The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning

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      See now, how, of that 'Friendship' you offer me (and here Juliet's word rises to my lips)—I feel sure once and for ever. I have got already, I see, into this little pet-handwriting of mine (not anyone else's) which scratches on as if theatrical copyists (ah me!) and Bradbury and Evans' Reader were not! But you shall get something better than this nonsense one day, if you will have patience with me—hardly better, though, because this does me real good, gives real relief, to write. After all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me, and that stops me. Spring is to come, however!

      If you hate writing to me as I hate writing to nearly everybody, I pray you never write—if you do, as you say, care for anything I have done. I will simply assure you, that meaning to begin work in deep earnest, begin without affectation, God knows,—I do not know what will help me more than hearing from you,—and therefore, if you do not so very much hate it, I know I shall hear from you—and very little more about your 'tiring me.'

      Ever yours faithfully,

      Robert Browning.

      E.B.B. to R.B.

      50 Walpole Street: Feb. 3, 1845.

       [Transcriber's Note: So in original. Should be "Wimpole Street."]

      Why how could I hate to write to you, dear Mr. Browning? Could you believe in such a thing? If nobody likes writing to everybody (except such professional letter writers as you and I are not), yet everybody likes writing to somebody, and it would be strange and contradictory if I were not always delighted both to hear from you and to write to you, this talking upon paper being as good a social pleasure as another, when our means are somewhat straitened. As for me, I have done most of my talking by post of late years—as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls. Not that I write to many in the way of regular correspondence, as our friend Mr. Horne predicates of me in his romances (which is mere romancing!), but that there are a few who will write and be written to by me without a sense of injury. Dear Miss Mitford, for instance. You do not know her, I think, personally, although she was the first to tell me (when I was very ill and insensible to all the glories of the world except poetry), of the grand scene in 'Pippa Passes.' She has filled a large drawer in this room with delightful letters, heart-warm and soul-warm, ... driftings of nature (if sunshine could drift like snow), and which, if they should ever fall the way of all writing, into print, would assume the folio shape as a matter of course, and take rank on the lowest shelf of libraries, with Benedictine editions of the Fathers, κ.τ.λ. I write this to you to show how I can have pleasure in letters, and never think them too long, nor too frequent, nor too illegible from being written in little 'pet hands.' I can read any MS. except the writing on the pyramids. And if you will only promise to treat me en bon camarade, without reference to the conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen,' taking no thought for your sentences (nor for mine), nor for your blots (nor for mine), nor for your blunt speaking (nor for mine), nor for your badd speling (nor for mine), and if you agree to send me a blotted thought whenever you are in the mind for it, and with as little ceremony and less legibility than you would think it necessary to employ towards your printer—why, then, I am ready to sign and seal the contract, and to rejoice in being 'articled' as your correspondent. Only don't let us have any constraint, any ceremony! Don't be civil to me when you feel rude,—nor loquacious when you incline to silence,—nor yielding in the manners when you are perverse in the mind. See how out of the world I am! Suffer me to profit by it in almost the only profitable circumstance, and let us rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side. You will find me an honest man on the whole, if rather hasty and prejudging, which is a different thing from prejudice at the worst. And we have great sympathies in common, and I am inclined to look up to you in many things, and to learn as much of everything as you will teach me. On the other hand you must prepare yourself to forbear and to forgive—will you? While I throw off the ceremony, I hold the faster to the kindness.

      Is it true, as you say, that I 'know so "little"' of you? And is it true, as others say, that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature, ... that in the minor sense, man is not made in the image of God? It is not true, to my mind—and therefore it is not true that I know little of you, except in as far as it is true (which I believe) that your greatest works are to come. Need I assure you that I shall always hear with the deepest interest every word you will say to me of what you are doing or about to do? I hear of the 'old room' and the '"Bells" lying about,' with an interest which you may guess at, perhaps. And when you tell me besides, of my poems being there, and of your caring for them so much beyond the tide-mark of my hopes, the pleasure rounds itself into a charm, and prevents its own expression. Overjoyed I am with this cordial sympathy—but it is better, I feel, to try to justify it by future work than to thank you for it now. I think—if I may dare to name myself with you in the poetic relation—that we both have high views of the Art we follow, and stedfast purpose in the pursuit of it, and that we should not, either of us, be likely to be thrown from the course, by the casting of any Atalanta-ball of speedy popularity. But I do not know, I cannot guess, whether you are liable to be pained deeply by hard criticism and cold neglect, such as original writers like yourself are too often exposed to—or whether the love of Art is enough for you, and the exercise of Art the filling joy of your life. Not that praise must not always, of necessity, be delightful to the artist, but that it may be redundant to his content. Do you think so? or not? It appears to me that poets who, like Keats, are highly susceptible to criticism, must be jealous, in their own persons, of the future honour of their works. Because, if a work is worthy, honour must follow it, though the worker should not live to see that following overtaking. Now, is it not enough that the work be honoured—enough I mean, for the worker? And is it not enough to keep down a poet's ordinary wearing anxieties, to think, that if his work be worthy it will have honour, and, if not, that 'Sparta must have nobler sons than he'? I am writing nothing applicable, I see, to anything in question, but when one falls into a favourite train of thought, one indulges oneself in thinking on. I began in thinking and wondering what sort of artistic constitution you had, being determined, as you may observe (with a sarcastic smile at the impertinence), to set about knowing as much as possible of you immediately. Then you spoke of your 'gentle audience' (you began), and I, who know that you have not one but many enthusiastic admirers—the 'fit and few' in the intense meaning—yet not the diffused fame which will come to you presently, wrote on, down the margin of the subject, till I parted from it altogether. But, after all, we are on the proper matter of sympathy. And after all, and after all that has been said and mused upon the 'natural ills,' the anxiety, and wearing out experienced by the true artist,—is not the good immeasurably greater than the evil? Is it not great good, and great joy? For my part, I wonder sometimes—I surprise myself wondering—how without such an object and purpose of life, people find it worth while to live at all. And, for happiness—why, my only idea of happiness, as far as my personal enjoyment is concerned, (but I have been straightened in some respects and in comparison with the majority of livers!) lies deep in poetry and its associations. And then, the escape from pangs of heart and bodily weakness—when you throw off yourself—what you feel to be yourself—into another atmosphere and into other relations where your life may spread its wings out new, and gather on every separate plume a brightness from the sun of the sun! Is it possible that imaginative writers should be so fond of depreciating and lamenting over their own destiny? Possible, certainly—but reasonable, not at all—and grateful, less than anything!

      My faults, my faults—Shall I help you? Ah—you see them too well, I fear. And do you know that I also have something of your feeling about 'being about to begin,' or I should dare to praise you for having it. But in you, it is different—it is, in you, a virtue. When Prometheus had recounted a long list of sorrows to be endured by Io, and declared at last that he was μηδεπω εν προοιμιοις,² poor Io burst out crying. And when the author of 'Paracelsus' and the 'Bells and Pomegranates' says that he СКАЧАТЬ