The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume Ii Part 43

_To Mr. Chorley_

28 Via del Tritone, Rome: May 2, [1860].

My dear Mr. Chorley,--I make haste to answer your letter, and beg you to do the like in putting out of your life the least touch of pain or bitterness connected with me. It is true, true, true, that some of my earliest gladness in literary sympathy and recognition came from you. I was grateful to you then as a stranger, and I am not likely ever to forget it as a friend. Believe this of me, as I feel it of _you_.

In the matter of reviews and of my last book, and before leaving the subject for ever, I want you distinctly to understand that my complaint related simply to the mistake in facts, and not to any mistake in opinion. The quality of neither mercy nor justice should be strained in the honest reviewer by the personal motive; and, because you felt a regard for me, _that_ was no kind of reason why you should like my book.

In printing the poems, I well knew the storm of execration which would follow. Your zephyr from the 'Athenaeum' was the first of it, gentle indeed in comparison with various gusts from other quarters. All fair it was from your standpoint, to see me as a prophet without a head, or even as a woman in a shrewish temper, and if my husband had not been especially pained by my being held up at the end of a fork as the unnatural she-monster who had 'cursed' her own country (following the Holy Father), I should have left the '_mistake_' to right itself, without troubling the 'Athenaeum' office with the letter they would not insert. In fact, Robert was a little vexed with me for not being vexed enough. I was only vexed enough when the 'Athenaeum' corrected its misstatement in its own way. _That did_ extremely vex me, for it made me look ungenerous, cowardly, mean--as if, in haste to escape from the dogs in England, I threw them the good name of America. 'Mrs. Browning _now states_.'

Well, dear Mr. Chorley, it was not your doing. So the thing that 'vexed me enough' in you was a mistake of mine. Let us forgive one another our mistakes; and there, an end. _I_ was wrong in taking for granted that the letter which referred to your review was entrusted to you to dispose of; and you were not right in being in too much haste to condemn a book you disliked to give the due measure of attention to every page of it.

The insurgents being plainly insurgents, you shot one at least of them without trial, as was done in Spain the other day. True, that even favorable critics have fallen here and there into your very mistake; but is not that mainly attributable to the suggestive power of the 'Athenaeum,' do you not believe so yourself? 'Thais led the way!'

And now that we clasp hands again, my dear friend, let me say one word as to the 'argument' of my last poems. Once, in a kind and generous review of 'Aurora Leigh,' you complained a little of 'new lights.' Now I appeal to you. Is it not rather _you_ than I, who deal in 'new lights,'

if the liberation of a people and the struggle of a nation for existence have ceased in your mind to be the right arguments for poetry? Observe, I may be wrong or right about Napoleon. He may be snake, scoundrel, devil, in his motives. But the thing he did was done before the eyes of all. His coming here was real, the stroke of his sword was indubitable, the rising and struggle of the people was beyond controversy, and the state of things at present is a fact. What if the father of poetry Homer (to go back to the oldest lights) made a mistake about the cause of Achilles' wrath. What if Achilles really wanted to get rid of Briseis and the war together, and sulked in his tent in a great sham? Should we conclude against the artistic propriety of the poet's argument therefore?

You greatly surprise me by such objections. It is objected to 'new lights,' as far as I know, that we are apt to be too metaphysical, self-conscious, subjective, everything for which there are hard German words. The reproaches made against myself have been often of this nature, as you must be well aware. 'Beyond human sympathies' is a phrase in use among critics of a certain school. But that, in any school, any critic should consider the occasions of great tragic movements (such as a war for the life of a nation) unfit occasions for poetry, improper arguments, fills me with an astonishment which I can scarcely express adequately, and, pardon me, I can only understand your objection by a sad return on the English persistency in its mode of looking at the Italian war. You have looked at it always too much as a mere table for throwing dice--so much for France's ambition, so much for Piedmont's, so much stuff for intrigue in an English Parliament for ousting Whigs, or inning Conservatives. You have not realised to yourselves the dreadful struggle for national life, you who, thank G.o.d, have your life as a nation safe. A calm scholastic Italian friend of ours said to my husband at the peace, '_It's sad to think how the madhouses will fill after this._' You do not conceive clearly the agony of a whole people with their house on fire, though Lord Brougham used that very figure to recommend your international neutrality. No, if you conceived of it, if you did not dispose of it lightly in your thoughts as of a Roccabella conspiracy, full half vanity, and only half serious--a Mazzini explosion, not a quarter justified, and taking place often on an affair of _metier_--you, a thoughtful and feeling man, would cry aloud that if poets represent the deepest things, the most tragic things in human life, they need not go further for an argument. And _I_ say, my dear Mr.

Chorley, that if, while such things are done and suffered, the poet's business is to rhyme the stars and walk apart, _I_ say that Mr. Carlyle is right, and that the world requires more earnest workers than such dreamers can be.

For my part, I have always conceived otherwise of poetry. I believe that if anything written by me has been recognised even by _you_, the cause is that I have written not to please you or any critic, but the deepest truth out of my own heart and head. I don't dream and make a poem of it.

Art is not either all beauty or all use, it is essential truth which makes its way through beauty into use. Not that I say this for myself.

Artistically, I may have failed in these poems--that is for the critic to consider; but in the choice of their argument I have not failed artistically, _I think_, or my whole artistic life and understanding of life have failed.

There, I cannot persuade you of this, but I believe it. I have tried to stand on the facts of things before I began to feel 'dithyrambically.'

Thought out coldly, then felt upon warmly. I will not admit of 'being heated out of fairness!' I deny it, and stand upon my innocency.

And after all, 'Casa Guidi Windows' was a book that commended itself to you, Mr. Chorley.

[_The rest of this letter is missing_]

_To John Forster_

28 Via del Tritone, Rome: Monday [May 1860].

I have tried and taken pains to see the truth, and have spoken it as I have seemed to see it. If the issue of events shall prove me wrong about the E. Napoleon, the worse for _him_, I am bold to say, rather than for me, who have honored him only because I believed his intentions worthy of the honor of honest souls.

If he lives long enough, he will explain himself to all. So far, I cannot help persisting in certain of my views, because they have been held long enough to be justified by the past on many points. The intervention in Italy, while it overwhelmed with joy, did not dazzle me into doubts of the motive of it, but satisfied a patient expectation and fulfilled a logical inference. Thus it did not present itself to my mind as a caprice of power, to be followed perhaps by an onslaught on Belgium, and an invasion of England. These things were out of the beat; and _are_. There may follow Hungarian, Polish, or other questions--but there won't follow an English question unless the English _make_ it, which, I grieve to think, looks every day less impossible.

Dear Mr. F., have you read 'La Foi des Traites,' written, some of it, by L.N.'s own hand? Do you consider About's 'Carte de l'Europe' (as the 'Times' does) 'a dull _jeu d'esprit_'? The wit isn't dull, and the serious intention, hid in those mummy wrappings, is not inauthentic.

Official--certainly not; but Napoleonic--yes. I believe so. And I seem to myself to have strong reasons.

But you are sorry that Cavour loves popularity in England. I cried rather bitterly, 'Better so!' A complete injustice comes to nearly the same thing as a complete justice. Have we not watched for a year while every saddle of iniquity has been tried on the Napoleonic back, and nothing fitted? Wasn't he to crush Piedmontese inst.i.tutions like so many egg-sh.e.l.ls? Was he ever going away with his army, and hadn't he occupied houses in Genoa with an intention of bombarding the city? Didn't he keep troops in the north after Villafranca on purpose to come down on us with a Grand Duke at best, or otherwise with a swamping Kingdom of Etruria and Plon-Plon to rule it? and wouldn't he give back Bologna to the Pope bound by seven devils fiercer than the first, and prove Austria bettered by Solferino? Also, were not Cipriani, Farini, and other patriots, his 'mere creatures' in treacherous correspondence with the Tuileries; 'doing his dirty work,' 'keeping things in suspense' till destruction should arrange itself on falsehood? Have I not read and heard from the most intelligent English journals, and the best-informed English politicians (men with one foot and two ears in the Cabinet) these true things written and repeated, and watched while they died out into the Vast Inane and Immense Absurd from which they were born?

So I would rather have a rounded, complete injustice, as we can't have the complete justice. After all, the thing done is only a nation saved.

Hurry up the men who did it on the same cord! Ought not Cavour to be there?

And if the Savoy cession is a crime, he is criminal, he, who undeniably from the beginning contemplated it, not as the price of the war, but as the condition of a newly const.i.tuted Italy. And the condition implies more than is understood, more than the consenting parties dare to confess--can at present afford to confess--unless I am deceived by information, which has. .h.i.therto justified itself in the event. Be patient with me one moment--for if I differ from you, I seem to have access to another cla.s.s of facts than you see. If Italy, for instance, expands itself to a nation of twenty-six millions, would you blame the Emperor who 'did it all' (Cavour's own phrase) for providing an answer to his own people in some small foresight about the frontier, when in the course of fifty or a hundred years they may reproach his memory with the existence of an oppressive rival or enemy next door? Mr. Russell said to me last January 'Everything that comes out proves the Emperor to have acted towards Italy like an Italian rather than a Frenchman.' At which we applaud; that is, you, and Mr. R., and I, and the Italians generally applaud. But--let us be just--_that_ would not be a satisfactory opinion in France of the Head of the State, would it, do you think? It was obviously his duty not to be negligent of certain eventualities in the case of his own country, to be a 'Frenchman'

_there_.

Oh, Savoy has given me pain: and I would rather for the world's sake that a great action had remained out of reach of the hypothetical whispers of depreciators. I would rather not hear Robert say, for instance: 'It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity.' I don't think this judgment fair--and much worse judgments are pa.s.sed than that, which is very painful. But, after all, this thing may have been a necessary duty on L.N.'s part, and I can understand that it was so. For this loss of the Italians, _that_ is not to be dwelt on; while for the Savoyards, none knew better than Cavour (not even L.N.) the leaning of those populations towards France for years back; it has been an inconvenient element of his government.

Whether there are or are not natural frontiers, there are natural barriers, and the Alps hinder trade and make direct influence difficult; and what the popular vote would be n.o.body here doubted. Be sure that n.o.body did in Switzerland. The Swiss have been insincere, it seems to me--talking of terror when they thought chiefly of territory. But I feel tenderly for poor heroic Garibaldi, who has suffered, he and his minority. He is not a man of much brain; which makes the subject the more cruel to him. But I can't write of Garibaldi this morning, so anxious we are after an unpleasant despatch yesterday. He is a hero, and has led a forlorn hope out to Sicily, to succeed for Italy, or to fail for himself. It's 'imprudence,' if he fails: if otherwise, who shall praise him enough? it's salvation and glory.

_To Miss E.F. Haworth_

[Rome], 28 Via del Tritone: May 18, 1860 [postmark].

My dearest f.a.n.n.y,--It seems to me that you have drunk so much England, which cheers _and_ inebriates, as to have forgotten your Italian friends. Here have I been waiting with my load of grat.i.tude, till my shoulders ache under it, not knowing to what address to carry it!

Sarianna sent me one address of your London lodgings, with the satisfactory addition that you were about to move immediately. You really _might_ have written to me before, unkindest and falsest of Fannies! Or else (understand) you should not have sent me those graceful and suggestive drawings, for which only now I am able to thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. It was very kind of you to let me have them.

Then, pray how did you get my 'Poems before Congress'? Was I not to send you an order? Here I send one at least, whether you scorn my gift or not; and by this sign you will inherit also an 'Aurora Leigh.'

Yes, I expected nothing better from the 'British public,' which, strictly conforming itself to the higher civilisation of the age, gives sympathy only where it gives 'the belt.'[87] As the favorite hero says in his last eloquent letter, 'In all my actions, whether in private or public life, may I be worthy of having had the honor ... _of a notice in the_ "_Times_,"' he concludes 'of the abuse of the "Sat.u.r.day Review"'

&c., &c., say _I_.

For the rest, being turned out of the old world, I fall on my feet in the new world, where people have been generous, and even publishers turned liberal. Think of my having an offer (on the ground of that book) from a periodical in New York of a hundred dollars for every single poem, though as short as a sonnet--that is, for its merely pa.s.sing through their pages on the road to the publisher's proper. Oh, I shall cry aloud and boast, since people choose to abuse me. Did you see how I was treated in 'Blackwood'? In fact, you and all women, though you hated me, should be vexed on your own accounts. As for me, it's only what I expected, and I have had that deep satisfaction of 'speaking though I died for it,' which we are all apt to aspire to now and then. Do you know I was half inclined to send my little book to Mr. Cobden, and then I drew back into my sh.e.l.l, with native snail-shyness.

We remain here till the end of May, when we remove back to Florence.

Meanwhile I am in great anxiety about Sicily. Garibaldi's hardy enterprise may be followed by difficult complications.

Let us talk away from politics, which set my heart beating uncomfortably, and don't particularly amuse you....

Have you read the 'Mill on the Floss,' and what of it? The author is here, they say, with her elective affinity, and is seen on the Corso walking, or in the Vatican musing. Always together. They are said to visit n.o.body, and to be beheld only at unawares. Theodore Parker removed to Florence in an extremity of ill-health, and is dead there. I feel very sorry. There was something high and n.o.ble about the man--though he was not deep in proportion. Hatty Hosmer has arrived in America, and found her father alive and better, but threatened with another attack which must be final. Gibson came to us yesterday, and we agreed that we never found him so interesting. I grieve to hear that Mr. Page's pictures (another Venus and a Moses) have been rejected at your Academy.

Robert deserves no reproaches, for he has been writing a good deal this winter--working at a long poem[88] which I have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which I _have_ seen, and may declare worthy of him. For me, if I have attained anything of force and freedom by living near the oak, the better for me. But I hope you don't think that I mimic [him, or] lose my individuality. [Penini] sends his love with Robert's.

[He ri]des his pony and learns his Latin and looks as pretty as ever--to my way of [thinking]. If you don't write directly, address to Florence.

We have another thick Indian letter for you, but Robert is afraid of sending it till you give us a safe address.

_To Miss I. Blagden_

[Rome: about May 1860.]

[_The beginning of this letter is wanting_]

When the English were raging about Savoy, I heard a word or two from Pantaleone which convinced me that the Imperial wickedness did not strike him as the sin against the Holy Ghost precisely. In fact, I doubt much that he (an intimate friend of Ma.s.simo d' Azeglio) knew all about it before the war.

By the by, why does Azeglio write against Rome being the capital just now? It seems to us all very ill-advised. Italy may hereafter select the capital she pleases, but now her game ought to be to get Rome, as an indispensable part of the play, as soon as possible. There are great difficulties in the way--that's very sure. It's quite time, indeed, that Mrs. Trollope's heart should warm a little towards the Emperor, for no ruler has risked so much for a nation to which he did not belong (unless he wished to conquer it) as Napoleon has for this nation. He has been tortuous in certain respects--in the official presentation of the points he was resolute on carrying--but from first to last there has been one steady intention--the liberation of Italy without the confusion of a general war. Moreover, his eyes are upon Venice, and have been since Villafranca. What I _see_ in the very suggestion to England about stopping Garibaldi from attacking the mainland was a preparation to the English mind towards receiving the consequence of unity, namely, the seizure of Venice. 'You must be prepared for that. You see where you are going? You won't cry out when France joins her ally again!' Lord John didn't see the necessity. No, of course he didn't. He never does see except what he runs against. He protested to the last (by the Blue Book) against G.'s attack; he was of opinion, to the last, that Italy would be better in two kingdoms. But he _wouldn't intervene_. In which he was perfectly right, of course, only that people should see where their road goes even when they walk straight. And mark, if France had herself prevented Garibaldi's landing, Lord John would simply have 'protested.'