911. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 238–240.
[London]
Feb. 21st 1842
Flushie’s likeness! Is’nt it like? The ears rather too long, the nose rather too short, the eyes rather too round! all the rest very like indeed!– Papa brought it home for me some days ago, as Flushie’s double. “Thine Infelicia’s self”!– [1] What do you think of it?
Thank you my beloved friend, for interrupting the question upon my lips with an answer from your own dear ones. Your letters are my sunshines & moonshines & larks & nightingales, & when they dont come, I who shd be ashamed under such a deserved catastrophe—to complain, yet begin to fancy all sorts of melancholy reasons, more melancholy if possible than the event. And after all, I am half right—for you have been disturbed, vexed, anxious, unwell! May God bless & strengthen you my beloved friend! I yearn to hear better news. Whenever you write there is something to make me sigh & to balance the rest of the pleasure. Another sick servant! And the first sickness not at an end! And Dr Mitford—& you yourself! I turn my head quite quick round for some comfort, but altho’ you speak of betterness, I can find nothing for my own use but hope, hope!–
The thought of yr engagement to Mr Bourcicault [2] gave me to hope last week that the silence might be set to his account—though I received the same misgivingly. And I feared to be in the way by writing to you. My papers are not in the Athenæum yet—seeing that Mr Dilke wrote to me to apprize me of his intending, according to “my custom always in the Athenæum”, to wait for the whole series before printing one number. [3] If critics & editors ever cd be wrong, I shd call it silly—but as it is, the delay is necessary, I having counted upon the more natural arrangement & dawdled “to suit”. He has two papers, one of them in printed proof—& my poets crowd round me so, that I shall scarcely have done with them without a fourth paper, which Mr Dilke who only wants three of me, will be sure to smile at, a ghastly smile, in agonized courtesy. How amusing all this must be!– I wanted to explain why you did not receive the Athenæum, & ‘all this’ came!
He—they—that is, Mr & Mrs Dilke, & Mr & Mrs Wentworth Dilke [4] were good enough to leave cards here some days ago. Who are the Wentworth Dilkes? Our cards have gone back, but we are not likely to communicate otherwise from Papa’s non-visiting tendencies & my non-visitable necessities.
Mr Kenyon has been seen in London .. but not yet by me. He will come when he can. Believe me, that was’nt the rumble of a grumble. Henceforward I mean to be more goodhumoured, or goodtempered (not to make a fault in metaphysics) than usual!–
In the meanwhile––what an amusing book these Burneyana do make! [5] There is certainly a consciousness which combined with the egoism & the Evelinaism ‘in sæcula sæculorum’, [6] suggests no idea of modesty, real modesty—& made me think again & again of the true distinction you held up once for my meditation & advantage, between modesty, which is not self-occupied, & shyness which is. And thus I do not worship the “dear little Burney” as a fair incarnate modesty, though with a grove of rose trees turned into blushes, flourishing upon each cheek. But I do like her book—I do think it full of living pulses & delightfulness, & my heart leaps up at the hum of work-day life issuing thus from the tomb-door of that dead generation. Oh—do read the book—I mean, at once—read it at once. Dr Johnson is softer in it than he is to be seen elsewhere—more as Tetty [7] beheld him than as Boswell did! And one understands the charm of Mrs Thrale [8] more quickly than by the tradition in other places of her sharp sayings & witty vivacities. It lay, I think, in her quick sympathies of head & heart. After all the book, the Evelina, was wonderfully overpraised [9] —which fact, however certain it may be, gives us leave to praise this book, this diary of Madme d’Arblay, .. does’nt it?
Let me say while I remember it—but surely not à propos to either book—that I ventured to send to Three Mile Cross, a day since, a barrel of oysters, & am spoiling myself with fancying that one of you at least may care to receive them.
Did you ever hear of Arcturus a New York review? The editors sent me two numbers of it this morning—or rather, they sent it by <the> last packet & I received it this morning—with a benignant criticism in one, & a gracious letter—besides. [10] Flush & I blushed “a Burney, a Burney”. [11]
Of course he sends his love with his picture—& mine is with you always.
Your EBB–
I am very well (for me) & walk to the sofa.
Thank you, thank you for the praise of George. How like you, how kind of you to tell me! Yes!– He was Mr Wightman’s pupil– [12]
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 350–352.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Cf. Dekker, The Honest Whore, pt. I (1604), IV, 1, 34. Stationery for this letter was imprinted with the “likeness” (see illustration) which EBB mentions.
2. See letter 906.
3. Despite this, he did not wait; the first paper was printed in the issue of 26 February, the fourth and last in that of 19 March.
4. Charles Wentworth Dilke (1810–69) was the son of the editor of The Athenæum, also Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789–1864).
5. Frances (“Fanny”) Burney was born in 1752. A backward child, entirely self-educated, she began composing poems and stories when she was 10, but destroyed all her manuscripts on her 15th birthday. She continued to write, and her first work was published anonymously in 1778 as Evelina, or a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Her second novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress was published in 1782; both were great successes. She served in the Royal Household from 1786 to 1791 as an assistant to the Keeper of the Robes. In 1793 she married General d’Arblay, who had been Lafayette’s comrade, and they spent some time in France. She continued writing novels and plays, but, although financially successful, none quite equalled her early novels. She died in 1840, and the first volume of her Diary and Letters had just been published.
6. “Unto the age of ages”; i.e., without end.
7. Samuel Johnson’s wife, Elizabeth (1688–1752, née Jervis), whom he married in 1735 after the death of her first husband, Henry Porter, in 1734. She was 20 years his senior.
8. Hester Lynch Thrale (1741–1821, née Salusbury), later (1784) the wife of Gabriel Piozzi, a talented Italian musician, was the author of Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1786), whose close friend she had been.
9. The Critical Review: or, Annals of Literature said of Evelina: “This performance deserves no common praise … It would have disgraced neither the head nor the heart of Richardson” (vol. 46, 1778, pp. 202–204). Johnson “was so caught by it … that he has sung its praises ever since,—and he says Richardson would have been proud to have written it” (Mme. d’Arblay, Diary and Letters, I, 76).
10. Arcturus, a Journal of Books and Opinion had noticed The Seraphim in its February 1841 issue (no. III, pp. 171–176). (For the full text, see pp. 388–389.)
11. Evelina having been published anonymously, with only a select few knowing the identity of its author, Mme. d’Arblay tells of her embarrassment and fear of disclosure when Mrs. Thrale and Johnson discussed the novel with a friend. Mrs. Thrale told her “you have looked like your namesake in the ‘Clandestine Marriage’, all this evening, ‘of fifty colours, I wow and purtest’.” While not accusing Fanny of affectation, Mrs. Thrale felt she was over-delicate: “why should you write a book … and then sneak in a corner and disown it!” (Diary and Letters, I, 74–78.)
12. See letter 672, note 4.
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