To Mrs. Martin
Florence: December 3, 1848.
My dearest Mrs. Martin,—It seemed long to me that you had not written, and it seems long to me now that I have not answered the kind letter which came at last. Then Henrietta told me of your being unwell at the moment of her mad excursion into Herefordshire. Altogether I want to speak to you and hear from you, and shall be easier and gladder when both are done. Do forgive my sins and write directly, and tell me everything about both of you, and how you are in spirits and health, and whether you really make up your minds to see more danger in the stormy influences of the Continent in the moral point of view than in those of England in the physical. For my part I hold to my original class of fear, and would rather face two or three revolutions than an east wind of an English winter. If I were you I would go to Pau as usual and take poor Abd-el-Kader's place (my husband is furious about the treatment of Abd-el-Kader, so I hear a good deal about him[[183]]), or I would go to Italy and try
Florence, where really democratic ministries roar as gently as sucking doves, particularly when they are safe in place. We have listened to dreadful rumours—Florence was to have been sacked several times by the Livornese; the Grand Duke went so far as to send away his family to Siena, and we had 'Morte a Fiorentini!' chalked up on the walls. Still, somehow or other, the peace has been kept in Florentine fashion; it has rained once or twice, which is always enough here to moderate the most revolutionary when they wear their best surtouts, and I look forward to an unbroken tranquillity just as I used to do, even though the windows of the Ridolfi Palace (the ambassador in London) were smashed the other evening a few yards from ours. Perhaps a gentle and affectionate approach to contempt for our Florentines mixes a little with this feeling of security, but what then? They are an amiable, refined, graceful people, with much of the artistic temperament as distinguished from that of men of genius—effeminate, no, rather feminine in a better sense—of a fancy easily turned into impulse, but with no strenuous and determinate strength in them. What they comprehend best in the 'Italian League' is probably a league to wear silk velvet and each a feather in his hat, to carry flags and cry vivas, and keep a grand festa day in the piazzas. Better and happier in this than in stabbing prime ministers, or hanging up their dead bodies to shoot at; and not much more childish than these French patriots and republicans, who crown their great deeds by electing to the presidency such a man as Prince Louis Napoleon, simply because 'C'est le neveu de son oncle!'[[184]] A curious precedent for a president, certainly; but, oh heavens and earth, what curious things abroad everywhere just now, inclusive of the sea serpent! I agree with you that much of all is very melancholy and disheartening, though holding fast by my hope and belief that good will be the end, as it always is God's end to man's frenzies, and that all we observe is but the fermentation necessary to the new wine, which presently we shall drink pure. Meanwhile, the saddest thing is the impossibility (which I, for one, feel) to sympathise, to go along with, the people to whom and to whose cause all my natural sympathies yearn. The word 'Liberty' ceases to make me thrill, as at something great and unmistakable, as, for instance, the other great words Truth, and Justice; do. The salt has lost its savour, the meaning has escaped from the term; we know nothing of what people will do when they aspire to Liberty. The holiness of liberty is desecrated by the sign of the ass's hoof. Fixed principles, either of opinion or action, seem clearly gone out of the world. The principle of Destruction is in the place of the principle of Re-integration, or of Radical Reform, as we called it in England. I look all round and can sympathise nowhere. The rulers hold by rottenness, and the people leap into the abyss, and nobody knows why this is, or why that is. As to France, my tears (which I really couldn't help at the time of the expulsion of poor Louis Philippe and his family, not being very strong just then) are justified, it appears, though my husband thought them foolish (and so did I), and though we both began by an adhesion to the Republic in the cordial manner. But, just see, the Republic was a 'man in an iron mask' or helmet, and turns out a military dictatorship, a throttling of the press, a starving of the finances, and an election of Louis Napoleon to be President. Louis Philippe was better than all this, take him at worst, and at worst he did not deserve the mud and stones cast at him, which I have always maintained and maintain still. England might have got up ('happy country') more crying grievances than France at the moment of outbreak; but what makes outbreaks now-a-days is not 'the cause, my soul,' but the stuff of the people. You are huckaback on the other side of the Channel, and you wear out the poor Irish linen, let the justice of the case be what it may. Politics enough and too much, surely, especially now when they are depressing to you, and more or less to everybody.... We are still in the slow agonies of furnishing our apartment. You see, being the poorest and most prudent of possible poets, we had to solve the problem of taking our furniture out of our year's income (proceeds of poems and the like), and of not getting into debt. Oh, I take no credit to myself; I was always in debt in my little way ('small im morals,' as Dr. Bowring might call it) before I married, but Robert, though a poet and dramatist by profession, being descended from the blood of all the Puritans, and educated by the strictest of dissenters, has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing five shillings five days, which I call quite morbid in its degree and extent, and which is altogether unpoetical according to the traditions of the world. So we have been dragging in by inches our chairs and tables throughout the summer, and by no means look finished and furnished at this late moment, the slow Italians coming at the heels of our slowest intentions with the putting up of our curtains, which begin to be necessary in this November tramontana. Yet in a month or three weeks we shall look quite comfortable—before Christmas; and in the meantime we heap up the pine wood and feel perfectly warm with these thick palace walls between us and the outside air. Also my husband's new edition is on the edge of coming out, and we have had an application from Mr. Phelps, of Sadler's Wells, for leave to act his 'Blot on the 'Scutcheon,' which, if it doesn't succeed, its public can have neither hearts nor intellects (that being an impartial opinion), and which, if it succeeds, will be of pecuniary advantage to us. Look out in the papers.... My love and my husband's go to you, our dear friends. Let me be always
Your affectionate and grateful
BA.
While Italy shows herself so politically demoralised, and the blood of poor Russia smokes from the ground, the ground seems to care no more for it than the newspapers, or anybody else.
Such a jar of flowers we have to keep December. White roses, as in June.
To Miss Mitford
Florence: December 16, [1848].
... You are wondering, perhaps, how we are so fool-hardy as to keep on furnishing rooms in the midst of 'anarchy,' the Pope a fugitive, and the crowned heads packing up. Ah, but we have faith in the softness of our Florentines, who must be well spurred up to the leap before they do any harm. These things look worse at a distance than they do near, although, seen far and near, nothing can be worse than the evidence of demoralisation of people, governors, and journalists, in the sympathy given everywhere to the assassination of poor Rossi.[[185]] If Rossi