3219. RB to Euphrasia Fanny Haworth
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 19, 141–142.
Florence,
2 July 1853.
Offered for sale by Maggs, Catalogue, date unknown, item 841. 4 pp. 12mo. RB mentions a concert of Rossini’s music and the composer himself. He also discusses Colombe’s Birthday: “It was like you to go & see & tell me of the Play & I got a good notion from you of the general effect & particular acting; I have but one groan to utter on all performances of dramas of mine—I never shall be quite ‘damned’ to my heart’s content—sheerly then my drama’s fault—nobody to blame but myself; in this case if there was no Valence, [1] there was no success, could there be? The last I heard of the thing was that Miss Faucit was playing it at Manchester, with much the same result as in London, to judge by the one paper I saw. Miss F. must have done her best & very well.... I wish you were here that I might give you more than good words; this beautiful place is drunk with the unwonted spring rain, it is too absurd with its leaves & fruits & heaps of corn between the mulberries. The fire flies are millions ahead of the average number, and one is startled by a good unmistakable scorpion every now & then. … We just learn by the merest accident this very morning, that the Municipal council have given orders that a few passages of Casa Guidi Windows be translated, so as to give them an inkling of what it is all about—what does that mean?” [2]
1. The hero of Colombe’s Birthday, played by Barry Sullivan, of whom The Literary Gazette remarked: “Little do we find in the sombre monotony of Mr. Sullivan’s elocution the fiery energy of Valence, the man in whom passion and poetry have only slept, to be roused into wilder commotion by contact with the grace and purity and elevation of Colombe. Speeches which are full of broken emotion, and where a great actor would electrify the house, fall cold and meaningless from Mr. Sullivan’s lips” (30 April 1853, p. 435). For the full text of this review, see pp. 388–389.
2. See letter 3220, where EBB refers to the government’s order for a translation and speculates as to its possible consequences.
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