5846. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 152–154.
[London]
[19 January 1867] [1]
<***> And now as to Mrs Eckley and her doings: I should be surprized indeed if she did any otherwise than as you describe: not only I knew she would make a show of those letters, and said so,—but Ba was the first to say so, when she found her out—at last. I used to reply (for she mentioned her belief more than once)—“of course she will parade them, and you must make up your mind to it: the very uselessness which yourself feel of making any appeal to her, shows what you now understand her to be—the love, the honesty you were once confident in the existence of,—yourself laugh now at the notion of finding a trace of these to appeal to. It is a punishment you must bear—that of having her name associated with yours: you should have believed me so far at least as to use your own faculties and so get to believe for yourself.” So I say still,—with hardly additional pain. When Mrs Eckley found herself discovered, she never made an effort to recover her place in Ba’s liking—not to say love, still less esteem: she just asked leave to come and see her sometimes,—by way of hiding the separation from people. Ba wrote her one letter, which I read, [2] —and which, depend on it, don’t figure in the book as “finis”—and then, for the next year and a half, not a word: for “Where’s Agnes?” [3] —disguised in the circumstances for my sake—who always said, “For the husband’s sake,—and because you really deserve some punishment in the matter, don’t make an explosion.” You know, poor Eckley & his wife lived six months in the same street with us in Rome, that last winter, and, so far as I remember, never called once, pretending she was devoting herself to sculpture. Well, when she called on me in London, from your house opposite, [4] bathed in tears and so on,—I could not, for the life of me, feel angry—any more than the poor fellow, in “Madame Bovary,” with the man whom, after his wife’s suicide, he finds, by a bundle of love-letters, had seduced his wife. [5] I rather thought—“After all, you thought she was worth damning your soul for, and I agree with you!” I gave her some photographs accordingly. Of course there is no possible way of preventing her doing as she likes with her own,—as the letters are. She cannot print them (in England at least)—and if she does so in America, she will have to explain why they end abruptly, and what she won’t explain, letters of Ba, to other people, will—to say nothing of what I may contribute. Of course the letters are nothing but what it is natural that Ba should feel for “Agnes” in her supposed perfection of purity. As Landor wrote—“Why repine? And not rather consider that God created his best and noblest to be left at the mercy of a serpent.” [6] If I ever see her again, “a quattr’ occhi,” [7] what a strange talk we will have, I & that speckly Eckley! Where is her husband, do you know? [8]
I am glad Hatty is going to have so great a chance; she is an intrepid creature to accept it. [9] Six and thirty figures here, four there, three everywhere,—all on the strength of Puck and Zenobia and the Faun, [10] best of all.
We are very well: Pen has been skating. My sister is quite well, and sends her love to you,—so does Pen. I daresay you meet many people I know, and some few I care about. Good bye, dearest Isa,—look at the length of this letter, and do your own part when you write next: do you at all expect to come to England this year?
Ever affectionately yours
Robert Browning.
Publication: DI, pp. 294–296 (as [19 March 1868]).
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Year and month based on RB’s reference to Pen’s skating. In letter 5850 RB writes that “Pen has skated diligently while skating-time was.” And Sarianna writes to Milsand about going “to see the skating on the Serpentine” (see SD2866). The 19th of the month was RB’s day to write Isa Blagden (see letter 5089, note 1).
2. See vol. 24, pp. 248–249.
3. A veiled portrait of Sophia Eckley and her fall from grace, written in the autumn of 1859, published in Last Poems (1862).
4. When RB was living at 1 Chichester Road, Isa Blagden was lodging opposite at 1 Montpelier Villas from mid-October until late December 1861.
5. In the last chapter of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). After the death of the title character, her husband, Charles Bovary, finds the love letters from Rodolphe Boulanger, meets him later, and tells him: “I don’t blame you.”
6. Cf. Walter Savage Landor, “Southey and Porson,” Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, Vol. 1 (1824), p. 47, in which Southey speaks of Wordsworth and the critic Francis Jeffrey: “Wordsworth is the prey of Jeffrey. Why repine? and not rather amuse ourselves with allegories, and recollect that God in the creation left his noblest creature at the mercy of a serpent.”
7. “Face to face.”
8. Mrs. Eckley accused her husband, David Eckley, of infidelity in 1863, and they separated soon afterwards. Little is known of his whereabouts from that time until he moved to Buffalo, New York, in 1876.
9. At this time it was assumed that Harriet Hosmer would be awarded the commission for a monument to Abraham Lincoln (known as the Freedmen's monument), which was proposed to be placed on the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. She had sent a plaster model of her design to Boston, where it was on display to the public. In the end, however, a different proposal, a Lincoln monument in Springfield, Illinois, took precedent, and in 1868 a contest was held for the best design, in which Miss Hosmer and many others competed but lost to the American sculptor Larkin Mead (1835–1910). See Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer: American Sculptor, 1830–1908 (Columbia, Missouri, 1991, pp. 245–246, 253, and 290).
10. “The Sleeping Faun” (1865). For “Puck” (1855), see letter 4291, note 14. “Zenobia in Chains” was completed in 1859.
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