The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett | Page 6

I

will simply assure you, that meaning to begin work in deep earnest,
begin without affectation, God knows,--I do not know what will help
me more than hearing from you,--and therefore, if you do not so very
much hate it, I know I shall hear from you--and very little more about
your 'tiring me.'
Ever yours faithfully,
ROBERT BROWNING.
_E.B.B. to R.B._
50 Walpole Street: Feb. 3, 1845. [Transcriber's Note: So in original.
Should be "Wimpole Street."]
Why how could I hate to write to you, dear Mr. Browning? Could you
believe in such a thing? If nobody likes writing to everybody (except
such professional letter writers as you and I are _not_), yet everybody
likes writing to somebody, and it would be strange and contradictory if
I were not always delighted both to hear from you and to write to you,
this talking upon paper being as good a social pleasure as another,
when our means are somewhat straitened. As for me, I have done most
of my talking by post of late years--as people shut up in dungeons take
up with scrawling mottoes on the walls. Not that I write to many in the
way of regular correspondence, as our friend Mr. Horne predicates of
me in his romances (which is mere romancing!), but that there are a
few who will write and be written to by me without a sense of injury.
Dear Miss Mitford, for instance. You do not know her, I think,
personally, although she was the first to tell me (when I was very ill
and insensible to all the glories of the world except poetry), of the
grand scene in 'Pippa Passes.' She has filled a large drawer in this room
with delightful letters, heart-warm and soul-warm, ... driftings of nature
(if sunshine could drift like snow), and which, if they should ever fall
the way of all writing, into print, would assume the folio shape as a
matter of course, and take rank on the lowest shelf of libraries, with
Benedictine editions of the Fathers, [Greek: k.t.l.]. I write this to you to
show how I can have pleasure in letters, and never think them too long,
nor too frequent, nor too illegible from being written in little 'pet
hands.' I can read any MS. except the writing on the pyramids. And if
you will only promise to treat me en bon camarade, without reference
to the conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen,' taking no thought for
your sentences (nor for mine), nor for your blots (nor for mine), nor for

your blunt speaking (nor for mine), nor for your badd speling (nor for
mine), and if you agree to send me a blotted thought whenever you are
in the mind for it, and with as little ceremony and less legibility than
you would think it necessary to employ towards your printer--why,
then, I am ready to sign and seal the contract, and to rejoice in being
'articled' as your correspondent. Only _don't_ let us have any constraint,
any ceremony! _Don't_ be civil to me when you feel rude,--nor
loquacious when you incline to silence,--nor yielding in the manners
when you are perverse in the mind. See how out of the world I am!
Suffer me to profit by it in almost the only profitable circumstance, and
let us rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side.
You will find me an honest man on the whole, if rather hasty and
prejudging, which is a different thing from prejudice at the worst. And
we have great sympathies in common, and I am inclined to look up to
you in many things, and to learn as much of everything as you will
teach me. On the other hand you must prepare yourself to forbear and
to forgive--will you? While I throw off the ceremony, I hold the faster
to the kindness.
Is it true, as you say, that I 'know so "little"' of you? And is it true, as
others say, that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real
nature, ... that in the minor sense, man is not made in the image of God?
It is not true, to my mind--and therefore it is not true that I know little
of you, except in as far as it is true (which I believe) that your greatest
works are to come. Need I assure you that I shall always hear with the
deepest interest every word you will say to me of what you are doing or
about to do? I hear of the 'old room' and the '"Bells" lying about,' with
an interest which you may guess at, perhaps. And when you tell me
besides, of my poems being there, and of your caring for them