1076. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 203–206.
[London]
Decr 7th 1842–
You shall not indeed make up such a lamentable futurity of sailors jackets for any friend of yours. Has she not (consider the legal decision in its worst possible light) a house & furniture & pictures, .. & jewels perhaps, to sell,—and would not the proceeds, if spent on an annuity, keep her out of actual want?—give her a room better than mine above the grocer’s, & dress her up in beautiful white dimity? [1] Ah! but if I smile it is only to balance your groan over a most exaggerated hypothesis of misery,—as I must believe & hope!—and not that I shd not sincerely be sorry & compassionate at your poor dear Mrs Dupuy adding to the sorrows she has sustained, a new one called poverty. God forbid that such a thing shd ever be. It is not likely to be—it will not be. Only if it should, the fall wd scarcely be to the bottom of such a miserable ditch as your imagination my beloved friend has dug. We should get something better for her to do than sowing [sic] hard at sailor’s jackets. The portrait-painting would be better, I fancy. Portraitpainters in the provinces are often very successful—it is so delightful to one’s ego to be painted with a rose in one’s buttonhole & to descend from generation to generation as an ancestor!—that very few grocers & bakers & drapers can resist the thing. Mr Carter, Mrs Carter the miniature painter’s husband, [2] takes portraits in oil, & from what I can understand, they are something below the happy medium of successful Art .. very very moderately well done they seem to be—and yet he cdnt get away from Exeter, he was so softly entreated on all hands to take off all heads, & may be there still for aught I know to the contrary, painting away the jolly persons of the burgesses.
But now you speak of the possibility (after all our talk, it is a mere dream, a prospect in the clouds!) of your poor friend attempting to support herself by her pictures, .. I will just mention to you what I have heard with equal surprise & disbelief, .. that she is said to have painted for money already, .. to be doing so in fact at this precise moment. It is certainly true, says Henrietta,—because Lady Bolingbroke told me so,—& Lady Bolingbroke is a relation of Mrs Dupuy’s [3] & observed last summer that when Mrs Dupuy described to her how she had to get up early in the morning & to paint all day through to the night for the sake of money, the tears rose to her (Lady Bolingbroke’s) eyes. Now it cant be true,—can it? Because the distress must be now purely in idea & fear & futurity—and therefore why begin to sell her pictures now? Do you believe it? I believe that Lady Bolingbroke heard from Mrs Dupuy a story of the lawsuit & of the results which its possible termination wd involve,—& that she confounded the future with the present. Poor Mrs Dupuy! But oh—how truly & proudly might she scorn those friends who wd neglect her on account of her change of circumstances. “Thrown into the society of the vulgar & uneducated”! My dearest friend! Could she, in such a case, regret the “nous aûtres” [4] —& the educated? Could you? Could I? Could anyone in the world? Could the countenance withdrawn from us on account of our change of circumstances, be felt as a loss? Should we be humiliated by that withdrawment? No—& three times no! No, never! Never unless our souls grew poorer than our purses!–
For yourself!—for yourself, oh my dearest friend, .. for you who talk of what your fate wd have brought, if it had not been .. not for your nature, but for that of others, .. I really cannot entertain the subject .. cannot hold it in my hands a moment, .. in the monstrous shape into which you have fashioned it. Is it possible that you have no consciousness of the actual position which you, individually you, as a woman & a writer, occupy, now while we are speaking? Would you really change it as a social state, & in reference to dignity, with that of any one of the mistresses of princely mansions & large estates?– Do you actually consider that the attention which is paid you, would not be flattering instead of humiliating to the ‘proudest woman’ under the sun? Can you for a moment believe it to be the attention of “compassion” rather than the homage of admiration? If this appear so to you–—and indeed, indeed, it cannot so appear even for a moment but by the influence of temporary depression—we need not argue any more, about blue being green, & green blue, because you are talking by moonlight & I by day-light, & we never can come to an understanding.
As to literature, when you go to it again you will want nobody to cheer you on (there will be multitudes of cheerers!) & let the pecuniary returns diminish ever so, they will not, I trust & hope, altogether disappoint you. I know that I, who write from riddledom & have deservedly none of your popularity, could support myself by writing for the magazines & other periodicals[.] I have proved that to myself. The returns are not likely, therefore, to fail for you. À fortiori, [5] as the logicians say, you wd pick up gold as you walked.
Being in a quarrelsome humour I must moreover dissent from you my beloved friend, a little bit about Mary Howitt. Surely some of her ballads are beautiful! suggestive of a power which does not explain itself, I admit, in her longer efforts, .. but still to be recognized as born of poetry, in themselves. I like Mary Howitt’s lyrical poetry—ballad poetry, I shd say distinctively,—and once thought,—before I had read the ‘Seven Temptations’, [6] that I wd prefer having her genius to work with, than either Mrs Hemans’s & [sic] Miss Landon’s. The Seven Temptations changed my view, & checked my admiration. She cannot sustain a high song—& that became clear to me. Still I like her better than Mrs Norton—I think I do. Some of Mrs Norton[’]s minor poetry has a deeper hold of pathos,—but upon the whole—& considering the exceeding feebleness of the long principal poem of her last volume, [7] I think I certainly do. In regard to the prose, you are quite not to be quarrelled with. Mrs Howitt’s prose is, in general, wonderfully bad—& that book you speak of & whose name has vanished from my recollection, is, to be sure, as bad as bad can be. [8] But I acquit her in relation to Frederica Bremer, & consider that when people undertake to translate books, it by no means signifies that they shd new-model them, leaving out “the objectionable parts”. [9] And besides—it is the fashion to call everything which is dark & sorrowful morbid, just as if guilt & sorrow were not sufficiently important constituent portions of human nature & condition. There may indeed, be one or two things a little melodramatic & beyond ordinary prevision in this book—but as to leaving out all the dark part, .. that is, all the story of Bruno,—I wd not for the world that it were done. [10] Well—when you have read it, you will decide between Mrs Niven & me. The title is, The Neighbours—just a title for Miss Austen you see!– And for Miss Austen, you shall praise her as much as you please. She is delightful exquisite in her degree!—only I wdnt have one of your dear hands “cut off” that you shd “write one page like her’s with the other”,—because, really & earnestly, your Village & Belford Regis are more charming to me than her pages in congregation. She wants (admit it honestly, because you know she wants it) she wants a little touch of poetry. Her ‘neighbours’ walk about & gossip, all unconscious of the sunshine & the trees & the running waters .. to say nothing of the God of nature & providence. ‘Persuasion’ (ah! you are cunning to bring ‘Persuasion’ to me!) is the highest & most touching of all her works—and I agree with you gladly that it is perfect in its kind, & with touches of a higher impulse in it than we look generally to receive from her genius. [11]
Are you .. oh, so .. angry with me, .. for railing? I am under a quarrelsome star today—perverse beyond bearing, perhaps! I have the London fog in my temper.
And think of Mr Landor .. Savage Landor .. writing an Imaginary Conversation in Blackwood, in which in [sic] introduces Porson railing at Wordsworth!! .. & Southey (Poor Southey!– What a lack of taste & feeling!) defending him as half ashamed, & languidly consummating the full damnation with ‘faint praises’. [12] The result is, that Wordsworth is forced into the rank below Gray!! and Goldsmith!– Now I consider myself a lamb after Savage Landor .. who is a tiger.
How is your dearest patient? How I think of you & of your heavy cares!! May God bear you through them & bless you by them, as He can. And do, d<o> rest & take care!–
Your own
EBB–
You are too kind to me by far, my dearest dearest Miss Mitford!—far too kind! And a pretty gratitude I must have, to put that at the end of a letter!—!!——
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 107–111.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. A further reference to Mrs. Dupuy’s financial concerns (see letters 1072 and 1075).
2. J.H. Carter exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1839 and 1856. His wife, Elizabeth Carter, had works shown there between 1839 and 1869. Daphne Foskett believes that Matilda Carter, whose miniature of EBB is reproduced in volume 5, was their daughter, as all three used the same address (A Dictionary of British Miniature Painters, 1972, p. 197).
3. We have been unable to establish the relationship.
4. “The likes of us.”
5. “With stronger reason.”
6. Mrs. Howitt published The Seven Temptations in 1834.
7. The last-published work of Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton (née Sheridan, 1808–77) was The Dream, and Other Poems (1840). Her earlier titles included The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829), The Undying One (1830) and A Voice from the Factories (1836). In view of EBB’s comment about her, it is of interest to note that Horne chose to speak of both of them in the same chapter of A New Spirit of the Age (1844).
8. This was probably Work and Wages; or, Life in Service, reviewed in The Athenæum on 29 October 1842 (no. 783, p. 931).
9. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) edited The Family Shakespeare (1818) and a six-volume edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1826) with “the careful omissions of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency.” Despite the havoc wrought on Shakespeare’s text, the expurgated edition sold well and was reissued several times.
10. In letter 1074, Miss Mitford had alluded to “some strange morbid tale” running through the Bremer novel.
11. Fredrika Bremer was compared to Jane Austen (see letter 1070). Miss Austen’s Persuasion was published posthumously in 1818.
12. Pope, An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734), line 201. Landor’s essay, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for December 1842 (pp. 687–715), imagined a conversation between Southey and Richard Porson about Wordsworth. Southey, who died in March 1843, was already in “a mere trance” (DNB), hence EBB’s comment.
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