5212. RB to William Wetmore Story, Emelyn Story & Edith Story
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 234–236.
19. Warwick Crescent,
Upper Westbourne Terrace, W.
May 2. ’63.
Dearest Friends,
What a time since I have heard from you! I got a letter from Story nearly a month ago—a full chord, & then, instead of striking up myself, I began to count I can’t say how many bars’ rest—thirty days of it about—always meaning to lead off with a fresh subject presently! If I had written two days after, and told you any little thing—for instance, how I went, the day after, to Chapman’s, and found that he had already printed off the first volume and was working double tides to despatch the second, [1] —you would have,—some one of you three,—replied to me—as you will now. To go on,—I easily reconciled myself to the (perhaps) fortunate impossibility of chopping & changing—a vile business: your book has succeeded remarkably—Chapman told me, two days ago, that he was getting rapidly through the new edition, [2] —the praises have been universal and hearty,—why not let “well” alone? And we must, this time; but so you will next time, if you take my advice.
Next, “Saul”—I wish you & us all joy of it: I know it will be all I hope,—Arthur Russell speaks in the highest terms of it,—and other opinions in the same sense have reached me; that is right. And now,—the new Statue, what will that be? [3] Give me another to expect.
I told Mrs Story what I thought about the pleasant charge against that hardened reprobate, Don Juan redivivus, & so on, poor dear good simple David. [4] His sister’s [5] defection don’t surprise me one bit more than his wife’s,—though on quite different grounds. I never knew but a very little of Miss E: who was, had one cared to look into the matter, a far more curious study than her sister-in-law—for you had a person neither stupid, nor vain, nor pretentious, nor scheming, nor false in any discernible way, who yet, for some inexplicable reason, chose not to see, or by some miracle could not see, what must have been perked in her face daily and hourly. You know that those inventions about spirits &c were not at all more prodigious than the daily-sprouting toadstools of that dunghill of a soul,—lies about this, that & the other: I am convinced that even her Husband caught a sight of these,—indeed, more than once, came full upon some outrageous specimen,—& then resolutely shut his eyes and said black should be white to the end of the chapter: but then, he was in love. I remember once inadvertently telling him something she had said, about an invitation “she had reluctantly accepted to please him”—whereas, as he cried in amazement, “she had forced him to go, purely to please her.” I saw his face change, and was afraid he would go home and explode: not he! It was gulped down, and ignored thenceforth & forever. But for his sister to gulp & ignore,—I can’t explain, but it must have been so—and I shall continue to believe that here has been a swallow of a camel, where no gnats nor black beetles have been “strained at.” [6] My own fancy is, that the intercourse with Lady A.N [7] has fired Sophy with a noble emulation—the interest and mystery of the “injured wife”—the glory of becoming a Lady B in 24. mo! and from the wanting this to the oldest of the old ways of getting this was, as Hamlet says, “as easy as lying:” [8] and the more that I discover the perfect ease of it, the more do I feel humbled before minds so made that to them the immense difficulty of lying appears an impossibility, and who accept Sophy with her wallet of wares for an angel laden with roses. [9] I accept her now as a familiar blotch on a picture of the past—and I solaced myself the other day by placing two portraits of her [10] on[e] on each side of a delicious drawing of a “model” in the costume of Truth, just given to me by Leighton. I should like above most things to have a good talk with her: no hurting me, alas!
I’ll leave off, or wait to go on—when an answer comes. Robert is quite well: Lady W. more & more dear & delightful—she suffers much, but recovers soon,—I am hopeful as to the result, and that she will yet walk as she can talk. I dine with her to-day: she always asks (did ask, two days since) “when I heard last from you.” Let me tell her something soon! Now, all love to you all, all memory and some hope from yours affectionately ever
Robt Browning.
Publication: BAF, pp. 122–124.
Manuscript: University of Texas.
3. Probably “Sappho” (1863), a version in marble is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
4. RB alludes to Sophia Eckley’s accusation of infidelity against her husband (see the second paragraph in letter 5191).
5. Frances (“Fanny”) Augusta Eckley (1823–82); see letter 4092, note 9.
6. Cf. Matthew 23:24, “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”
7. i.e., Lady Anne Isabella Noel King (afterwards Blunt, 1837–1917), the only daughter of William King (1805–93), 1st Earl of Lovelace, and his wife, Augusta Ada (née Byron, 1815–52), only daughter of Lord Byron. After the death of her mother, Lady Anne was raised by her maternal grandmother, Lady Byron (née Milbanke, 1792–1860), and would have certainly heard the latter’s views on her husband’s infidelities, in particular that with his half-sister, which led to the Byrons’ legal separation. Sophia Eckley and Lady Anne had become acquaintances by 1861. On 3 May of that year, Mrs. Eckley wrote to her brother Frederick that Lady Anne “has offered us her house in London while we are there” (ms at Harvard).
8. Hamlet, III, 2, 357. In this and subsequent quotations from and allusions to Shakespeare’s works, the line numbers correspond to those in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).
9. i.e., EBB.
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