5558. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 226–227.
1, Cumberland Place,
Regent’s Park. N.W.
Friday Feb 24th /65
Thank you very much, dear friend, for writing to tell me about your boy. I wanted very much to hear, & shd have been still more anxious but that I had gone to Mrs Procter to ask about him. I am so greatly relieved to think that he is well again, for it is not always a trifling disorder when a person is so nearly grown-up, still more I am glad for you to be spared the associations of illness. All this year I have been feeling as if there were no other sorrow in the world, but that of a parent for a child, & so one trembles at the faint possibility of an approach to it for any one.– I have been trying to read Keats since your letter, but I find all gods and goddesses unendurable. This is really I suppose not caring for poetry at all, which is form & not substance, & I fear that is my case!– I can just put up with Virgil’s semi-demi belief in the old mythology, but I can’t get below his twilight into our broad day.
Did you ever know Thorwaldsen in Rome? what an unpleasing specimen of an Artist he seems to have been!—no, I think I am extending your years even beyond their long span, see what an impression of wisdom you must have made upon me, & beware how you imperil it!– I have more patience with (or rather I suppose understanding of) the antique in marble, & always had an admiration for him as an artist, which I was sorry to join on to such an objection to him as a man. That was a stupid criticism of his Mercury in the Saturday Review—he is resting his hand on the sword, not drawing it. [1] We have the statuette on our chimney piece so I have a fund of opinion on the subject, which I shd just have liked to make the Saturday writer listen to, it wd have made his moral criticisms much more telling to have appreciated the act of the man. But I think twas writ by a [illegible word] & that sect is not tolerant, though the founder I shd think was—oh no, I remember a dinner here which produced eminently the reverse of tolerance from him.
Farewell dear friend
Ever affly yrs
FJW.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 130–131.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. The Life of Thorvaldsen (1865), collated from the Danish of J.M. Thiele by M.R. Barnard, was reviewed in The Saturday Review of 11 February 1865, pp. 173–174. In discussing the sculptor’s “Mercury about to Kill Argus” (1822), the reviewer writes: “The ‘Mercury’ … failed precisely at the point which always parts genius from commonplace. Mercury is drawing the dagger which is to slay the monster Argus. His own life depends on his being able to do this at once silently and with lightning speed. … But Thorvaldsen has put the hand that draws the dagger into a curve of graceful languor; there is no force or wrench, only stealthiness, in the wrist” (p. 174).
___________________
