1213. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 75–77.
[London]
Friday– [?14] April. 1843. [1]
Yes—to be sure. My dearest friend, did you really expect me to say, “No—I wd rather, if you please, that you did not write to me—”? Is it really true that such a reply would not have surprised you the least bit in the world? How great must be your faith in me!
Well then—if I must, as Mr Boyd says, “explicate” myself .. translate myself into the vulgar tongue .. I beg you to understand before the end of those three hundred years, which you designate as the time for me to be generally known & admired, that I have enough sense & feeling & love of you to appreciate your letters, to aspire towards receiving them by every possible post; to avoid putting them in the fire when they come, & to prefer, really to prefer their being addressed to me rather than to another correspondent. Under my breath I murmur … “oh!—how jealous I am capable of being of any other …” black Browne or fair, [2] —“who stretched forth his or her hands to catch my letters.”!! You have had an escape of the dagger & the bowl.– [3]
Seriously my dearest friend, (& I do hope you were only half serious in your doubt of me!) I accept with open hands & arms your correspondence, & will preserve your letters apart & in order … & .. what is a greater effort, .. will return them to you when you & the compositor claim them. [4] I will act the public at your rehearsal .. & I clap my hands now for a beginning.
Well—as long as you go on tuesday, I will not scold you for not going on monday—altho’ I who am superstitious more than enough, & have felt myself grow white & sick at the sound of a death-watch, [5] never fell into that particular superstition about unlucky days. [6] But I earnestly hope that you may stay away longer than the three weeks & month you speak of, because they appear to me only enough to tire you & not enough for renovation & refreshment of health & spirits. Suffer yourself to be kept away from home, six weeks at least, if not two months—do, my dearest friend! & suffer yourself to be held in the embracing arms of the Bath P. if by no more golden gyve! [7] I shall tell Flush to lock the house up & refuse to let you in any sooner. Three weeks! what are three weeks?
You go away persuaded of my “obstinacy”, & you will make “morals” on the way. Yet I am not particularly obstinate on the point in question—only particularly ignorant. Yet I know that annuities are modified in general by the age of the persons receiving them!– Yet Mr Kenyon certainly told me that according to the “Long Annuities,” an individual of any age received eight per cent between this 1843 & 1860.
His letter to you is sufficient. For my part, I humbly confess that whenever I “do sums” or meddle with business questions, I sit down by the waters of Cocytus [8] & hang my bonnet upon the brambles, [9] .. & deserve all the intense contempt which Papa serenely expresses for me. That I shd have written absurdly to you about interests & annuities is a matter of course I suppose,—& I will confess any profundity of ignorance you please to exact from my humility, as long as you will let me off from the charge of obstinacy. How can I be obstinate, when I dont know enough to believe in anything? You might as well say that Pyrrho was self-willed when he let himself be driven over. [10]
Now I must come to an end, like other mortals. May God bless & keep you my dearest friend. Be sure that my thoughts & wishes will tenderly follow you–
Ever your
EBB–
Think of somebody having the impertinence to bring a number of the pirated Tableaux [11] to this house two days ago!– It is in this way, (hawking it about the streets) that they attempt the circulation of the work. I am so very glad to hear of the new announcements. You will make a delightful book for us out of Devonshire–
I am delighted with your praise of ‘Pan’—thank you for it!—for notwithstanding the obliquity of my judgements on my own poems, I do fancy that it is the best, or almost the best, I ever wrote. Only I hope I may yet do better. It is my tendency, you see, to aspire beyond myself—which is not a bad tendency––except that it makes one discontented & restless– Oh Flush! how you make my hand shake!
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 208–210.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Conjecturally dated by EBB’s reference to “unlucky days” (see note 6 below).
2. Pope, Epistles to Several Persons (1744), II, 4.
3. i.e., death by stabbing or poison.
4. This project of publishing the letters written by Miss Mitford during her journey did not materialize, although some use was made of them in her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852).
5. The tick of the death-watch beetle was supposed to be ominous, and EBB believed that the unexpected death of her mother in 1828 had been thus heralded (see Diary, p. 54).
6. The reference to Monday and “unlucky days” suggests that EBB had in mind Black Monday, so named in memory of the fatalities incurred on Easter Monday 1360 when Edward III was besieging Paris. As Easter Sunday fell on 16 April in 1843, we infer that EBB was writing on the previous Friday.
7. Fletcher, A Wife for a Month (1624), act I, sc. 2. As previously noted, “the Bath P.” was Miss Pickering.
8. From the unwholesomeness of its water, this was considered by the ancients to be one of the rivers of hell.
9. Possibly EBB’s equivalent of the psalmist’s hanging harps upon the willows (Psalms, 137:2).
10. Pyrrho (ca. 360–ca. 270 B.C.) was the founder of Scepticism. Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, wrote that Pyrrho would go “out of his way for nothing, taking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not … but he was kept out of harm’s way by his friends who … used to follow close after him” (bk. IX, cap. 11, 62, trans. Robert D. Hicks).
11. A further reference to the vexing usurpation of Miss Mitford’s copyright by the Finden brothers, first mentioned in letter 967.
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