925. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 259–262.
[London]
16th March. 1842
My ever dearest Miss Mitford,
You will laugh at me for my important profession of business!! [1] which cd possibly stand in the way of the expression of that going out of my heart to you, the reality of which nothing interrupts. Yet for these two, three, four, days past, most particularly for two of them, I really have seemed to myself much like a hare tearing away before the huntsman sweeping over the most fragrant of thyme without the power of pausing to crop the least head of it. Two books were wanting for my last paper—so I waited & waited till Mr Dilke sent for it [‘]‘at my earliest convenience”. Whereupon I had to scurry rather than write .. scurry, hand & eyes & pulses—the last, Papa declared was past the hundred, & well it might be—& only finished last evening at seven! [2] Quite finished though! What a triumph as Lady Mary Shepherd used to say, “to be just in time”—what a triumph to throw one’s weight off, not from despondency but completion! What a gladness to get back to one’s leisure, & you my own beloved friend, .. to one’s leisure which may be one’s idleness if one pleases,—and to you who must be one’s happiness besides. I am so glad, the papers are done!—quite glad! Writing to the clock is against my nature. Yet Mr Dilke has been very gracious .. & I am not complaining .. & I never was hurried, chased at all, until the last paper. Well! you are glad (generously & kindly) that I was chased, & you hope now that I have had enough of it & will return to the household gods of my poetry. Yes—very soon! There is this ‘Book of the poets’ still—sent to me to say something about. But I mean to be very leisurely & dawdling & discursive thereupon, [3] & make it my last Athenæum task for the present.
Your encouragement—no, not encouragement because you do not approve of the Athenæum-writing at all—but your benignity of affectionateness towards the papers I wrote against your approbation, makes my heart feel full! That feeling always marks my sense of your praise—& well it may, because it is in fact your heart which praises me, rather than your critical faculty.
My beloved friend, I wish, oh how I wish that I cd see your face instead of writing to you! I am anxious about you. That you shd suffer at last in the body the result of your late anxieties, is only the accomplishment of a painful expectation but when I make up the sorrowful sum of prospective restlessness, of all this house-changing, this bearing your own fatigues & ministering to those of others, together with your present feebleness resultive from past agitations, I quite take a long breath in apprehensive love for you! May God bless & keep you my beloved friend! We come to Him at last, when we can do nothing for each other! Sometimes I wish I were well & able to help you & K_____ in the shifting of chairs & stools & books—as if under any circumstances, the probability were not that I shd be in your way .. just as very “useful people” generally are! But I do yearn from my heart’s bottom to do some good beyond these words—& these prayers––and these last, they are not, God be thanked for His pitifulness, as weak as the rest!
Tell me how long the renewing of the old house will take & if there is painting in addition to the white washing. In the latter case, you will not of course hasten to go back. Oh I do wish the whole turmoil at an end! And I wish my Wishes could each turn into a broomstick or a painting-brush or some such useful instrument, after the transformations of the old German story, [4] so as to cast their love-quickness into the accomplishment of the labor!
And here am I writing about wishes & painting brushes, as if I were not to be swallowed up before twelve of the clock on this present Wednesday Night! I shd instead be sending you my solemn benediction, & no sort of good wishes except the last! But you see what a tittle tattle Humanity is, even on the edge of an earthquake! Make a little philosophy out of us my dearest friend, I bequeath it to you—and although all your publishing business is over for ever & ever in London,—Bath, or Liverpool may inherit our printing presses with our metropolitanism, & you may bring out somewhere else a new book of the ‘Last days of London’, with a vein of the melancholy Jaques [5] crossing your own in the marble!–
You know of course,—I am not writing to anyone ‘ignorant of the knowledge dearest chuck’ [6] .. you know of course how it is with us in the eye of the prophetic & with the cognizance of all almanacks? Of course you know, that London is to be swallowed up bodily to say nothing of a circumference of fifteen miles of country, within these present four & twenty hours .. probably, people say, “in two minutes time”, at a gulp! [7] The sensation excited among the lower classes, in station & education, yes, & the sensation fluctuating & rising up into the bewildered wits of better-informed persons, is more than you wd be prepared for. Crowds of the poor Irish have been pressing away out of their holes & corners—householders removing their furniture to Hampstead & Highgate [8] .. clerks throwing up their offices .. the panic active in absurd gesticulation. Mrs Orme who was mine & my sisters[’] governess for two or three years—quite a woman of the world, agreeable & clever in a certain way, .. said to me seriously the other day—“Are you frightened?”–“No—are you?” “Why really it is as likely to happen as not—but I wdnt leave London on any account! All I care for are here, & I prefer sharing their fate”! Quite in earnest really!—in sober wonderful earnest. I have plenty of credulity & superstition myself—but I stand bravely this earthquake shock—which is far more than might be expected of me.
My dearest friend, I will send you the Chaucer Modernized, and two shaddocks besides which you or dear Dr Mitford may grace us by accepting. Will you? I have read Marmontel’s memoirs [9] .. & a most amusing book it is—and Madme Roland [10] I was just bestirring myself to see as your question reached me. Those coincidences touch me with a gentle thrill of complacent affectionateness! I do like them so!–
But I am not yet sure whether I shall get Madme Roland. Saunders does not lighten his books back quickly on me. There was one you spoke of on the French revolution [11] … your letter has tumbled somewhere out of my reach at the moment .. no, I have not read that. I do not know very much about the French memoirs—and until lately, I knew scarcely anything of them—it was from want of opportunity, & I think I once sighed out loud to you about it. Lately, before these Greeks set on me, I breathed a few breaths to try to disperse the ignorance—the more especially undesirable, as these memoirs do in my belief, as formerly in my suspicion, constitute by far the most valuable part of French Literature. Do you not think so?
We must talk more of it, my own dearest friend! I wonder if ever in your secret soul, you say to yourself—“She is over-brave with me—& opiniated altogether.” And yet—if you do say so .. I shd not like to know it––unless indeed you ended the saying with such another one as .. “but I love her better still than [sic] I know her faults”. I could be almost glad at any sharpness I think, closing with such a sweetness!
Your own attached
EBB.
No Mr Kenyon! He does not come—we do not hear a word of him. Perhaps some particular Earthquake is engaged upon him .. aside!–
Will you pray Miss Anderdon to keep the Chaucer as long as she pleases? The shaddocks have come to us unseasonably, “all unaware”! [12] The better if you care for them. I only wish they were more numerous.
I remember Miss Harrisson in the Tableaux. The epitaph is beautiful indeed. But no—I never heard of it. I never was in that church to see it! [13]
Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 359–363.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. EBB emphasized “business” by printing it.
2. The fourth and final part of “Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets” appeared in The Athenæum of 19 March (no. 751, pp. 249–252).
3. The first part of EBB’s review did not appear until the issue of 4 June.
4. Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling” (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” 1797), later set to music by Paul Dukas and now known to millions through Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.”
5. The lugubrious character in As You Like It.
6. Macbeth, III, 2, 44–45, slightly misquoted.
7. “For some weeks past a singular impression has been entertained by the lower classes of Irish residing in the metropolis and its environs, that London is to be destroyed by an earthquake, and the day fixed for this event … is the 16th of March. A great many people have already left the metropolis” (The Times, 3 March 1842). This expectation owed its credence to two ancient prophecies dating back to 1203 and 1596; both specified 1842 as the year of the catastrophe, and the latter the specific date of 16 March.
8. On high ground, north of the city.
9. Jean François Marmontel (1723–99), novelist, dramatist and critic, was the author of Bélisaire (1766) and Contes Moraux (1761–86). EBB’s copy of his Mémoires (4 vols., 1804) formed lot 904 of Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1545).
10. Marie Jeanne Roland de la Platière (née Philipon, 1754–93) knew Voltaire and Rousseau and her salon was frequented by Robespierre and other major personalities of the day. Before being guillotined in 1793, she uttered her memorable cry: “O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!” Her Mémoires were published in 1820.
11. The Athenæum of 21 August 1841 (no. 721, pp. 639–640) had reviewed History of the French Revolution till the Death of Robespierre, by David Wemyss Jobson. This may be the book of which Miss Mitford had spoken.
12. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, III, x, 7.
13. We cannot clarify the reference to this epitaph, also mentioned in SD1171. Henrietta Harrison (?–1879), later Mrs. Acton Tindal, had contributed to the 1838 and 1841 Findens’ Tableaux.
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