Dearest, you did me so much good yesterday! Say how your head is—and remember Saturday. Saturday will be clear through Chiswick—may the sun shine on it!—
Your own Ba.
Think of the dreadful alternative as set forth in this MS.!—The English ... or a bad climate!—Can it be true?
Enclosure
[La Cava is impossible for the winter owing to the damp and cold. At no season should any person remain out at the hour of sunset. An hour afterwards the air is dry and healthy—[Is this at La Cava? Ba] This applies to all Italy, and is a precaution too often neglected. Salerno has bad air too near it, to be safe as a residence. Besides, it is totally without the resources of books, good food, or medical advice. Palermo would be agreeable in the winter, and not very much frequented by English. However, where good climate exists, English are to be found. Murray’s ‘Southern Italy’ would give every particular as to the distance of La Cava from the sea.]
E.B.B. to R.B.
Thursday Evening.
[Post-mark, July 10, 1846.]
How I have waited for your letter to-night,—and it comes nearly at ten!—It comes at last—thank you for it, ever dearest.
And I knew—quite understood yesterday, that you were sorry for me, which made you angry with another ... but, as to poor Haydon, you are too generous and too pitiful to refuse him any justice. I was sure that the letters would touch you. The particular letter about the ‘back-ground’ and the ‘neglect’ and Napoleon, ... that, you will observe, was the last I had from him. Every word you say of it, I think and feel. Yes, it was just so! His conscience was not a sufficient witness, ... nor was God. He must also have the Royal Academy and the appreciators of Tom Thumb. A ‘weak man,’ of course he was,—for all vain men are weak men. They cannot stand alone. But that he had in him the elements of greatness—that he looked to noble aims in art and life, however distractedly, ... that his thoughts and feelings were not those of a common man, ... it is true, it is undeniable,—and you would think so more and more if you read through the packets of letters which I have of his—so fervid, so full of earnestness and individuality ... so alive with egotism which yet seemed to redeem itself. Mr. Kenyon said of the letter we have spoken of, that it was scarcely the production of a sane mind. But I who was used to his letters, saw nothing in it in the least unusual—he has written to me far wilder letters! That he ‘never should die,’ he had said once or twice before. Then Napoleon was a favourite subject of his ... constantly recurred to. He was not mad then!
Poor Haydon! Think what an agony, life was to him, so constituted!—his own genius a clinging curse! the fire and the clay in him seething and quenching one another!—the man seeing maniacally in all men the assassins of his fame! and, with the whole world against him, struggling for the thing which was his life, through night and day, in thoughts and in dreams ... struggling, stifling, breaking the hearts of the creatures dearest to him, in the conflict for which there was no victory, though he could not choose but fight it. Tell me if Laocoon’s anguish was not as an infant’s sleep, compared to this? And could a man, suffering so, stop to calculate very nicely the consideration due to A, and the delicacy which should be observed toward B? Was he scrupulously to ask himself whether this or that cry of his might not give C a headache? Indeed no, no. It is for us rather to look back and consider! Poor Haydon.