5453. RB to Julia Wedgwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 134–136.
151. Rue de Grenelle, Faubourg St Germain, Paris
Biarritz, Oct 3. ’64.
Still here, you see, & till the 7th, Friday, on which morning we leave for Bordeaux, Tours, and Paris—three days’ easy travelling,—and then, after another week at most, London,—say on the 15th or 16th—a Sunday, by my calculation: but if .. where do I catch this mean spirit? .. if you let me have a letter at Paris to re-assure me that you will be found again at Cumberland Place, I will write and tell you for certain. I shall be glad to see you, do you know?
We stayed a little beyond the appointed time in order to get more of the wonderful weather and warm, wide sea: the heat is only too Southern, none of us are “braced,” as by the Breton rough procedure, but slackened rather. The bright noisy people keep on their own side of the little town, and my son likes brightness & noise, if I do not. The blue mountains of Spain are a stone’s throw off. This day week, we crossed the little boundary-river and landed at Fontarabia—a delicious little ruined old city, with such silent houses, and carved eaves, and wrought-balconies,—I could live with the three or four dozen inhabitants, and die there, “Where Charlemagne with all his peerage fell”, [1] comfortably alone, as my dear old Landor has just accomplished that feat—“without pain, and, at the last, very patient.” We then lounged for hours at Irun, close by,—my best sight & instruction being from the Spanish management of a fan by a Christian sister with whom, preferably to Miss Wedgwood, Father Newman may expect to go shares in the next world: I did not quite follow the accompaniment, but I think I am right in saying that “Et Incarnatus Est” [2] is properly exemplified by suddenly letting drop the whole rainbow of the outward rim, suspending it in midway fall by a little-finger artfully projected, then changing sides, and somehow bringing the right extremity to the left so that you had half a group of Watteau [3] shepherdesses and swains and half a tessellated pavement, or what looked like it—“et-factus-est”—Snap! and the lady grasped a solid black truncheon, pointed at the nose of the unbeliever. I should like to write an answer to the “Apologia” in fan-language: I am afraid that the appropriate illustration of “Where their worm dieth not” [4] —was detected by me in a certain vigorous application of the handle-end to that amazing knob of “back-hair” which was hidden by the lace-veil. Well, we went on to St Sebastian, and tasted further the Spanish quality, which I am inclined to like much.
Yes, poor Landor is off and away at last—I wish him well with all my heart: he wrote to me a month ago,—“probably about to die in a few weeks or days,” [5] —but he had cried “wolf!” so often. Five years care about him, and now he is past me. He has written passages not exceeded in beauty and subtlety by any literature that I am acquainted with; that is my opinion, other people have theirs; he was followed to the grave by two of his sons, [6] and nobody else—the grand old solitary man, beset by weaknesses just as, in his own words, “the elephant is devoured by ants in his inaccessible solitudes.” [7] Bless us, if he had let the world tame him and strap a tower on his broad back, what havoc he would have made in the enemy’s ranks!—as it was, they let off squibs at him and he got into a rage and ran off, topsey-turveying his friends right and left. I’ll tell you how he talked—the rather that I might not be impudent enough to tell you, if it occurred to me on next edifying Sunday morning’s colloquy. “Mrs Landor called to-day”—said I. “Ha,—why, you did not let her in—never surely let her in?”—“Oh, I should let a dog in, even, bearing your name on the collar!”—“Oh, ay, a dog,—good! but a ?”
Methinks I have a pleasure in remembering that he “gave her her own,” now that the dead lion is being appraised as “worth” so much to the living Landors.
My friend, am I intelligible? Write and hold out a light, if I am ever to swim across the dark strait from Boulogne to the Abydos [8] of Warwick Crescent, which invites me very little otherwise. Orsù! [9]
Onward, my merry men,
Just a stroke more,—& then,
Over & ended. [10]
Is that mine or whose? That I hum it ever and anon? I have got the whole of that poem, you enquire about, well in my head, shall write the twelve books of it in six months, [11] and then take breath again.
Ever yours affectionately RB.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 92–95.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 586.
2. This Latin phrase and the one below are taken from the Nicene creed: “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine et homo factus est” (“And he was made flesh by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary and was made man”).
3. Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), French painter.
4. Mark 9:44.
6. His youngest sons: Walter Savage Landor (1822–99) and Charles Savage Landor (1825–1917).
7. From Landor’s Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, Vol. I (1824), “Southey and Porson”: “What a rabble has persecuted my friend [Wordsworth], in these latter times the glory of our country. An elephant is born to be consumed by ants in the midst of his unapproachable solitudes” (p. 47).
8. RB humorously alludes to Byron’s feat of swimming across the Hellespont, which he marked with the short poem “Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” (1812).
9. “Well then!” or “Come now!”
10. We have been unable to trace these lines.
11. The Ring and the Book (1868–69).
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