4501. EBB & RB to William Allingham
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 325–328.
| [In EBB’s hand] | Villa Alberti. Siena. |
wednesday. [5 October 1859] [1]
My dear Mr Allingham, I will begin to write to you to prove that we are really alive, &, which is the same thing, full of regard for you however silent. We hear from Paris [2] that you have written to enquire after us—& this excites us at once—though indeed you should have had the due letter from us without a prick of spur, if it had not been that I have been ill .. more ill than usual, .. & thrown out of habits of ease for some two months or more. When able to leave Florence we came here, where my husband in his goodness has been doing double work for me in hearing Penini’s lessons, more than his share. We talked of you & of the letter we meant to write, meanwhile, & so the time passed. Now I am all but well—with no remainder to signify, beyond the necessity of a winter further south than Florence, in order to be warmer & safer– We go to Rome again for that purpose—returning to Florence only for a short time– Here we have enjoyed the silence & repose & the vintage time, in a lonely half-furnished villa with windows looking on a very pretty country. This summer has been strange & wild– At first, a rapture & exaltation .. all of us walking in a golden cloud! then, bitter, struggling anxiety, in which we have walked like stedfast & noble men .. but on the earth & on uneven & doubtful ways– The reaction has been trying to body & soul,—but a cheerful & hopeful constancy having survived all, out of it, comes a great Nation. The emperor Napoleon will justify himself, as this people will, magnificently. But certain parts of the world have not done well– You felt that, I think, when you wrote. I must send you a stanza dropped by an oversight out of my Tale of Villafranca, & regretted much by the author. Insert it between the sixth & seventh stanzas, when ever you read the poem again in your Athenæum.
‘A great Deed in this world of ours?
Unheard of the pretence is.
It threatens plainly the Great Powers;
Is fatal in all senses.
A just Deed in the world? Call out
The rifles! [3] be not slack about
The National Defences.’
I confess to you that I took very much to heart Alfred Tennyson’s invocation to the Riflemen, at the beginning of the war. [4]
Speaking of the Athenæum let me thank you, dear Mr Allingham, for the pleasure it gives us to see poems of yours every now & then flashing out from between its columns. [5] But are you doing nothing except for the Athenæum? Are we not soon to look for another volume from you?–
The ‘Idylls of the King’ [6] have reached us here in the silence. More welcome than the King himself!—unless it were the King of Piedmont, whom we are very loyal to just now– But the Idylls. Am I forced to admit that after the joy of receiving them, other joys fell short rather?—that the work as a whole produced a feeling of disappointment? It must be admitted, I fear. Perhaps we had been expecting too long—had made too large an idea to fit a reality. Perhaps the breathing, throbbing life around us in this Italy, where a nation is being new-born, may throw King Arthur too far off & flat– But, whatever the cause, the effect was so. The colour, the temperature, the very music, left me cold. There are exquisite things, but the whole did not affect me as a whole from Tennyson’s hands. I would rather have written ‘Maud,’ for instance, than half a dozen volumes of such Idylls. What do you say?
Write & tell us of yourself. I should like you to see your friend little Penini, to whom you were always so kind, galloping about the lanes with his curls flying, on a poney of the same colour. It is a Sardinian poney, which Robert has given him, & he is in the first rapture of possession. Beautifully the child rides– Mr Wilde a clever American artist who is passing the summer in this neighbourhood has made a lovely little picture of him on horseback & presented it to me, and we mean to have it exhibited in London next year. Penini gets on with his music, & plays a whole sonata of Beethoven .. which we consider a triumph, too.
Now I leave the rest of the road to my husband, desiring to reward you for your patience so far.
[Continued by RB]
Dear Allingham, I wish you were here, with all my heart: I am glad, equally, that you remember us and care to hear what we do. My wife was very ill two months ago, and I had little calling to write with only that to tell. Besides, Mr Landor is wholly on my hands now—as much as if he were my child! He is in a house close by, having escaped from his amiable family. His English relatives (noble, sympathetic people) commend him to me—how strange things are! I want you to understand from all this, that I don’t keep silence from sheer laziness altogether. How you would like Siena! I have seen this morning half a dozen finest of things in their way, by men whose names are all but unknown in England. Razzi’s Christ at the Column, & his Eve: [7] Beccafumi’s Michael, and St Catherine. [8] Razzi’s women-faces are more lovely than Rafaelle’s. Then I saw in a church a sword & helmet & shield, together with a shoulder blade of a whale—all hung up as votive gifts by Columbus on his return from his discoveries. [9] I wish I may see you, next year say, and shake your hand– Do write to us– Tell us what you do—& what all friends do. I forget nobody’s least look or word. God bless you,
RB–
[Continued by EBB]
direct to Casa Guidi, Florence.
Publication: Letters to William Allingham, ed. Helen P. Allingham and E.B. Williams (London, 1911), pp. 102–105.
Manuscript: R.H. Taylor Collection.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference to the purchase of Pen’s pony. As of letter 4497, RB had not bought it. The Brownings’ last Wednesday at Siena in 1859 was 5 October.
2. From Sarianna; see SD2287.
5. Signed W.A., two poems by Allingham appeared in The Athenæum in 1859: “The Poor Little Maiden” (5 March 1859, no. 1636, p. 320) and “Song.—‘We Two’” (30 April 1859, no. 1644, p. 581). Both pieces were later collected in his Fifty Modern Poems (1865).
6. Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (see letter 3104, note 4) was published by Moxon on 11 July 1859. A glowing review in The Athenæum of 16 July (no. 1655, pp. 73–76) ran to over three pages with numerous extracts. EBB’s copy of the book, inscribed by the author, “Mrs E B Browning with best regards A Tennyson,” is now with Alan and Miranda Feinstein, Johannesburg, South Africa.
7. RB refers to works by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477–1549), better known as Sodoma, whose last name was misspelled “Razzi” into the early twentieth century. The two paintings mentioned are frescoes that were in the Accademia delle Belle Arti of Siena when RB saw them but are now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. For “Christ at the Column,” see letter 2886, note 4. “Eve,” a subject in “The Descent into Limbo” (1525), is described by Robert H. Hobart Cust as “the absolute embodiment of all that man ever dreamt or thought of Woman, in her noblest and truest essence” (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, Hitherto Usually Styled “Sodoma,” 1906, p. 185).
8. Two paintings by Domenico Beccafumi (1486?–1551): “Stigmatization of St. Catherine of Siena” (ca. 1518) and “Fall of the Rebel Angels” (ca. 1524), the latter depicting a muscular Archangel Michael with peacock wings. As with Sodoma’s works (see note 7), RB saw both paintings at the Accademia; they are now at the Pinacoteca Nazionale.
9. In the church of Fonte Giusta, built in 1482 (see Murray’s A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 1857, part I, p. 189).
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