Correspondence

931.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 276–284.

[London]

March 28 & 9th [sic, for 27 & 8th] 1842– [1]

It is Sunday & there is no way of sending a letter to you my beloved friend—but it is a day to speak what is in my heart, [2] & the heart moves your way without thought of the day. And this is what is in my heart!

Are we so far apart my dearest friend? Do we think so differently on a point scarcely unimportant? Ought I to deny my convictions for the love of you? Surely not! you will say so as I say so! That I love & admire & revere you .. that you know! But I shd be more unworthy of the least of your love than I feel myself to be now, if I cd sacrifice or appear to sacrifice in the cowardice of silence any one opinion or principle which I hold honestly.

In the first place, we do quite differ in regard to our mutual estimation of the mass of persons called “religious”, that is,—making high religious professions,—whether in the church or out of it. All these persons—of whom I know more privately & domestically than my beloved friend appears to know—all this mass of persons, except such as are hypocrites, hold strongly by my affection & respect. I believe them to be right & safe—justified before God. I believe that it is right to think earnestly & not to be ashamed of speaking earnestly, our belief in the gospel of Christ & our hope by His death! I believe that Christ’s will is, that we shd speak aloud our love for Him—that it is the natural result of our natural affections that we shd speak them all—why not our love which goes upwards? But you will agree with me in your admirable candour my beloved friend, that by the great mass of the world this upward love alone is unspoken! Is it unfelt? Is it a subject of shame? Those inferences remain.

I do believe then that the persons in question, are both in doctrine & in word right—& if I do not say ‘I am proud to be numbered among them’ it is because I wd rather be humble in the same place.

The individual case you mention is exactly twice as revolting (I eagerly agree with you) as connected with a person of the class in question—but I appeal to your justice not to condemn a class for the corruption of an individual! it is as you observe a very large class (I thank God it is) in the church of England & out of it .. almost all the dissenters—all, as far as profession goes—with the exception of the ice-bound unitarians; & if in all classes—whether political, philosophical, artistical or philanthropical,—there are hypocrites, why shd you expect the religious class to be free from the taint! Even the apostles had their Judas—did you ever mistrust John for Judas? [3] Surely not! Nor shall this infamous man who did you so much harm [4]  .. nor should [5] he .... forgive me my dearest friend .. wrench your opinions & affections into a universal wrong. I could tell you instance upon instance of the actions of noble Christian hearts & hands which might well neutralize the poison of that man’s wickedness. There is Mr Groves of Exeter, [6] in the receipt of five thousand a year from his profession, who gave up everything, nay, gave away everything, & went into the east without purse or scrip, [7] a missionary on foot, with a noble heroism. The taunt of “Methodism” [8] has drawn tears from many meek eyes I know .. while the heart sate firmly on its throne of a strong purpose. The lives of many have been cast away .. the blood of their life pouring from their dying lips,—through a life-devotion to preaching Christ’s truth! And all this to be remembered in Heaven! Should we forget it here? If God loves it, should we not love it? Let us think twice before we say we do not.

Yes! they are narrow in taste for the most part. They hold strange opinions, strange contractive opinions on the subject of literature & the arts—which I call a contracted spirituality as well as a contracted taste. Because the whole atmosphere of God’s creation (man’s works being a part of it, even as the bee’s geometry is) is a medium of beholding God—& we are not called upon to look away from the creation up to God, but to look through the creation up to Him. It thus appears to me that their notions on the subject of literature & the arts are defective spiritually—I do think so!

People of very different opinions generally, fall into a similar mistake! Mr Dilke for instance, wrote to beg me to avoid as far as possible in my papers the mention of the name of Christ (& I writing upon the Christian poets!!!) because it was painful to people’s feelings to see that name mixed up indifferently with the ordinary subjects of the journal. Of course I did not enter upon an argument with Mr Dilke—but I thought within myself—“Here is just the mistake of a large religious class. They say, Christ’s name must not be named in conjunction with ordinary literature—& therefore we who hold by the name of Christ, must shun the ordinary literature.” The mistake is identical you see—the inference only being different—religious persons forsaking literature,—& worldly ones avoiding Christ’s name! I mean no disrespect to Mr Dilke—but I am emphatic upon a mistake which is in my eyes dangerous to the world & melancholy for the religious. I agree with the latter from my heart .. that the place unfit for the naming of the redeemer’s name, is unfit for the thoughts of the redeemed. The inference is as right as the premises are wrong!

Still it is not everybody in the class in question who holds the opinion .. & you must not consider it so. The Evangelical part of the establishment, & the methodists are the most narrow—the independents the most liberal. [9] I have heard Shakespeare quoted from the pulpit in dissenting chapels—and Mr Hunter a congregational minister, a dear & valued friend of mine, has all sorts of reading even to a partial knowledge of the old dramatists.

For my own part, I holding by the convictions of my soul to these Christian societies in all their chief doctrines & yet so far from being “unco guid” [10] that I am guid in no possible sense, .. you know very well how little I have stayed my thirst in any matter of literature. There are not perhaps many women in England even beyond my age who have tasted of such hundreds of muddy waters as I have—muddy & pestilential as well as the clear & pure—all sorts of abominations in & out of philosophy—as Hume & Hobbes [11] & Voltaire & Bolingbroke, [12] coming down from Lucian in the antique—manifold attacks, atheistical & otherwise on what I reverence as the truth. Reading everything, it has been said, does nobody any harm—& yet I shd scarcely like my sisters to touch all that has strengthened the truth to me through an antagonistical iniquity. Still, without referring any more to these philosophies so called, .. my conviction is that general literature shd be as open to the devoutest soul as the meadows are! I shd as soon say do not look at the sun—do not listen to the nightingale—as do not read the poets! The opinion is as monstrous in my ears & to my understanding as to yours.

If I could think that my Seraphim were read by the class in question my beloved friend—I should be .. just pleased! I was very much pleased to hear once that Dr Pye Smith had used it as a “book for Sunday”. I have been pleased by hearing of its proving acceptable in a like manner to others: but be sure that the acceptability is far from being general. A baptist minister whom I had known & regarded for years [13] told me with a praiseworthy candour, nay, a thank-worthy candor, that the religion seemed to him made subservient to the poetry, rather than the poetry to the religion—& shook his head over it altogether. Another true & holy christian now dead [14] left a message to me which gave me some pain at the time .. that the book was unworthy of my knowledge of the Scriptures. Well!—should I be irritated at these things? should I respect them less for the contraction expressed in an opinion. Oh surely not! A religious man without literature is nobler in the sight of the angels, than a literary man without religion! [15] Surely he must be nobler!

In regard to poetry—whether exclusively religious subjects be or be not the best adapted to poetry—I am sure that we shall agree my dearest friend in the opinion that the tendency of poetry must be upward––that religion should virtually enter into it—that Humanity cannot be considered philosophically without a reference to its relations God-ward & Heaven-ward. One might as well (& better) leave a man’s mortality out of his humanity, as his immortality. We shall agree in this—shall we not? Let us, my dearest friend!

“We were placed on this earth to love each other” [16] —yes! but we know from the supreme book if we do not from our own experience that the love is warmest, truest, purest, which is the overflow of the love to God—even as we hear your own Coleridge say

 

‘He prayeth best who loveth best’— [17]

love & prayer being reciprocal helps. Therefore it wd not be true in philosophy to insulate in poetry the bare human love! It has been done I know! And that it is done too often is exactly what I mean to lament in wishing for “Christ’s hand upon our poetry”. [18] I wish it for poetry[’]s sake & philosophy’s as much as I wish it for religion’s. I beseech you to consider what I mean before you decide that you will have no sympathy with me in the opinion!–

That your sympathy is very dear to me, that your approval in all things is very precious, I do not disguise to myself for a moment. You will believe it of me always—will you not?—however obstinately & opiniatively I may seem to cling to a particular doxy against (perhaps) your approval. But honesty above all things! honesty in all things! it is the best way even for love! Even for us, even in our case, where certainly all the reverence shd go from me to you, .. I believe that an entire openness & honesty on both sides has given more vivacity & stedfastness to the friendship you have honored me by permitting between us, than if I had laid heart & brain beneath your feet. It has been so hitherto—oh may it be so now!

As to the drama, I believe there is a prejudice as well as an opinion—& that your conjecture respecting the revolting influence of the amphitheatre may be connected with it. The theatre I am persuaded might be a means of great moral good. That it is not so now however—that it was not so even under James the first, that it was so fearfully the contrary under the second Charles, may justify utterly the absence upon principle of any person. [19] Do not mistake me my beloved friend! I do not blame you or others for attending the theatres—in all liberty of conscience. I shd not blame my own brothers & sisters for doing it—if Papa had a less particular objection. But I quite see the sufficiency of the objection as it is seen by him & others. Do you know how Mr Macready has been attacked for even trying, even beginning to try to suppress the saloons—(the miserable application of which is very well known)—& how it has been declared that no theatre can exist at the present day without a saloon—& how, if it could, the effect wd be to force vicious persons & their indecencies into full view in the boxes—!! [20] Now this appears to me enough to constitute a repulsive objection! & I who have read hard at the old dramatists since I last spoke to you about them,—Beaumont & Fletcher Massinger Ben Jonson all Dodsley’s collection, [21] —can yet see that objection in all its repulsiveness! .. & read on!

Dear Mr Kenyon came here again yesterday (Sunday) I am writing now on monday—& overwhelmed me with the unexpected supernumerary visit of kindness! Mr Browning, the poet, passed saturday & a part of sunday with him, & pleased & interested him very much! He has bad health—swimmings in the head—& a desire (if any loosening of family ties shd give him to himself) to go to a Greek island & live & die in the sunshine. Mr Kenyon says he is “a little discouraged” by his reception with the public, [22] which I am very sorry to hear .. but “a strong sense of power” which is equally obvious may obviate the effect of the depression. Do you at all doubt that the writer of the Athenæum papers upon the ‘Handbook,[’] is Mr Darley? [23] Mr Horne—a generous-hearted man he really is—wont believe any harm in the world of Mr Darley—& thinks that all the stings lavished upon the poets’ [sic], including Chaucer’s modernizers, are the evil work of a certain Dr Taylor. [24] Of “Darley the author of Ethelstane” [25] he wont believe anything but innocense & ill-health! Macready told Mr Kenyon on saturday that he was about to read & pass judgment on a new play by Charles Darley, a brother of George’s, & which by the glances he had cast upon it already he guessed to be a very extraordinary production. [26] Did you ever hear that there was a brother who was a poet?

Do you know Carlyle’s writings? I am an adorer of Carlyle. He has done more to raise poetry to the throne of its rightful inheritance than any writer of the day,—& is a noble-high-thinking man in all ways. He is one of the men to whom it wd be a satisfaction to me to cry ‘vivat’ [27] somewhere in his hearing. Do you recognize the estate of mind when it waxes impatient of admiration & longs to throw it off at the feet of the admired? I have felt it often!

You have not been well, my dearest dearest friend! Those newspapers—those newspapers! [28] Do say particularly how you are! Be sure that I cd not mistake you. Try not to mistake me—or rather try to love me through what appear to you my mistakes—& through what are!——

Happy! “you are happy!” You startled me with the sound of the word! I am content my beloved friend at least!

George said smiling one day by my bedside a great truth which I smiled at too though sadly. He said “When I hear people say they are content, I always know that they are miserable”. It is a great truth with some modification—for certainly I, for one, never felt satisfied, content, I call it—until the illusion of life was utterly gone. When I think of the future now .. I think of something to be done, something to be suffered,—not of what is to be enjoyed. It is not when we talk or write lightly that we do not feel heavily—it is not at least so for me. My only individual hopes now are prospective actions & duties. My castle-building is at an end! A great change has passed both upon my inward & outward life within these two years. I scarcely recognize myself sometimes. One stroke ended my youth. [29]

And so be it! even so! It must have ended some time—& it is as well ended suddenly as more gradually. Bearing this vacancy at my side, I may bear the rest patiently.

And I am you see contented—quite calm—fearless even of the future. I am at leisure too & able by God’s grace to count the much which remains—to think of the beloved faces near me still—& of such a dear & precious friend as yourself in the same world with me—& permitting me to love her, heart to heart, as at this day!

May God bless & keep you my beloved friend! I never can thank you enough for all the comfort & sympathy I have received from you. I beseech you to bear with, a little longer,

your ever attached

EBB

Yes—I know Mary Wolstonecraft. I was a great admirer at thirteen of the Rights of woman. [30] I know too certain letters published under her name: [31] but Godwin’s Life of her I never saw & shd like much to do so. [32]

The exquisite letters of Meta Klopstock! Exquisite is the only word of them. They have been extracted in different works—& I was familiar with nearly all of those in Richardson’s Correspondence before my acquaintance with it. [33]

I have read the ‘Cavalier’—but years ago. I must see it again. Nothing in Defoe fastened upon me much, except Robinson Crusoe & The Plague—which last you know of course, & which is still more a romance than the other– [34]

Have you received Miss Seward’s letters—with mine? I sent them by the railroad on friday I think. I do hope too that you received the last Athenæum—the one containing my last paper? [35] Papa directed it himself to you.

Our dear Sette, is well again, I thank God [36] —breakfasted down stairs this morning—& Occy feels no symptom up to this hour. You need not be afraid of infection through my letters—as he has never entered my room so as to touch a paper in it since he began to be ill!

My love to Dr Mitford—I hope he continues better, & will forbid some of the reading. I think I shd dare to whisper that impertinence somewhere in his hearing—if the hearing were attainable to me. What you tell me of Mrs Niven’s kind opinions is of course very agreeable to hear. I thank her for her kindness.

I wish you cd hear how dear Mr Kenyon talks of you! I wish that for two reasons––if not three! Guess them!—— [37]

Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 373–381.

Manuscript: Folger Shakespeare Library and Wellesley College.

1. EBB has altered the dating but clearly says in her text that she writes on Sunday and Monday.

2. Easter Sunday.

3. Just as the treachery of Judas Iscariot did not stain the other disciples, so should the corrupt man of whom Miss Mitford had spoken not condemn his peers.

4. We are unable to identify “this infamous man.”

5. Underscored three times.

6. Anthony Norris Groves (1795–1853) was one of the founding members of the Plymouth Brethren. In 1829 he and his wife had undertaken missionary work in Bagdad; she died there in 1831 of the plague. In 1833 he went to Bombay, and, except for two brief visits to England, spent the rest of his working life as a missionary in India. EBB had mentioned his second marriage in letters 499 and 504.

7. Cf. Luke, 22:35.

8. The term methodist was first applied to Charles Wesley (1707–88) and a group of his friends at Oxford for their serious application to a particular system of study; it had a slightly pejorative meaning, equivalent to “prig,” with no special religious connotation. It was only later, in association with his brother John Wesley (1703–91), that evangelical activities became dominant, and not until after John’s death that a separate Methodist Church was established.

9. By “independents” EBB means the Unitarians.

10. “Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous” (1787), by Robert Burns.

11. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose philosophical and political views were expressed in Humane Nature: or, the Fundamental Elements of Policie and De Corpore Politico: or, the Elements of Law, Moral and Politick (1650) and Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651). EBB’s copy of his Tracts (1678–81), now at Harvard, formed lot 743 of Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1188).

12. Henry St. John (1678–1751), 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, was a political philosopher whose works included Letters on the Study and Use of History and Reflections Concerning Innate Moral Principles (1752).

13. The Rev. George Henry Roper-Curzon, who had been appointed Baptist minister in Ledbury in 1828 while the Moulton-Barretts were at Hope End. EBB corresponded with him for some time after leaving there.

14. Probably the Rev. William Marriott Caldecott, described by EBB as “a saint” when she wrote of his death in letter 728.

15. An echo of Burns’s “an irreligious poet is a monster,” quoted by EBB in letter 534.

16. Cf. I Peter, 1:22.

17. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), line 612, slightly misquoted.

18. In the second of the papers on the Greek Christian poets, EBB had said “We want the touch of Christ’s hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things—we want the sense of the saturation of Christ’s blood upon the souls of our poets” (The Athenæum, no. 748, 26 February 1842, p. 190).

19. Hence such criticism as Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698).

20. Macready was unsuccessful in his efforts to eliminate the sale of alcohol in theatres, but when the Drury Lane Theatre opened under his management in December 1841 the playbill warned that “the room … for refreshment attached to the boxes would be strictly protected from all improper intrusion” (Macready, II, 151, note 1).

21. Robert Dodsley (1703–64), dramatist and bookseller, issued a Select Collection of Old Plays in 1744.

22. The reviews of Sordello and Pippa Passes were largely negative. The former was criticized for its “pitching, hysterical, and broken sobs of sentences”; a review of the latter found RB’s “texts nearly as obscure as ever—getting, nevertheless, a glimpse, every now and then, at meanings which it might have been well worth his while to put into English.” (For the full text of the reviews, see vol. 4, pp. 416–417 and 420–424 and this volume, pp. 392–400.)

23. See letter 927, note 3.

24. William Cooke Taylor (1800–49), author, translator and critic, had settled in London in 1829, bcoming a contributor to, and staff member of, The Athenæum. He continued to work for the magazine until his death.

25. George Darley’s play, Ethelstan; or, The Battle of Brunanburh, was published in 1841.

26. Either Kenyon had misunderstood Macready, or EBB had misunderstood Kenyon, because Macready had recorded in his journal on 6 August 1841: “Finished the play of Plighted Troth—a play written in a quaint style, but possessing the rare qualities of intense passion and happy imagination” (Macready, II, 139). The author, Charles F. Darley (1800–61?), was now busy making changes suggested by Macready, prior to the play’s going into rehearsal. Despite Macready’s initial impression of the script, the play was a failure, and he wrote on 21 April 1842 “I cannot imagine how I could have been so mistaken” (Macready, II, 162–165).

27. “May he live.”

28. A reference to Miss Mitford’s fatiguing chore of reading the papers to her father (see letter 882, note 2).

29. i.e., the trauma of Bro’s death.

30. In 1821, EBB’s mother had referred to “yours & Mrs. Wolstonecrafts system” (letter 135) and it was about then that EBB wrote her “Fragment of an ‘Essay on Woman’” (see Reconstruction, D308). Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) had published Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

31. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).

32. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written by her husband, William Godwin (1798).

33. Four letters from Margareta (“Meta”) Klopstock to Richardson, written in 1757–58, were printed in Memoirs of Frederick and Margaret Klopstock, Translated from the German, by the Author of “Fragments in Prose and Verse” [Elizabeth Smith], (1808), where EBB probably first read them. They were also printed in Richardson’s Correspondence. The Memoirs also contained eight “Letters from the Dead to the Living,” letters to her family containing thoughts on her own death. EBB had spoken of Meta Klopstock in letter 488.

34. Memoirs of a Cavalier (1724) by Daniel Defoe ( Foe, 1661?–1731). Robinson Crusoe, one of his best-known works, was published in 1719, and A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722.

35. The issue of 19 March 1842.

36. As letter 928 indicates, he had had measles.

37. The three reasons are enumerated in letter 938.

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