5442. RB to Julia Wedgwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 110–113.
Maison Isabelline,
Cambo, près Bayonne, Basses-Pyrénées.
Aug. 19, ’64.
So far South, you see—farther than I intended: after staying at Paris a week we thought of going to Arcachon, a new place by Bordeaux—but found it full of visitors and noise: three or four years ago, it must have been mere sand-hill and pine-forest, along the sea—now you have boulevards in the middle of the old trees, a casino, & the other French institutions. La Teste, nearer the city, had no houses to let, nor did I much care: so we made for Bayonne—tried St Jean de Luz (the charming little port, with an Italian-looking frame of mountains,—all to no use, every place taken: remained the formidable Biarritz, which we looked at and left alone):—tired and teazed with travel and heat, we betook ourselves to this pretty little village some sixteen miles from Bayonne, with the Pyrenees and woods enough: it is a mineral-spring, several indeed, that bring people here at the “season,” which is not now: the Basque peasantry are somewhat interesting; anyhow, here we stay a month—till next 13th when we shall try again St Jean de Luz: if I don’t yield to my adventurous son who wants to go to Madrid instead—it is really but a few hours distance by railway: Spain itself, the first village in it, is eight or nine miles off. I want the sea, for myself,—though the notion of seeing the Titians and Velasquez is not a bad one. The country is strangely green and growthful, for this time of year,—the mountains like those about Florence and Siena—the little river under the village, far more abundant than you would find such a stream in Italy, comes from Navarre: in fine, there’s no particular hardship in spending a month here, but it’s a transparency which I have no candle to put behind: it “lights up,” I daresay, to the luckier sort: beside, I am bilious and sleepy overmuch, and made little or no provision for being not impossibly bored. I have got Virgil—for the boy’s plague—Euripides, for my own solace,—a volume of George Sand’s plays,—Oh, George!—and the “Travels of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela,” [1] which I must have been inspired to bring from Paris by an astonishing note of the Translator’s, evidently meant for me—you shall judge: the translator was a schoolmaster: [2] “Rabbi Perida took such great care of his scholars, who from appearances were as promising as my own, that he made it a general rule to read and explain the same thing four hundred times over: but such was his fortune, that on a particular occasion, one of his hopeful pupils, either through stupidity or inattention, was at the end of the lecture as wise as he was at the beginning: whereupon the Rabbi gave a specimen of his patience by repeating the same lecture over four hundred times more. At this, a voice was heard from heaven, to the following purpose, “Perida, either live four hundred years, or obtain innocence and eternal life for thee and thy posterity!” Perida without hesitation chose the latter: but his scholars, out of cruel kindness, cried “No, no, no,—but four hundred years for Perida!” Their request was granted: he lived four hundred years: and if he was a schoolmaster all the time, I heartily pity him.” [3] What do you say? I keep trying to be quite intelligible, next poem: what if the Saturday Review should get me four hundred years more of rendering-intelligible, by general outcry to heaven? Mind, this book, printed in 1783, has my grandfather’s name among the subscribers—did he foresee the lesson he was securing to his descendant? But I observed another omen at Arcachon, telling the other way—for they caught and exhibited on the beach two mighty dolphins, the biggest I ever saw,—“had les poltron [4] chosen to break my nets,” quoth the hero of the haul, “he might have done it like cobweb, but he thought they were strong,—I know the nature of the beast,—and he let me get under his fin with my knife”—so the great fellow, eight feet long, was to “yield a little oil,” and get sous from us the badauds [5] as the hat went round. No, I shall charge the nets, for my part, and mind nobody’s voice but ‘Arion’s’. [6] These dolphins had really heads like the old idealized creature, with respectable teeth, which I was glad to hear they knew how to use, poltrons as they were.
20th I went this morning to see the mountain-pass called “Le pas de Roland” [7] —the tradition being that he opened a way through a rock that effectually blocks it up, by one kick of his boot, and so let Charlemagne’s army pass: it is a striking little bit of scenery, with the clear green river between the mountain-walls, not unlike the Lima at Lucca: [8] but I think I liked best of all a great white-breasted hawk I saw sunning himself on a ledge, with his wings ready. How can you so misconceive of those above us, as to fear they may continue to misunderstand? Couched eyes that see none the better for that operation!– Oh, no! Then, it is so easy, wickedly easy, for people indifferent to each other never to quarrel: thence comes it that living in families tends to cretinize one—you find out early all about your fellows, love them always, but have no more curiosity about them, have no hope of improving them in any way, nor indeed desire it—they will do as they are: but you yourself will not do as you are, and if you wish another spirit to keep close by you while you go up higher, offences must come, and the wings get in the way of each other: how easily that must be seen by the bird that gets first to the height! Of course I was fortunate through the peculiarity of the relation: in that closeness there could be no misunderstanding: but had there been, I should care nothing about it now. As for enjoying the sun,—all the enviable instants of this life seem when we push out of it into the other, to fall back again fast enough: “whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell”: [9] those who can tell that they are out of it,—do you think they envy you down among the fir-trees? But they may, in a sort, envy you the feeling you will have presently when the dark cloth is suddenly twitched from your face, and fancying yourself lost in the dark, you find yourself at home. “The world has no perdition, if some loss.”– [10] This is no chatter nor cant with me, I can tell you, but an instinct which has given worth to many formulas, before I could bear it by itself, truth and force as it is: how these formulas get true and false and then true again when unnecessary!—when you can mean with Dante “Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, and that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where that Lady lives, of whom my soul was enamoured.” [11]
21st. Pray what do you mean by being such a coquette and talking about “your course, now setting toward me, which tomorrow may set from me and turn no more”? [12] Thank you,—particularly if you will instruct me as to how I should reply to such a complimentary prognostication. “Pray do so when you please—it will be quite the same to me”—or, as an itinerant corn-cutter calls after his relieved patients in Rome “I told you, you’d soon be able to run away from me!”– Or is it an ingenious way of reassuring me, in case I am compunctious at doing you possible harm? Perida, didst thou ever explain a thing after eight hundred times iteration? I dare say you never understood me a whit the better for my painstaking. Never mind, you will always be good enough for me.
God bless you.
RB.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 60–65.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Travels of Rabbi Benjamin, Son of Jonah, of Tudela: Through Europe, Asia, and Africa, trans. Rev. B. Gerrans (1783), a copy of which sold as lot 381 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A194, where the title is incorrectly given, and a signature of “Robert Browning” is attributed to RB but may be the poet’s grandfather, who is listed as a subscriber on p. iv). Benjamin Ben Judah, of Tudela, Spain, lived in the second half of the twelfth century.
2. Rev. Benjamin Gerrans (d. 1825, aged 80) is described on the title-page of Travels of Rabbi Benjamin as “Lecturer of Saint Catherine Coleman, and Second Master of Queen Elizabeth’s Free Grammar-School, Saint Olave, Southwark.”
3. Cf. Travels of Rabbi Benjamin, p. 84n. RB gives a slightly condensed and altered version of the anecdote.
4. “The coward.”
5. “Gawkers.”
6. According to Herodotus, Arion was a superior “lyre-player” and “the first man … to compose and name the dithyramb” (Herodotus, I, 23, trans. A.D. Godley). On a voyage to Corinth, he was robbed and forced overboard but saved by a dolphin that “took Arion on his back and bore him to Taenarus” (I, 24).
7. A few miles south of Cambo on the Nive river, which flows northwest and empties into the Adour at Bayonne. “Pas de Roland” was sketched by Sarianna on 27 August (see Reconstruction, H65) and by her father the following day (his “The Pas de Roland” is now at Yale).
8. i.e., Bagni di Lucca.
9. Cf. II Corinthians 12:2.
10. EBB, Casa Guidi Windows (1851), II, 780.
11. Cf. Dante, Convivio, II, 8, last line. The “Lady” is Dante’s great love, Beatrice.
12. See the end of the second paragraph in letter 5438.
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