual expected to be bombarded—‘per se’. Now, mind you come .. dear, dear Mr Kenyon, how delighted past expression we should be to see you! Ah, do you fancy that I have no regret for our delightful gossips? If I have the feeling I told you of for Balzac & George Sand, what must I have for you? Now come, & let us see you! And still sooner if you please, write to us—& write of yourself & in detail .. & tell us particularly, first if the winter has left no sign of a cough with you .. & next .. what you mean by something which suggests to my fancy that you have a book in the course of printing. Is that true? Tell me all about it—all! Who can be interested, pray, if I am not? For your & Mr Chorley’s & Mr Forster’s kind dealings with Robert’s poems, [7] I thank you gratefully, and, as a third volume can bring up the rear quickly in the case of success, I make no wailing for my ‘Luria’, however dear it may be.
You are not to fancy that I am unwell now. On the contrary—I am nearly as strong as ever, & go out in the carriage for two hours every day, besides a little walk sometimes.
Not a word more today. Write—do .. & you shall hear from us at length. Robert sends his own love, I suppose– We both love you from our hearts. Your ever affectionate & grateful Ba (who cant read over, & writes in such a hurry!)–
Publication: LEBB, I, 361–365 (in part).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Year provided by EBB’s references to the revolution in France.
2. “O beloved children.”
3. Presumably an allusion to the “dumb man possessed with a devil” in Matthew 9:32.
4. “The social truth.”
5. Cf. Matthew Henry, An Exposition, with Practical Observations, upon the Poetical Books of the Old Testament (1710), gloss on Psalm 102: “A sorrowful complaint which the psalmist makes either for himself, or in the name of the church.”
6. The Palazzo Frescobaldi is situated not far from Casa Guidi in Via Santo Spirito.
7. Evidently, Forster had acted as an intermediary on RB’s behalf in Chapman and Hall’s decision to publish Poems (1849); see letter 2722, note 14. We have been unable to determine how Kenyon and Chorley assisted the book’s publication.
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