5447. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 124–127.
Combe Hurst
Kingston-on-Thames
London SW.
for another fortnight.
Friday Sept 9th 1864
I think I must begin my letter if it is to travel all across France before the 13th I hope you will find a bit of sea to get to by that time,—who calls the sea “scroll-finis to a wicked world”? [1] —that is a very modern booky metaphor, but fixes itself in one’s mind as something appropriate. Poetry is all ready-made in the sea, the most commonplace real thoughts about it are poetic, any mind that gives back a mere echo of what is there is poetic for the time; & vice versa, it seems to me poets can write very prosaically upon it, to judge from Tennyson’s Sea Dreams. [2] I was much amused with your hypothetical funeral for Enoch, but it is only saying there is material in the facts for a different set of ideas, you could not introduce that bit of Rembrandt shadow anywhere in the little water colour sketch as it is without spoiling it. I don’t think he could deal effectively with that irony of fate, it would not fit in with his style of execution, & it seems to me that the very exception you take to the grand funeral is a proof of it, for what is intended is just this allusion, I suppose, & instead of being forcible it is unsatisfactory, like a sudden modulation in his last bar.– The only thing I enjoy in the book is the Lincolnshire farmer, [3] which is to me delicious. Like E.A. I believe it was an expansion of a fact, one of the verses I heard quoted at least as a real speech before the book came out.– I think the perfect paganism of the man’s feeling, & the devout absorbedness in “the land”—the grand indifference to his own prospects in comparison,—form the most emphatically a work of genius of anything he has ever done, for it is most of a creation. I write on the supposition that he read you that with the others, unless he had a very different comparative estimate of the value of those poems, he must have done so.– I liked his dedication [4] less on a 2nd reading there is a little too much about himself in it & not enough about his wife.– I wish I could get into a right spirit of appreciation of him. I know so many little unpleasantnesses of him, & though that is not a good standpoint to take with reference to a great poet, one can’t help being influenced by it. Rather like judging the tree by the caterpillars that drop off it, you will say. In this Dedication, for instance, I can’t help seeing an unhealthy liveliness of perception of his critics, & there is one little poem about his own poetry that put me into a rage. [5]
Talking of appreciation, I have been so much interested in the few reminiscences which Hilary Bonham Carter [6] (I think you know her) was giving me of your wife as it struck me that there was a singular degree of appreciation of her, for the slight degree of their intercourse. I have hardly ever seen any one else who knew her, so there was perhaps an adventitious interest in her recollections to me. I was looking into Aurora Leigh for something that expressed what I meant about the dawn. “Observe, I means in youth—just I the conscious & eternal soul &c” [7] I will never say anything so foolish as “do you remember” any passage of hers.— Ah really I don’t think there is anything very valuable in those vistas that seem to open on every side into the infinite in the early days, they are mere pictures that we take for windows, & some of them perhaps hang before & hide the real windows, but one regrets the infinite possibilities of youth, unreal as they are.– I was not thinking of children’s experience when I spoke of it. I always went to bed as a child elaborately expecting the Judgment Day, remembering that passage about it’s coming as a thief in the night, [8] & not feeling sure about my own account in the reckoning, I thought that the best measure to take to keep it off.– If I held the same opinion now as to the influence of my large expectations on that small matter, they might be arranged differently. That kind of anticipation is an unfortunate enough element in a child’s life, & it is the natural form which is taken in a child’s mind by what are true grown up motives & beliefs– So far I agree with you in what you say of their practical atheism. Yes, I am afraid I agree with you in the peach-cluster theory, but when one sees a peach which has succeeded in elongating its own stalk sufficiently to detach itself from that parent cluster one feels that it is not unmixed advantage. Miss Bonham C. for instance, though she is a highly favoured specimen. Art has been to her the gold of the fable, she has dug her vineyard to some purpose & has produced a goodly crop of friends, but I think the Art is nought. We have been all inspecting her statuette of Florence Nightingale, [9] which has occupied four good years of her life, & is—well, I don’t think I shd have been much less unwilling to have spent 4 years over a beautiful piece of embroidery. How melancholy it is to think of all the large amount of life & thought & emotion that may be put into a work of any kind, & be completely absorbed by it, leaving no trace to any eye but the originator. I thought of the 2 women that were employed on the little doll as subject & object, & marvelled at the poverty of the result.– FN, too is one of those detached peaches—better so on the whole, doubtless, better for the sake of the world as herself—but meantime not without heavy loss.– We have been all much interested in Mr Woolner’s marriage, [10] which took place on Tuesday. He is a sort of adopted younger brother of Miss Carter’s, who went to the wedding & described the pretty bride to us—quite dainty enough to marry a sculptor, to judge from her Photograph,—an exception to the general run of Photos, as they were cleverly described by one of the Lushingtons, [11] as having for their chief value “to be worn next the heart in cases of unrequited attachment.” This particular one was only fitted to aggravate the complaint. I hear W. is a great habitué of Mr Carlyle’s, I daresay he will stand that atmosphere better than poor Ruskin.– I thought I might have been nearer you by the width of the Channel by this time as my elders are gone to a German bath, & I offered to go & take care of them, but my services were declined with ardour,—perhaps founded on no inadequate conception of my capacities as courier.– I am well satisfied not to exercise them for my own part.– That Euripidean Helen is what Plato works so hard in the Republic [12] —another type for the poor over-worked lady!– Ah no, the Eidolon theory has a broader application than to poems or poets, which if they are really good suffer mighty little from the worlds want of appreciation[—]it is for more common-place mortals that wait wringing their hands in Egypt, while the Eidolon plays unseemly pranks in Troy.– I wish you wd take that subject that you meditated it is one of the most capacious conceivable.
Farewell dear friend.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 80–84.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
2. “Sea Dreams,” first published in Macmillan’s Magazine (see letter 4581, note 7), was included in Enoch Arden, etc. (1864).
3. “Northern Farmer” (Enoch Arden).
5. In “The Flower” (Enoch Arden), Tennyson uses a seed as a metaphor for his poetic style, the flower being the poetry produced. Critics “cursed me and my flower,” but when thieves steal the seed and spread “it far and wide,” then “all the people cried / ‘Splendid is the flower.’”
6. Joanna Hilary Bonham Carter (1821–65); see letter 3060, note 4.
7. EBB, Aurora Leigh (4th ed., 1859), 3, 283–284.
8. Cf. I Thessalonians 5:2.
9. We have been unable to trace the whereabouts of the original. A copy in Copeland parian, once owned by George Eliot, is in the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry.
10. Thomas Woolner (1825–92) married Alice Gertrude Waugh (1845–1912) on 6 September 1864 at St. James’s Church, Paddington.
11. Probably Godfrey Lushington (1831–1907), who married in 1865 Beatrice Anne Shore Smith (1835–1914), daughter of Samuel Smith, barrister, of Combe Hurst.
12. See Republic, IX, 586c, ed. and trans. Christopher Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy.
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