4887. EBB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 104–106.
Rome
Tuesday– [30 April 1861] [1]
Dearest Isa mine, I write to tell you that the journal comes. M. le Colonel [2] applies & asks what they mean by it– Answer—they mean to stop his papers, unless he gets an order from the minister of the Interior. [3] Which he gets forthwith, and straightway we are in possession of a bundle of Naziones.
“Questi birboni!” [4] as Ferdinando says, whenever it’s necessary to specify this Heavenly & Holy government.
And now my Isa, a word of you. Neither Robert nor I liked your letter. You are out of spirits .. not vexed with me this time .. but out of spirits– Dear, dont let unworthy people annoy you. See! you are making your own life, & you will make it. Dont set yourself up by the side of others, for the pleasure of bowling yourself down. Whoever may choose A or B .. I, for my part, choose my Isa. Oh Heavens—if we could see as the angels see! or even as lower creatures with their eyes open, see– I should never think of comparing certain persons, for reasons contrary to yours– Youth, yes– But for all the rest … Well– To dispute about tastes is not lawful– [5]
Oh—I entirely comprehend that your feelings remained safe & whole [6] —but the epidermis of the womanhood of us gets rubbed, irritated, by being thrust into certain positions. Half the delicacy of us, half the pride, suffers somehow– I should feel so, whether you do or not– Only dont (for this or any other reason) get disgusted with Florence—dont send away the potage because there’s a hair in it!– I know well besides that you’ve had a hankering after England for some time– I know above all, that an intermittent Ba is not worth staying anywhere for– I do know it. I know it so perfectly that I feel averse to arguing in favor of your staying in Italy– And yet, I have a conviction that England will not suit you, & that you will repent uprooting yourself just once. Ah my Isa! You know more intellectual people in England, say you? I dare say you do. But you dont know them where you can get at them at so little cost & effort– London is a very large place. Where will you combine your Bessie Parkes & your Bowen, I wonder. Bowen, (his cousin told me), is in the most brilliant society of London—tossed from hand to hand, from dinner-table to dinner-table. Will you see as much of him in a London year as in a Florence month, I wonder. The Parkes ‘gang’ as you call it, is good as far as it goes—but will that sort of thing satisfy you quite? It is notorious in London that people who like one another cant get to see one another’s faces. Everything goes on through dinners .. most expensively of course. Five miles off is scarcely a ‘distance’ to be objected to. Then how would you bear London, .. you who cant live without a view? Go into the country, & you are thrown out in another way.
Then the question of climate! I base my objections chiefly on the climate, & then on your long Italian residence, which has disorganised you socially for English habits of life as you will too quickly find. Well—you will consider it all & decide after reflection of course. I never would advise an English-woman who could live healthily & happily in England to come & live in Italy, for reasons of an analogical character to these.
A note comes from your prophetess. [7] She tells me she is going to send me your book, .. she has paid you a visit & found you looking “very well & very happy” .. and begs me to write to her. I shall not write; & she will be just as devoted as ever– What you say is true—but the “winding’[’] & ‘clinging’ of the serpentine nature is a thing to mark also.
She told people that she could’nt show the letter I wrote to her about her book, I had said of it such intensely flattering things—!!! You remember my writing that letter at Siena– [8]
Dearest Isa, if Mr Story comes out at last as a real genius, what shall you say? I got to see his African Sybil the other day, just in time before she passed into plaster,—& I assure you it is a sublime work. Not only did it affect me at the moment,—but, since, the impression remains & deepens. Robert says he has seen no modern statue in Rome equal to it,—& for me, I say that no sculptor of the Anglo saxon race ever set before me so grand a work .. felt so grand, by my instincts & emotions– Of course, I do not speak as the learned,—not as one having authority. Still, opinion seems generally moved. Gibson expressed himself strongly the other day. Hatty wonders at the extraordinary “progress.” Cleopatra was a great advance but this Sybil far exceeds the Cleopatra. The type of race is preserved, yet the beauty is gorgeous, & the poetical sentiment of high order–
Some of us have been thinking that the emperor of the French if he knew of it would order it into marble for Algeria. [9] I mean, in reference to Algeria. What do you think of getting De Fauvety to speak of it—sending a photograph? Its my particular scheme.
The attack on your ‘Agnes’ seems to me better than all the rest, as a symptom of a stroke struck– [10] I am sanguine, my Isa. Now you’re a regular authoress, I mean to use my axe freely on all your careless turns of style– For instance, you never shall say, much less write, “like” in the sense of “as” .. “like I did”. You shall be pedantic from henceforth,—my Isa—and Ba impertinent.
Here’s an end for today however–
If you go away what shall I do I wonder?
We are not going to give up Florence, observe, whatever we do. If we take an apartment here, it will be a small one. But one talks & does’nt take sometimes!
In true & grateful love your
Ba.
Publication: B-IB, pp. 456–458.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum.
1. Date provided by EBB’s reference to the “Naziones,” which she had not received by letter 4884.
2. i.e., Colonel Pissis (see letter 4866, note 2).
3. Monsignor Andrea Pila (1811–68), Minister of the Interior in the Papal government from 1858 to 1865.
4. “These rascals.”
5. Cf. the Latin saying, “de gustibus non est disputandum” (“there is no arguing about taste”).
6. Presumably, EBB refers to Dr. Gryzanowski.
7. An allusion to Sophia Eckley.
8. Letter 4703, written a few days before the Brownings left Florence for Siena.
9. The French completed their subjugation of Algeria in 1847. Napoleon III visited Algiers in September 1860.
10. EBB probably has in mind a notice of Agnes Tremorne that appeared in The Morning Post of 15 April 1861, in which the reviewer declared: “There is not in the book any approach to a portraiture of real life. It may be doubted whether the author intended such a portraiture. It is an unadulterated fiction, not alone in plot, but in every sense. There are not, and there could not be, such people as are represented in this book; and the entire concatenation of circumstances detailed is of the most wildly improbable order. … A dashing inattention to probabilities, and the conventionally-termed ‘unities,’ is not the author’s only peculiarity; he [sic] exhibits a magnanimous contempt for some of the most stringent of those grammatical rules which usually restrict composition within prescribed limits” (p. 2).
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