5423. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 88–90.
Leith Hill Place
July 23rd 1864
I wonder if you will be surprised at any letter coming so soon– No I do not think you will. I feel as if I were safe from surprise with you. Is it a rash hope? I live upon it for the present, at any rate. I have just come in from walking in these woods where I have walked any time these fifteen years, I stopped continually to ask myself if it was really I who was walking in them, where were all the companions that had clung to that woman of past years so closely, she is startled to find them gone—the regrets, the wishes, the weariness of life.
Are they all really gone? will they not return?– Surely I think they must—but meantime what a strange wonder, what a foretaste of immortality to feel oneself without them. What most undoes my sense of identity, is the loss of that one desire that bent all my inward life like an unseen magnet. I look round me today at the shrubs & the distant hills as if I should find some change in them, that I had ceased to feel “Oh Earth, release me![”]– Is it possible that I do not still pull against that chain?—& that it is only because a fellow-creature—not spotlessly perfect by any means—tells me that my absence makes a hole in his life, that I am willing, oh more than willing, to keep my foothold here, while he cares to have me? Ah, something tells me that my faithful companion will return to me, that I shall have to live, when my life has lost that fragrance of being something to you, but it will not be as it has been.
One thing, I know, could make me regret that I had ever known you, if I missed anything ungracious or ignoble in your life, but nothing else. Oh, I hope your wife hears my thoughts as I write to you! Is it not a marvellous thing that we hear no thoughts?—only the poor hortus siccus [1] of words reaches our sense, while the growing garden is inaccessible. Surely it is not so hereafter, & if ever one human soul can come near another, it must be when such a feeling contains them both, as ours for you.
With what a wonderful fearlessness of misconception I am writing to you! I did not think such utterance was possible while we were clothed in flesh, but with you I have invincibly a sense of that emergence being past. I search my spirit in vain for anything that I would hide from you. I do indeed find much that would oppose itself to you, as there is that in you which I question & criticize, but nothing that would separate us.– I am not feminine, they say. Well, it is true for good as well as for evil. That sounds arrogant, & if ever God meant to teach any of his creatures humility, certainly it is my lesson—but it is true. Your wife always seems to me so eminently a woman, the maternal, the conjugal relation seem necessary parts of her character, one feels they were the expressions of herself. With me, all the relations of life are unfortunate, & I do not feel that it just so happens because the beloved & honoured ones with whom I share them are what they are—but because of something in me which grates against all the material bonds of life. My sphere is the intercourse of spirit with spirit—there I breathe a pure air, there indeed I am not meant to linger long, or life would not be to me the discipline I suppose it is to every one,—but there is my house, & this is my excuse for this fearlessness towards you. Oh when you said those words “I last” what a thrill went through me!– I believe you. I shall believe you, if you seem ever so much to change to me, for I should know it was not you that had changed, but I that had ended so much sooner than you expected, & left you no choice but to quit the tiny place. If I dwell so much on the thought, if our intercourse seems on my part one perpetual farewel, it is not that in you I see any sign of leave taking my liberal guest—but that my love is inseparably entangled with fear, the two chords vibrate together. All love has been passion with me, & it is a simple translation of that phrase to say that at one time or other, all love has proved a scourge. Then with you, I am continually pleading to God– Oh let it be separation, let it be loss! don’t make it misconception, bitterness & that wrath that works like madness in the brain!– Could I bear never to see you again? Yes, from the bottom of my soul.– Could I bear to feel angry with you? I suppose we poor human beings mean something when we say we cannot bear what we do bear, I suppose I should say in that case with poor Heine
Und ich hab’ es doch ertragen
Aber frage mir nur nicht wie! [2]
And if you say that in this anticipatory self-torment I am addressing a Setebos [3] rather than a Father—I only reply that I judge for no one but myself. I rejoice to contemplate love that is not steeped in pain, such as you have known, but for myself I feel as if that were no part of the intentions of Heaven. My hope will not rise above the level of my memory—not indeed that there is not space, but she is tired & moves no more into the unknown.
And so it comes that I find myself imploring bearable pain, not pleasure. Oh what different dimensions there are in one’s wishes! First, for you, that you may live unfalteringly, up to your highest ideal—that fills up all the space you occupy in my heart—then, that sorrow may keep far from you, & last & least of all, length without breadth, that you may continue to me what you are.
Perhaps this is vain cowardice, perhaps our friendship will be the streak of foreign light which I think falls into most lives—but I cannot rest on a perhaps. I want to have no more disappointment. I want to live in tents. Bear with this distrust, not of you, but of Fate, who will have to change all her treatment of me, if she leaves me you!
You asked me for my photograph, to which this letter is a very complete answer. O my friend, what unique trust is in my soul, that it can thus unveil itself to you: admitting you into the place where I thought I was alone with God.
Sunday.—do I wish I was back in Cumberland Place today? you shall guess.– Shall you be tired if you have many of these letters from me?– I think you will be tested. I rather think you are an impatient personage, & that it will be good for you to read many effusions from such a tiresome person as your
FJW.
Next week at Lady Inglis’s [4]
Milton Bryan
Woburn
Beds
that is to say after tomorrow[.]
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 39–43.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. “Dry garden.”
2. Cf. Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), Buch der Lieder (1827), “Lieder,” VIII.
3. A reference to RB’s “Caliban upon Setebos” (Dramatis Personæ, 1864). In The Tempest, I, 2, 373, Setebos is the god worshipped by Sycorax, mother of Caliban. In this and subsequent quotations from and allusions to Shakespeare’s works, the line numbers correspond to those in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).
4. Julia Selina Inglis (née Thesiger, 1833–1904), daughter of Frederic Thesiger (1794–1878), 1st Baron Chelmsford, and his wife, Anna Maria (née Tinling, 1798–1875). She married Sir John Eardley Wilmot Inglis (1814–62) in 1851. Lady Inglis was a close friend of Mary Rich, Julia Wedgwood’s half-aunt (see letter 5425, note 4), who was staying at Milton Bryan.
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