3683. EBB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 9–11.
102 Rue de Grenelle. Fg St Germain.
Wednesday—and Thursday. [28–29 November 1855] [1]
My dearest Isa your letter lingered on the road through the address being written as the gods please– Robert says you must really write plainer for the postman. Think he is dictating to you more “men & women”! [2] Also use four postage stamps or none, because the one you gave us went just for nothing, & it’s a pity that even a postage stamp should do that. Mark how I grow in practical business, but you may be sure that queen Mab has been with me, [3] & that it is’nt of myself I am so prudent.
Dear, Robert has been to see your apartment [4] which I care less about because it is in the Champs Elysées a long way off, without the advantages & view of the Grande Avenue– But he gives a promising account of it—and it looks on gardens, & the entrance is excellent, & the rooms are good. The drawback is that there are no carpets—not laid down regularly—& that the curtains are mere summer curtains, .. muslin & cold looking. Supposing we took these rooms & could get them for two hundred we should have to hire curtains & carpets—it would really be necessary. We remain here till saturday fortnight & then go .. as many of us as survive. Perhaps I shall—but it’s doubtful. We have had two very cold, frosty days, and my soul went out as usual– Today it seems warmer. I would give much to be in Italy, I confess to you in a low whisper. Paris has been spoiled to us by the trap of an apartment we fell into—and perhaps .. (who knows?) I am a little spoiled for Paris– I wonder sometimes whether I shall be in good earnest able presently to set to work & finish my poem—or whether I never shall–
The sun shines brightly while I write & reproves me—not into the room of course—but on the left hand wall. But even that is something.
The Athenæum has had an article, which, if Mr Chorley wrote, I am sorry for all of us .. himself included. It’s an unworthy & unjust article. [5] The Examiner delays speaking—through Mr Forster being unwell I hear– The Observer makes up a very silly face & is complimentary– [6] The Illustrated Times, they say, calls him the first poet of the Age, & then lays it upon him for obscurity, observing that he writes for me as I write for him, & that we scorn to write intelligibly for the masses. [7] Most absurd, to be sure–
Dearest Isa, how I congratulate you on the happy letter from Louisa! [8] —how I understand the joy & satisfaction it must have given you– Now, dear, you must rise up & cast off your burden, & enjoy your life wisely– Soon you wont be afraid of ghosts, in coming to Paris .. shall you?
Oh—talking of ghosts, there arrived for me yesterday a letter from Mrs Kinney all about Home from beginning to end. It’s too long to send you—you shall see it when you come. She and Mr Kinney are converts. She only has doubts whether there may not be “sorcery” at work—but for trickery, legerdemain, it is out of the question in her mind. Home who is in continually bad state of health, spitting blood, I am sorry to say, is living in the same house with Mr Powers—who, with his wife, seems to be of the believers– Mr Kinney was told the last words of his mother [9] —& she had the names of deceased friends—dead, years & years ago .. beaten out by the raps.
An Italian gentleman was communicated with in his own language, and a Polish princess in hers, [10] —Home being ignorant of both– You shall see the letter– Robert really behaved like a sort of angel, for he had made up his mind on the first sight of it that it had come to strengthen his side. He said she had done well to write—he liked her the better for it—that certainly the letter had surprised him—only he ended by swearing that nothing in heaven nor earth would make him believe—& he may perhaps keep his oath .. who knows? Sophia Cottrell too is to write to me on the subject. Mrs Kinney tells me that her husband had a malignant fever in the summer & was in the greatest danger, & delirious for a fortnight. [11] Did you hear of this? She seems very anxious about your going back to Florence.
Mrs Jameson was with us last night, & Mrs Sartoris, with Leighton & Capt Aidé– We hoped for Lytton, but he did’nt come– I felt too unwell to enjoy much, though Mrs Sartoris was brilliant with spirits & diamonds,—but I am blyther this morning. I mean to send ‘Charles Auchester’ [12] by Mrs Jameson who goes to England for a time, to return, I do hope, to Paris for the winter. Mrs Sartoris hears, through a reliable person, that Hatty is compromising herself more & more with Shakespeare Wood– [13] What a pity! what a pity!– The Clarke influence appears to be as impotent as others are. [14] She’s a .. Hatty.
Dearest Isa, write to me all you hear & see, & feel, as far as it is lawful– In spite of what you say, I sometimes (in suspicious moods) suspect you of some romantic passion (in f sharp above the line) to account for your staying in England through november.
Your faithfully attached
Ba–
Peni’s “own love” to you—and Robert’s “best love”.
Publication: B-IB, pp. 91–94 (as [5–6 December 1855]).
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum.
1. Dated by EBB’s mention of remaining in the Rue de Grenelle apartment “till saturday fortnight”; that is, 15 December. In the first paragraph of letter 3688, she tells Henrietta that she and her family will “get clear of” the apartment “next saturday week” (also referring to the 15th). The Brownings actually moved on 13 December; see the first paragraph in letter 3693.
3. Cf. Romeo and Juliet, I, 4, 53. In this and subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s works, the line numbers correspond to those in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).
4. i.e., the one Isa had recommended; see the first paragraph in letter 3678.
6. At the beginning of a brief notice of Men and Women in The Observer for 18 November 1855, the reviewer declared that RB’s aim in his “series of lyrical poems” was to “illustrate the various conditions of the soul, intellectual and sensuous. There is more, however, of the latter than of the former, and therefore it is that the series is in its character rather erotic than pathetic” (p. 7). For the full text of this review, see p. 298.
7. In The Illustrated Times of 24 November (p. 403), the reviewer complained: “Mr. Browning writes for Mrs. Browning, and is no doubt intelligible to Mrs. Browning; but he is not always so to the public.” For the full text of this review, see pp. 298–302.
9. Hannah Kinney (née Burnet, 1761–1832).
10. Patrick Waddington suggests that this is a reference to either Anna Maria Clementina Lubomirska (1838–1916) or her mother Yekaterina Nikolayevna Lubomirska (née Tolstaya, 1789–1870), wife of Prince Konstanty Stanislaw Lubomirski (1786–1870); see Waddington, pp. 336–337 and 341. In this note and many others concerned with Daniel Dunglas Home and his circle, the editors have drawn on Patrick Waddington’s Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? (Upper Hutt, New Zealand, 2007). We here record our debt to his scholarship.
11. Elizabeth Kinney recorded an account of her husband’s illness: “On August 27th—one month ago to-day—my poor husband was seized with a dreadful fever … the disease was pronounced typhus fever, & so it proved. For seventeen days it raged to madness, he being delirious nearly all the time, & in a state which almost excluded hope of his recovery. … On the seventeenth night his fever suddenly subsided” (Mrs. Kinney’s Journal, 27 September 1855, ms at Columbia).
12. A novel by Elizabeth Sara Sheppard (1830–62), published in 1853.
13. Shakspere Wood (1827–86), an English sculptor and journalist, was living in Rome at 28 Via del Corso. Dolly Sherwood, in her biography of Harriet Hosmer, suggests that Wood was looking after her business affairs and that “she was apparently being seen in company alone with him, enough to cause comment” (Harriet Hosmer: American Sculptor 1830–1908, Columbia, Missouri, 1991, pp. 117–118). Sherwood further suggests: “It is almost certain that the relationship was platonic and that nothing considered to be improper occurred” (p. 118).
14. Possibly a reference to Sarah Anne Freeman Clarke (1808–96), American landscape painter and portraitist, who was an acquaintance of Harriet Hosmer (see Sherwood, p. 118). Miss Clarke, sister of James Freeman Clarke (whom the Brownings had met—see letter 3159), was in Europe during 1855 and 1856.
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