920. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 253–255.
[London]
March 3d 1842 [1]
My beloved friend too kind always to me, there goes to you today another Athenæum with its burden of Greek poets. I may end by tiring you of them after all .. & yet I almost fancy to myself that you will care something for Gregory’s [‘]‘Soul & body” which strikes a sprightly note in the midst of his more solemn minims. In the meantime I embrace as if I were a Brahmin martyr, though in quite a different spirit, your column of prophecy. You the dearest prophetess in the world, & dear Mr Kenyon & I myself shall be nearly sure to walk round it since you say so! [2] I hail the omen “a good bird” as the old Romans wd call it, & singing like a nightingale!
But dear Dr Mitford is not well again—yet better—yet not the more well for being better. Oh that you could take some breath from these anxieties! You are hardly tried indeed. How are his spirits commonly? Do they feel refreshed by this breathing of spring which we can all feel in our faces as she “comes slowly up this way.”? [3] And that reminds me– Did I thank you—oh no no! I didn’t—for that spring-feeling which threaded your violets & kept them fresh on their journey from your garden to my glass, & a day or two afterwards besides! Ungrateful being that I am to have to say ‘no’ to such a question. Dont derive me to be as bad as the premises threaten! I love both violets & you—but you best!–
I have seen Mr Kenyon. I saw him either the day on which my last letter went to you or the day next to it,—& the first word which he, in his evil conscience uttered as he passed the threshold of my door, was … “Dont ask me if I have written to Miss Mitford”. Well!—then he went on to tell me of his Bath expedition—how immediately upon his arrival there in the midst of his Landors & Crosses & Eagles, a dumb devil took him, in the shape of a cold, & he cdnt speak a word. That was disappointing & vexatious of course to every one of them—& he appears to have scarcely been able to speak again until he went out of hearing, back again on the London road. And thus perhaps he had not much pleasure in being away—at any rate he did not talk of the journey as one talks of pleasures—& between ourselves, dear Mr Kenyon did not seem to be altogether in the satisfied sunny spirits one is used to associate with the name. Not that he did not smile, & laugh even, & talk with gaiety & brilliancy—but the sparks did appear struck accidentally—the buoyancy & abandon were not in their old places. I said to myself “He is out of spirits plainly[’]’. My fancy very likely! Dont take much note of it lest it be my fancy. He congratulates himself on his return to his own quiet back room which you may remember, & from which he has shut out the world with his folding doors. That is his illusion! For you know & I know, that the world can slide in at a back door as well as a front, & that our dear friend’s solitude is confined to .. perhaps .. half an hour before breakfast. I asked him when he was going away again– “Never!” “So you said the day before you went to Bath”. “No, no. I always meant to go in the spring to Bath, if not then—but now I am quite settled”. You see we may be sure of him for a fortnight—or even three weeks!—there’s no knowing! Dear Mr Kenyon!
Thank you my dearest friend for wishing to lend me Richardson’s letters in the five lost volumes—& promising me the one within reach. [4] But since I spoke, I have found them all six at Saunders’s library, & they are at this moment waiting to be read at my right hand. I rejoice in my sympathy with you,—(it is more honor!—& a pleasure, oh surely a pleasure, besides!) regarding the love of details, & of all memoirs & letters in which the great Humanity is revealed to us by a thousand little strokes. “Sands make the mountains” [5] —& still lesser grains, this large Human Nature. I quite quite agree with you. It has always been my impression that if Sir Charles Grandison had appeared in three volumes like the novels of our day, he wd have been unreadable. [6] But we come to love the personnages of that work as we do many people in the world, by force of knowing them long, by force of being tired of them, by force of recognizing the neutral tint of our common life in the very tedium of their dulness. I do think just that of Sir Charles Grandison. As to the divine Clarissa she is a book apart, a poem apart—a beatitude in a fiend’s mouth! There is no praise fit for her beyond our tears. [7]
Will you give me a handful of sympathy for Flush’s misfortunes—not that Clarissa’s suggested them,—however “by your smiling you may think to say so.” [8] You may have heard of Miss Trepsack, a very dear old family friend of ours, who lived simply as a friend in Papa’s family, has held him an infant in her arms besides each of his infants, & now having lodgings in a street near to us runs in & out (she can still run I assure you) of this house & calls us “her children”. Now you understand who our dear Trippy is—for we call her impertinently just that—& now you have only to learn that dear Trippy who cant bear dogs in general, has dropped down into love before Flushie, & gives him cakes so often that Flushie’s first ceremony upon meeting her is to examine both her hands & then push his nose into her bag. Well. Flush went out walking with Trippy & Arabel yesterday, & was taken into a confectioner’s shop & presented with a spunge cake for himself. Flush is too great a coward to eat even a cake in a shop, with a strange man staring at him, & far too gentlemanly to eat it out in the street—therefore the gift was wrapt up in paper & given to him to carry home “to Miss Barrett”—all of which he perfectly understood & acted upon. He had carried it with the gravest satisfaction quite up to this door—when on a sudden—behold, there was a vision of the two great dogs, Resolute & Catiline, who also, on their part, were coming in from walking, & met him on the threshold. Now Flush’s delight in the society of these great dogs is something quite wonderful—& more especially as they in their tender affection very often almost swallow him up. Even his love of cakes is nought before his love of the dogs! Therefore on he sprang,—into their very mouths—& down in his emotion, fell the precious cake—& up in the same minute was it snatched by his beloved friend Catiline & swallowed with a mouthful. Poor, poor Flush! He did not see the catastrophe—but on the subsiding of his passionate delight he looked about for his cake round & round in vain—smelt into everybody’s hands,—went on his hind legs, feeling with his pretty front paws all round my tables, & at last had recourse to most vehement coaxing that somebody might give him his cake. Of course, the end of my story is that I sent out for another one, & that he ate it with many signs of satisfaction. But think—in the meantime—of poor Flushie’s anxieties! And that treacherous friend Catiline! [9]
God bless you my ever beloved & kindest friend! My love & most affectionate wishes to your invalid. How are the servants.
Your own EBB–
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 356–359.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. EBB’s reference to “another Athenæum” indicates that she was sending the second of her papers on the Greek Christian Poets. This appeared in the issue of 5 March, so it is apparent that EBB received advance copies, or else misdated her letter.
2. Lacking Miss Mitford’s letter, we cannot clarify her “column of prophecy.” EBB’s comment suggests that Miss Mitford had linked EBB’s and Kenyon’s poetical skills in some manner.
3. Coleridge, Christabel (pt. I, 1816), line 22.
4. Miss Mitford referred to having lost five volumes of “Richardson’s curious correspondence” in a letter of 4 March 1842 to Miss Anderdon (see Chorley, I, 198).
5. Cf. Edward Young’s Love of Fame, the Universal Passion (1728), Satire VI, “On Women,” line 206.
6. The History of Sir Charles Grandison. In a Series of Letters Published from the Originals (6 vols., 1754).
7. Richardson’s Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady (the longest novel in the English language) was published in 1747–48 (8 vols.). The “fiend’s mouth” refers to Lovelace, who, in the novel, dupes Clarissa into going to London with him, where he establishes her in what she believes to be respectable lodgings but which, in reality, is a superior brothel.
8. Cf. Hamlet, II, 2, 309–310.
9. EBB is comparing Catiline’s theft of Flush’s cake with the treachery of the Roman Catiline, whose conspiracy to overthrow the Roman government was discovered by Cicero.
___________________
