762. EBB to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 279–281.
Torquay
June 1, 1840
My dear Mr Horne,
I have doubted about writing altho’ at last I do write—by a venture—rather than leave myself heavily beneath your ban in relation to Matilda. [1] I doubted about writing because the letter after the one ‘sub tempore fugi’ [2] seemed to throw a shadow in another way, benighting me as to where you were. The [illegible word] of York for a postmark & a ship for a seal seemed to make a total of New York. You trampled out your own footsteps either by accident or sagacity so I doubted.
Under the circumstances, however, a little note may be cast upon the waters mutis piscatus [3] perhaps.
No question about Matilda, of course, after your adjuration. Only forgive me if I took a mistaken view, as I must have done, in relation to her in it, if I still fancy there is something too twofold about her [4] & not the character—[illegible word] be more effective if more clearly developed. He [illegible word] who considers her cold & calm self possession through the former scenes or self vindicated by her very first words, “Let us be calm & wait” [5] —is pardonable perhaps for starting & looking round for the major “parceque” [6] when she goes mad just like a common woman. [7] You know she says herself that her sympathies had reached from Heaven to hell before, [8] without asking any questions. Well!—but there was said quite enough to make her mad;—& I was wrong. Only there is something abrupt as also in Gregory’s remorse “And where are now my hopes?” [9] It seems transition time with every body. But you who work by grand masses are the very person to produce this sort of hard outline occasionally tho’ you contrasted adjacencies—and we should be ungrateful people to complain of them. However ‘foreheads’ may ache with gazing on your foot—“puzzling its breadth & purpose.” [10] The critic in the examiner made a worse mistake than I (which is a comfort) in—puzzling about Gregory himself whose delineation is to my mind wonderfully fine and perfect in all its parts—the delineation of that sort of intellect which is best expressed by the epithet physical. [11] There are such in the world. Nothing subtle or dreamy about it—nothing fitted to |side| the angels or the saints going straight to its ends & means with a ferocious & bestial energy. While its very end[s] are physical [12] after their kind—visible tangible power[—]Gregory is self contradictory in nothing at all. His is the [illegible transcription] of the physical intellect– The [illegible word] is ethereal & knew absolutely nothing of Christ’s sublime, the sublime of Love—& of evil testifying to it—the Father of Spirits crowning it. His end is visible, tangible power even in his praying that is the ‘end’. Thou givest us prayer to reach the stars and the thrones of the remote. Oh—I am sure you never meant to admit the ideal of Christianity into Gregory and are absolutely guiltless of inconsistency in regard to him.
Napoleon interested me very much. [13] What I estimated was that we are not suffered in this as in some other animated narratives to be separated from our higher feelings without our consciousness. I like the tone of solemn thought distinguishable through it from the cannonading—the half sarcasm dropped as unaware among the pseudo glories which are the subjects of description. “The dead say nothing.” [14] There are fine things too—more than I can count particularly with the book out of [15] sight. The Duc d’Enghien’s death has haunted me—with the concluding words on human power—that “effluence of mortality already beginning to decay”. [16] The book’s fault is its inequality of style—in fact that you did’nt write it all [17] —and I am consistent enough not to complain of that. Did you ever see Mr Landor’s epigram upon Napoleon? He was so kind as to give it to me—the only evening I ever spent in his company—& here it is.
Τις ποτε, Ναπολεον, τα σα πρωτα και ὑστατα
Εργα; Χρονος τεκνων ἁιματι γραψει τερπομενος. [18]
to which be now added another tragic person!
Who—or rather to put the question I was going to ask, less personally & directly—what is the “impertinent book”– So you say dear Mr Horne, in your character of Oates, [19] that I shall be “so well”– Well, perhaps I may. That is considered possible—, altho’ my actual condition is precarious—, & when a vessel has broken upon the chest, which was my case two years ago, there is always danger of recurrence,—particularly where the effects linger– Therefore it is wise to temper quite a sufficient eagerness to recover, with a willingness to go—and this is rendered the easier for me from the circumstance of there being objects of my love on each side the grave.
Most truly yours
E B Barrett.
Address: R H Horne Esqr / 2: Gray’s Inn Square / Gray’s Inn / London.
Publication: EBB-RHH, II, 26–28 (in part).
Source: Transcript and partial manuscript at Yale University.
1. One of the major characters in Gregory VII.
2. “At the time.”
3. “Fishing in still waters.”
4. For EBB’s earlier comments, see letter 758.
5. On her first entrance, in act I, sc. 2, she says “We must be calm, and wait.”
6. “Reason.”
7. At the conclusion of the play, after the murder of her husband.
9. Act V, sc. 2, spoken after the murder of Matilda’s husband.
10. Gregory VII, act IV, sc. 3 (p. 65).
11. The review in The Examiner (no. 1686, 24 May 1840, pp. 323–324) included this passage: “For what is Mr Horne’s purpose in the delineation of Gregory? It is not to give us the ordinary figure of a great and unscrupulous man of action, but to express that thing in his person before which action commonly quails and the conventional strengths of the world fall prostrate. … The lesson of Gregory’s life, howsoever written, should be the triumph of the spiritual nature”; further comments question Horne’s characterization. The reviewer in The Monthly Chronicle (July 1840, pp. 17–32) supported EBB’s view: “Gregory, as here delineated, is eminently a man of action, with strong physical capabilities, indomitable energy, unquenchable pride and self-reliance.”
12. The transcript offers “material” as a possible alternative reading.
13. The History of Napoleon.
14. Cf. “Dead men tell no tales” (Dryden, The Spanish Friar; or, The Double Discovery, act IV, sc. 1).
15. Up to this point, we reproduce the transcript made by Catharine Tinker Patterson; from here on, we transcribe the two pages remaining of EBB’s manuscript, which, together with the envelope, accompany Mrs. Patterson’s transcript.
16. Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon Condé, Duc d’Enghien (1772–1804) fled from France after the fall of the Bastille in 1789. He worked for the restoration of the monarchy, receiving a pension from the English, and took part in the Duke of Brunswick’s unsuccessful invasion of France in 1792. He was suspected of complicity in the Cadoudal-Pichegru conspiracy to oust Napoleon and place Louis XVIII on the throne, and was arrested on 15 March 1804 on the orders of Napoleon, then First Consul. When it proved impossible to link him with the plot, he was charged instead with bearing arms against France in the late war. A speedy military trial found him guilty, his request for an interview with Napoleon was refused, and he was shot in the moat of the castle of Vincennes. Horne dealt with this incident in chapter XXIII of his book.
17. Horne had a collaborator, Mary Gillies.
18. “Who then, Napoleon, writes about your earliest and your latest deeds? Time, delighting, writes them with the blood of children.” Horne made a paraphrastic translation of this epigram, as follows: “Napoleon! thy deeds beyond compeers, / Who shall write, thrillingly?— / The Father of Years! / And—with the blood of children—willingly” (EBB-RHH, II, 28). Landor’s original manuscript, given to EBB on 27 May 1836, is listed as L147 in Reconstruction.
19. Titus Oates (1649–1705) was the perjurer who fabricated the “Popish Plot,” alleging that Catholics were conspiring to assassinate Charles II and put the Duke of York on the throne.
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