4799. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 256–258.
Via Felice, 126.
Dec. 27. ’60.
Dearest Isa,
We are very grateful for the newspapers which arrived on Saty night. Don’t think we shall let you supply us at your cost this way any more than the other—I mean, that if you send them in a heap from time to time we will gladly pay half (nobody fancies you care about halves, but we’ll do it, never the less.) No other paper ever arrived, that single one excepted. I shall call on Mr Sellar [1] & his friend—I was introduced to him at a party on Christmas Eve, and can assure you he seemed grateful indeed for the kindness with which you had received him. Ba is very low & weak—she will get over this grief in some respects but it wears her still,—such a wretched Christmas day did we have. Yet she is anxious to be good & reasonable. The letters continue to open the wound as fast as it films over: we find, for instance, that the disease was really cancer—tho’ the poor thing herself was let die quietly in ignorance of what had caused her excruciating pain. I continue to intercept letters, & read as much as she can bear of the contents—or rather, she obliges me to do this—refusing to see them when they come, if I am out of the way.
I seem to have written snappishly about that foolish Madame Brecker & her “madness,” as you properly called it: you see, I have plenty of weak points (quite between our two selves, Isa!) and one strong one,—that of not stealing in the ordinary ways—so when I hire books & engage to return them in a specified manner by an appointed time, I do so—you may be sure: consequently if those books were not so returned, she ought to have divined some hitch or accident had occasioned the delay, and apprised me, who would have taken the prompt & proper method of remedying the same: but she lets weeks go by,—as if it were the most natural thing in the world I should break my word, and then begins to be “mad” & so on. Is she “mad” a second time at “Junius” [2] not coming to hand? Mr Atkinson [3] who volunteered to carry any parcel to Florence—as I understood him—told me at the last moment that he only goes to Pisa: so I must wait for another messenger. I hope she has found her books, however,—is that the case? Observe I tell you plainly, I don’t think she treats Ba properly: we pay all she asks, and never get new books nor a quarter the good things that you do, for instance. I am always strict upon rights in this world, and let generosity and all its derivative virtues & graces show themselves or keep quiet as they please—provided justice is done in the first place: and one doesn’t find that (like blackberries and “decided genius”) at one’s right hand & left.
Dearest Isa,—why, if the weather is cold and our house is a thought warmer than yours, don’t you,—or didn’t you a week ago, when you wrote,—enter in and take it with all our hearts? You do not surely need pressing & pretty ways, proper enough for other people but quite out of the question with you who are our best & dearest friend, as you know? I fancied, & Ba too, that all that was settled long ago. Perhaps you are in the house & laugh while you read this at my taking you for such a goose: but if a goose you are, pray please to go and make yourself as comfortable as our poor means allow, or I’ll pluck all the pens from your wing till you squeal again! Here’s an end to the paper but none to the love of your ever affectionate
R Browning
Ba’s kindest love, truest thanks, warmest entreaties to write again, deepest interest in the pictures of Mr J[arves], intense love to Miss Field from us both. Mr Landor writes to say, among other things, that you had just called.
Publication: B-IB, pp. 379–380.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Alexander Craig Sellar (1835–90), Scottish lawyer and M.P., is listed by name only in the Brownings’ address book of this period (AB-4). He was graduated B.A. in 1859 from Balliol College, Oxford, where he had become friends with Charles Synge Christopher Bowen, through whom he may have been introduced to Isa Blagden.
2. Possibly either Heart Visions and Realities: Poems of Hope, Love and Disappointment by “Junius” (1860) or Jelinger Cookson Symons, William Burke: The Author of Junius (1859).
3. Probably Joseph Beavington Atkinson (1822–86), of Bristol, an art critic who contributed to several periodicals, including The Saturday Review, The Contemporary Review, and Fraser’s Magazine. In 1873 he published An Art Tour to the Northern Capitals of Europe. According to The Athenæum, “his knowledge of the modern German school of art … was for an Englishman exceptionally great. His sympathies with the old Florentine school of painting were close and frequently expressed” (30 October 1886, no. 3079, p. 574). Atkinson is listed in AB-4 at “Rose Hill, Cotham Park, near Bristol.”
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