5728. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 64–67.
[London]
March 19. ’66.
Dearest Isa,
First—I am really happy to hear you are recovered, tho’ “weak and thin,”—poor dear: those harms can be remedied. I know how sea-air restores you too: in my own case, it seems to wipe out all my ailments and set the brain to-rights, I come back aged sixteen—“save for these bonds.” [1] So, go and do likewise. [2] I am just now getting very tired of the early season, all but at end now, happily: and long to go to Paris, as I hope to do next Saturday week or thereabout: the weather is still vile here, and unholiday like, as is the way when Easter is so early. I should like to fancy you at the Villa Moutier [3] again: I once walked thence with Ba to Casa Guidi—I think the longest walk I ever knew her take: it was at the very height of her health, so far as she ever recovered it: but we returned for the first time to England, [4] and there was fatigue, and, afterward, other troubles began, and she never touched that height again. Well, que voulez-vous? [5] Here was her child entering his eighteenth year this month: I hope he does well: I want a good deal, for him—& her,—but I think there’s something. In one year he may go to Balliol—perhaps I shall keep him till he is nineteen, however. He is very strong and healthy—only, he won’t be as tall as I expected: he will be about my size, [6] and that will “do” in this world. His whole soul is concentrated on the approaching Oxford & Cambridge Boat-race, [7] —which I have no objection to. I shall not live again at Florence, I think—the changes seem too violent here—you get used to them little by little, but if I went and found walls levelled, squares where the lanes used to be, and so forth, I could not bear it. [8] As for growing old here, unless there be plain good in it—for Pen,—no! Now, about your letter: Chapman’s carelessness is quite natural in that matter: I have suffered nearly as much as I can from his peculiarities: what disarmed me the other day was the death of his pretty, cheerful, good young wife, [9] —she lost a child a few weeks before, [10] her health was always consumptive, and she died—I suppose of consumption—a fortnight ago: I expected he would be heartbroken—but last wednesday, going to a dinner given by the Proprietors of the Fortnightly Review to which I was invited for some inscrutable reason,—there was the man “under his thunder-split tree, playing pans’ pipes.” [11] He said—“You wonder to see me here” (answering my look, no doubt) “but I thought there was no use in moping at home.” Well, it’s either lucky or unlucky for him: mind, there is no doubt that he was devoted to her: he told me that “had her death happened by itself, he should have felt it terribly: but the death of his child seemed to prepare him for it”—another mystery. He is honest, but a scatter brain creature,—forgets, makes excuses, and worse—but the worst he is not, and you will certainly get your money tho’ you have been most shamefully kept out of it [12] —and might have suffered inconveniences enough. I don’t hear from the Storys, but shall write one day—not in the least fearing that they will let me go, whether I write or not,—but because, of my own selfish liking of what’s old. As for Wilde, that’s only gossip, I think—Mrs S [13] told me once how vexed the report had made them,—so absurd &c,—still it may happen, after all. Mrs Bracken and Willy are back again: Willy’s destination is the Editorship or whatever the office is, in the Liverpool Mercury: [14] he is much wanting to go to Oxford with Pen, and I should like it much,—not to Balliol, of course, but an easier college: the two boys really have a deep & true friendship for each other: but Willy knows exactly nothing of Latin,—how should he?,—and not the Greek Alphabet: he is to have a private tutor—indeed he has got one—and means to “cram”, he says: he is quite clever enough to catch up lost time, if he can get the money, and have the time.
Cottrell sent me a photograph of the monument,—a bad one, taken by young Powers, [15] to sell as fast as possible: I am to have another: this was sent that I might approve of Powers’ & Cottrell’s opinion that the erection ought to be raised: I went about it to Leighton, who asked pertinently enough “If anybody proposed to stretch you out a verse you had written?–” He says, the proportions are so, and should not be otherwise: it must be seen by itself,—the object was not to rise above the surrounding erections,—one must isolate it in one’s mind. So I hope it may be let alone. I am thankful that there is no ground for Lady Eastlake’s nonsensical fears or pretences of them, [16] —and that the ground will be preserved. Here they come for my letter– God bless you—I am ashamed of its stupidity.
To amuse you—a fancy comes into my head to send my memorandum of engagements for the last two months– D. dinner, E. Eg party: those marked S. have been attended to. Put it in the fire. [17]
Publication: DI, pp. 231–234.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Cf. Acts 26:29.
2. Cf. Luke 10:37.
3. Isa leased Villa Moutier, located near the Poggio Imperiale, from about May to November 1850 and later from April 1854 to June 1855.
4. During the summer of 1851.
5. “What do you wish?”
6. No exact measure of RB’s height is known. Elizabeth Kinney considered him “below the medium height” (see vol. 21, p. 361). Various sources give 5ft. 5in. as the average height of an Englishman in the nineteenth century. Walter Richard Cassels also thought RB was “rather under than over the middle height” (see SD1636 in vol. 18).
7. The annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race was held on 24 March and won for the sixth time in a row by Oxford (see The Times, 26 March 1866, p. 9). For the setting of the race and the number of participants, see letter 5351, note 2.
10. Arthur Trollope Chapman died on 7 January 1866. He was baptised on 26 April 1865.
11. Cf. Aurora Leigh (4th ed., 1859), 7, 261–264:
… The lightning strikes a man,
And when we think to find him dead and charred ..
Why, there he is on a sudden, playing pipes
Beneath the splintered elm tree …
12. RB refers to royalties Miss Blagden expected from The Cost of a Secret (see letter 5146, note 2). Frederic Chapman explains in letters 5778 and 5779 that Bradbury and Evans were responsible for the royalties. However, see letter 6008, in which RB calls Chapman’s claim that Bradbury and Evans owed her the money an “impudent absurdity.”
13. Emelyn Story; we are unable to clarify “the report” concerning Hamilton Wild.
14. The Liverpool Mercury was partly owned by Willie Bracken’s aunt Annie Egerton Smith (see letter 5036, note 2).
15. Nicholas Longworth Powers (1835–1904), eldest child of American sculptor Hiram Powers (1805–73) and his wife, Elizabeth (née Gibson, 1813–94). One of Powers’s photographs of the monument is reproduced facing p. 177.
16. In regard to the closing of the Protestant Cemetery in Florence (see letter 5689).
17. The memorandum is no longer with the letter and has not surfaced.
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