5294. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 306–309.
19. Warwick Crescent, Upper Westbourne Terr:
Nov. 19. ’63.
Dearest Isa,
I was happy hearing from you—& am happy in talking to you again. To begin where you leave off—the Leweses have just moved into a new house, a purchase in St John’s wood: I am asked to the housewarming, but can’t go. I told you what I thought of the two first volumes of Romola: as honestly, I add now that I was much disappointed in the third & last: there was too much dwelling on the delinquencies of the Greek after he had been done for, and might have been done with, as a pure and perfect rascal—while the great interests, Savonarola and the Republic, which I expected would absorb attention and pay for the previous minutenesses, dwindled strangely. My impression of the great style and high tone remain, of course,—but, as a work of art, I want much. Other people like it– I heard Gladstone loud in its praise the other day at a dinner—but then he detested, he said, that horrible “Wuthering Heights” [1] —which has also a merit of its own. Mrs Bracken is come at last, and domiciled for the present—i.e till she can take a house, in Bayswater [2] —near this place. Willy is to go by underground-railway [3] to the London University School. He will have to work hard,—for I doubt if he have seriously learnt anything, except French: he is a good boy, and will do well if well done by. Mrs B. is curious to me, with her intense appreciation of trifles—you’d suppose she had no other object in the world than to get thro’ the day pleasantly: how can people who have known real grief stop to notice the darkness of the sky, the ill-manners of the passers-by <…> [4] their hats”) and so on? I laugh <…> her that if she comes for a <…> she really wants Willy’s good f<…> miseries. As for Annette’s <… cer>tainly does not dream of, nor arrange for, such an apparition.
I can’t tell you if Lytton went to Florence. He left England just before my arrival. I met, a fortnight ago, Sir Edward—was asked to dine with him and the Ernsts [5] at a friend’s—could not, but looked in later. He was going to Bath next day—with the Ernsts to whom he is abundantly kind—asked me to go too! On entering the room where Mrs E: was, up she rose—a very pretty, young woman of a piquant style—“Mr B—allow me to introduce myself to you—as the best friend of Robert L!” She went on to tell me in a breath that [“]she wrote to him daily, that he sent her his journal daily, that he had read her such a beautiful poem of his own &c &c that he loved me so much &c &c”– Now, by this time, “je connais mon L.” [6] and, given the piquant brunette, with a husband,—the rest follows as the cat & the fiddle follows hi-diddle-diddle. Ernst the husband is in a deplorable state of health,—can’t stand, and worse than that. She told me “Sir E. and Robert had mutually fallen in love with one another on the occasion of this last visit—meant next year to take a house in Town, that they might live together. L. is now at Vienna—or was, very lately. Ly Westmorland told me he had stayed two days with her at Wimbledon.
George Barrett is not so much to blame as you think: for, till the last year, he was a barrister and had engagements: he wrote to me—a few days after the end which was then unknown to him—that he would willingly come if I thought there was any increase of weakness—begged me not to leave him ignorant on that point. All the Barretts, that I know <…> peculiar in this, that they all made out of in<…> out of proportionate value to the <…> if a dealer in choice woods had <… c>ases out of the odds and ends of <… wh>ich the bulk had gone to make the priceless of coffer you know: they are limited strangely—but the limits are of fine stuff: Arabel, for instance, is perfect as far as she goes, and one cube of her wood would drop into Knebworth [7] like so much brazil-wood into the chip-basket of one of the Swiss manufacturers of shaving-work cottages: but the wants are manifest enough, she can’t hold the world, like my coffer.
I have just read Renan’s book, [8] and find it weaker and less honest than I was led to expect. I am glad it is written: if he thinks he can prove what he says, he has fewer doubts on the subject than I—but mine are none of his. As to the Strauss school, [9] I don’t understand their complacency about the book—he admits many points they have thought it essential to dispute—and substitutes his explanation, which I think impossible. The want of candour is remarkable: you could no more deduce the character of his text from the substance of his notes, than rewrite a novel from simply reading the mottoes at the head of each chapter: they often mean quite another thing,—unless he cuts away the awkward part—as in the parable of the Rich Man & Lazarus. [10] His admissions & criticisms on St John are curious– I make no doubt he imagines himself stating a fact, with the inevitable license—so must John have done. His argument against the genuineness of Matthew—from the reference to what Papias says of the λογια [11] —is altogether too gross a blunder to be believed in a Scholar,—and is yet repeated half a dozen times throughout the book: if Pen, in three y<ears …> means, an oracle or revelation <…> he’ll stand badly of for <…> honest old Tom Paine [12] stands <… mi>racles were cheats, and their author a cheat! What do [you] think of the figure he cuts who makes his hero participate in the wretched affair with Lazarus, and then calls him all the pretty names that follow? Take away every claim to man’s respect from Christ and then give him a wreath of gum-roses and calico-lilies—or as Constance says to Arthur in King John—“Give Grannam kingdom, and it grannam will Give it a plum, an apple and a fig.” [13]
For what you ask about my things—most of what you saw at Siena will be brought out in the Spring: I shall soon go to press with them—but we wait, because there is some success attending the complete edition, and we let it work– That critique was fair in giving the right key to my poetry—inasmuch as it is meant to have “one central meaning, seen only by reflexion in details” [14] —“& bad principle,” says the critic—“mine, and good” say I: he is more than fair in praising one portion of my works at the expense of all the rest,—unfair in saying I have never even tried to do, what I have done, well or ill, in long poems he is pleased—not to call failures but pass clean over: thus, I never describe (“Flight of the Duchess”) [15] —never delineate the quieter female character (“Colombe”) & so on. [16] The fact is, there is more in my works than a new comer can take in at once—or by next month, when the article ought to be ready. [17] Bless us, I can wait a little longer. Here is a letter! <…> all love. Annunziata is to stay all <…>: remember me to all friends. <…> that sprung to my mind when <…>
Ever yours affectionately
R Browning
Publication: DI, pp. 178–182.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. By Emily Brontë (1818–48), writing under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell.” Wuthering Heights was published by Thomas Newby in 1847.
2. At 4 St. Petersburgh Terrace, as listed in RB’s address book of this period (AB-5).
4. Part of the manuscript has been torn away, affecting text here and below.
5. Heinrich (“Henri”) Wilhelm Ernst (1812–65) and his wife, Amélie (“Siona”) Ernst (née Levy, 1831–1914).
6. “I know my L[ytton].”
7. The country seat of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
8. Vie de Jésus (1863) by Ernest Renan. It was the first volume in his Les Origines du Christianisme (7 vols., 1863–83).
9. i.e., the ideas of David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74); see letter 2846, note 2.
10. Told in Luke 16:19–31 (see letter 3299, note 24).
11. “Oracles” (later scholars translate the word as “sayings”), from The Exposition of the Lord’s Oracles (early 2nd century A.D.) by Papias (b. ca. 60 A.D.), Apostolic Father, of Hierapolis. Of the Oracles, only fragments remain in the works of other writers. Papias’s comment on Matthew comes from Eusebius of Caesarea: “So then Matthew composed the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as he could” (see J.B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, ed. J.R. Harmer, 1891, p. 529).
12. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), English author of Common Sense (1776), a political pamphlet advocating American independence, and The Rights of Man (1791–92), a defense of the French Revolution.
13. Cf. King John, II, 1, 161–162.
14. RB refers to a review by Richard Holt Hutton (1826–97) of Poetical Works (1863) that appeared in The National Review of October 1863 (pp. 417–446). Introducing “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” at the end of the first paragraph, Hutton writes: “The whole must be fairly grasped before any of the ‘component parts’ are intelligible,—the component parts, indeed, being little more than diminutive wholes, too diminutive in scale to be clearly legible until you have seen the whole.” For the full text of this review, see pp. 386–397.
15. Hutton views RB’s “descriptive talent” as “highly picturesque,” but after comparing a passage from RB’s Christmas-Eve with one from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, he finds that RB’s description fails to catch what “the restless eye and ear” miss, “the silence as well as the sound, the middle tints as well as the flashes of light and colour.”
16. After quoting from Goethe’s Egmont, Hutton notes: “He has given you the whole character in an aroma of brief but surpassing sweetness. There is no trace of this power in Mr. Browning. He throws his feminine characters into as strongly-defined attitudes as his masculine, and the consequence is, that they are not nearly so effective; and also that, half-conscious of this intellectualising … he attempts them very much less often.”
17. Presumably, Moncure Daniel Conway’s forthcoming review of Poetical Works (1863); see letter 5275, note 5.
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