5955. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 248–251.
Le Croisic,
Sept. 19. ’67.
Dearest Isa,
I was truly glad to get your letter and to find that the statement (not report) is in all probability an immense mistake and untruth. [1] Observe, I never believed it—that is, that if such a separation had taken place it could be on the ground alleged (—for it would be too absurd for a man’s second wife to quarrel with him because his first had used him ill; such a reason could only be a pretence covering something deeper)—and I at once applied to you for corroboration of it—partly through real concern should it be true,—partly from fear at having ignorantly given pain to a person I much like. But you cannot class with “reports” like that cackle about my marriage, the deliberate statement of as veracious a man as I know that he had been told what I told you by Anthony T. himself: if instead of the goose your informant, you had been assured by Milsand that Sarianna had told him such a piece of news,—why, I should expect a question to myself of the kind I have put to you. I believe there has been some most extraordinary mistake, caused—the devil knows how or why,—and I do not at all care how,—only am very glad it should be so, thinking that our friend has had quite his share of being dragged thro’ the dirt already. I should be delighted also to think, if I possibly could, that the falsity of this report is “good ground for disbelieving in all those old stories,” as you suggest: that seems to me not unlike the lady who would not credit the execution of Maximilian, [2] seeing that John Brown [3] was not married to the queen after all. Better let us “gently raise so weak a fame, Or softly drop so poor a shame.” [4] As to the “principal calumny,”—if that be, as I suppose, the paternity,—why, some part of it should be called “self-calumniation”: a person told me only a few weeks before I left London,—one who never saw the mother nor, I believe, heard a word about the scandal,—that the demeanour of Mrs So & So with the child was improper and unintelligible except as coming from a near relation. What is the amount of evidence people do expect in such cases? The seventy-two eye witnesses which, it is said, are required to prove the adultery of a Cardinal? Let’s drop it all, Dearest Isa: above all, don’t fancy me “hearing news about it from London”—I should never have mentioned it to anybody but you, and only you, under the circumstances I mentioned: wait till we two get to be “bright and aged snakes by the Adriatic,” [5] and then I may begin disbosoming a little. I need not repeat that I depend absolutely on your silence as to all of this,—indeed, the nature of the story shows it could hardly be a deliberate lie,—for the first letter that comes, like those you received, mentioning that the parties are together, disposes of the “separation,” which either was or was not: no goose tells you I am married,—only, that I shall be,—and six years hence, the same goose can cackle “So it was to be,—only, it was broken off!”—(I never saw Miss Ingelow but once, at least four years ago, at a musical morning party, [6] when I said half a dozen words to her: only heard of her, as I told you, by her writing a note to accompany her new book, [7] a day or two before I left London. It is funny people think I am likely to do nothing naughty in the world, neither rob nor kill, seduce nor ravish,—only honestly marry—which I should consider the two last,—and perhaps two first, naughtinesses united, together with the grace of perjury. Enough of it all.
Our time for departure is approaching, and you must write next time to 19. Warwick Crescent. The weather broke up, partially, yesterday: we have had fifty consecutive fine days here,—with rain & sometimes thunder storms in the night only,—all washed away, and brightness restored by the early morning,—delicious weather: I bathed this morning for the fiftieth time,—the water was cold, but I swam for a quarter of an hour,—the shortest swim I have had: last week but one, I swam for very nearly three quarters of an hour, without stopping. I am rather proud of my doings this way, inasmuch [as] it is a new acquisition: I could only swim a few strokes in my youth,—only, took to the sea at Pornic five years ago, and then used to bear only a few minutes’ dipping: now, it seems to suit me better than any other exercise, at any hour and for any time. All that hampers my performance is a nervous spasm of the throat, to which I am,—or rather used to be subject some time ago,—which once or twice came on me while swimming, and was dangerous enough there: but, this year, there has been no return of it. I dearly like this wild place: Guerande, where I was two days ago, is delightful—and a wilder place still, Piriac, where we all went, for the sake of the coast and caves. There was a great enterprise begun there and abandoned fourteen years ago,—the working a tin and silver mine: an English company built houses, sank wells, brought machinery, spent “trois millions”, then abandoned everything: there lie the boilers, pumps &c. exposed like rocks and sand. An old fellow, who had been to England, and was always in the employment of the head man, Capt Peters, [8] (if he pronounced aright) pointed to one & another “That, now, is still worth 25.000 fcs—and that as much.” He said all the money had been wasted in unnecessary expence,—house-building &c—and that when the mines began to be worked, and give good metal,—in rushed the sea,—their funds were at an end,—there was no more to be done but go and leave all this ruin, “these fourteen years now”! Depend on it, the imaginative men are not exclusively the poets and painters, as Balzac knew well enough.
And you too will return to Florence, I suppose. I am particularly glad you have got the right sense of the Bagni: those villages,—the hill-roads through the woods,—how I remember them. And the Lima, where I used to bathe, or duck rather. Is old Mrs Stisted still alive and stationed there? It can’t well be, yet I have never heard of her death. I think you said the place was little changed. I was there three times. α. β. γ. δ. ε. ζ. ι. There! Those letters indicate seven distinct issues to which I came with Ba, in our profoundly different estimates of thing and person: I go over them one by one, and must deliberately inevitably say, on each of these points I was, am proved to be, right and she wrong. [9] And I am glad I maintained the truth on each of these points, did not say, “what matters whether they be true or no?—Let us only care to love each other.” If I could ever have such things out of my thoughts, it would not be to-day—the day, twenty years ago, that we left England to-gether. [10] If I ever seem too authoritative or disputative to you, dearest Isa, you must remember this, and that only to those I love very much do I feel at all inclined to lay down what I think to be the law, and speak the truth,—but no good comes of anything else, in the long run,—while, as for seeing, the truth, it seems to me such angelic natures don’t—and such devilish ones do: it is no sign of the highest nature: on the contrary, I do believe the very highness blinds, and the lowness helps to see.
Yes, I assuredly remember “the fiery earwig”—it was an expression pointed out by Leigh Hunt, from the “Tales of the Fairies”—some fairy-king went to war “mounted on a fiery earwig,” [11] —my little spirited horse got the name that way. So you are getting on with another “novel,” [12] —that’s right: if I were at your ear’s reach, would not I be a “fiery earwig,” and make you show your horsemanship. I like your saying of Mrs T. “you know she has written another novel”: [13] I do not, I assure you: as for “All the Year Round,” I never have seen the outside of it, that I remember, since my stay in England.
Good bye, dearest Isa: I shall go back presently to bother enough,—I predict,—and your letter will be pleasant to look forward to,—like the lighthouse-spark here, over the sea of dark evenings. Sarianna & Pen are quite well, & send their best love. Pen & Willy swim & shoot & enjoy themselves. Mrs Bracken & Miss Smith are always here, and enjoy the place. Good bye,—see my long letter, equal to any three of yours! God bless you ever yours affectionately
Robert Browning.
Publication: DI, pp. 279–284.
Manuscript: British Library.
1. Concerning the T.A. Trollopes (see letter 5951).
2. Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph (1832–67), younger brother of the Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph, was made Emperor of Mexico in 1864, largely through the machinations of Napoleon III and wealthy Mexican reactionaries. In May 1867, Maximilian was overthrown, subsequently tried by court martial, convicted of rebellion (among other charges) on 14 June 1867, and five days later executed by firing squad.
3. John Brown (1826–83), Scottish servant of Queen Victoria, who, after Prince Albert’s death in 1861, became indispensable to her. In 1865 she named him her “personal servant for out of doors” (ODNB). Rumors of an intimate relationship or even marriage between the two were widespread between 1865 and 1871 (see ODNB).
4. Cf. EBB, “‘Died … ’,” (Last Poems, 1862), lines 39–40: “Then slowly lift so frail a fame, / Or softly drop so poor a shame.”
5. Cf. Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna (1852), I, 2, 425 (see letter 5044, note 7).
6. According to one source, “the first time Jean [Ingelow] met Robert Browning was at a musical party at Virginia Gabriel’s. The acquaintance thus begun never ripened into an intimacy, though Jean was a great admirer of his genius” (Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow and Her Early Friends, 1901, pp. 56–57).
8. The Port Laurie Mines, Piriac, were managed by Matthias Daniel Jenkins (1821–69), of Madron, Cornwall, from 1850 to 1853.
9. The previous editor, Edward C. McAleer, suggests that “the seven issues with EBB might include (1) spiritualism, (2) Napoleon III, (3) Mrs. Eckley, (4) Mrs. Trollope, (5) the method of raising Pen, (6) the subscription for Mrs. Jameson’s sisters, and (7) their own marriage, which EBB at first opposed.” “Mrs. Trollope” refers to T.A. and Anthony Trollope’s mother, Frances Trollope (née Milton, 1779–1863).
10. A week after their marriage, the Brownings left England for Italy on 19 September 1846, twenty-one years before.
11. Cf. Leigh Hunt, Wit and Humor, Selected from the English Poets (1846), p. 24: “Drayton, in his Nymphidia, or Court of Faery, has an amusing description of a rider, who turns and winds a fiery ‘earwig.’”
12. Isa Blagden’s next published novel was The Crown of a Life (1869).
13. Mabel’s Progress (3 vols., 1867) by Frances Eleanor Trollope was serialized in Charles Dickens’s weekly All the Year Round from April to November 1867, after which it was issued in book form by Chapman and Hall, who also published her first novel, Aunt Margaret’s Trouble (1866).
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