I have read your letter again and again. I will tell you—no, not you, but any imaginary other person, who should hear what I am going to avow; I would tell that person most sincerely there is not a particle of fatuity, shall I call it, in that avowal; cannot be, seeing that from the beginning and at this moment I never dreamed of winning your love. I can hardly write this word, so incongruous and impossible does it seem—
…In so many words, is it on my account that you bid me 'leave this subject' [of marriage]? I think if it were so, I would for once call my advantages round me. I am not what your generous self-forgetting appreciation would sometimes make me out—but it is not since yesterday, nor ten nor twenty years before, that I began to look into my own life, and study its end, and requirements, what would turn to its good or its loss—and I know, if one may know anything, that to make that life yours and increase it by union with yours, would render me supremely happy, as I said, and say, and feel. My whole suit to you is, in that sense, selfish—not that I am ignorant that your nature would most surely attain happiness in being conscious that it made another happy—but that best, best end of all, would, like the rest, come from yourself, be a reflection of your own gift.
Dearest, I will end here—words, persuasion, arguments, if they were at my service I would not use them—I believe in you, altogether have faith in you—in you.
… My whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated—and it supposed you, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible—because in calculating one goes upon chances, not on providence—how could I expect you?
How Elizabeth Barrett could resist this I have no idea. However, she writes back that she can’t marry him because she’s sickly and unworthy and couldn’t dream of burdening him, and furthermore her father wouldn’t hear of it (tyrant). She says, “The subject will not bear consideration—it breaks in our hands. But that God is stronger than we, cannot be a bitter thought to you but a holy thought ... while He lets me, as much as I can be anyone's, be only yours.”
It gets Robert Browning all glum. He tells her this:
Well, I understand you to pronounce that at present you believe this gift impossible—and I acquiesce entirely—I submit wholly to you; repose on you in all the faith of which I am capable. Those obstacles are solely for you to see and to declare ... had I seen them, be sure I should never have mocked you or myself by affecting to pass them over ... what were obstacles, I mean: but you do see them, I must think,—and perhaps they strike me the more from my true, honest unfeigned inability to imagine what they are,—not that I shall endeavour. After what you also apprise me of, I know and am joyfully confident that if ever they cease to be what you now consider them, you who see now for me, whom I implicitly trust in to see for me; you will then, too, see and remember me, and how I trust, and shall then be still trusting.
Er. I actually was just going to summarize this whole exchange. But I couldn’t resist quoting. He’s such a dear. And did I mention he was born on my birthday? When I was a young lass I thought that my best advertisement for 7 May as a birthday was Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but I realize now, of course, that Robert Browning is the real coup. Though I am very envious of my mother’s star-studded birthday – Tennessee Williams, Diana Ross, Nancy Pelosi, Bob Woodward, Erica Jong, Alan Arkin, Robert Frost, A.E. Housman – I would not switch with her because I have so much love for Robert Browning.)
They are totally my favorite literary couple. I like them even better than I like Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. I’m getting all suspensey for when Elizabeth agrees to marry him. Also, I’m starting to feel a little guilty for reading their letters. Sort of. But not enough to quit reading them. I may even buy a great big book of their letters. Apparently the big book o’ letters from 1845-1846 (the only letters they ever exchanged, said their son, because after their marriage they were never separated) just got put back into print – though I’d prefer, of course, to get the old hardback ones.
Number two pleasing thing is: I learned a new word!
I know this is geeky, but I love, love, love learning words for things for ideas I already have in my brain but I didn’t know there was a word for them. I always want to call up Helen Keller on the phone and be all, I totally know how you felt about the water, dude. (Sorry, Jenny, she’s dead.) Sometimes I have dreams about learning words of this kind, and they are not dissimilar to those dreams where I go to the library or the bookstore and discover that my favorite author has actually written an entire shelf of books I never read before (actually sort of true of Martin Millar who is not my favorite author but I am very fond of his books) and I get them ALL INSTANTLY because I have a library card or a whole bunch of money.
But I digress. I’m going to put my word in its own paragraph, because it deserves it.
Apophenia. Apophenia.
It means perceiving connections between random-ass things that happen even if actually there’s no pattern to the events. There’s a word for that! I have such a crush on this word. If I had had classes today instead of work, I’d’ve spent the whole time doodling on my notes, Apophenia + Jenny = <3 and Mrs. Jennifer Apophenia.
It’s most fortunate I had this word today. My brain keeps playing me snippets of songs from the musical episode of Buffy, which we watched last night, and from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It’s helpful to have a shiny new word for distracting my brain with. It’s all, I hope she fries, I’m free if that bitch dies, and I’m all, Hey, brain, APOPHENIA and it’s all, Oo, pretty! for a few minutes before getting back to the important business of trying to remember what exactly Mal says about blowing in the breeze (teehee).
P.S. While writing this blog post, I got addicted to the Brownings’ letters and read farther down, and I swear to God, I wouldn’t keep posting these excerpts if it weren’t for how Robert Browning keeps on saying things that are so nice it does my head in. Behold a bit of his response to her story about how her mean, mean father won’t let her to go Italy for her health:
Now again the circumstances shift—and you are in what I should wonder at as the veriest slavery—and I who could free you from it, I am here scarcely daring to write ... though I know you must feel for me and forgive what forces itself from me ... what retires so mutely into my heart at your least word ... what shall not be again written or spoken, if you so will ... that I should be made happy beyond all hope of expression by. Now while I dream, let me once dream! I would marry you now and thus—I would come when you let me, and go when you bade me—I would be no more than one of your brothers—'no more'—that is, instead of getting to-morrow for Saturday, I should get Saturday as well—two hours for one—when your head ached I should be here. I deliberately choose the realization of that dream (—of sitting simply by you for an hour every day) rather than any other, excluding you, I am able to form for this world, or any world I know—And it will continue but a dream.
Bless him. She said this back to him, and I swear that after this I’m shutting up about the Brownings, but I have to quote this because it’s very touching:
But it will be the same thing—for you know as well as if you saw my answer, what it must be, what it cannot choose but be, on pain of sinking me so infinitely below not merely your level but my own, that the depth cannot bear a glance down. Yet, though I am not made of such clay as to admit of my taking a base advantage of certain noble extravagances, (and that I am not I thank God for your sake) I will say, I must say, that your words in this letter have done me good and made me happy, ... that I thank and bless you for them, ... and that to receive such a proof of attachment from you, not only overpowers every present evil, but seems to me a full and abundant amends for the merely personal sufferings of my whole life. When I had read that letter last night I did think so. I looked round and round for the small bitternesses which for several days had been bitter to me, and I could not find one of them. The tear-marks went away in the moisture of new, happy tears. Why, how else could I have felt? how else do you think I could? How would any woman have felt ... who could feel at all ... hearing such words said (though 'in a dream' indeed) by such a speaker?
And now listen to me in turn. You have touched me more profoundly than I thought even you could have touched me—my heart was full when you came here to-day. Henceforward I am yours for everything but to do you harm—and I am yours too much, in my heart, ever to consent to do you harm in that way. If I could consent to do it, not only should I be less loyal ... but in one sense, less yours. I say this to you without drawback and reserve, because it is all I am able to say, and perhaps all I shall be able to say. However this may be, a promise goes to you in it that none, except God and your will, shall interpose between you and me, ... I mean, that if He should free me within a moderate time from the trailing chain of this weakness, I will then be to you whatever at that hour you shall choose ... whether friend or more than friend ... a friend to the last in any case. So it rests with God and with you—only in the meanwhile you are most absolutely free ... 'unentangled' (as they call it) by the breadth of a thread—and if I did not know that you considered yourself so, I would not see you any more, let the effort cost me what it might. You may force me feel: ... but you cannot force me to think contrary to my first thought ... that it were better for you to forget me at once in one relation. And if better for you, can it be bad for me? which flings me down on the stone-pavement of the logicians.
In all seriousness, I really admire Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She totally shook free of her father's awful tyranny and nastiness even though she had been dealing with it her whole life and even though she was an invalid, and she went off and she had her own life. And you know what else? When she got pregnant, she got off morphine. She did! Straight off! They were like, Dude, I know you take morphine all the time for your sickness, but you can't be doing that while you're pregnant, so she just stopped. She was much more hardcore than lame old Mrs. Dubose, and she was also nicer and a good writer. So there. And I also think it's sweet how they think each other are so important that they're constantly italicizing you when they write to each other.
Okay. I'm stopping. Someone should chain my fingers together so I can't type any more of these blog posts.
1 comment:
Oh, so sweet. If you want to stop posting these excerpts in your blog, feel entirely free to email them to me.
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