The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume Ii Part 40

28 Via del Tritone, Rome: December 29 [1859].

It was pleasant to have news of you, dearest friends, and to know of your being comfortably established at Pau this cold winter, as it seems to be in the north. We came here, flying from the Florence tramontana, at the very close of November, on the Perugia road, after having been weather-bound at Casa Guidi till we almost gave up our Roman plan. Most happily the cold spared us during our six days' journey, which was very pleasant. I like travelling by vetturino. The fatigue is small, and if you take a supply of books with you the time does not hang fire. We had some old Balzacs, which came new (he is one of our G.o.ds--heathen, you will say) and we had, besides, Charles Reade's 'Love me Little, Love me Long,' which is full of ability. Then Peni had his pony as a source of interest. The pony was fastened to the vettura horses, and came into Rome, not merely fresh, but fat. And we have fallen into pleasant places by way of lodgings here, our friends having prepared a list to choose from, so that I had only to drop out of the hotel into bright sunny rooms, which do not cost too much on account of the comparative desertion of this holy city this year. We arrived on December 3, and here it is nearly January 1--almost a month. The older one grows the faster time pa.s.ses. Do you observe that? You catch the wind of the wheels in your face, it seems, as you get nearer the end. I observe it strongly.

Let me say of myself first that I am particularly well, and feel much more sure and steady than since my illness. How are you both? I do hope and trust you can give me good news of yourselves. Do you read aloud to one another or each alone? Robert and I do the last always. May G.o.d bless you both in health of body and soul, and every source of happiness for the coming and other years! I wish and pray it out of my heart....

And you are studying music? I honour you for it. Do tell me, dearest Mrs. Martin, did you know nothing of music before, and have you taken up the piano? I hold a peculiar heresy as to the use hereafter of what we learn here. When there is no longer any growth in me, I desire to die--for one. And at present I by no means desire to die.

So you and others upbraid me with having put myself out of my 'natural place.' What _is_ one's natural place, I wonder? For the Chinese it is the inner side of the wall. For the red man it is the forest. The natural place of everybody, I believe, is within the crust of all manner of prejudices, social, religious, literary. That is as men conceive of 'natural places.' But, in the highest sense, I ask you, how _can_ a man or a woman leave his or her natural place. Wherever G.o.d's universe is round, and G.o.d's law above, there is a natural place. Circ.u.mstances, the force of natural things, have brought me here and kept me; it is my natural place. And, intellectually speaking, having grown to a certain point by help of certain opportunities, my way of regarding the world is also natural to me, my opinions are the natural deductions of my mind.

Isn't it so? Still I do beg to say both to you and to others accusing that Italy is not my 'adopted country.' I love Italy, but I love France, too, and certainly I love England. Because I have broken through what seems to me the English 'Little Pedlingtonism,' am I to be supposed to take up an Italian 'Little Pedlingtonism'? No, indeed. I love truth and justice, or I try to love truth and justice, more than any Plato's or Shakespeare's country.[73] I certainly do not love the egotism of England, nor wish to love it. I cla.s.s England among the most immoral nations in respect to her foreign politics. And her 'National Defence'

cry fills me with disgust. But this by no means proves that I have adopted another country--no, indeed! In fact, patriotism in the narrow sense is a virtue which will wear out, sooner or later, everywhere. Jew and Greek must drop their antagonisms; and if Christianity is ever to develop it will not respect frontiers.

As to Italy, though I nearly broke my heart over her last summer, and love the Italians deeply, I should feel pa.s.sionately any similar crisis anywhere. You cannot judge the people or the question out of the 'Times'

newspaper, whose sole policy is, it seems to me, to get up a war between France and England, though the world should perish in the struggle. The amount of fierce untruth uttered in that paper, and sworn to by the 'Sat.u.r.day Review,' makes the moral sense curdle within one. You do not _know_ this as we do, and you therefore set it down as matter of Continental prejudice on my part. Well, time will prove. As to Italy, I have to put on the rein to prevent myself from hoping into the ideal again. I am on my guard against another fall from that chariot of the sun. But things look magnicently, and if I could tell you certain facts (which I can't) you would admit it. Odo Russell, the English Minister here (in an occult sense), who, with a very acute mind, is strongly Russell and English, and was full of the English distrust of L.N., when with us at Siena last September, came to me two days ago, and said, 'It is plain now. The Emperor is rather Italian than French. He has worked, and is working, only for Italy; and whatever has seemed otherwise has been forced from him in order to keep on terms with his colleagues, the kings and queens of Europe. Everything that comes out proves it more and more.' In fact, he has risked everything for the Italians except _their cause_. I am delighted, among other things, at Cavour's representation of Italy at the Congress. Antonelli and his party are in desperation, gnas.h.i.+ng their teeth at the Tuileries. The position of the Emperor is most difficult, but his great brain will master it. We are rather uneasy about the English Ministry--its work in Congress; it might go out for me (falling to pieces on the pitiful Suez question or otherwise), but we do want it at Congress.

_To Mrs. Jameson_

28 Via del Tritone, Rome: February 22 [1860].

Dearest, naughtiest Mona Nina,--Where is the place of your soul, your body abiding at Brighton, that never, no, never, do I hear from you? It seems hard. Last summer I was near to slipping out of the world, and then, except for a rap, you might have called on me in vain (and said rap you wouldn't have believed in). Also, even this winter, even in this Rome, the city of refuge, I have had an attack, less long and sharp, indeed, but weakening, and, though I am well now, and have corrected the proofs of a very thin and wicked 'brochure' on Italian affairs (in verse, of course), yet still I am not too strong for cod-liver oil and the affectionateness of such friends as you (I speak as if I had a shoal of such friends--povera mi!). Write to me, therefore. Especially as the English critics will worry me alive for my book and you will have to say, 'Well done, critics!' so write before you read it, to say, 'Ba, I love you.' That makes up for everything. Oh, I know you did write to me in the summer. And then I wrote to you; and then there came a _pause_, which is hard on me, I repeat.

Geddie has come here, lamenting also. Besides, we have been somewhat disappointed by your not coming to Italy. Never will you come to Rome as Geddie expects, late in the spring, to take an apartment close to her, looking charmingly on the river. I told her quite frankly that you would not be so unwise. Rome is empty of foreigners this year, a few Americans standing for all. Then, in the midst of the quiet, deeply does the pa.s.sion work: on one side, with the people, on the other in the despair and rage of the Papal Government. The Pope can't go out to breakfast, to drink chocolate and talk about 'Divine things' to the 'Christian youth,'

but he stumbles upon the term 'new ideas,' and, falling precipitately into a fury, neither evangelical nor angelical, calls Napoleon a _sicario_ (cut-throat), and Vittorio Emanuele an _a.s.sa.s.sino_. The French head of police, who was present, whispered to acquaintances of ours, 'Comme il enrage le saint pere!' In fact, all dignity has been repeatedly forgotten in simple _rage_. Affairs of Italy generally are going on to the goal, and we look for the best and glorious results, perhaps _not without more fighting_. Certainly we can't leave Venetia in the mouth of Austria by a second Villafranca. We cannot and will not.

And, sooner or later, the Emperor is prepared, I think, to carry us through. Odo Russell told me (without my putting any question to him) that everything, as it came out, proved how true he had been to Italy--that, in fact, he had 'rather acted as an Italian than as a Frenchman.' And Mr. Russell, while liberal, is himself very English, and free from Buonaparte tendencies from hair to heel.

We often have letters from dear Isa Blagden, who sends me the Florence news, more s.h.i.+ning from day to day. Central Italy seems safe.

But let me tell you of my thin slice of a wicked book. Yes, I shall expect you to read it, and I send you an order for it to Chapman, therefore. Everybody will hate me for it, and so _you must_ try hard to love me the more to make up for that. Say it's mad, and bad, and sad; but _add_ that somebody did it who meant it, thought it, felt it, throbbed it out with heart and brain, and that she holds it for truth in conscience and not in partisans.h.i.+p. I want to tell you (oh, I can't help telling you) that when the ode was read before Peni, at the part relating to Italy his eyes overflowed, and down he threw himself on the sofa, hiding his face. The child has been very earnest about Italian politics. The heroine of that poem called 'The Dance'[74] was Madame di Laiatico. The 'Court Lady' is an individualisation of a general fas.h.i.+on, the ladies at Milan having gone to the hospitals in full dress and in open carriages. Macmahon taking up the child[75] is also historical. I believe the facts to be in the book: 'He has done it all,'[76] were Cavour's words. When you see an advertis.e.m.e.nt and have an opportunity to apply at Chapman's, do so 'by this sign' enclosed. I read of you in the papers, stirring up the women.

Write and say how you are, and where you are.

[_Part of this letter is missing._]

Your ever very affectionate BA.

I hope you liked the article on the immorality of luncheon-rooms in your high-minded 'Sat.u.r.day Review.'

FOOTNOTES:

[62] Prime Minister of Piedmont from 1849-52, and one of the most honourable and patriotic of Italian statesmen.

[63] Subsequently English amba.s.sador at Berlin, and one of the plenipotentiaries at the Berlin Congress of 1878. Created Lord Ampthill in 1881, and died in 1884.

[64] Now in the possession of Mr. R. Barrett Browning.

[65] The conferences for the arrangement of the final treaty of peace were held at Zurich.

[66] Of Tuscany with Piedmont, which was voted by Tuscany in August.

Modena, Parma, and Romagna did the same, and so made the critical step towards the creation of a united Italy.

[67] It was supposed that Napoleon contemplated const.i.tuting Central Italy, or at least Tuscany, into a kingdom for his brother Jerome, and that it was for this reason that the latter had been sent to Florence with a French corps at the beginning of the war.

[68] Napoleon being opposed to the idea of a united Italy, Victor Emmanuel did not consider it wise to accept the proffered crown of Central Italy while a French army was still in the country and the terms of peace were not finally settled.

[69] The new Duke of Tuscany. He had succeeded to this now very shadowy throne on July 21 of this year.

[70] Not on account of bad riding, be it observed, but of daring and venturesome riding.

[71] Mr. Chorley had dedicated his last novel, _Roccabella_, to Mrs.

Browning.

[72]

'Do you see this ring?

'Tis Rome-work, made to match (By _Castellani's_ imitative craft) Etrurian circlets,' etc.

(_The Ring and the Book_, i. 1-4.)

[73] Mrs. Browning is here quoting from her own preface to _Poems before Congress_.

[74] _Poetical Works_, iv. 190.

[75] See 'Napoleon III. in Italy,' stanza 11, _ibid._ p. 181. The incident occurred at Macmahon's entry into Milan, three days after Magenta.

[76] _Ibid._ stanza 12.

CHAPTER XI

1860-1861

Early in 1860 the promised booklet, 'Poems before Congress,' was published in England, and met with very much the reception the auth.o.r.ess had antic.i.p.ated. It contained only eight poems, all but one relating to the Italian question. Published at a time when the events to which they alluded were still matters of current controversy, they could not but be regarded rather as pamphleteering than as poetry; and it could hardly be expected that the ordinary Englishman, whose sympathy with Italy did not abolish his mistrust (eminently justifiable, as later revelations have shown it to be) of Louis Napoleon, should read with equanimity the continual scorn of English policy and motives, or the continual exaltation of the Emperor. Looking back now over a distance of nearly forty years, and when the Second Empire, with all its merits and its sins, has long gone to its account, we can, at least in part, put aside the politics and enjoy the poetry. Though pieces like 'The Dance' and 'A Court Lady' are not of much permanent value, there are many fine pa.s.sages, notably in 'Napoleon III. in Italy,' and 'Italy and the World,' in which a true and n.o.ble enthusiasm is expressed in living and burning words, worthy of a poet.

For attacks on her Italian politics Mrs. Browning was prepared, as the foregoing letters show; but one incident caused her real and quite unexpected annoyance. The reviewer in the 'Athenaeum' (apparently Mr.

Chorley) by some unaccountable oversight took the 'Curse for a Nation'

to apply to England, instead of being (as it obviously is) a denunciation of American slavery. Consequently he referred to this poem in terms of strong censure, as improper and unpatriotic on the part of an English writer; and a protest from Mrs. Browning only elicited a somewhat grudging editorial note, in a tone which implied that the interpretation which the reviewer had put upon the poem was one which it would naturally bear. One can hardly be surprised at the annoyance which this treatment caused to Mrs. Browning, though some of the phrases in which she speaks of it bear signs of the excitement which characterised so much of her thought in these years of mental strain and stress, and bodily weakness and decay.

_To Mrs. Jameson_