4069. EBB & RB to Leigh Hunt
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 173–177.
| [In RB’s hand] | Bagni di Lucca, |
Oct. 6. ’57.
Dear Leigh Hunt. (It is hard to write, but you bade me do so: [1] yet I had better say “Master Hunt,” as they used to call Webster or Ford) [2] a nine-months’ silence after such a letter as yours [3] —seems too strange even to you perhaps.– Do understand that you gave us more delight at once than we could bear,—that was the beginning of the waiting to recover spirit and try and do one’s feeling a little less injustice: but soon followed unexpected sorrows, to us and to you, [4] —and the expression of even gratitude grew hard again. Certainly all this while your letter has been laid before our very eyes, and we have waited for a brighter day than ever came till we left Florence, two months ago & more: then we brought it here to “answer” among the chestnut-trees: but immediately on our arrival, a friend was attacked by fever, and we were kept in anxiety about him for six weeks; at last he recovered sufficiently to leave for Florence, and (just think) our little boy became ill, for the first time in his life, and gave us solicitude enough for a fortnight: it is nothing now that it is over,—he is going about now, almost as well as before; and we go away tomorrow, as I said—but I will try and get one, at least, of the joys I came to find here, and really write to you from this place, as I meant to do– “I”—you know it is my wife that I write for,—though you entangle and distract either of us by the reverberations (so to speak) of pleasures over and above the main pleasure you give us– I intend to say, that you praise that poem, and mix it up with praise of her very self, and then give it to me, directly, and then give it to her with the pride you have just given me, and then it somehow comes back to me again increased so far,—till the effect is—just as you probably intended. I wish my wife may know you more. I wish you may see and know her more—but you cannot live by her eleven years, as I have done: or, yes, what cannot you do, being the man, the poet you are?. This last word, I dare think I have a right to say; I have always venerated you as a poet; I believe your poetry to be sure of its eventual reward: other people, not unlikely, may feel like me that there has been no need of getting into feverish haste to cry out on what it is: yet you, who wrote it, can leave it and look at other poetry, and speak so of it: how well of you!
I am still too near the production of “Aurora Leigh” to be quite able to see it all: my wife used to write it, and lay it down to hear our child spell, or when a visitor came—it was thrust under the cushion then. At Paris, a year ago last March, she gave me the first six books to read. I having never seen a line before,—she then wrote the rest, and transcribed them in London, where I read them also. I wish, in one sense, that I had written, and she had read it, so: I should like also to tell you that I never suspected the existence of those “Sonnets from the Portuguese” till three years after they were written: they were shown to me at this very place eight years ago, in consequence of some word of mine, just as they had been suppressed thro’ some mistaken word: it was I who would not bear that sacrifice, and thought of the subterfuge of a name. I shall commend myself to you by telling you this– Indeed the proper acknowledgement of your letter seems to be that one should do something, not say something: if you were here, I might quite naturally begin repeating “Giaffar,” or “Solomon” and the rest– [5] You would see whether I was not capable of getting all the good out of your praise.
While I write, there is a strange thing that happened last night, impossible to get out of my thoughts. It may give you pain to tell you of it—yet, if with the pain, come triumphant memories & hopes, as I expect there will, you may choose the pain with them: what decides me to tell it, is that I heard you, years ago, allude to the circumstances of the destruction of a volume of “Lamia, Isabella” etc—“to be restored to you yet” [6] —now you remember: also, I think of your putting my name near Shelley’s in the end of your letter, where you say “since I lost Shelley.” [7] Is it not strange that I should have transcribed for the first time, last night, the “Indian Serenade” that, together with some verses of Metastasio [8] accompanied that Book?– That I should have been reserved to tell the present possessor of them—to whom they were given by Capt. Roberts [9] —what the poem was & that it had been published!– It is preserved religiously—but the characters are all but illegible—and I needed a good magnifying-glass to be quite sure of such of them as remain—the end is that I have rescued three or four variations in the reading of that divine little poem, as one reads it, at least, in the “Posthumous Poems”– It is headed “The Indian Serenade”—(not “Lines to an Indian Air”.) [10] In the first stanza the seventh line is “Hath led me”: in the second, the third line is “And the champak’s odours fail”—and the eighth, “Oh! Beloved as thou art!”– In the last stanza, the seventh line runs “Oh, press it to thine own again,” Are not all these better readings? (even to the “Hath” for “Has”) [11] Then, I give them you as you gave us Milton’s hair. [12] If I have mistaken in telling you, you will understand and forgive.
I think I will ask my wife to say a word or two: so I shall be sure that you forgive. First I will speak about what she will be little likely to allude to—that act of Mr Kenyon to which you refer. [13] The notice in the newspapers was altogether a misconception of his intentions—which had nothing to do with literature: probably you may have heard a truer account since then. [14] Your appreciation of him is just and right. I wish he had known you, face to face, as he knew others—but the mention of any name in the will executed a few days before his death gives very little indication of the degree of his feeling for its owner, do believe. Now let my wife say the remainder. All I have wished to do,—know how little likely it was that I should succeed in that,—was to assure you of my pride and affectionate gratitude. God bless you ever. RB.
[Continued by EBB]
Dear friend I will say—for I feel it must be something as good as friendship that can forgive & understand this silence, so much like the verriest human kind of ingratitude. When I look back & think—all this time after that letter, .. & not a sign made, .. I wonder. Yet if you knew!– First of all we were silent because we waited for information which you seemed to desire—about that will .. and we waited long for that. Then there were sadder reasons– Poor ‘Aurora’ that you were so more than kind to (oh, how can I thank you!) has been steeped in tears, & some of them of a very bitter sort. Your letter was addressed to my husband, .. you knowing by your delicate true instinct, .. where your praise would give most pleasure—but I believe Robert had not the heart to write when he felt that I should not have the spirits to add a word in the proper key– When we came here from Florence a few months ago to get repose & cheerfulness from the sight of the mountains, we said to ourselves that we would speak to you at ease—instead of which the word was taken from our mouth, & we have done little but sit by sick beds & meditate on gastric fevers– So disturbed we have been—so sad! Our darling precious child the last victim. To see him lying still on his golden curls, with cheeks too scarlet to suit the poor patient eyes!, looking so frightfully like an angel! It was very hard. But this is over, I do thank God,—& we are on the point of carrying back our treasure with us to Florence tomorrow, quite recovered, if a little thinner & weaker, & the young voice as merry as ever– You are aware that that child I am more proud of than of twenty “Auroras”, even after Leigh Hunt has praised them– He is eight years old—has never been “crammed”,—but reads English, Italian, French, German .. & plays the piano—then, is the sweetest child!—sweeter than he looks. When he was ill he said to me .. “You pet! dont be unhappy about me– Think it’s a boy in the street, & be a little sorry, but not unhappy!” Who could not be unhappy, I wonder.
I never saw your book called the ‘Religion of the heart’ [15] —it’s the only book of yours I never saw,—and I mean to wipe out that reproach on the soonest day possible. I receive more dogmas perhaps, (my ‘perhaps’ being in the dark rather) than you do. I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ in the intensest sense—that he was God absolutely. But for the rest, I am very unorthodox .. about the spirit, the flesh, & the devil [16] .. and if you would not let me sit by you, a great many churchmen would’nt– In fact the churches do all of them, as at present constituted, seem too narrow & low to hold true Christianity in its proximate developments. I, at least, cannot help believing them so.
My dear friend, can we dare, after our sins against you, .. can we dare .. wish for a letter from you sometimes? Ask, we dare not. May God bless you. Even if you had not praised me & made me so grateful, I should be grateful to you for three things .. for your poetry, (that first!) then for Milton’s hair, and then for the memory I have of our visit to you when you sate in that chair & spoke so mildly & deeply at once. [17]
Let me be ever
affectionately yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Publication: LRB, pp. 47–50.
Manuscript: British Library.
1. See the beginning of letter 3949.
2. Leigh Hunt had written about John Webster (1580?–1638?) and John Ford (b. 1586?), as well as other Jacobean and Elizabethan dramatists, in Imagination and Fancy (1844), a work admired by both Brownings (see letters 1775 and 2392). A copy of it, inscribed to EBB by her brother George, sold as lot 779 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1268).
3. See letter 3949, notable for its length and enthusiastic praise of Aurora Leigh.
4. A reference to the death of EBB’s father on 17 April 1857 and that of Hunt’s wife, Marianne (née Kent, 1787–1857), on 26 January.
5. RB alludes to two poems by Hunt: “Jaffar,” dedicated to Shelley, which first appeared in The New Monthly Magazine (February 1850), later collected in Stories in Verse (1855); and “The Inevitable,” dedicated to John Forster, in which Solomon is the central figure. It also first appeared in The New Monthly Magazine (January 1850), then in Stories in Verse.
6. Hunt’s copy of Keats’s poems that Shelley had in his pocket when he drowned in the Gulf of Spezia on 8 July 1822. Years later, in a letter to H. Buxton Forman, RB wrote that he had asked Hunt whether the book still existed, the reply being, “No—I threw it into the burning pile: Shelley said he would return it with his own hands into mine—and so he shall return it!” (27 March 1877, ms at BL).
7. At the end of the 3 January section of letter 3949.
8. Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), Italian poet and librettist.
9. Captain Daniel Roberts, who salvaged the Don Juan, which he had designed and built for Shelley, turned over most of the items he found to Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, but he kept a manuscript of “The Indian Serenade,” later giving it to Mrs. Stisted.
10. The various titles are: “Song, Written for an Indian Air” in Liberal, II, 1822); “Lines to an Indian Air” (Posthumous Poems, 1824); “The Indian Serenade” (transcripts by Mary Shelley in The Harvard Shelley Notebook and the Pierpont Morgan Library). Shelley’s fair copy of the poem is entitled “The Indian Girl’s Song” (ms at Bibliotheca Bodmeriana).
11. RB’s changes in the lines are given as alternative readings in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (1909, p. 575).
13. A reference to John Kenyon’s bequests to the Brownings: £4,000 to EBB and £6,500 to RB.
14. A few days after Kenyon’s death, an item in The Athenæum implied that his bequests were motivated chiefly by a love for literature (see letter 3931, note 10).
16. EBB may be conflating two allusions: Galatians 5:16 indicates the war between flesh and spirit, and “The Litany” in The Book of Common Prayer warns of the “Deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil.”
17. During their visit to Hammersmith, which occurred on 13 July 1856, as indicated by RB in a letter to H. Buxton Forman (31 July 1882, ms at Pforzheimer).
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