5445. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 117–120.
Combe Hurst. [1]
Wednesday Aug. 24th 1864
This 24 of August has been made a bright day to me by the arrival of a letter from the Pyrenees. We were further apart than I thought, instead of being opposite neighbours having half Europe between us. I am sorry you have not got to the sea, which will not be substituted for by mountains & trees,—that is not grammar I am afraid but quite good enough to go to a Poet. “Rien ne se remplace, parce que rien ne se ressemble.” [2] I like that pensée of Mme Swetchine. [3] How bad the best thing is, when one wants something different!—the ugly things that those transparencies are, when one’s candle is extinguished. There is nothing like the viel-aufrauschende Meer [4] (do you know Voss’s Iliad—I am so fond of that epithet) when one has any sort of weight to throw off from body or mind. I think it is partly the entire absence of any association with man’s work, one is weary sometimes at the sight of hedges & roads, thinking of the toil—but one looks at that waste of waters that refuses to retain for one moment a trace of any effort of ours, & yet makes no pause in it’s own, & it seems a rest to one’s fancy—for I dare hardly call it imagination. Your Sea by the bye does no work of it’s own. I suppose I should miss the tides—the crystal rock pools with all their inhabitants, you have not them in the Mediterranean?– [5] You have mightier inhabitants however, & I am not in doubt as to which of your omens will lead you, the dolphins or the Rabbi.– [6] Meantime dear friend be assured you are always & have been always perfectly intelligible to one reader, whether through the printer’s handiwork or your own, & I think that conjugation may be completed. Nay if it were not too arrogant I should add that misunderstanding was more likely, if it arose at all, to begin at the other end—from the fact of one of us being given to express every gust of thought or feeling for which wiser souls have no weathercock, & which had much better find none. There is nothing so delusive as such thinking aloud as mine. But I have no fear. I will promise you to make no outcry to Heaven that you shd live till the Saturday [7] understands you as well as I do. However it (the 400 years) [8] might be a wholesome contingency to contemplate, for I think you wd bear clarifying.
Here everybody is reading Tennyson. You know I am a heretic about him,—no not a heretic, for I bow to the general creed, but only confess to a want of fervour in my response.– I only know Enoch Arden in your version, do you remember giving it me? You said you thought it a fault that Enoch shd reveal himself to his wife after his death– I think that touch of inconsistency makes it natural, but it wd be more heroic to have kept the mask down. I thought the dedication to his wife very fragrant & delicate– [9] Ah how weary you will be of my boiled-down essence of post-London talk!– What a dreadful friend Mrs Cameron [10] must be, my friends here were calling upon her during his presence in the house, when he went out of the room she fell upon them, “oh now do at once tell me what you think of his last poem” (not this, it was some time ago.) “he will be sure to ask me, but mind you do not say anything disagreeable. I always look through the newspapers to see if there is anything that wd go against him.” How glad I am you have not a Mrs Cameron!– It is amusing to see how that species of woman ignores the wife.– Well, there is something touching in every form of hero-worship, but from such poisoned cup-bearing, the Lord deliver us! I have seen a deal of the mischief we do in that way, upon very noble characters, I wonder which will be called to account at last– I think you, as the stronger creatures, will have the larger half to answer for. You were happy only to have the vulgar American type, pure penance. I say you were, you see, to such an aged man one anticipates that tense! I look upon your father as a sort of wandering Jew, in fact I don’t believe in him.– My imagination refuses to go a generation back from you. See all the veneration that is ready for you, & beware how you abuse it!
I wish I could send you some of my books, which chiefly occupy me here. Homer is my chief friend. I wonder what the charm is of unfeelingness wherever it is not unnatural. One feels it in such different things, in a young animal, & in those old stories– I suppose it is a rest to our over-worked nature to find an exercise for one part of us that lets the deepest rest in a sound sleep. Of course, I don’t mean there is no pathos, but it is the want of any case for humanity as such that has a sort of curious satisfaction in it.– What do you think of Max Müller finding out that the siege of Troy is a mythical representation of the Dawn, Helen is the morning twilight, stolen by the Sun, & only to be restored after a long siege! [11] Poor Helen what hard service she has done in supporting types. I met her again in a sermon of Jeremy Taylor’s where she was the one darling sin, that we would not surrender though our Troy fall for her sake. [12] Ah that morning twilight that is stolen from us shall we ever find it again?—our evening twilight is something different, though it may have its own force too. How beautiful it was with the deep Heavens & the dim earth, now it is the heavens that are dim, & the earth so obtrusive.
25th– I wonder if you will go to Madrid, it wd be a great temptation. My brother was a little disappointed in the gallery. [13] If your boy really wants to go I am sure you will obey him. I know how absolute those monarchs are! We have such a one in our family, the child of one who had as many months of happiness as you had years, & who is one of my greatest friends. [14] For this reason & for no other, he is rather bound up with you in my mind. The loss is rather too recent for such speculations, but I cannot help shrinking in imagination from the time which for a young man is natural & so I suppose right, when the absorbing grief shall yield to the mere material want of a new companion. It is so disappointing to see it, it seems to me like a sort of abdication of the rights of immortality; all my relations, who want that everybody should be comfortable are always anticipating it, & it always jars on me so painfully.– A barren post has just come in which disappoints me, & I turn to my yesterday’s harvest again, my lean kine are very tolerable after it. Ah if they wd only match themselves as equally as in Pharaoh’s dream!– [15] But the herd are lean & the fat one is hidden among them.
I sometimes fear that the sense of immortality may be the very thing itself—that those souls which see the future, have their inheritance there, but that for others who merely live on a second-hand investment of those hopes & convictions of others, as they are formulized for us in the deepest words we know, are really deluding themselves with a prospect which is not for them. In other words that to be immortal is to know it, & then I am sure I am not. Perhaps this is the delusion of the sultry noon, when one is so tired of the journey that one could almost be content, at certain moments, to sit down by the dusty highway & fall asleep, even to wake no more. I saw my stars in the early dawn, & perhaps I shall see them again in the twilight. Even at noon they may be seen from the shaft of a well, they say, & those who pass into the hidden depths of life may keep their view of the eternal through all the glaring day. But what if we get into those deep clefts and do not see them?—that also may be weak eyesight perhaps. Strange that one should understand human beings so well as I do (does that sound too arrogant?) & come upon some such strange misunderstanding with that which is in some way, expressed in all; as if I should understand your poems & not you. For the infinite that separates the man & what he makes, is surely a sufficient type for the other infinite difference. “With stammering lips & an unknown tongue will I speak to this people![”] [16] —others have heard that announcement, besides Isaiah.– I will not keep this, lest I shd put it into the fire. Tell me something of your companions, young & old, & most of all of yourself & try as much as possible to banish from my thoughts
Yr ever affec.
Julia Wedgwood.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 66–72.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Combe Hurst, Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, residence of Samuel Smith (1794–1880), barrister, and his wife, Mary (née Shore, 1798–1889). Smith was an uncle of Florence Nightingale.
2. “Nothing can be replaced because nothing is exactly the same as itself.” Cf. Madame Swetchine: sa vie et ses œuvres, ed. Alfred de Falloux (2 vols., 1860), II, “Pensées,” 2, 60.
3. Sophie Swetchine (née Soyanonov, 1782–1857), Russian-born writer, mystic, and salon hostess, who emigrated to Paris in 1815.
4. Cf. Homer, Ilias (Altona, 1793), I, 34, trans. Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826), German poet and classicist: “… des weitaufrauschenden Meeres.” Cf. Homer, The Iliad, I, 34, trans. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt: “… the loud-resounding sea.”
5. The nearest sea to Cambo is the Atlantic Ocean. RB points out the mistake in letter 5446.
7. i.e., The Saturday Review.
9. “A Dedication,” a 13-line poem in blank verse in Enoch Arden, etc. (1864) begins: “Dear, near and true—no truer Time himself / Can prove you, tho’ he make you evermore / Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life / Shoots to the fall.”
10. Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle, 1815–79), photographer, one of seven daughters (notable for their beauty—though Julia was considered the plainest) of James Pattle (1775–1845) and his wife Adeline (née de l’Etang, 1793?–1845). In 1860 Julia and her husband, Charles Hay Cameron (1795–1880), moved next door to the Tennysons at Freshwater, Isle of Wight.
11. Miss Wedgwood refers to Lectures on the Science of Language, 2nd series, by (Friedrich) Max Müller (1823–1900), Sanskrit scholar and philologist, which was published by Longman in early July. In Lecture IX (“Myths of the Dawn”), Müller writes: “The siege of Troy is but a repetition of the daily siege of the East by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their brightest treasures in the West. That siege, in its original form, is the constant theme of the hymns of the Veda” (p. 471). Müller equates the Hindu deity Sarama with Helen of Troy, describing her as “the equivocal character of the twilight” (p. 471).
12. In one of his sermons, Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), Anglican Bishop of Down and Connor, writes: “Although Homer was pleased to compliment the beauty of Helena to such a height as to say it was a sufficient price for all the evils which the Greeks and Trojans suffered in ten years … yet it was a more reasonable conjecture of Herodotus that during the ten years’ siege of Troy Helena … was in Egypt, not in the city; because it was unimaginable but that the Trojans would have thrown her over the walls, rather than for the sake of such a trifle have endured so great calamities. We are more sottish than the Trojans if we retain our Helena, any one beloved lust, any painted devil, any sugared temptation, with … the certainty of having such horrid miseries, such invaluable losses” (The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, D.D., 10 vols., 1850–56, 4, 570).
13. In the Prado Museum, Madrid.
14. Unidentified.
15. Cf. Genesis 41:1–4.
16. Cf. Isaiah 28:11.
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