5471. RB to Julia Wedgwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 157–159.
19 W.C.
Oct 31. ’64.
Am I really to see you next Sunday? No, I fancy. This is only going to be a word, however, just as if I were certain of the better thing. I ought to have written at once, having an impulse to do so, but there were many calls on my time and I waited too long. I am not going to let another day go by, however, without speaking after being spoken to,—and saying this particularly that you never are in my way in the “sacred place” you speak of, and, so far as you go, I like walking with you. Nobody else goes many inches over the threshold of it. Yes—I took up that book of Miss Cobbe’s, at the “Athenæum” on Saturday—and found a part in which I was concerned: well-meant, poor, inexact, painful & mistaken stuff, all of the performance, I should judge, from the samples I came upon. The first fact in the portion about us was—that Azeglio, to Miss Cobbe’s wonder, had never even heard of my wife’s name: for all that, he called on her, on the strength of his ignorance perhaps, and told me it was only proper in him so to do. [1] I suspect Miss C. cannot understand, nor express herself in, Italian. All the other people she went on to describe were well known to me, [2] —and “done” as well.
So, I am arrogant for not taking this step on the stool of humility—pronouncing, to-wit, that a mean piece of work which (it is easily said) would be impossible to me as pocket-picking, may yet be the proper & pardonable occupation of “my brethren”: eh, my friend & fellow-student,—will you, please, to oblige me and get fifty pounds, review Tennyson, giving extracts from his “Poems by Two Brothers”, [3] as fitly representing what he now produces,—and, including the new book in the title of your critique, give a line or two from “the Ringlet,” say of the Farmer, [4] that is “irreverent,” and so—end? Do you answer, “I do this?– No,—but if Miss Eldrid should diversify her life by doing so, my heart would yearn over her!” I know, I cannot bring myself to think that dishonesty should be harder to my man here than to me: if it is, goodbye to him, and my anger for time and, I do hope, eternity! You don’t, of course, confound one’s classing a creeper definitely as Cimex Edenburgensis, (graveolens Reevii) [5] —for mere science’s sake,—with being put out of temper by the thing: there happens to be a spice in me of the snuff-taker’s vice, love of sub-irritation,—mild pugnaciousness. But I don’t want to degrade God’s creatures and bid them scratch and so far amuse me. And here—there is no malice in my transition to Ld Houghton: I know not one, but a multitude of good, gracious acts of his,—my old thirty-years’ acquaintance, or friend à la rigueur: [6] but for all that, he plays the social game unfairly, [7] —it may be but dominos, still if you do play, mind the rules,—and he does not mind them. He “dissembles his love & kicks you down stairs” [8] —whereat I kick again, and love shines afresh over our hand-shaking. I don’t know whether, if I loved thoroughly in return, I should not rebuke myself—“You, will you not forward the good work of amending this excellent person by really kicking like a Roland [9] next time?”
I know the easy self-deception,—how one may indulge spites & revenges, calling them by pretty names all the time: the ditch is on either side the road—for surely it is as vile a ditch one falls into when one reflects that “gentle words are always gain”, [10] and it is gentle to pity this man and find excuse for the other—instead of “being angry and sinning not.” [11]
You shall take me in hand and teach me—if you don’t get tired.
I ought to have gone out this long, not unpleasant day,—and the dark is beginning.
God bless you.
RB.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 107–109.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. In Frances Power Cobbe’s Italics (1864), she describes a conversation she had with Azeglio (which evidently took place in French), and writes: “Strange to say, M. d’Azeglio had never heard of a woman great in her way, as he is in his, and whose whole heart was given to the course of which he was one of the leaders” (p. 389). Massimo Taparelli d’Azeglio (1798–1866) called on the Brownings in March 1859 (see letters 4367 and 4368). He most certainly knew of EBB, considering that he had quoted from her poetry in the Italian parliament seven years earlier (see letter 3227, note 7).
2. Among “the other people” Miss Cobbe described were: Seymour Stocker Kirkup (unnamed), Walter Savage Landor, Kate Field (unnamed), Hiram Powers, and William Wetmore Story (see Italics, pp. 394–404).
3. Poems by Two Brothers (1827), which contained poems by three Tennyson brothers: Alfred, Charles, and Frederick.
4. “The Northern Farmer” and “The Ringlet” are two of the poems in Enoch Arden, etc. (1864).
5. “Edinburgh bedbug, (strong-smelling of Reeve).” Henry Reeve was the current editor of The Edinburgh Review. The scientific name for the common bedbug is cimex lectularius.
6. “At a pinch.”
7. See the third paragraph in letter 5367.
8. Cf. Isaac Bickerstaff (b. 1733), “An Expostulation,” lines 3–4.
9. See the second paragraph in letter 5442.
10. Tennyson, “Love thou thy land, with love far-brought” (1832), line 23.
11. Cf. Ephesians 4:26.
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