6072. RB to Blanchard Jerrold
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 331–333.
19. Warwick Crescent,
Upper Westbourne Terrace, W.
June 5. ’68.
Dear Sir, [1]
I would do much when appealed to “in the name of one common friend Mahony”, [2] —how can I make the very nothings I shall be able to tell you,—which yet are all I remember like “characteristic points” in the man whom I knew so little and liked so much,—into something worthy record? [3] I met him first at Sir Emerson Tennent’s, many years ago: we talked and agreed about Rabelais & Erasmus, disagreeing as notably when he undervalued Spenser: I thence-forward continued to meet him about Town, generally in Regent Street,—I never knew where he lived: he used to disappear & return as unexpectedly, and our communication was a Latin word or two of greeting and acknowledgement—my question, “where have you been?”—his answer,—“at Constantinople”—“at Rome”,—a classical good bye, and there an end. One day I began—“I go to Italy.” “We shall probably meet there,” he said: I started a few days after, spent a month on the road, and reached Leghorn: as I was being rowed past the Lazaretto to land, I looked up at the knot of passengers just deposited there by a steamer of longer passage than mine,—Mahony was leaning over the rail: “Heus tu!” [4] and so on. Thus I continued to find and lose him during my years of Italian life. Once he came and found me too indisposed to see him: he changed his whole manner of indifference, and pushed into my bedroom, despite all entreaty, saying “He knew more than any doctor about sore-throat such as I was affected by”: I remember his earnest and affectionate way: he made me drink some compound of strong wine and good things, [5] while the Italian servants declared that “the pretaccio [6] was murdering the Signore”—however the Signore got well at once: to assist convalescence he came six weeks together, without the interval of a day, spending the evenings hilariously: I hear him now in the entrance of the apartment, three rooms off, announcing himself by shouting a song at the top of his voice, with, for his first word, “Boy,—my pipe!–” “A priest!” ejaculated the servants. But he talked wisely, kindly & considerately too[.] I thought he was a man full of sympathy and in want of it, vexed by the knowledge that his reputed Jesuitism put people upon their guard and threw suspicion on his own advances. His love for the two or three who had got at his real nature despite of its fantastic disguises was all the more intense: Thackeray he could never praise enough. At last he came one evening—“Just as I expected, Rossi [7] has been murdered, I shall go to Rome to-night.” He certainly had expected it, for he said a week before,—“the foolish fellow will be stabbed one of these days.” Exactly so our acquaintance continued to the end: of late years, it was only in Paris that we met—in Galignani’s reading-room. I saw him there a month or two before his death,—bade him come into the passage and shake hands with a boy of seventeen whom he knew a baby: [8] he did so, asking kind questions, and ending, in reply to mine, with “I shall very likely spend the remains of an ill-ordered life in Rome,”—laughingly: but the next I heard was of his death, as I say. What can you make out of such poor points as these? They help me however,—of course with many other subsidiary touches too faint for reproduction,—to confirm my instinctive guess at, and subsequent certainty of the goodness of Mahony’s heart: his fine scholarship and rare faculty were plain to every body.
I am, Dear Sir,
Yours very faithfully
Robert Browning.
Blanchard Jerrold Esq.
Publication: The Final Reliques of Father Prout, ed. Blanchard Jerrold (London, 1876), pp. 61–64.
Manuscript: Yale University.
1. William Blanchard Jerrold (1826–84), journalist and playwright, was the eldest son of Douglas William Jerrold (1803–57) and his wife, Mary Ann (née Swann, 1804–59). In 1857 he succeeded his father as editor of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper.
2. Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804–66), (pseud. Father Prout); see letter 2678, note 16.
3. Jerrold was in the early stages of preparing The Final Reliques of Father Prout (1876), in which RB’s letter appeared in full.
4. “Ho thou!”
5. “Two yokes of eggs in port wine”; see letter 2748.
6. “Damn priest.”
7. Count Pellegrino Rossi (1787–1848); see letter 2751, note 22.
8. i.e., Pen. He and RB were in Paris from 31 March to 14 April 1866. Mahony died a little over a month later on 18 May “in the rue des Moulins of bronchitis and diabetes” (ODNB).
___________________
