5446. RB to Julia Wedgwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 120–124.
Cambo, près Bayonne, Basses-Pyrénées. (till the 13th)
Sept. 2. ’64.
There is all but another fortnight to pass here, and I want another letter, you understand. The place is even prettier than I thought, but I feel somehow walled-about and over-looked, as one says of London suburban houses, though the obstructions are purely spiritual in this case, the influences in the air,—for, nine times out of ten, I don’t meet a soul. But there is no sea to go out and walk on, as, I suppose, Christ used when he was sick of the world. The sea,—“that fair scroll-finis to a wicked book” [1] —(what perfect poetry that is!) What is it that I have been meaning to say to you, now, in reply? First, this nearest sea will not be the Mediterranean, but the Atlantic, if you please: you think I am east of the midway from Bayonne to Marseilles, whereas there are scarcely twenty miles to get back again, in case I go to St Jean de Luz. Madrid, I shall postpone, contenting the boy probably with a taste of [San] Sebastian or Pampeluna: [2] I want two or three weeks’ bathing, and then our holiday ends.
I am not sure that I understand what you mean by “having seen stars in the early dawn”— I observe nowhere in youth, except in diseased & dying youth, the religious instinct: religious dogmas are accepted at that age undoubtingly, but they don’t influence a child’s actions at all—that business is done by quite other agents: it is curious to observe what practical atheism—so far as regards the God themselves affect to believe in—distinguishes ordinary children: they have not a natural need for what you artificially give them, and so, without at all disputing your dogmas’ truth, they never apply them in any difficulty, having better ways of their own for righting matters: whereas the real instinct is developed with mature years, and, then only, substitutes itself for the previous motives which are losing their virtue of impelling or repressing one,—hence the new birth: while this life suffices, I don’t see that another incentive to push on through its insufficiency, in the shape of a conceived possibility of a life beyond,—is ever given us. I know that I possess at this minute every advantage that I had thirty five years ago, even to the health and power of physical enjoyment,—added to plenty of acquisition undreamed of at that time,—and yet have outgrown all the considerations which used to manage, for better and worse, the wise person of my perfect remembrance and particular dislike—but there are new finger-posts in this far end of the road, as it once seemed, and I am less than ever my own master: that, however, is far from meaning that one is clearly another’s servant,—life would not be what life is,—and is, for a good reason probably,—if one or the other relation could be clearly determined,—one could then live forever:—it is because one cannot so live on now, under the present conditions, in virtue of the very desire to live in a conceivable absolute freedom and fulness of life,—that I hope this is to be one day.
You exaggerate the horrors of Mrs Cameron,—“poison,” indeed!—no, but she keeps a tray of brandied “lollipop,” and other substitutes for honest beefsteak requisite to the natural stomach: and after all, what harm does she do Alfred?—if he considered her while he made his verses, then indeed! As it is, there will always be a buzzing of sillinesses about such a person. Depend on it, nobody has done him the least harm at any time: nobody has more fully found out at the beginning what he was born to do,—nor done it more perfectly. He told me that when he wrote the Gardener’s Daughter [3] he felt his life to be in flower—that he wrote “baskets-full” of similar poems at that time, emanations of the same spirit. I have not read this book yet—and know nothing of the “dedication” [4] —except that I rejoice at it, loving Mrs Tennyson singularly. I still see that fault in Enoch Arden: if he is to be “strong & heroic,” a fault: nor a natural one, in that way, I think. Could I rule the œconomy of the piece, it should go thus:—after the return from the peeping in at the window—Enoch should confirm himself in his resolution “never to let her know,” and only admit those other fancies of her learning the truth after his death, and of his children seeing their father once again,—as impossible luxuries, to be put down as fancies, because destructive, if carried into fact, to what is the only purpose of his life now: and so fancying, and so repressing fancies, he should quietly die in his hole. And then on a mellow autumn evening, the right time for a nutting excursion, should the happy family from the mill sally forth, with a tender reminiscence of old days, toward the well-known brow of the hill, and the hollow where the bushes abound, and there come upon a pauper’s funeral, the cart and the four rough planks,—and be so set, the party, upon natural speculations. The young man, with the sagacity of his age, should divine that the poor devil could be no other than that odd, disreputable-looking & suspicious character who used to skulk about the ale-house, as if he had reasons enough for avoiding the constable,—and,—telling on his fingers,—wonder whether it could be Giles the Poacher, or Jack the Gypsey that had to do with setting the barn on fire,—or peradventure George the Tinker that decamped from his wife and children, leaving them a present to the parish? Thereupon should the Miller, whose thumb is proverbially made of gold,—he should “improve” the occasion, by inculcating on the young ones the evil consequences of self-indulgence,—how man is made to conquer his riotous desires, not yield to them “like this publican”—while the mother, the faithful Annie, though setting a proper example by turning up the white of her eyes, should treat herself to a little retrospective thankfulness—acknowledging that after a little roughness things had come satisfactorily round, and that, worst coming to the worst, dear Enoch’s brave death in the storm,—was it not better for him, and these beloved ones, than that he should .. who can tell? .. have lived on, even for such an end as this! And so they should proceed to their nutting, and Enoch, by a series of jolts, to his harbour in the churchyard,—and we, to the considerations appropriate to one more view of this world. And now, goodbye till I have taken a stroll—after I have added, though, that the concluding touch in the poem about the fine funeral,—which Tennyson gave me to understand was a very pregnant one,—strikes me as ambiguous and unlucky—it coincides too exactly with an impudent speech in an old French play, I remember, wherein a gallant thus addresses his mistress—“And, talking of brute-beasts, how does your husband do? Whenever is he intending to die, that fellow? Let him make haste, and I promise him the finest of funerals!”– [5] By the bye, there is another thing which I want to say, in explanation of something I wrote—about one’s family not “growing”,—proportionately to one’s own growth,—I meant symmetrically, rather,—for they may grow just as you grow, only,—here’s the fault,—you none of you profit by each others’ growth, it is not in your direction, but for somebody else to profit by—much as with a cluster of fruits on a common twig,—each may bulge out round and red enough in the sun’s eye, but the place where all the clustered knobs touch, where each continues to be known to the other, that is as hard, & green, and insipid as ever, and if peach can only judge of fellow-peach by that place of junction & communion, the result’s generally poor enough. Or is it generally so? I am inclined to go into extremes, and want, as you say “we poets do,” intensity at price of all other qualities. And now for the woods.
Sept. 3/ Yes, the seed of beauty that “Helen” has scattered all over the world is infinite: I don’t know many memorable paintings nor studies of her—but in music, I have been remembering these thirty years & more Glück’s overture to “Helen and Paris”, [6] and wondering whether the rest of the work could keep up to the tone of that .. exactly what you remark in Homer .. that far-away carelessness of common hopes & fears: I was speaking of it, so, to Hallé not two months ago, and playing it to him on the table-cloth. In my last good days at Rome, the best in my life, I was meaning to do what I could “next year” with a subject that struck me,—Helen dedicating a goblet, which re-produced the perfection of what Virgil calls “exsertæ mammæ,” [7] and was deposited in the temple of Venus,—a group of her, bidding farewell to the imperishable beauty, and a young priest receiving the same, and revolving other comparisons: on mentioning this to my friend Rossetti, “I’ll paint it,” said he—and there it is, archaically treated indeed. [8] Then, what a strange fancy is that of Euripides on which he has founded his whole play of “Helena” [9] —“that it was not really Helen, only an apparition of her, that fled to Troy, and caused all the fighting,—the true Helen living sadly and saintly in Egypt, having been stolen by Mercury at the command of Juno and confided to the care of Proteus the King; at whose tomb her husband finds her again, wringing her hands at the world’s misconception of her character through the doings of the eidolon. Qy: does this mean, a good poem suffering from the world’s misconception of it? There,—take your revenge on my eidolon for this string of rags and tatters, and be sure that (in Egypt) I am ever affectionately yours
RB.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 73–79.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Cf. EBB, Aurora Leigh (4th ed., 1859), III, 952.
2. Former name of Pamplona.
3. First published in Alfred Tennyson’s Poems (2 vols., 1842).
5. We have been unable to trace the source of this quotation.
6. Paride ed Elena, an opera by German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87), was first performed in 1770 at Vienna.
7. “Naked breast.” Cf. Vergil, The Æneid, I, 292.
8. This may be the “chalked out” design mentioned in a letter from W.M. Rossetti to W.B. Scott (see SD2629 in vol. 30). Evidently it has not survived. Another drawing of this subject by D.G. Rossetti is now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it is dated “about 1870.”
9. Euripides, Helena (412 B.C.).
___________________
