3466. EBB & RB to William Page
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 301-303.
| [In RB’s hand] | Florence, |
Sept. 9. ’54.
My dear Page–
You will have supposed me at Paris or London—and indeed it is only since this week or two that I quite settle down to the necessity of staying another winter here before doing what I expected to do this summer. Circumstances got the better of us,—it will not be so next year, we hope & believe. I was intending to write to you as soon as there was anything definite to write about, when here returns Mr Tylton [1] as from the clouds: he called this afternoon and will leave for Rome early on Monday. I shall just have time to tell you how opportune is his visit, for it enables me to give effect to a very great desire of mine—that you should yourself see to the proper course to be taken with your picture—the crack in which alarms me more and more. [2] Surely it will be better to attend to it at once than to run the risk of the injury’s increasing. I propose the moment I receive it again—by any opportunity that may offer—to send it to London directly. How greatly it has impressed everyone who has seen it hitherto, I should find it hard to tell you. We love you and your art the more as we look at it the more,—I can say for my wife and myself. How it would delight us if we might know, by a few words from you, how you are—how it fares with Mrs Page and your family,—and how your pictures progress—those six, and especially that one. I have set my heart on their completion—but should be glad of your own assurance that all goes well with them. The single fear I admit is concerning your health—have you done wisely in staying at Rome? The weather has been very endurable here—our child who was ailing in Rome seems healthy now.
I daresay my wife will add a few lines. Give my kindest remembrances and regards to Mrs Page and your daughters: and take every care of yourself for better reasons than the sake of, my dear Page,
Yours ever affectionately,
Robt Browning.
[Continued by EBB]
My dear Mr Page I cant let my precious picture go back to Rome without writing a word on the hem of Robert’s official garment. [3] But it’s only to say .. Tell dear Mrs Page that she shall hear from me & have Penini’s hair by Hatty Hosmer when she returns to you. See how we have lingered in Florence! We were not able even to get to the Baths of Lucca, where we wished so much to go for the sake of the cool mountain air for our child, not to count the temptation of Mrs Sartoris’s society! But we could’nt help ourselves—we have been transfixed at Florence—& really found the affliction bearable after all. Penini weathered the heat beautifully & grew fat through it all—and, if Robert & I are not fat, we have been at least very happy .. “with books & work and healthful play” [4] as the old hymn says, and carriage-drives in the evening, & wanderings among the fireflies & nightingales at night. What if the thermometer rose above ninety sometimes! If we were on the gridiron we bore it as well as St Lawrence. [5] Dear Mr Page, I do wish you had been here in the heat, & were here now it is cooler, & that we were all three talking over Swedenborg. I am reading Judge Edmond’s & Dr Dexter’s “Spiritualism” [6] in which a false Swedenborg speaks falsely .. denying his own philosophy & God’s Scriptures, & reasoning insidiously against Christ’s divinity. “Why do you reason,” it is asked– “Cant you speak as to facts.” “The facts concerning Christ are only known to the more advanced spirits” [7] —evading evidently any bold specification of them. These suppositious spirits of Swedenborg & Bacon at whose feet the writers are trailing their souls, are evil & lying– [8] Swedenborg & Bacon have lost a full cubit of their stature since they entered the spiritual world, if they speak so. The book as to physical phenomena is wonderful. I have heard much, too, lately of the spread of these things, from your countryman Mr Jarves– [9] Mr Tylton will tell you I dare say. The worst is, there is plainly a great deal of false teaching—(though all is not false, of course) and an abandonment of God’s revelation & man’s rational judgment which is lamentable. We dont ask for bread & get a stone, but we very often get bread & turn it into stone– [10] There are petrifying wells enough in our bad hearts. [11]
Dear Mr Page, you are careful of your health, I do hope. Remember how your art (& so much good to the world) hangs by it– Is your wife stronger than she used to be? Give her my love & say that I do not forget her. I had a letter from Mrs Shaw the other day from Germany, but you know perhaps that Mr Shaw goes to America in November & returns for his family in June, & that meanwhile they spend the winter in Paris.
May God bless you– Let me be remembered as
ever affectionately yours
EBB
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. John Rollin Tilton (1828–88), an American landscape painter originally from New Hampshire, had recently settled in Rome.
2. A crack had appeared in the wooden panel on which Page had executed RB’s portrait in oil.
3. Cf. Matthew 9:20.
4. Cf. Isaac Watts, “Against Idleness and Mischief,” line 13, in Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715).
5. According to tradition, Lawrence, a deacon of Rome, was roasted alive on a gridiron in the year 258, during the persecution of Valerian.
7. See John Worth Edmonds and George T. Dexter, Spiritualism (New York, 1853), p. 209.
8. As Dexter notes in his “Introduction” to Spiritualism, his “hand was controlled by two spirits, whose names will be found recorded in this book as Swedenborg and [Francis] Bacon” (p. 93).
9. James Jackson Jarves (1818–88), American critic and journalist, was a son of Deming Jarves (1791–1869), a prosperous glass manufacturer in Boston, and his wife Anna Smith (née Stetson, 1796–1874). Jarves arrived in Florence in 1852 and was beginning to develop a collection of early Italian paintings.
10. Cf. Matthew 4:3.
11. EBB records a visit to the “petrifying wells” at Matlock, in which everyday objects are turned to stone, in her early poem “On Visiting Matlock, Derbyshire” (1814). See Reconstruction, D688.
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