4636. RB to Kate Field
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 248–249.
Rome, Via del Tritone, 28.
March 29. ’60.
Dear Miss Field,
Do you really care to have the little photograph? [1] Here it is with all my heart: I wonder I dare be so frank this morning, however—for a note just received from Isa mentions an instance of your acuteness that strikes me with a certain awe: “Kate” she says “persists that the ‘Curse for a Nation’ is for America & not England”! You persist, do you?—no doubt, against the combined intelligence of our friends who show such hunger and thirst for a new poem of Ba’s—and, when they get it, digest the same as you see. “Write a nation’s curse for me,” quoth the Anti-Slavery Society five years ago “and send it over the Western Sea”: “Not so,” replied poor little Ba, “for my heart is sore for my own land’s sins, which are thus and thus,—what curse assign <to> another land when heavy for the sins of mine?” “Write it for that very reason,” rejoined Ba’s botherer, “because thou hast strength to see & hate a foul thing done within thy gate”—and so, after a little more silly dallying & shilly shallying, “she wrote and sent over the Western Sea what all may read” [2] —but, it appears, only Kate Field, out of all Florence, can understand. It seems incredible—how did you find out—besides the meaning of all these puzzling passages which I quote in the exact words of the poem—that the “people who have broken their own chain and climbed a nation’s height, yet thence bear down with brand & thong on souls of others” [3] —are not precisely the English? That “those who have a claim to honor in the Old World’s sight” [4] —are likely to live in the New World? In short, you are not only the delightful Kate Field which I always knew you to be,—but the perspicacious creature I am suddenly found bowing down before as the sole understander of Ba in all Florence.—“Kate persists &c” I can’t get over it.
To be sure, the “Athenæum” pretended to make the same blunder, for a private pique,—but then it had the instincts of its kind, the crawlers,—and took care to leave out of its quotations every word of the explanatory prologue I have been laying under contribution: but I thought the friends you “persist” against would read plain English and were inclined to pay a moderate attention to that of the divine Mrs Browning. They precipitated themselves upon this excruciatingly-expected work—they read, marked and thoroughly digested those precious words above-cited—they devoutly thanked God they were not called to discuss any of the unintelligible Browning the Husband’s Stick-jaw, Sordellian Stir about—and they come to a conclusion which “Kate Field persists” against! Browning the Husband means to try increasingly and grow somewhat intelligible to all of his intimates at Florence, with the sole exception of Kate Field, to whose comprehension he will rather endeavor to rise than to stoop henceforward. And so, with true love from Ba to Kate Field,—and our united explanations to all other friends that the subject-matter of the present letter is by no means the Annexation of Savoy & Nice, she will believe me
Hers very faithfully,
Robert <Bro>w<nin>g.
Publication: Lilian Whiting, Kate Field: a Record (Boston, 1899), pp. 126–128.
Manuscript: Boston Public Library.
1. The one taken by the Alessandri brothers (see letter 4571, note 6).
2. RB quotes freely from the “Prologue” of “A Curse for a Nation.”
3. Cf. “A Curse for a Nation,” lines 53–57.
4. Cf. “A Curse for a Nation,” lines 65–67.
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