5472. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 159–161.
Manchester
November 1st 1864
No, you will not see me next Sunday. I am not turning my face southwards quite so soon as I expected, finding more appreciation of my company here than might have been looked for in a poor blind world that lets so much excellence slip by!– Poor Miss Cobbe. I think I may excuse myself from reading her, by your account. [1] I shd think you must have derived some entertainment from your own appearance in Italian books of travels;—as I did the other day when I came upon a woodcut in a collection of portraits, which needed the two words underneath to tell me who the ardent youth might be. [2] I suppose Miss C’s portraits are done much in that style. Oh if we women knew when to hold our tongues! There is my petition to the gods if ever they shew themselves disposed to grant any of mine. However, as we all talk together it comes to much the same thing as if we were all silent, certainly no pair of ears keep our words long—verily I fear we must have been guilty of a miniature Tower of Babel & are punished with a new confusion of tongues. You pique my curiosity to see your Helix [3] —no, I know he does not sting you, perhaps it wd be as well if he did. You care at least little enough about the opinion of your fellow creatures. I wish with all my heart I could make over some of the vast surplus of that caring from my mind to yours!—one of us at least wd be benefitted by the transfer.
Poor Lord Houghton! I think you are ungrateful to him, for you go on from your love of sub-irritation to complain of his dissembling his love &c [4] & so affording you an excellent opportunity for exercising yours—why may not that be the final cause of his being? Well I hope it is not the final cause of mine for I hate the element of even the mildest pugnaciousness—no I think we shd never provoke each other. If that disaster comes to pass I may console myself with the reflection that I am supplying you with a pinch of snuff, but that is a habit I particularly disapprove, & I hope I may do nothing to encourage it.– I have a weakness for Lord Houghton, there seems to me something manqué about him, which always draws me towards people. I think in those odd omnium gatherum collections of his [5] there is such a curious kind of aspiration after excellence in one walk or another, & then he is content to be 2nd rate himself, which very few people are. I don’t know him socially, so I can’t estimate him that way.
I came upon some of those Sonnets from the Portuguese the other day in an old Blackwood, [6] —you ought to have taken that review to leave a good taste after the Edinburgh. But indeed there is a marvellous readiness to praise as soon as the object is beyond the reach of whatever faint pleasure reviews may give! They are wonderfully beautiful (I don’t mean reviews!)– I do not know any utterance that has the same sort of thrill in it as they have—not that others have not felt it, but it is rarely given to express & experience at once that sort of feeling. Generally the life & the art are two things, at least it seems to me an exception when they are so much one as they were with her.– I hope you are very busy, & that I am to see some fruit of it before long. I want to make the most of your declining years.– I was so amused the other day by that old Aunt [7] of mine I told you of who enjoys attacking all my friends as it is very easy to make me angry that way—when I was with her she found out a curious new sin of yours that you had written “so much.”– I hope that sin is to grow worse, & that you are to give your Helix many a flower to crawl over yet.– Well I doubt whether we can classify our fellow creatures in that way!– By the bye what do you think of Tennyson’s arrogance about his “little flower”? All have got the seed forsooth! [8] —so everybody has strained their ear to catch his cadence! I hope you don’t like Aylmer’s Field,—or understand that extraordinary bosh about the singer’s wife.– [9] I have heard one or two provoking little things of him since I came here. What a strange thing it is that a great man may be vain. I shd have said that was the one quality that cd not go with greatness—but all my theories are being knocked to pieces.
Have you begun dining out again? I suppose dinners are being eaten again though I hear nothing of them.
I think it is just a year since you came to our house so ailing—do you remember?—you earned great praise on that occasion. I hope your dinners are more propitious now.
Farewel, dear friend
Ever yrs affly
FJW.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 110–113.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Referring to Frances Power Cobbe’s Italics (1864).
2. The implication being that she saw a portrait of RB, presumably a woodcut made from the Margaret Gillies’s portrait, which was engraved for The New Spirit of the Age (reproduced in vol. 8, facing p. 271; also reproduced in vol. 3, facing p. 164). We have been unable to trace the “collection” mentioned by Miss Wedgwood.
3. Here and below, Miss Wedgwood doubtless has in mind “cimex”; see the preceding letter. Helix is the genus name for a type of mollusk that includes snails.
4. See the second paragraph in the preceding letter.
5. i.e., his famous breakfasts, known for the diversity of the guests.
6. In a review by George Henry Lewes of EBB’s Poems (5th ed., 1862), which appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for April 1862 (pp. 449–451), the full texts of three poems from Sonnets from the Portuguese were included: xviii (“I never gave a lock of hair away”), xxviii (“My letters! all dead paper, .. mute and white!–”), and xxxviii (“First time he kissed me, he but only kissed”). In introducing the sonnets, Lewes wrote: “How instinct with life, and real, not feigned, emotion they are!”
7. Mary Rich.
8. Cf. Tennyson, “The Flower” (Enoch Arden, etc., 1864), line 20.
9. “The Islet” and “Aylmer’s Field,” poems in Enoch Arden.
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