4524. EBB to Henry Fothergill Chorley
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 40–42.
Casa Guidi
Nov. 25. [1859] [1]
My dear friend I thank you with all my heart for your most graceful & touching dedication, and do assure you that I feel it both as honor & as pleasure.
And yet, do you know, Robert says that you might peradventure by the dedication of your book to me, mean a covert lecture .. or sarcasm .. who knows? [2] Even if you did, the kindness of the personal address would make up for it. Who would’nt bear both lecture & sarcasm from anyone who begins by speaking so? Therefore I am honored & pleased & grateful all the same—yes, and will be.
But, dear Mr Chorley, you dont silence me, notwithstanding. The spell of your dedication has’nt fastened me up in an oak for ever. [3] Your book is very clever—your characters very incisively given, .. princess & patriots admirably cut out (and up!–) .. half truths everywhere, to which one says ‘How true’– But one might as well (& better) say ‘How false’ .. seeing that, dear Mr Chorley, it does really take two halves to make a whole, & we know it. The whole truth is not here—not even suggested here—and let me add that the half-truth on this occasion is cruel.
One thing is ignored in the book– Under all the ridiculousness, under all the wickedness even of such men and women, lies a cause, a Right inherent, a wrong committed– The cant presupposes a doctrine, and the pretension a real heroism– Your best people (in your book) seem to have no notion of this. Your heroine deserves to be a victim, not because she was rash & ignorant, but because she was selfish & foolish. The world was’nt lost for her because she loved .. either a cause or a man .. but because she wanted change & excitement. If she had felt on the abstract question as I have known women to feel even when they have acted like fools, I should pity her more– As it is, the lesson was necessary. If she had not married rashly an Italian birbante [4] she would have married rashly an English blackguard and I myself see small difference in the kinds. With you however, .. to your mind,—it is different,—and, in this view of yours, seems to me to lie the main fault of your book. You evidently think that God made only the English. The English are a peculiar people. Their worst is better than the best of the exterior nations– Over the rest of the world He has cast out his shoe– [5] Even supposing that a foreigner does, by extraordinary exception, some good thing, it’s only in reaction from having murdered somebody last year, or, at least, left his children to starve the year before. Truth, generosity, nobleness of will & mind, .. these things do not exist beyond the influence of the Times newspaper and the Saturday review– (By the way, it would be extraordinary if it were so.)
Well—I have lived thirteen years on the continent, and, far as England is from Italy, far as the heavens are from the earth, I dissent from you, dissent from you, dissent from you.
I say so, and there is an end– It is relief to me, & will make no impression on you—but, for my sake, you permit me to say it, I feel sure.
Dear Mr Chorley, Robert & I have had true pleasure (in spite of all this fault-finding), in feeling ourselves close to you in your book. Volume after volume we have exchanged, talking of you .. praising you here, .. blaming you there, .. but always feeling pleasure in reading your words & speaking your name. Dont say its the last novel—you who can do so much– Write us another at once rather, doing justice to our sublime Azeglios and acute Cavours and energetic Farinis. If I could hear an English statesman, (conservative or liberal) speak out of a large heart and generous comprehension as I did Azeglio this last spring, I should thank God for it .. I fear I never shall– My boy may, perhaps– Red tape has garotted this political generation–
One thing makes me very sorry in your last letter. You do not think your sister so well– May it not be the consequence of the change of the year? And will she not rally again in the spring? Give her my love & sympathy—now mind you do. For my own part I keep pretty well– The cold weather suddenly fell on us & hindered the Roman journey—but here is a break, & if it lasts we shall venture to go– Write .. will you? Write to Florence, and whatever you write will follow us if gone. Robert will thank you for your wisdom about the music. It seems to my ignorance quite wonderful how the child plays that ‘Carneval’ of Schuloff with those tiney hands of his leaping at all the octaves, .. meeting all the difficulties of execution .. slurring nothing. He will be a brilliant player.
I persist in being in high hopes for my Italy.
Ever affectionately yours
Elizabeth B Browning
Publication: LEBB, II, 350–352 (in part).
Manuscript: Thomas V. Lange.
1. Year provided by EBB’s references to Chorley’s Roccabella, which was issued in September 1859.
2. Not in the dedication itself, which is highly complimentary (see letter 4497, note 16), but rather in the novel, because of its unflattering depiction of Italians.
3. At the end of “Vivien” (later retitled “Merlin and Vivien”), the second idyll in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859), the wizard Merlin succumbs to Vivien’s wiles and reveals the secret of a charm, whereupon she uses it to imprison him for eternity in a hollow oak.
4. “Rascal.”
5. Cf. Psalm 60:8.
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