For instance, did I flatter you and say that you were right yesterday? Indeed I thought you as wrong as possible ... wonderfully wrong on such a subject, for you ... who, only a day or two before, seemed so free from conventional fallacies ... so free! You would abolish the punishment of death too ... and put away wars, I am sure! But honourable men are bound to keep their honours clean at the expense of so much gunpowder and so much risk of life ... that must be, ought to be, ... let judicial deaths and military glory be abolished ever so! For my part, I set all Christian principle aside, (although if it were carried out ... and principle is nothing unless carried out ... it would not mean cowardice but magnanimity) but I set it aside and go on the bare social rational ground ... and I do advisedly declare to you that I cannot conceive of any possible combination of circumstances which could ... I will not say justify, but even excuse, an honourable man’s having recourse to the duellist’s pistol, either on his own account or another’s. Not only it seems to me horribly wrong ... but absurdly wrong, it seems to me. Also ... as a matter of pure reason ... the Parisian method of taking aim and blowing off a man’s head for the sins of his tongue, I do take to have a sort of judicial advantage over the Englishman’s six paces ... throwing the dice for his life or another man’s, because wounded by that man in his honour. His honour!—Who believes in such an honour ... liable to such amends, and capable of such recovery! You cannot, I think—in the secret of your mind. Or if you can ... you, who are a teacher of the world ... poor world—it is more desperately wrong than I thought.
A man calls you ‘a liar’ in an assembly of other men. Because he is a calumniator, and, on that very account, a worse man than you, you ask him to go down with you on the only ground on which you two are equals ... the duelling-ground, ... and with pistols of the same length and friends numerically equal on each side, play at lives with him, both mortal men that you are. If it was proposed to you to play at real dice for the ratification or non-ratification of his calumny, the proposition would be laughed to scorn ... and yet the chance (as chance) seems much the same, ... and the death is an exterior circumstance which cannot be imagined to have much virtue. At best, what do you prove by your duel? ... that your calumniator, though a calumniator, is not a coward in the vulgar sense ... and that yourself, though you may still be a liar ten times over, are not a coward either! ‘Here be proofs.’
And as to the custom of duelling preventing insults ... why you say that a man of honour should not go out with an unworthy adversary. Now supposing a man to be withheld from insult and calumny, just by the fear of being shot ... who is more unworthy than such a man? Therefore you conclude irrationally, illogically, that the system operates beyond the limit of its operations.—Oh! I shall write as quarrelsome letters as I choose. You are wrong, I know and feel, when you advocate the pitiful resources of this corrupt social life, ... and if you are wrong, how are we to get right, we all who look to you for teaching. Are you afraid too of being taken for a coward? or would you excuse that sort of fear ... that cowardice of cowardice, in other men? For me, I value your honour, just as you do ... more than your life ... of the two things: but the madness of this foolishness is so clear to my eyes, than instead of opening the door for you and keeping your secret, as that miserable woman did last year, for the man shot by her sister’s husband, I would just call in the police, though you were to throw me out of the window afterwards. So, with that beautiful vision of domestic felicity, (which Mrs. Jameson would leap up to see!) I shall end my letter—isn’t it a letter worth thanking for?—
Ever dearest, do you promise me that you never will be provoked into such an act—never? Mr. O’Connell vowed it to himself, for a dead man ... and you may to me, for a living woman. Promises and vows may be foolish things for the most part ... but they cannot be more foolish than, in this case, the thing vowed against. So promise and vow. And I will ‘flatter’ you in return in the lawful way ... for you will ‘make me happy’ ... so far! May God bless you, beloved! It is so wet and dreary to-day that I do not go down-stairs—I sit instead in the gondola chair ... do you not see? ... and think of you ... do you not feel? I even love you ... if that were worth mentioning....
being your own
Ba.
How good of you to write so on Sunday! to compare with my bad!
R.B. to E.B.B.
Tuesday.
[Post-mark, April 7, 1846.]
They have just sent me one proof, only—so I have been correcting everything as fast as possible, that, returning it at once, a revise might arrive, fit to send, for this that comes is just as bad as if I had let it alone in the first instance. All your corrections are golden. In ‘Luria,’ I alter ‘little circle’ to ‘circling faces’—which is more like what I meant. As for that point we spoke of yesterday—it seems ‘past praying for’—if I make the speech an ‘aside,’ I commit Ogniben to that opinion:—did you notice, at the beginning of the second part, that on this Ogniben’s very entry (as described by a bystander), he is made to say, for first speech, ‘I have known so many leaders of revolts’—‘laughing gently to himself’? This, which was wrongly printed in italics, as if a comment of the bystander’s own, was a characteristic circumstance, as I meant it. All these opinions should be delivered with a ‘gentle laughter to himself’—but—as is said elsewhere,—we profess and we perform! Enough of it—Meliora sperumus!