But none of it was happiness, dearest dearest. Happiness does not come with the sun or the rain. Since my illness, when the door of the future seemed shut and locked before my face, and I did not tire myself with knocking any more, I thought I was happier, happy, I thought, just because I was tranquil unto death. Now I know life from death, ... and the unsorrowful life for the first time since I was a woman; though I sit here on the edge of a precipice in a position full of anxiety and danger. What matter, ... if one shuts one’s eyes, and listens to the birds singing? Do you know, I am glad—I could almost thank God—that Papa keeps so far from me ... that he has given up coming in the evening ... I could almost thank God. If he were affectionate, and made me, or let me, feel myself necessary to him, ... how should I bear (even with my reason on my side) to prepare to give him pain? So that the Pisa business last year, by sounding the waters, was good in its way ... and the pang that came with it to me, was also good. He feels!—he loves me ... but it is not (this, I mean to say) to the trying degrees of feeling and love ... trying to me. Ah, well! In any case, I should have ended probably, in giving up all for you—I do not profess otherwise. I used to think I should, if ever I loved anyone—and if the love of you is different from, it is greater than, anything preconceived ... divined.
Mrs. Jameson, the other day, brought out a theory of hers which I refused to receive, and which I thought to myself she would apply to me some day, with the rest of what Miss Mitford calls ‘those good-for-nothing poets and poetesses.’ She maintained, (Mrs. Jameson did) that ‘artistical natures never learn wisdom from experience—that sorrow teaches them nothing—leaves no trace at all—that the mind is modified in no way by passion—suffering.’ Which I disbelieved quite, and ventured to say on the other side, that although practically a man or woman might not be wiser, through perhaps the interception of a vivid apprehension of the present, which might put back the influence of the future over actions, ... yet that it was impossible for a self-conscious nature (which all these artistic natures are) and a sensitive nature, not to receive some sort of modification from things suffered—‘No’—she said, ‘they did not! she had known and loved such—and they were like children, all of them,—essentially immature.’ But she did not persuade me. What is inequality of nature, as Dugald Stewart observed it, (and did he not say that men of genius had lop-sided minds?) is different, I think, from immaturity in her sense of the word. We were talking of her friend Mrs. Butler, which brought us to the subject. Presently she will say of you and me ... ‘Just see there! she meant no harm, poor thing, I dare say—but she acts like a child! And, for him, his is the imbecility of most regent genius ... such as I am to live to see confessed imperial, or I die a disappointed woman.’!
Do you hear? I do, distinctly. You, in the meantime, are looking at the ‘locks’ ... just as poor Louis Seize did when they were preparing his guillotine.
May God bless you, my own dearest—Think of me a little—as you say!
Your
Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Friday.
[Post-mark, April 3, 1846.]
I want to tell you a thing before I forget it, my own Ba—a thing that pleased me to find out this morning. A few days ago there was a paragraph in the newspaper about Lord Compton and his ways at Rome. His address was to be read in the general list of working-artists kept for public inspection at Monaldini’s news-room, and the Earl’s self was to be found in fraternal association with ‘young art,’ at board and sporting-place, wearing the same distinctive blouse and Louis II. hat with great flaps; even his hair as picturesquely disordered as the best of them—(the artists, not flaps)—at all which the reporter seemed scarcely to know whether he ought to laugh or cry. This I read in the Daily News with other gossip about Rome, last Wednesday. But this morning a Cambridge Advertiser of the same day reaches me—and there, under the head of College news (after recording that Mr. A. has been appointed to this vicarage, and Mr. B. licensed to the other curacy)—one finds this—‘The Earl Compton, M.A. (Hon. 1837)—is of great fame in Rome as a Painter!’—which the other authority wholly forgot to mention; supposing, no doubt, all the love went to the blouse and flapped hat aforesaid! Now, is it not a good instance of that fascination which the true life at Rome (apart from the stupidities of the travelling English) exercises every now and then on susceptible people? The best thing for an English Earl to do,—(who will be a Marquis one day)—would be to stay here and vindicate his title by honest work with the opportunities it affords him—but if he cannot rise to the dignity of the best part, surely this, he chooses, is better than many others—being caught as some noblemen were yesterday, for instance, superintending a dog-fight in some horrible den of thieves in St. Giles’s. I don’t know, after all, why I tell you this,—but that amid all the dull doings of the notable dull ones there, and their ‘honours’—(such a wonder of a man was Smith’s prize-man,—another had got to be gloriously first in the Classical Tripos)—this bit of ‘fame at Rome’ seemed like a break of blue real sky with a star in it, shining through the canvas sham clouds and oil-paper moons of a theatre.