4540. EBB to Euphrasia Fanny Haworth
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 70–72.
Rome– 28. Via del Tritone–
Dec. 9–[1859] [1]
My dearest Fanny I must correct my own giddiness– What! to write to you of this & that, & to forget a chief subject .. just as you once forgot a famous autograph– To think of my dropping out Scammon. [2]
Also I wanted to praise & commend you ever so much for your admirable discretion with regard to him. For the man himself, it’s difficult to calculate the amount of his stupidity .. or of his impertinence– To suffer himself to be led into unmanly offences by filial hands seems strange– But these are the days of dutiful parents– Pray tell me all about the end of him,—if there’s an end—and if he does’nt break bonds at last–
Penini is enjoying his poney here where there are various persons ready to ride with him. The poney is much admired & is flourishing, having grown fat on his journey– It isnt all riding however. The child gives his regular two hours to music, & has made much progress—plays Schuloff’s ‘Carnival de Venise’ really wonderfully, which with those small fingers of his is a most extraordinary effort. If he does not fall off & disappoint us all, as children do sometimes, he will be a very fine performer. Then he is to be subjected to a Roman priest [3] three times a week, for two hours at a time, & be taught Latin & mathematics .. poor little Dot. Edith Story is to be his fellow-pupil, & I hope he may be able to keep up tolerably with his little steps. I suppose it’s time that he should begin to drudge at Latin, and learn something without coaxing up to mama’s shoulder on the sofa. Though it went rather to my heart this morning when he said pathetically “Why could’nt you teach me, mama?” But Robert thinks it better so– Also there remains for me much to teach him,—and I must’nt give up my own work & life in art quite, for what another can do perhaps better than I—who knows?
Tell me how you get on at the galleries, & what pictures you work upon. I suppose it is Mrs Mackenzie’s nervousness which so interferes with her. If I wanted to make a fortune as a copyist I would go to Madrid, where the original works are so unfamiliar & have been so little repeated.
I think I told you that Mr & Mrs Cartwright are here. Also we are close to Odo Russell—so that Robert is not altogether in the ‘abomination of desolation’ [4] at Rome this year. But how different from last year! It is from one extreme to another. I am much the happier since I arrived, about the prospects of southern Italy– Things will end excellently, & Napoleon’s loyalty will come out clean. I have a poem on him in my desk however, which must still wait. [5]
By the way the Atlantic Monthly has applied to us for poems “at any price”, [6] —and Thackeray has written also in behalf of his Cornhill magazine. [7] Robert is averse both ways, & will probably remain so. Have you tried Chambers again? I think I told you that your first story was reprinted by Littell in America, .. in the selections from English magazines. [8] Tell me if you have seen Mrs Crowe’s book on spiritualism. [9] If we had remained in Florence I should have had it out, but here we are beyond such efforts of civilization. I should like much to know her present views. Have you heard of Hume [10] at all. Enquire, pray. Either Morin [11] or the Guldenstubbe may know something, I should fancy. Is Mrs Milner Gibson in England again? Did you get at nothing through her—see nothing, experience nothing? And to what end does her creed influence her?– I understand that Theodore Parker does not believe in ‘the spirits’: it could scarcely have been expected of him, considering that he believes nothing except intuitions. He is One of the off-shoots of Kant’s mind. [12] Still, when he comes here next, I shall perforate him on the subject of spiritualism, because I know that he has not despised the movement in question, & has various things to say on it. I like American thinkers, even when they fall into sceptical excesses such as those of Parker—I like them for their boldness & largeness, & for not believing on simply re-iteration as is the way in England. Otherwise I made myself melancholy last night in reading his address to his congregation. [13] Christian conscience & heart with Deistical dogma jar. One cant live by naked intuitions. At least I cant.
You wanted me to find you subjects out of the Idylls of the King, but there are so many, it is for the artist to choose what is most congenial to him .. or her. Do a great deal of work, & be very happy. Happiness is in us, (in the right sense) not outside of us—and yet we make a struggle, (mostly through life), to get it outside of us,—and to get silence & quiet on the outside of us is all we can hope for—silence & quiet, in which we can hear the divine harmony within, of the spiritual influx– No—I have not been talking with Mr Page– But there are truths which speak out themselves to you more & more clearly. Otherwise, why should we live here? We had better go where the angels speak in vowels. [14] May God bless you–
Your ever affectionate friend
EBB—
How wise of you to begin work at the galleries! Work, work, work—it is the secret of happiness. Anything that calls off this poor me from this poor me– Anything that raises us from this wretched mud into the clean sphere of abstract thought. May God bless you dearest Fanny. Love from all here, and much from Ba.
Write.
Address: France / Mademoiselle Fanny Haworth. / <…>. [15]
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum and Scripps College.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. Jonathan Young Scammon (see letter 4401, note 6).
3. Maurice Venturini.
4. Matthew 24:15.
5. “Napoleon III in Italy” (1860).
6. The Atlantic Monthly, founded in 1857 by James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Francis Underwood, among others, was acquired by the Boston publishing firm Ticknor and Fields on 17 October 1859. The current editor of the magazine was Lowell, but the request may have come from James T. Fields, the junior partner, who had arranged the American publication of RB’s Men and Women and had previously, like Lowell, met the Brownings. At this time, Fields was in Paris with his wife, Annie, and they were soon to leave for Florence, followed by Rome, where they would call on the poets. For further details about the Fieldses and their association with the Brownings, see pp. 325–331.
9. Spiritualism, and the Age We Live In by Catherine Ann Crowe (née Stevens, 1790-1872) was published in November 1859. It encourages an open-minded attitude toward spiritualism and criticizes dogmatic religion.
10. Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86); his last name, pronounced with a long “u,” was habitually misspelled by the Brownings and many others.
11. André Saturnin Morin (1807–88), author of critical studies on the occult and religious questions. In 1860 he published Du magnétisme et des Sciences Occultes.
12. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher.
13. Parker’s sermon Beauty in the World of Matter (Boston, 1859), a 24-page pamphlet, had been preached on 15 July 1855. It was republished in the third volume of The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, ed. Frances Power Cobbe (14 vols., 1863–71). The sermon describes the infinite fecundity and beauty of nature and suggests that the world was engendered for “continual creation” (the “Deistical dogma” that jars EBB).
14. EBB refers to the celestial and spiritual angels depicted in Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell (see letter 3554, note 6).
15. The bottom two thirds of the envelope has been excised, and only the tops of the letters of the second line of the address remain.
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