5450. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 129–131.
Combe Hurst
Thursday Sept. 22nd 64
Not much fear of my letter not hitting you, you see. I am well accustomed to “false quantity” from all my correspondents, as everybody knows what a gift of the gab I have on paper, & that there is no danger of my stopping too soon when I begin to write. You do not say where you are going to after Biarritz—which sounds a horribly commonplace & fashionable retreat for you. I suppose you are among the bathers, so that you have the excitement of being nearly drowned yourself, as well as the entertainment of watching it in others. I think if I write a long letter in answer to yours, a rule-of-three sum wd exhibit a wonderful debtor & creditor account between us, considering the proportion of my material to my production, & comparing it with yours. I have not left this villa nor seen but one face, since you went to Cambo. Nevertheless it is odd that I don’t find few things to say to you.– I quite long for you to see the “Northern Farmer” it is so charming. Oh what a horrible young lady epithet!—it reminds me of a friend of mine who took another friend to Mr Hunt’s studio, to see that moonlight picture. [1] “Oh, very nice—but what is that blue thing in the sky?[”] I was amused at the idea of Hunt having a young lady to tell him his picture was nice, & having to explain to her that an object in the sky was the moon.
To go back to my old Lincolnshire pagan– [2] I think it must be, so to speak, a sort of accident that it is so vigorous. I mean that I don’t think the kind of merit it has is in the author, but must be contained in an aspect of character familiar to him in early life which is rather a photograph in his memory than a picture in his imagination. Just as one comes upon real poetry sometimes in the utterance of those who have nothing poetic in them. Or am I too Athenian-like to our Aristides? [3] I hope there will be another poem for my perverted taste when I see you again. You know you promised me an early instalment of it, if you will reward me with that I will try to appreciate poor Enoch a little better. But I am afraid Biarritz can’t be very propitious. Who knows but I may save you from the fate of your Rabbi schoolmaster!– [4] Or do you not tremble still more at this commentary I am going to publish the moment you are dead? But no, I fancy we may say what we like about you then, & even less than now you will care.
I came upon a sentence in Plato that reminded me of something you said in a letter. “Dost thou not think that some of the departed would return to us, if Hades retained them by any weaker bond than that of desire?[”]– [5] And of course the docile pupil agrees with him. It is a grand utterance of the infancy of the world when desire had not tried it’s wings long enough to beat against the bars of a cage that is wide enough to be sometimes forgotten. I am afraid now we should not feel that unhesitating conviction that desire is the strongest of bonds. Yet there is something of grandeur in Heathen contempt for death that we can never attain to. And then I fancy there was a Spring freshness in the atmosphere of this poor little earth, that we have lost. “We look before & after & sigh for what is not”. [6] Dont you think Plato wd have been horribly disappointed to have looked forward 2000 years & seen—us? Our little Sun is much better furnished, no doubt, but the sojourn seems long.–
All the Reviews are busy with Newman’s Apologia. They all fall foul of him for that in him which I admire, his courageous denial of all sleek optimist theories. Truly it seems a wondrous leap from the conviction that those are false, to the Church of Rome but in the early divergence between him & his critics I side with the poor priest. There is something wonderfully typical in the passage of arms between the Apostle of the flesh & the last of the Ascetics. Can you not fancy some future Strauss [7] sublimating it (is there such a word?) into an allegorical representation of the tendencies of the age. “The dominant spirit of that material, positive, luxurious age extorts by it’s arrogance a protest from the keen & narrow enthusiasm of an expiring asceticism. The secular virtues of a hard worldly character are brought out in rigid relief against that dying mysticism.” Poor Newman! there is something very pathetic to me in the aspect of his painful unveiling before the world that is so soon to shrivel in Hell fire. One sees both inconsistent feelings are so intense. I don’t know on the whole that I have less sympathy with that ardent sense of Hell, than with what I may call the spirit of the Saturday Review. Leave out that part of it which nobody really imagines or believes, & the conviction of unsounded depths below us seems to me not only truer, but a better guide in life than that general comfortable feeling that after all there’s not so much difference between one course of action & another, or one character & another—there are compensations everywhere, some people suffer more, but then their sense of enjoyment is keener &c &c.
Do you remember a discussion we had about the patient Grizzel, [8] the nut-brown maid [9] &c.? I was reminded of it by a very graceful little German version of Griselda a tragedy of a man named Halm, [10] where the moral of the story is exactly inverted. Griselda bears all her husband’s treatment with meek faith, but when he comes to take her back & tell her he has only been tormenting her to try her, she bursts out into indignant refusal to have anything more to do with him, very refreshing to one’s feelings—& in spite of his passionate repentance, goes back alone to her father’s hut. I like any protest against the woman’s tendency to servility, for all poems & fiction are so fond of the opposite view.– Now I think I deserve full measure pressed down & running over to be returned unto me!– That abundant requital may come to me at
Lady Inglis–
Milton Bryan
Woburn
Beds.
where I spend the 1st 10 days of October, after which I am to be seen at C.P. [11] & my company is particularly edifying about 1 o’clock on Sundays!
Farewel dear friend[.]
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 87–91.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. “Landscape by Moonlight, Devon” (1860) by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910). It is now at the Morgan.
2. i.e., “The Northern Farmer.”
3. Aristides (d. ca. 467 B.C.), Athenian politician known as “The Just,” was ostracized in 483 but allowed to return three years later.
5. Cf. Plato, Cratylus, 403c, trans. Harold North Fowler.
6. Cf. Shelley, “To a Sky-Lark” (1820), lines 86–87.
7. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74); see letter 2846, note 2.
8. The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissill (1603) by Thomas Dekker (ca. 1572–1632), in collaboration with Henry Chettle (d. ?1603) and William Haughton (d. 1605), is a dramatic version of the Griselda story (see letter 4594, note 14).
9. “The Nut-Brown Maid,” a 15th-century poetic reworking of the Griselda story, was printed in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).
10. Griseldis (Vienna, 1837), a five-act tragedy by Friedrich Halm, pseudonym of Baron Eligius von Münch-Bellinghausen (1806–71), was first performed in 1835 at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
11. Cumberland Place.
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