Correspondence

3489.  EBB & RB to Harriet G. Hosmer

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 21, 8–12.

Nov. 16. ’54.

Writing to you, dearest Hattie, is almost like breaking a spell and driving you away, or at least, putting in evidence for the first time that you are really gone, out of sight, out of hearing, out of reach—you won’t, then, come in any more of a morning or afternoon the old way? I can tell you, and you will believe it, I think, that often and often Ba and I have seen you on the queer chair at the little end of the table, on the sofa, and in all proper old places of yours. You are dear and good to speak to us as you do, to feel, as you say, for us—come back to us at any distance of time and you’ll see whether we love you less—more it won’t do to promise, meantime both of us wish you well with our whole heart. Now then, the quarrel which lovers always indulge in: [1] —What business had you to suppose we wanted those cups [2] and spoons to remember you by? There I found them on my return that last morning[;] would not a flower or two have done as well—should we not have kept it equally for your sake? We will keep these and think of you, however, and so will Penini—who told me, out of his own head, this very morning on hearing me say I was about to write to thank you for your box which he greatly delights in. [3] He is very well, imaginative and noisy, and is gone this moment to give Isa the benefit of his qualities. She wrote to you the other day, I know nothing would surprise and delight you more than the evident and partial improvement in her state—the only fear is of some piece of imprudence and over-presumption in using her recovered forces. She can walk only too well, in fact. Is not Zan[n]etti a man now? All this comes of his one visit and prescription. She is still up in the cold at the Villa, and keeps there until the end of the month when she descends into the town [4] —but she will have told you all that. Now about yourself. The news of your finding just the domicile you wanted [5] reached us thro’ Isa—what a good chance. You must tell us when you write next, how you really are at your dear Rome—whether there has been a second headache with its appropriate cure of the “two grains” (and a draught, ugh!) or a fourth, fifth or sixth (which is it?) other annoyance calling for poulticing and so on– [6] You don’t mention anything of the kind but make us quite sure, please!

No writing about art in this letter, which just knocks at your door for news: Yet I am quite happy to think of you and that noble Page together. Stick to him like a leech, for it is real life blood you will get out of him, real thoughts and facts, nothing like sham or conventionalism. I carry in my mind all I can of his doctrine about the true proportions of the human figure, and test it by whatever strikes me as beautiful or the reverse. [7] How I wish I could see your little room and what’s in it. Do help me to see in some measure. Does the fillet you mention depend from the hand? or lie on the ground, perhaps? Do you draw from Teresa or any new model? Are you turning over in your mind the two Circe groups? How goes on the bust of Mrs. Cass? [8] I daresay Greville [9]  fidgets, but you’ll get over that. I called on Powers the other morning—he has wholly changed the drapery of his statue[:] [10] he found, he says, that the drapery from the breast to the waist would have a bad effect in its straight line and now there is to be a sort of mediæval bodice of velvet, and underclothing for the thighs, with buttons, if not other ornaments, and, frankly, I don’t understand it at all for Milton’s Melancholy, if this is meant for her, is said to be “like a nun” [11] —and I should have styled this a chatelaine in ecstacy or contemplation. I write this only to and for you (as whatever else I write) for one should not pronounce definitively upon a work still in progress, and Powers has talent enough to redeem or explain everything yet—but I do doubt and fear the eff[ic]acy of every alteration he has made since the naked, or rather the first gauze drapery he threw round it. He saw my disappointment and said, rightly enough, I must wait for the completion of the work—only, then where will be the use of criticism? I was not alone—but mean to go in a day or two and ease my mind. The face looked large in the new dress, too. He may change everything yet, so—this is between us! I saw the same morning Stanton’s statue– [12] He has worked hard at it and done it a deal of good—though I still think the type abominable—pinched in here and there—the face is ugly as ever but the body looks truthful now and the attitude which seems too pronounced and s-y (can one make such a word like an S or rather a Z) will do better in bronze I seem to think than plaster:—bronze is such inadequate stuff for the expression of flesh compared to marble that one requires, or at least bears a little surcharge of the qualities of flesh, which marble needs only indicate. I went to Mr. Kirkup—said all I dare—perhaps I do him injustice in not daring more, but he repeated so decisively that a line to Sir Geo. Hayter, mentioning such and such particularities, would get us the arm—that I mean to try him first—I waited a little, hoping that Mr. Gibson would pass through Florence; as friends of his assured me that he would [13] —and meaning to take counsel with him. Even now, a word from him to Sir George would probably, or certainly, be your most expeditious way of getting the cast. [14] Failing other modes, however, I will make up my mind and ask for an impression from this. Of course, the mere photograph you may have at any time, but the cast would be so much more valuable. Will you, by the bye, offer my true respects to Mr. Gibson, whom I had hoped to see here, and whose genius I am less than ever in danger of forgetting: in standing off a little from it, one sees its height better, you must tell me how his great work prospers, and if the Pandora is sketched yet. [15] And how does your portrait get on [16] and is there anything else about him you can tell me? I wrote to him a few days ago. How does my picture look now? [17] And, Hattie, how does your horse do, I must not forget that. Does he answer expectation? I saw last week that iron-grey and his greenish rider, both much as usual.

I mean to write to dear Mrs. <Sartoris> [18] and be written to, so only our kindest love and regrets to her! Mr. <Sartoris> did justice to Florence, if more flinty hearts [19] did not understand! We see next to nobody, but make up a rare fire and get on a little with our work more than when you were here, by a good deal—yet we had rather be idle and have you. Best remembrances to Leighton, I wish his picture all success from my heart. [20] What of the Greek now, pupil of mine? and what do you read or intend to read? Poetry, mind; and the sketching once a day, and inventing something don’t you remember? [21] Oh! you will succeed, I know! Here’s a letter now, won’t you answer it soon, and wish that letter writing may soon be succeeded by face to face talking? However that may be– Good-bye and God bless you dearest Hattie– I shall leave the rest of the sheet to Ba who will speak for herself.

Yours ever

RB

[Continued by EBB]

I quite shiver as I begin to write to you dearest Hattie,—and I daresay it is a sense of my demerits as well as of the cold. It has been so cold here, Hattie! warmer to-day, though—and we have been so wicked and ungrateful not to have written all this time, to thank you for the mystical egg boilers, whose spirit of Amé [22] and love must burn together! How much too kind you were to think so of us– Penini was in ecstacy and I wonder the hinges of his writing box have’nt dropped off at this millioneth time of opening and shutting. “Leally,” says he, “I must say, this is a velly pretty present of dear Hattie’s”. That was a soliloquy I happened to overhear. He has written various works since you left us, and the heroine of the last romance was “Emily Susan”, at your service!

And we, do you fancy that we don’t miss you? It’s dreadful to have no chance company at breakfast, and you must not count on the two egg boilers, as sufficient to console us for the want of the 3rd coffee cup.

Dear Hattie I am going to ask you to do something for me, Wilson hears from Mr. Miller the baker, that a golden topped comb which I left at the Baths of Lucca last year, was committed into the hands of some of Mrs. Sartoris’s people for me– I suppose they forgot to leave it at Florence—will you put in an enquiry. It’s an heirloom, or I would care less to give so much trouble.

Isa gives up Leghorn I am glad to say, and we are to have her in Florence for the winter. Never does she cease lamenting the loss of you, and two female friends, [23] suddenly dropped from the clouds bringing no heavenly balm for the wound. [24] Ah well—when Spring comes—we shall have Hattie and the roses, and you will be as gladly welcomed by us all in Paris or London where there is everybody, as here in Florence where there is nobody. May God keep you. Give our love to dear Mrs <Sartoris> and to dear Mr. Page.

Your ever affectionate,

EBB

Publication: Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories, ed. Cornelia Carr (New York, 1912), pp. 44–48 (in part).

Source: Typescript at Radcliffe Institute.

1. Cf. RB’s “A Lovers’ Quarrel” (Men and Women, 1855).

2. “Egg boilers,” as named by EBB below.

3. A “writing box,” as described by EBB below.

4. Isa Blagden was moving to an apartment in Villa Torrigiani; see the third to last paragraph in letter 3491.

5. Miss Hosmer had evidently moved from her apartment at 13 Via Gregoriana, but we have been unable to trace her new residence.

6. A reference to boils, one of which is discussed in letter 3470.

7. Page first presented his theory on human proportions in A New Geometrical Mode of Measuring the Proportions of the Human Body (New York, 1860), which Joshua C. Taylor suggests was privately printed (see William Page: The American Titian, Chicago, 1857, p. 129). Taylor was unable to locate a copy of that work, as were the present editors. Years later, Page published a brief summary of his theory in “The Measure of a Man,” (Scribner’s Monthly, April 1879, 894–898). Inspired by the passage in Revelation 21:17—“And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel”—Page determined that “the figure in height and breadth is divided by twelve” (p. 895), which he illustrates with drawings of figures on grids of 144 squares. He further divided the figure into “three grand divisions”: “from the top of the head to the point called the pit of the stomach … from the waist in front to the end of the muscle just above the knee-pan … from this point above the knee and its plane to the bottom of the feet” (pp. 896–897). Claiming that RB was “the first one to whom I had the pleasure of communicating my discovery and its use” (p. 895), Page quoted the reference to his theory that appears in “Cleon” (Men and Women, 1855), lines 55–56: “I know the true proportions of a man / And woman also, not observed before”; and he also quoted the reference in EBB’s Aurora Leigh, Book I, lines 864–869:

The only teachers who instruct mankind

From just a shadow on a charnel-wall

To find man’s veritable stature out

Erect, Sublime,—the measure of a man

And that’s the measure of an angel, says

The apostle.

8. Mary Cass (née Ludlum, 1834–55) had married Lewis Cass, Jr. (see letter 3299, note 15) at Paris on 31 May 1854. We have been unable to trace the sculpture mentioned.

9. Greville Edward Sartoris (1843–73).

10. “La Penserosa”; see letter 3244, note 1. The completed statue features the modifications that RB describes.

11. Cf. Milton, “Il Penseroso” (1645), lines 31–32.

12. George Clark Stanton (1832–94), sculptor and painter, was born in Birmingham, son of Thomas Stanton and his wife Ann. He attended the Birmingham School of Art, where he studied silversmithing. In 1854, while working for the firm of Elkington and Mason, he was sent by them to Florence to study Italian renaissance sculpture and metalwork. In 1855 he settled in Edinburgh, becoming a member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1862. We have been unable to identify the statue RB mentions here.

13. Gibson wrote to Miss Hosmer in early October that he might visit Florence on his way to Rome (see SD1778 in vol. 20).

14. We are unable to identify the “arm” that Miss Hosmer wanted a cast of.

15. “Pandora,” one of Gibson’s painted statues, was executed between 1856 and 1861. It is now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Cheshire.

16. RB is referring to Page’s 1854 portrait of Miss Hosmer, now at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. It is reproduced in vol. 20, facing p. 178.

17. Page was repairing the crack in the panel of RB’s portrait.

18. The transcript shows a blank space here and in a few instances below; the names in angle brackets are supplied by the present editors.

19. Robert Burns, “Logan Braes” (Liverpool, 1800), line 29.

20. Leighton was back in Rome at his studio in Via Felice. RB probably has in mind “Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence” (see letter 3467, note 2), but Leighton was at work on another painting as well, “The Reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets,” completed in 1855. It was sent that year to the Universal Exhibition in Paris.

21. Harriet Hosmer is known as a sculptor and inventor. Among her several patented inventions is a formula for making artificial marble. Later in life, she devoted much of her time to the creation of a perpetual motion machine.

22. Sic. The word in French, spelled Âme, translates as Soul, but the handwriting may have been misread by the editor of the printed source. It is possible that EBB wrote “l’ové” (“the oval-shaped”) and punned it with “love.”

23. One of these was Charlotte Agassiz (see letter 3484). As indicated by letter 3533, the other was Laura Getting (1817–94), youngest daughter of London merchant Moses David Getting (d. 1841, aged 73), of Wandsworth, Surrey, and his wife Sarah (née Levi, d. 1853, aged 77). In the 1881 British census, Miss Getting is listed at Brompton in the household of Annette Frascheri (née Bracken) as the latter’s aunt. Although this would indicate some family relation to Isa Blagden, we have been unable to confirm it. Miss Getting was staying with Isa at the time of the latter’s death in 1873.

24. Cf. Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, 1718, V, 489–490.

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