4711. EBB to Theodore Tilton
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 78–80.
Casa Guidi
Florence–
July 20– [1860] [1]
Dear Sir,
In acknowledging your liberality in the two hundred dollars received through Mr Francis [2] I send you other two new poems on Italian affairs with a certain reasonable shyness. [3] Pray understand that I would not for the world take advantage of your having perhaps over-generously made a rash engagement with me. If these mss destined for a future edition of my Italian volume, should suit you, they are at your service,—if not, let them pass simply into Mr Francis’s hands for the book. [4] Do I tire you of Italy? Another time I may let you have poems of a more general interest–
Only, here, it is hard for us to understand how anything can be of a more general interest than this subject. We are feeling keenly about the south. May God keep that hero, Garibaldi. His danger is less from the sword, than from certain influences unfavorable to the national sentiment, & against which he should have steel in his brain. Divisions coming now [5] (for the first time in this great movement!) would strengthen the separatists at Naples, & even turn to earnest what has been merely formal & official in the action of foreign diplomacy. When did Mazzini’s finger ever touch Italy—without a blot showing where?
Mr Francis hints that your people are not very Napoleonist. Neither am I in any partizan sense. My ‘Summing up’ is a bare statement. As for the emperor, there will be a reaction in time; and meanwhile it would be a pity if abstract thinkers such as you & I, should allow ourselves to be carried away, in the panic & passion of Europe, from an estimate of the real position. The Emperor’s farsightedness in foreign policy produces a necessary disagreement with statesmen who do not see far—and his recognition of the rights of majorities & of the nationalities, being perfectly understood by the retrograde parties at least, these build monstrous barricades of impossible calumnies, for the arrest of progress & the confusion of the world. Will they succeed in their scheme of drumming up a coalition of the old governments against France? And, in that case, on whose side will go the peoples? Those are questions. But this is a fact—that at Rome the pope’s tyranny is maintained & abetted by French anti-imperialist parties, as a means of opposition to the emperor. ‘Non his armis,’ [6] you would say if you were a French protestor against the government. Is France to stir a finger, do you think, to get these so-called ‘liberals’ back to power? Believe in the instinct of nations.
Let me add one word. I must: for I have only written so many, because of being drawn into admiring sympathy with you by your noble address in the church of Theodore Parker. [7] What affected me chiefly was .. not the eloquence, no—but the rare union of largeness & tolerance with fidelity to special truth. In our age faith & charity are found—but they are usually found apart. We tolerate everybody, because we doubt everything,—or else we tolerate nobody, because we believe something. And largeness of intellectual vision becomes indistinctness in the apprehension of outline, just as is the case in physical near-sightedness.
I congratulate you on having been able to speak so. Would that great truths had always such brave witnesses!– And would, that brave men (like Theodore Parker) had always great truths, to be brave for.
My husband unites with me in respects & good wishes while I remain,
dear sir,
most faithfully yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
I recommend to your attention Edmond About’s pamphlets “La carte de l’Europe” & “La Prusse.”
We are at Siena at present, but our address continues to be
Casa Guidi
Florence
Publication: Theresa West Elmendorf, Descriptive Catalogue of the Gluck Collection (Buffalo, 1899), pp. 10–12.
Manuscript: Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.
1. Year based on EBB’s comment at the end of her postscript, “We are at Siena at present”; 1860 was the only year the Brownings were in Siena on 20 July.
2. For EBB’s poems “King Victor Emanuel Entering Florence,” which appeared in The Independent of 7 June 1860, and “First News from Villafranca,” published in the issue of 16 August.
3. “The Sword of Castruccio Castracani,” published in The Independent of 30 August 1860, and “Summing Up in Italy,” in the issue of 27 September.
4. EBB had been assuming for some time that there would be a second edition of Poems Before Congress, both in England and America (where it was titled Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems), but it was never issued. All of the poems that she sent to The Independent were later collected in Last Poems (1862).
6. “Not for this side.”
7. Theodore Parker’s church from 1852 was the Boston Music Hall. On 10 June 1860, Tilton delivered a lecture there and spoke admiringly of Parker: “When God sees a noble and true man standing for the right in the midst of a corrupt age, he drops out of Heaven a crown to fall upon his head; but oftentimes the clamorous and hating multitude, gathering around him in fierce opposition, fill the air so thick with their hisses that the airy symbol comes fluttering slowly down, and does not appear within men’s sight until it falls with late honor upon his grave. … Envious men, following him with unfriendly eyes across the sea, saw him walking under the sunshine of Italy, and recognized no halo about his head; yet, before many coming months or years, these same critical eyes may yet marvel to see that the tardy crown has fallen and blossomed upon his grave” (New-York Tribune, 16 June 1860, p. 5).
___________________
