1105. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 252–256.
[London]
Dec. 30. 1842.
There are occasional florid passages, to be sure, in Madme de Stael—but “the rosy-fingered Aurora in prose” whom Pope used to hate so much, [1] is not predominant in her—and I never never could think, my dearest friend, of comparing her to Hervey. [2] The French critics cried aloud I know, & spared not, against her want of classicism & departure from the models. Let them cry! Who can be insensible to the warmth of colouring, the masterdom of outline .. the eloquent weeping & laughter of her style. It is eloquence. The tendency to an undue floridness is neither so general nor so extreme in its occurrence, in her as in others[,] as in Chateaubriand—for instance: & compare the flower of flowers taken from either her hand or his, with the genuine florid, or rather the artificial-floweriness, as it flourishes with such writers as the Viconte d’Arlincourt whose ‘Solitaire’ had such a success in its generation. [3] So I do venture to disagree with you, very humbly, in regard to what I cant help considering your underrating of one of the Duality of great women produced by or affiliated in France——Madme Dudevant being the second. Madme de Sevignè is an intellectual Grace—Madme Dacier [4] a learned writer: a woman of genius, neither of those can pretend to be. France must turn, with the crowning due to genius, to her Corinna [5] & George Sand.
Among her modern female writers, do you know much, or recognize as gladly & admiringly as I do, the gracious vivacity of the Duchesse d’Abrantes? Her voluminous memoirs upon Napoleon & the Restoration are quite delightful to me: & some of her romances have great merit. [6]
And all this reminds me of Madme Brulart & of the question you put to me long ago, & which I do believe I never even tried to answer. She was an ‘enfant perdu’ [7] —slipped out of my head & was never picked up afterwards!—& now that I have found her, I am afraid of having no great good to say of her, my dearest friend. Are you not ‘’ware’, as we say in the ballads, of the Duke of Orleans & their mutual accredited affections [8] —& do you believe all the good she says “honestly & candidly” of herself in her memoirs? Ah—I am afraid, I am afraid, that you must’nt go on to do so. The continual hum which is audible in all the contemporary & later french writers who mention her name, is full of scandal—& I remember particularly reading in the curious Memoires d’une femme de qualitè, [9] a mot upon Madme de Genlis who was said to have confessed in her memoirs everybody’s sins except her own. In fact, she was one of your exemplary moralists who exhaust their virtues in their books. I like Madme de Genlis in many of her writings. She had imagination & vivacity—something very near to genius. I like her well enough to be sorry, for the sake of the Palace of Truth & Alphonsine [10] & one or two more, that she wrote the hundred books beside. Do you know Alphonsine? the story of the Duchesse de C. in the cavern, [11] extended into three volumes? Would you like to know it, if you do not already? I have it here. It belongs to me. And it always seems to me the very best, most vivid & most interesting of its author’s various romances, & well worth reading once or twice or thrice.
Now I am going to tell you of a present I have received. My dear brother Charles John—he is the eldest of those left to us—very kind, warmly affectionate, sensitive beyond what is happy for him, & so unfortunately nervous as to shrink from general society & observation .. to refuse even to dine down stairs when women dine here .. most unfortunately shy & nervous which infirmities an impediment in his speech has done much to increase & to be increased by—well, he, my dear brother Charles John, brought me, the evening before last, a very precious present. Can you guess what it is?–– It is the engraving from Mr Lucas’s portrait of you, my beloved friend, framed very prettily in satin-wood,—and he gave it to me, dear kind fellow, as “the present he thought I wd like best”. [12] If you had seen his dear face—how it shone & glowed at once with love & shyness! He had wished, he said, to give me a present—& he had great difficulty for fear of my not liking what he selected,—but he thought he cd.’nt make a mistake in choosing a portrait of Miss Mitford, particularly as it seemed to him [“]very like indeed”! Was’nt it dear & kind? And dont you guess that both for his sake & your sake I have banished Spenser’s castle [13] from under Papa’s picture & replaced it by yours? How like it is, my dearest friend! The likeness is quite startling to my eyes & heart! And the absurdity is that I once saw this very engraving & did not think it like .. my recollections being all dislocated by the first sight of that great black hat which is the blot & defamation of the whole, but whch does not, cannot, destroy the likeness. Do you not think it like, yourself? The half-smile, half-thought of the lips,—the sideway musing of the eyes—the brow with Coleridge in it [14] —there cannot be a more striking, startling likeness. So there I have you safe! I am triumphantly pleased about my present!–
No—Moxon wont have my poems. George went to him before he left us for the circuit, & he was infinitely civil & “did protest” like a bookseller, his “respect for Miss Barrett’s genius,”—the only drawback being that he preferred having nothing to do with her. [15] He said that he happened to be personally connected with several poets, & from mere personal motives had been drawn in to publish their poems—that they did not sell .. that Mr Milnes’s did not sell—that Mr Tennyson’s sold the best—indeed he might almost say that his last volume had succeeded—that Wordsworth’s were only beginning to sell—& that poetry being at a discount, his (Mr Moxon’s) object now, was to form quite a new connection. There!– Nothing cd be more unhesitating & decided, George told me, that [sic] his answer. He observed however, that in his opinion Miss Barrett was perfectly right in publishing miscellaneous poems in a small volume, rather than a longer poetical work—that it was far more likely to be successful. The advice was disinterested—& in this disinterested advice was comprised the whole gain of my application.
You see my beloved friend, how much too well you have thought either of the “trade” or of .. the poet. And now I am half inclined to enquire no farther at present—to wait till next year. Only I have by me quite enough fugitive poetry to make a volume—& my notion was that such a publication might prepare the public for a kind reception of a poem of more importance which is floating in my brain & might emerge another season. I am not very fond of writing for the magazines—I mean of writing poems for them. The trash of my constituents there, seems to me either derogatory or ominous—& when I am conceited, which is now & then, it seems both.
This morning I had a very cordial letter from Mr Lowell, [16] the poet of Boston—& he asks me to send him a few poems for a magazine he is originating (which I certainly will do, because the Americans have been so goodnatured to me) & to solicit Mr Tennyson for something, if he shd be of my acquaintance. But—alas, alas,—not for Mr Lowell but for me: Mr Tennyson is’nt of my acquaintance—I do not, so, “side the gods”. [17]
Mr Kenyon is at home again. In his goodness he called here the day before yesterday, not to see me but to leave Macauley’s ballads [18] for me to look thro’. How kind! how too kind for a scandalmonger! [19]
Mr Haydon too has given me, given me two pages, nearly, of Keats’ poetry written in the poet’s hand. [20] The world is prodigal to me just now I think!
But the post. The post wont oblige me by a moment’s delay. I break off unwillingly. How are you, my beloved friend! I am better both in head & chest. You never did annoy or vex or trouble me in your life—you never could. [21] The application of such words is impossible in our relation. I hope you received back Mrs Trollope’s kind, pleasing note.
Your own affectionate
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 136–140.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Cf. Homer, The Iliad, I, 447. “Lord Bolingbroke and the Bishop of Rochester (Atterbury) did not quite approve of Telemachus; and Lord Bolingbroke in particular used to say, that ‘he could never bear the Saffron Morning with her rosy fingers, in prose.’—For my own part, though I don’t like that poetic kind of prose writing, yet I always read Telemachus with pleasure.—‘That must be, then, from the good sense and spirit of humanity that runs through the whole work?’—Yes, it must be that; for nothing else could make me forget my prejudices against the style it is written in so much as I do.—P” (Samuel Weller Singer’s edition of Joseph Spence’s Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men. Collected from the Conversations of Mr. Pope, and Other Eminent Persons of His Time, 1820, pp. 141–142).
2. John Hervey, Baron Hervey of Ickworth (1696–1743), incurred Pope’s enmity because of his close relationship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Their feud was carried into print, with sneering allusions to both Hervey and Lady Mary in Pope’s Dunciad (1728) and his First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated (1733).
3. Charles Victor Prévost, Vicomte d’Arlincourt (1789–1856), published Le Solitaire in 1821.
4. Anne Dacier (née Lefèvre, 1654–1720) translated Callimachus, Anacreon and Terence, as well as Homer and other classical authors.
5. i.e., Mme. de Staël; EBB told Boyd she had “read Corinne for the third time, & admired it more than ever. It is an immortal book, & deserves to be read three score & ten times” (letter 453). Corinna was a celebrated and beautiful poetess, the rival of Pindar.
6. Mme. d’Abrantès published her Mémoires ou Souvenirs Historiques sur Napoléon, la Révolution, le Directoire, le Consulat, l’Empire et la Restauration in 18 volumes between 1831 and 1836. She also wrote Scènes de la Vie Espagnole (1836), L’Exile (1837) and L’Histoire des Salons de Paris (1837–38).
7. “Lost child.” Brulart was the family name of Mme. de Genlis’s husband, the Comte de Genlis.
8. In her Diary, Mme. D’Arblay recounts how “every ill story of la Comtesse de Genlis was confirmed by the Duke [de Liancourt],” who thought her to be a woman “of inexhaustible intrigue and ambition” and held her to be “a principal instrument of French misery” on account of her influence with the Duke of Orléans (V, 349).
9. Although entitled Mémoires d’une Femme de Qualité sur Louis XVIII, sa Cour et son Règne (1829), the book was actually from the pen of Étienne Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1786–1864).
10. “Le Palais de la Vérité” was included in Nouveaux Contes Moraux, et Nouvelles Historiques (1802); Alphonsine, ou la Tendresse Maternelle was published in 1806.
11. It was Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres sur l’Éducation (1782) that contained the story of the Duchess. This was subsequently published in an English translation as The Affecting History of the Duchess of C**; Who Was Confined Nine Years in a Horrid Dungeon Under Ground, Where Light Never Entered, a Straw Bed Being Her Only Resting Place, and Bread and Water Her Only Support … by Her Inhuman Husband [1820?].
12. This was the engraving EBB had criticized in letter 861.
13. The sketch by Mr. Weale acknowledged in letter 698.
14. EBB told Miss Mitford of Kenyon’s comment on the resemblance in letter 828.
15. Moxon subsequently changed his mind and became the publisher of Poems (1844).
16. Letter 1088.
17. A phrase frequently used by EBB; see letter 840, note 1.
18. His newly-published Lays of Ancient Rome.
19. i.e., EBB herself, referring no doubt to her enduring speculation about Kenyon’s romantic involvement.
20. See letter 1102, note 5.
21. Underscored three times.
___________________
