5564. RB to Julia Wedgwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 231–233.
[London]
[ca. 3 March 1865] [1]
My dear friend, this comes to me as no surprise: I thought from the beginning it was too good to last, and felt as one does in a garden one has entered by an open door,—people fancy you mean to steal flowers. I consider you are altogether right in deciding so—& certainly you are right in being sure that I understand you. I shall talk not another word about it: I “withdraw”—beyond my visits—exactly as much of my appreciation of you—as, having to go to the house no more, I withdraw my knowledge of in what part of London it is situated, and whether it look out on trees or a brick wall. What I knew, I know & shall always know, and after this world, I hope, when completion ought to be. As to the past, it was only incomplete thro’ my wife’s absence: she never had any woman-friend so entirely fit for her as you would have been,—I have told you so sometimes.
I like clearly-defined situations & relations, and by temper am led to call for them abruptly and at any price: consequently I bring myself to check this temper, and be moderate in the courses it would induce. I left you always to decide (as only yourself could) on what length into the garden I might go: and I still leave it you. But I would remark—as common sense must, I think—that to snap our outward intercourse off short & sharp will hardly cure the evil, whatever it be: two persons who suddenly unclasp arms and start off in opposite directions look terribly intimate. But you know all the circumstances.
I shall no more say or hear you say “goodbye” than I said anything of the kind because I kept away when measles were to be apprehended: “not a bit apprehended,” said the learned & laughed,—but I minded worthy folks’ fears: here is a fear of another juvenile ailment, and I may have to keep away long, longer & longest: what then? The old clothes will end in being burned, and then we will shake hands again.
Therefore, no goodbye! But, out of sight or in it, there will never come a change to my impression of you: and it is with no particular emphasis that I bid God bless you, my dearest friend.
Of course I will send you the poem, [2] when it is done; that can hardly be till next year, however hard I work—& I do work unintermittingly. I shall also send the new edition of my old things [3] —only not, perhaps, the very week or fortnight in which it is published—this, for a reason not worth explaining,—a printer’s reason; your copy will be a little the better.
Ever yours affectionately
Robert Browning.
Come, we will leave off and go about the week-day work with a laugh, which yet shall be to the purpose. I had a letter from America two days ago,—on opening which, a photograph dropped out. [4] “What can it be?” said I: a youngish man, dressed strangely in a long cloak or chlamys, and bare sandalled feet—yet with a mediaeval juste-au-corps [5] & the other habiliments—sits alone in a bare room, on a bare bench projecting from a bare wall, save where two masks, tragic and comic, hang in a corner: himself is contemplating a third mask in his hand: he is profoundly melancholy, close shaven, with close-clipped hair, black above a vast brow and lanthorn jaws,—a face like Tasso’s,—the mould of his face, which I have seen in the room where he died. Could this be Tasso? Or Iago meditating in a madhouse? Or what was the really striking and suggestive little thing? Oh ye correct comprehenders of human nature,—whether in the great American nation, of which this is a product, or in our own London,—this was—Robert Browning writing his “Dramatis Personæ”, and intended to figure as “frontispiece to that performance but that it was not ready in time!”
So, why wonder if he wear cap & plume, & have guitar, ribbon & all, in the conception of “other people”?
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 135–137.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. This letter is doubtless a response to letter 5563. Additionally, RB’s remarks in the fifth paragraph concerning “the new edition” (see note 3 below) imply that he wrote this letter sometime before 25 March 1865.
2. The Ring and the Book (1868–69).
3. Poetical Works (4th ed., 3 vols., 1865) was published by Chapman and Hall on 25 March 1865.
4. A photograph of a drawing by John La Farge (1835–1910), probably enclosed in a letter from James Thomas Fields, which has not surfaced. Underneath the photograph, which is mounted on a card, RB has written: “Imaginary & symbolical portrait of the writer of ‘Men & Women’—prefixed to an American edition.” The photograph with RB’s notation sold as lot 512 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, G143). It was later tipped in opposite the title-page in RB’s copy of Dramatis Personæ (see Reconstruction, A420).
5. “Jerkin.”
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