758. EBB to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 275–276.
Torquay.
Thursday morng. [?21] [May 1840] [1]
It requires some moral courage dear Mr Horne, to send you such a present as this cream: but it is of “Britannia’s Pastorals” [2] & the only fit tribute from Devonshire—& people do like it sometimes in their coffee or tea, or with their fruit– Therefore I pre-forgive your laughing at me–
Gregory enlarges while you gaze– Indeed it is a grand production, & one upon which I congratulate both you & our literature. Oh no!– It was not merely ‘for you’– You know you told me you were working for yourself–
At the same time there is a vacillation of incident & opinion & character—& we want room for our sympathies to stand upright in; Matilda’s madness, [3] exquisite as it is, seems (as well as Gregory’s remorse) to want a [“]parceque” [4] —she being cold as a stone from the beginning & apparently hard enough to receive & rebound a hundred such trifling incidents as Godfrey’s murder– [5] I admit the sudden revi[vi]fication to be fine—but then it wd in my fancy, have been finer, at least more moving,—had you suffered us to look, tho’ by a glance, at some heart of love before. We never guessed at such a thing. She was a cold hearted woman & a very bad wife—until she lost her senses: & we want the ‘parceque’ for the loss–
The returning upon Gregory’s words about ‘wasting himself upon her’, in the madness, is very fine. [6]
The whole of the fourth & fifth acts lies in masses before my admiration,—with short interventions– How sublime is the prayer—that one epithet “the insufficient sea[”] [7] .. ! & how much besides, which I cant write of this morning, is not to be forgotten while day follows day. Your Elizabethan fashion of malleting down your metaphors into the groundwork, produces a diction of extraordinary power– It is concentrated language– Can you read a word? [8]
Most truly yours.
Elizabeth B Barrett–
Address: R H Horne Esqr. / 2– Gray’s Inn Square / Gray’s Inn.
Publication: EBB-RHH, I, 18–19 (in part).
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. Dated by the references to Gregory VII, which EBB had received as a gift earlier in the month (see letter 756).
2. William Browne (1591–1643?), the author of Britannia’s Pastorals (1613–16), was a Devonshire man.
3. Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, loses her mind in act V of Horne’s play, after the murder of her husband, Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon.
4. “Reason.”
5. Matilda’s madness does seem improbable, given her earlier lack of feeling towards her husband, who said he was dying “In the palace of a most unloving wife, / Abetting my arch-foe! Most hated Gregory!” (act V, sc. 1). EBB’s reservations were shared by the reviewer in The Examiner (no. 1686, 24 May 1840, pp. 323–324), who wrote: “The failure of the sketch of Matilda is a necessary part of what we hold to be the failure in the conception of Gregory himself.”
6. In act IV, sc. 4, Gregory says to Matilda “Retire, retire!—I waste myself upon you.” Matilda echoes his words in act V, sc. 1, when she says “He wastes himself upon me!—this the reward / Of sympathies that reached from heaven to hell”; her final lines also reflect them: “Woe and alas! / The sun doth waste himself upon me!”
7. “And to behold / A shadowy portion of Thy Countenance / Reflected o’er the insufficient sea!” (IV, 2, 1–3).
8. Even by EBB’s normal standards, this letter is particularly difficult to read.
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