3287. RB to John Forster
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 19, 342–343.
Florence,
Nov. 13. ’53.
My dear Forster,
I was grieved indeed, a few days ago, by Lytton’s communicating to me so much of a note from you as related to a recent calamity [1] —it is sad to think of such a loss as that, coming when you are least prepared for it—out of your old health & spirits. I daresay you remember I was with you one morning (when you were oppressed with “Strafford” for the Cyclopedia) and you had to endure a similar misfortune [2] —how I remember it! I can write, now, even less than I could say, then—but I do wish you comfort with all my heart—believe it, my dear Forster! Poor Macready, too, will have to bear more sorrow, I fear [3] —if I don’t misunderstand what your friend Black [4] tells me. Very sad all of it, & not least so that one can only say “very sad.”
For the rest, you must be regaining health, by the last news I had from Mr. K. [5] —It was a good thing that there seemed one smile possible at an expression of your letter—where you spoke of ills incidental to “middle age”—not yet, I assure you, as I remember you so long ago as last year. Do you but take the care of yourself that “middle age” is bound to bethink himself of, and another spirit will appropriate it all, and deal more efficaciously with it. I shall need you to keep me & mine company for long days yet, and are we old, I wonder? I hope to see you in early summer—to enjoy that & much more as I could not last year. Meanwhile, I set out for Rome to-morrow (by Perugia)—shall arrive in a week, I trust—and stay the winter. So one is blown about, till there’s a quiet for the Landorian “old leaf”– [6] I am in stress & strain, with a great day’s work before me, but these two or three words I would write—& do you read them with your old good fellowship, & few as they are they will serve the end.
My wife would have you understand her sympathy and every good wish for you– God bless you, my dear Forster—
Yours affectionately ever
R Browning.
Address, on integral page: John Forster Esq / 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Publication: NL, pp. 65–66.
Manuscript: Victoria and Albert Museum.
1. The death from cholera of his sister Jane Forster (1802–53) at Newcastle on 16 September. She was the eldest of four children born to Robert Forster (1777–1836), a Newcastle butcher, and his wife Mary (née Angas, 1775–1852).
2. RB refers to the death of Forster’s father, Robert Forster (see note 1). It occurred while Forster was at work on his biography of the Earl of Strafford, to which RB made significant contributions (see letter 2374, note 4). For the extent of those contributions, see James A. Davies, John Forster: A Literary Life (Leicester, 1983), pp. 133–135.
3. Evidently, Macready was worried about the health of his eldest son, William (“Willie”) Charles Macready, Jr. (1832–71), for whom RB had written “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” (see letter 953, note 3). In a letter of 12 September 1853 to J.T. Delane, Charles Dickens wrote: “I have been in the receipt of several letters from Macready lately, and rejoice to find him quite himself again—though I have great misgivings that he will lose his eldest boy yet” (Dickens, 7, 145).
4. Charles Christopher Black (1809–79), assistant keeper in the art department in the South Kensington Museum from 1864 to 1870 and author of Michael Angelo Buonarroti: Sculptor, Painter, Architect (1875), spent much time in Italy, principally in Florence and Rome. EBB refers to his daughter Annette in letters to Isa Blagden in October 1854, and his eighth child, Julian, was born at Florence in 1856. Black’s wife, Catherine (née Elderton, 1811–91) was a sister of the wife of George Cattermole, a Forster friend and RB acquaintance.
5. John Kenyon.
6. An allusion to Landor’s The Last Fruit Off an Old Tree (1853). But RB may also have in mind Ebenezer Elliott’s “Leaves and Men” (The Poetical Works, Edinburgh, 1840), in which the frequently recurring words “OLD Leaf” serve as a metaphor for an “old man.”
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