5428. RB to Julia Wedgwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 97–99.
19. W.C.
July 28, ’64.
It happens, however, that I shall “make use of your address” at once, though I needn’t,—because I rather need a pin-head-sized drop of palm wine [1] just now, being out of sorts on various accounts & perhaps no-accounts, so I hold up the tip of my finger to catch it as having a right, please observe! And now, please further observe, I am “feminine,” if you are not, and bent consequently on having the last word about that palm-wine—and being as clear headed to-day as the enforcedly temperate usually are, I shall tell you exactly what it was I meant—not quite what you fancy—that I would not have you give away more in your generosity than you may need to account for, hereafter, in your justice, when some husbandman from a far country arrives and wants his whole palm tree: in other words,—no, there shall be other silences.
And now, the good of saying this is, that I can add with a safe conscience, “what wine you can afford, my own friend, I am quite thirsty enough for, and not a drop shall be spilt, do believe!” And then,—do you want some [of] the uses of my age? well, I know,—shall I say?—the signs and tokens, by this time, and how palm-wine is not proof-spirit, of which I am not without the experience of certain thimble-fulls: oh, the vivandières will press le petit verre [2] on us old grey moustaches, “for love”, if we flaunt a chevron or two, and have arms presented to us by the sentinels! And now, doing you this homage, let my own turn come, nor let mistake be feared, when I tell the pure truth that you are most dear to me, and will be ever so. I can live in very various spheres of activity, like those insects that people dry up & keep for years in a pill-box,—something that had the sea to swim in once: I can’t get that again, but any globule of your palm-wine will set me free within its circumference, to legs’ content; and it is far more likely that you will decide “Enough of kicking and capering—back to your box now!”—than that I shall object,—(in the phrase of begging letter writers & so not inappropriate here!)—to partially recovering the use of my precious limbs.
As to what you say of my Devil’s Gospel—I cannot disagree with you altogether. It is one of the facts of my experience that one limits sorrowfully one’s pretension to influence other people for good: I live more and more,—what am I to write?—for God not man—I don’t care what men think now, knowing they will never think my thoughts; yet I need increasingly to tell the truth—for whom? Is it that I shall be the better, the larger for it, have the fairer start in next life, the firmer stand? Is it pure selfishness, or the obedience to a natural law? How funnily and contemptibly one does good, when that happens! I had, two days ago, letters from the father,—no, the husband of that unwise lady who came for my decision about Sludge, [3] —and from the girl herself: he “is to be indebted to me all the days of his life,” and she “has indeed been saved from fearful misery!”– By what?– And yet, by what, once, did I not try, with the utmost of my soul’s strength, to demonstrate that out of figs and grapes could come neither thorns nor thistles,—and all in vain! [4]
I stay here till Monday certainly—the stupid absence of my publisher whom I have to see may even detain me longer, but I hope not.
I shall go to Wimbledon presently to meet Jenny Lind [5] at Ly Westmorland’s: do you remember our sitting behind her empty stool at Made Schwabe’s? [6] I don’t greatly take to that our most religious & gracious Queen of song, and mean to be prodigiously indifferent to her performances which will abound, I prophecy. “Spite, spite!”
Now, will you write to me once again before I go away? Goodbye, dearest friend. You have not given me certain things according to promise, the photograph for one: but never mind, though I do. The boy is well, and nobody is the “world” to me in that sense, I should think! Other people have such a monster, however, and I fear all the more for them, from my own ignorance.
Affectionately yours
RB.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 52–55.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
2. “The little glass.”
3. “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’” (Dramatis Personæ, 1864), RB’s poetic rendering of Daniel Douglas Home. We have been unable to identify the “unwise lady” who was to marry Home; however, see Patrick Waddington’s discussion of and speculation about the circumstances of their engagement in Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? (Upper Hutt, New Zealand, 2007), pp. 522–525. See also SD2738 for Edward Twistleton’s version of the story as told to him by RB.
4. Referring to his failed attempts to disabuse EBB of her belief in spiritualism, in general, and Daniel Dunglas Home, in particular.
5. Jenny Lind (1820–87), Swedish soprano.
6. Perhaps the dinner that took place the year before; see SD2650 in vol. 30.
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