5431. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 100–101.
The Crag[,] Falmouth
July 29th 1864
I am not altogether displeased with those no-accounts which sent me an order for a pin-head-drop of palm wine today, which I hasten to supply at the same time that I gratify your feminine taste in letting you have the last word on that same palm-wine subject. The palm is greatly flourishing in these genial regions—for they are very genial,—& those deep incisions not a few, are forgotten. I am sorry you are kept in London by publishing business, for the days of July in London are not tempting, even when one has villa parties with Jenny Lind to meet. I am rather inclined to agree with you about her though I have more respect for poor people who try to be good than you have.– I hope you were not too “prodigiously indifferent”, or it wd suggest epigrams to those who were clever enough. I feel as if I cd hammer one out on the subject myself if I had an ill-natured imagination, or a keener wit, but “I have not so large a mouth” as your boy said. I conceive how your anxious appreciation of the opinion of the world will awaken at such a suggestion! I wonder if we are meant to care so little for the judgment of our fellows—some of us are, I suppose, & perhaps thereby not to influence them the less. That Sludge anecdote is a true “moral tale” to me, [1] coupled with the other side to which you refer. I suppose one influences people mostly in that unexpected way, those [of] yours was certainly a startlingly extreme instance. I feel as if I had slipped into an improving & sermon-like vein which will of all others be the very thing to suit your taste so I shall work it thoroughly! I hope you will escape assassination. I am so weak and mean (as I’m afraid you will think it) that I have a little pity for poor Mr S.– I don’t mean for this last business, but for the poem, but I suppose he is the sort of man to endure being gibbetted better than most of us.
You will be glad to hear that I have cheerful letters from my mother. She writes me that she is much refreshed by a few days entire solitude, which is the best atmosphere, I think, in which to pass a certain stage of grief, it is better when all the inward lament has spoken uninterruptedly for a little. She is not a person to whom time will make much difference, not finding relief in utterance ever, it very soon becomes as hidden a thing as it ever is. I remain here a fortnight & return to pay some suburban visits, where the outer world will present no temptations to me & the inner world ought to produce some crop—but at the risk of hurting your feelings (for you have always implied a vast difference of age between us that makes any autumnal tinge in me mean a late December for you) I must say that I’m afraid it is too late in the day for me to do anything but improve my own mind. The Saturday ‘Review’s’ stock remark on all women’s productions “that it is gratifying to reflect that so much labour &c cannot but have produced valuable results to the writer, however &c”—looms mournfully before me as the goal of all mine—unless I bring out a commentary on your works. I think I must wait till you are dead before I venture on that, & as you are so old it will not detain me long. Reading it will probably form yr occupation in Purgatory.
Ever yr affec
FJW
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 56–58.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
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