928. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 265–268.
[London]
March 21. 1842
Thank you my beloved friend thank you for your abundant goodnesses! I am a mystic fleece—my heart is!—saturated with this dew from high places,—yet falling so softly as love!– When I turn to speak my sense of it, I cannot speak—my only answer must be love again. “Thank you” .. what can that say?
But do you know, my dearest dearest friend, that if you were not so you wd undo me by some of your praises. Your critical opinion—your’s as Miss Mitford, without relation to friendships & friends—would of course to me Elizabeth Barrett be of great importance, & if favorable of high price! But supposing the impossible supposition that you Miss Mitford did say of me Elizabeth Barrett what you as too tender friend have said of her in this letter by my hand … why you wd undo me in the very act of building me up! I shd be built up like a pack of cards, & fall by the very breath of my buildor!– For nothing wd be left to the faculty of my logic, than the miserable inference .. that by some mortal casualty, instability, or imperfection, common to the strongest of the earth-kings & earth-queens, .. Miss Mitford had so far beyond sight over-rated, hyper-exalted, praised above measure said Elizabeth Barrett, that .. (oh what a race of inferences is born from this Œdipus!) [1] .. that .. nobody could be sure whether she Miss Mitford had any cause for thinking any manner of good of said Elizabeth Barrett in any segment of degree! Do you see how you wd have undone me,—had you not been my friend? Had you not!– Ah! in a way nearer the heart than that!
But I am not undone. I am built up—“Love buildeth up” [2] —& I only look to your love—not my prophetess this time, but my beloved friend! caring more for it, wearing it nearer to my inward nature in dearness, than if it had been all your praise, won in open field, .. & mine because deserved!
For the rest, I always separate as far as it is possible whatever parts of your opinions can be true out of love—I mean apart from it,—& lay them by to muse over or take courage from or counsel from, whenever I want either for my writings. I have been musing these two days, off & on, upon what exactly you meant in relation to “the terms of endearment & appropriation,” as applied to the Supreme Being. I my<self> have observed & disliked such expressions in a few hymns of Watts [3] & others (motes in my brother’s eye!!) [4] but I am blind to them in myself .. with a great beam perhaps lying straight across my eyeballs. Do tell me, where the fault is in myself—.
Perhaps you allude to certain expressions in the Greek translations, such as “O my Jesus,” or “my Christ.” All such cases are,—I believe without an exception,—literal translations—& you will perhaps reconsider that “my Jesus” is not more than “my Saviour”, the word Jesus signifying Saviour. [5]
Any “familiar expression of endearment” or anything tantamount to such an expression I cd not attempt to defend either in others or myself—& I do not think that the Greek christian poets expose themselves, with all their fervency, to a reproach of that particular kind. At the same time you will allow me to suggest in an under-voice .. that there is an opposite fault common to higher poets & better writers than perhaps any of my modern Greeks are, & which consists in spiritualizing away to a dim far Influence, the Divine Glory as beheld in the Saviour’s human face. Too much of the Humanity, full & tender & simple as a man-woman-child humanity,—too much of the assured Humanity of Christ Jesus, is put out of sight & out of hearing, when we muse & speak & pray. The result is .. a cold adoration, instead of a worshipping love. The result is that we come to write & to think of the Man-Christ, coldly as Epicurus might of his Possible-gods—at best, solemnly as Plato might, of his God above the æons [6] —& not at all heartfully & with a love upturned, as to Him who is the Love-God,—God in Humanity.
It is this consideration which does seem to me most intensely true, which has acted upon minds of more fervency than delicacy, to the eliciting of the expressions in question. I defend not one of them! & am only anxious to know in which of them I myself have sinned. Tell me—do tell me, my beloved friend—everything which seems to you wrong—everything whether in the poetry or out of it, which you do not like to see in me, yet see!
You like my ‘House of Clouds’. [7] Now I will tell you what Mr Boyd said of it to my sister Arabel! He is very much pleased with my Athenæum papers, concluding his praise of them with a climax of this sort—“I am the more pleased, & surprised, because—”––(now listen stedfastly to the ‘because’——) “because I had inferred from the “House of Clouds” that her illness had weakened her intellect”! There is a subject of congratulation!! Mark it well!–
But you liked my House of Clouds—& Mr Kenyon did not take it as a token of idiocy—& I myself like it as well as any trifle of the kind which I have printed. Apart from your kindness, “Cowper’s grave’[’], [8] has pleased more persons to my knowledge than all the rest put together. Strangers who have written to me, always, almost, have spoken of it—& Mr Powell, a friend of all the poets as I call him, a particular friend of Mr Wordsworth & of Mr Horne, wrote once to me to decide a dispute about a passage in it, held between himself & Leigh Hunt—telling me at the same time that I never wrote up to that poem as a composition. Well—but, I do hope—it is my only excuse for talking so much upon so little .. I do hope to write better hereafter—were it only to give you generous pleasure, my beloved friend! As to justifying your words, I can never do that, otherwise than by my love!–
I am very anxious to hear how you decide about the house-changing, & what will be the first step. No—dont write to me at a period of so much bustle & uneasiness! No—dont write to me! It is written, yet I doubt myself! Am I an hypocrite? or so ambitious as to aspire to vanquish you in generosity? And yet, I am quite sure that I wd not willingly lay a burden upon your burdens—not even of a letter’s weight.
I shall take to my dreams the hope that dear Dr Mitford may be better after all. I think he is better! And that you are so .. what a blessedness that is! But the newspapers, the newspapers—& the other reading—& the universal talking .. I can understand it all, without the experience of any of it, & I tremble for the result upon you—for all your strong volitions & endurances of love. I have always been free from such trials—never was forced to read, or to talk much, when & where I did not please—never was called upon for unnatural attention. Still I shd always have instinct enough to feel for you—even if I had not fancy.
We have all a great anxiety at this moment, our dear Sette <…> being ill with the meazles, and Occy, who never had it, being in full prospect of the same evil. Poor Sette is “going on well” they say, & in that case we need not be quite unhappy—still—but may God preserve him dear fellow & our affections in him.
Mr Kenyon is here. I must end, & see him—for the post will be fast upon his heels. Dear little poney! how is it now?– [9]
Your own attached
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 364–367.
Manuscript: Folger Shakespeare Library and Wellesley College.
1. The oracle of Delphi had told Œdipus, who was ignorant of his parentage, that he would kill his father and marry his mother; despite his attempts to avoid this fate, the oracular predictions were fulfilled. On finally learning the truth of his birth, and that he had indeed slain his father and committed incest with his mother, he blinded himself. EBB seems to be suggesting that she recoils similarly from Miss Mitford’s forecast of coming fame.
2. Cf. I Corinthians, 8:1.
3. Isaac Watts (1674–1748) wrote on philosophical and religious topics, but his continuing fame rests on his prodigious output of hymns. These emphasized a personal relationship with, and affection for, God and Christ in the manner that Miss Mitford is objecting to in EBB’s translations.
4. Cf. Matthew, 7:3.
5. These possessives occur in EBB’s third paper on the Greek Christian poets (The Athenæum, 12 March, pp. 229–231).
6. Epicurus (ca. 340–ca. 270 B.C.) was criticized by contemporaries for representing the gods as being given up to pleasure and unconcerned with the affairs of men. Plato (ca. 427–ca. 348 B.C.) believed that man owed his creation to a divine emanation, and that his soul was immortal, but he did not postulate a loving and concerned Deity.
7. In The Athenæum of 21 August 1841 (no. 721, p. 643).
8. One of the poems included in The Seraphim (1838).
9. In a letter to Miss Anderdon, 4 March 1842, Miss Mitford had said “my poor pony has been, and still is, very ill of influenza. I believe that I shall lose him” (Chorley, I, 196).
___________________
