5909. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 205–207.
19. Warwick Crescent, W.
For the 19th May—but May 22. ’67.
Dearest Isa,—first of all, at this moment there is snow falling in thick flakes mixed with rain: mind that, and be thankful wherever you are. Next, & infinitely better, is that I have just finished your book: [1] I got it a few days ago and delayed writing till I could talk about it. Now, you know I never flattered you in my life,—very far indeed from that!—and moreover am, or was, a little given to expect “better wine from you than is made of grapes” [2] because I know what you ought to give forth under good culture: so you have nothing but pure truth in my assurance,—glad tho’ I feel in making it,—that your book is very far in advance of its predecessors and shows real workmanship and art as well as the natural ability which could not well be wanting from whatever you do. It is a real conception and adequate execution, all soberly and determinedly done. I was much interested, and not cheated of my interest. The characters are all well intended and sufficiently wrought out, and the whole story is worth being told and attended to; I especially like the straight forward march of the whole, undiverted by episodic description, or other matter apart from the purpose. The proof of this is, that I could at no very far-off day read the book again with greater pleasure inasmuch as there would be a light cast from the whole on the earlier parts which, taken as they came, were not so obviously interesting. I think you should at all events begin a story with so much of effectiveness that one shall be inclined to take those little details, not attractive in themselves, on trust—as what it will be worth while to remember: and I did not immediately care about the people, (a good number of them, nearly all your dramatis personæ indeed) to whom you introduce us in rapid succession: but now at the end, I see reason in it all. The character I like best is that of Philip—(artistically like, I mean;) Nora is very attractive, but wants the pinch of common sense to flavour her charms—all her gettings wrong & gettings right come from quite other causes than her own rationality—and I am by no means of your opinion that “beauty is found to supply all wants and compensate for all faults”: it does nothing of the kind,—the most infatuated man would tell you, far more explicitly than you would like to hear, that his passion for the beauty was one thing, and his contempt and even abhorrence of all the absent qualities, quite another. Also, a woman of the calibre of Mrs Lee the elder ought to know her daughter Lydia through and through,—there being none of the maternal love which might render her blind to her crimes—for such you make them, rather than faults: she should be sure such a person was doing wrong and hurting somebody: and Nora, as a simple and innocent person, ought to be disgusted at Lydia—at all events, not “stand” that letter about what Nora “owes her.” Lydia herself is too hateful and unnecessarily wicked, I think—your character of her is better than the facts warrant,—for she don’t do it all, as it seems to me, from “indolence”—but snaps up opportunities of committing crime with extraordinary alacrity. She might have been made only half-aware of her own actions and what their effects would be, or at all events sorry a little for those effects. Then, I should have liked a little less violent means to bring about the object in the story—which is, the making three people know and do justice to each other,—that half-maniac, with the management of him, and the vileness of his wife, are all quite natural enough but need, from their violent character, separate explanations of their own,—another novel, in short, to make them fit into this present one without abruptness. The true artistic objection to violent means to an end is that it is only the next means at hand that can be introduced without preparation—when you bring in bigamies, suicides &c—they want an atmosphere of their own, so to speak, before you bring them harmoniously to bear in the ordinary landscape: they are just as natural,—that is, in nature,—as meetings in the street, & shakings of hands. I don’t at all mean that these are unprepared, unaccounted for,—no,—but that they want the more, that less would have done: by the bye, you make people take them all too coolly: “I have no patience with her!” is not enough for the happy mother of Mrs Meredith to say: and Archibald seems to acquiesce tolerably in having such a—what? of a sister. I think your style immensely improved, tighter, compacter, yet fluid and in the main correct (—with such exceptions as when you talk about a climax culminating &c.) and the descriptions please me much as inelaborate and really apposite. Annina is perfect all through. I don’t think you manage English dialect happily—the bad English is not such as I hear, at least. There, you have my worst about your novel, dearest Isa! I praise it decidedly, and wonder that I have seen so few notices of it in reviews which are well off if they get such subjects often to review: [3] however I only see a few reviews now & then. I advise you to go on, make your incidents as simple as you can, put out your strength in the analysis of character, keeping in mind the immeasurable superiority (to my mind) of French models than English: oh, I know what the clever English find it useful to say!—and I say,—Bosh! I have other things to say however & must end here.
I never had, nor saw, anysuch drawing as you describe: though I, too, have a faint dreamy recollection of your talking about giving it me. In 1861, when we were in Paris, and after till next year, I never saw Mrs Bracken: you called, I believe.—I have enquired of her about it,—she says she never had it—but has seen it, she can’t remember where. She is in Paris, since yesterday only, on a visit to her sister [4] —to join Willy also on a visit there. I am sure my sister never had it—she, also, is in Paris—but will return at the month’s end: I will ask her if she ever heard of it: but beat up your own recollections, and see for yourself. So you go to Lucca, [5] I don’t in the least know—or rather in my fancies I change continually as to how I should feel on seeing old sights again. The general impression of the past is as if it had been pain. I would not live it over again, not one day of it. Yet all that seems my real life,—and before and after, nothing at all: I look back on all my life, when I look there: and life is painful. I always think of this when I read the Odyssey—Homer makes the surviving Greeks, whenever they refer to Troy, just say of it “At Troy, where the Greeks suffered so.” [6] Yet all their life was in that ten years at Troy. “Lucca, where I suffered so.” God bless you, dearest. I always love you–
R Browning.
Cottrell wrote to me that M. de Fauveau had met him and desired him to remind me that he had some old picture-frames of mine, loose, which he should like me to clear away, as he wants the room. I never knew—tho’ it is possible, that he had them “loose”—I thought they were in that case which was lost in his keeping. [7] At all events, when he sent the other things he ought to have sent these, one trouble for all. What am I to do? Do you know of a cellar (I would pay for) where there should be no fresh loss?
Address: Italie, Toscane. / Mademoiselle Blagden, / Villa Isetta, / Alle Due Strade, / Porta Romana, / Florence.
Publication: DI, pp. 264–267.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Nora and Archibald Lee (1867).
2. Cf. Othello, II, 1, 251–252.
4. Margaret Egerton Castle (née Smith, 1822–1912).
5. i.e., Bagni di Lucca.
6. Perhaps one of the passages RB has in mind is The Odyssey, XII, 189–190, which is spoken by the Sirens rather than the Greeks: “For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the Gods” (trans. A.T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock).
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