1353. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 278–283.
[London]
[?12] August 1843. [1]
Thank you my dearest friend for your letter! I waited for it eagerly & opened it without reverence to the seal. After all I am of course a little disappointed by your impression: [2] a want of refinement really not being the thing I expected to hear of. How is it that such varied mental acquirement, & such poetical sensibility & imagination should fail in forcing upwards & outwards a polished surface?– It is a mystery. Is it that the learning by rote of conventional forms by the process of association, proves to be more essential to the manners & what is called “breeding” than a training from within?– I am a little disappointed. And yet you like him you say. Well—I am disappointed nevertheless. In what you describe as the straining after wit, I miss my phantasma even more than in the want of general conversational power—it seems to involve a want of the good taste I had taken for granted. Because there really is in his letters & prose papers, a tact & delicacy .. a “gentilesse” as Chaucer says, .. from which I argued much. I am disappointed—cant help it—should be, if he sang like a nightingale. Oh! the guitar does not console me a bit!—I love music & can admire a musician—but we do not look to Orions for Cachuchas [3] .. but for a high sphere-music. [4]
Not that I am over-fine & particular. Your Mr Reade might be too level for me—and Mr Lockhart (from what I hear of him—cold & polished as marble—) certainly would be so. But I like gentle manners, & think a ‘soft low voice’ [5] almost as excellent a thing in man as in woman. I give your (no, not your!) crême de la crême to Flushie—or rather would .. if it were not too worthless for him—dear Flushie!—who is a Duke in his own right!–
Well! whatever the outside may be, our friend is a true-hearted man & generous—full of feeling & kindness—full of genius—rich in acquirement—there is enough to honor in him. I am only sorry that there should be any discordant note in such a full chord. But he is worth twenty Mr Reades who are played upon on the flute to no particular tune. I say no harm of Mr Reade—only of his poet-hood—the faces of ninety nine poets being under his hood! [6] You know he is a phenomenon of unconscious imitation. In his ‘Sacred Poems’ he adopts Wordsworth ‘for the nonce’. [7] He is a phenomenon—a physiological curiosity. Ungrateful of me to say so!
Mr Taylor [8] has bewitched you I think—& not without a charm of power. Ah—but it is not a sufficient argument for me against Mesmerism, that he did not experience it himself. That some organizations have an inaptitude, is a first principle in the system. I neither believe, nor disbelieve—; I am waiting for evidence—more evidence on each side: I am inclined to think however that if there is anything in it, there is more than hysteria, I mean, that the phenomena of the adoption of the senses of one person by another &c, cannot be resolved into any modification of Hysteria, consider them how we may. Mary Minto describes her after sensations very differently from your female friend, as delightful, luxurious—she thinks of nothing but Mesmer. Who was the famous physician who suffered so acutely from Tic douloureux that he is said to have stamped, in his agony, the bottom of his carriage out? I forget the name at this moment. That physician, Mr Tulk operated upon day after day, throwing him into magnetic sleeps oblivious of any pain in the course of five minutes, though he could not sleep otherwise by night or day from his state of suffering. Mr Tulk says so. I believe him to be a man of honor—yet to judges in general, the evidence is of course insufficient. I shall sieze on the Lancet [9] by my first opportunity—& I should like to see Dr Elliotson’s new work on Mesmerism [10] —which is said to be able & honest. That he is an able & honest man, I never can doubt—only there is a “speculation in his eyes”– [11] Perhaps after all your Mr Taylor may be as wrong about Mesmer, as he is, I think, about Körner .... & somebody else! [12] All gratitude to him!
Now I must tell you! I have had a letter .. a note, .. which has charmed me, touched me, made me feel inclined both to laugh & cry—a touching & most gratifying note from Miss Martineau. She has sent me a little book of hers called ‘Scenes of Palestine,’ in its second edition this year: & had she taken witch’s counsel as to the choice of words which best & deepest should please me, she would not have sent the book to me with other words than are actually employed by her. And this to me who deserve nothing from her!—who have honored her powers indeed .. but in the uttermost silence! who never even gave a sovereign towards her subscription!—— [13] I had thought of it, but being a little straightened myself, & told that she did not require the money & that it was only a supererogatory thought of certain personal friends who wished to prove the public feeling for her, I forbore my first better thought! She is a very noble woman—& her least word wd give honor to me—still more such kind words as these—and I cannot (you see I cannot) help telling you of them, knowing that you love me enough to be pleased in my pleasure. Do you know her? personally—or by letter? [14] She says that she has “almost forgotten to desire health & vigour in the keen sense of enjoyments which bear no relation to the body or its welfare.”
There is that kind dear Mr Kenyon! He proposed to me yesterday that I should go in my chair to his house in Regent’s Park & stay there for two or three hours lying on the sofa & looking on the trees, safe & silent from all the world, whenever I pleased—I & Flush & one of my sisters! Such a kind thought! so like him—suggested so considerately & affectionately! If I can get used enough to the motion of the chair to manage the distance & the cross-stones, I will really do it before the summer closes—at any rate I will dream of it. I told him that I wd set it by as my dream, & should like it the better for its association with his kind thoughts. He is a sort of male Grace of all kindnesses .. is he not?– If you can find him a female Grace to suit him (and the lady you speak of [15] promises excellently well) pray try to bring them together—for he deserves every species of felicity inclusive of the hymeneal. My impression however is, that if his marrying again was probable, it has ceased to be so. His brother’s marriage seems to be enough for him—enough to supply him with the sort of home-warmth which a single man advanced in life must sometimes feel the lack of. He may marry however for that very reason—controlled by example into action. And certainly nothing, he says, can be more delightful to witness than his “brother’s ménage”—the devotion on both sides—the silent anticipation of wish & thought .. the sacrifice of the whole world for their mutual society—she .. considered by him with a tender feeling approaching the parental .. (from the difference in age) .. & he, looked up to, as friend father husband, demi-god, .. the creator, in a sense, of her moral & intellectual being! She is not too young—thirty seven or eight, Mr Kenyon says; and he is not too infirm .. crippled as he is in hand & foot,—to delight in hearing her singing voice as it passes all over the house & round it. Only once since they came, has he been out of the house—& only twice has she: they live in the light of one another’s faces, & all beyond is in shadow. Well!—that is love—is it not? & with more romance in it too, than often goes to the making of many a youthful marriage where white & red meet carriage & four. [16] There is a peculiarity so far—that since the lady was ten years old, this infirm & crippled elderly man has been the light of her hearth .. her instructor & tender friend. No wonder that she shd say now——“To Africa! with him!.”
Oh—I like the Germans. I honor & love the Germans!– I love smoke for their sakes .. be it imagination-smoke or tobacco-smoke: & if “Grease & beer” are harder to bear—, .. I love the Germans nevertheless. If I were strong & free as you, you wd hear of me keeping witch-sabbath on the Brocken, [17] with a tame will o’ the wisp running beside me. I should be running myself all over the world—. I should be at Paris .. (there is a chivalry in the French which I like) .. I should be in Italy—. I should be longest in Germany– I should be in the Alps & Pyrenees—. I might be peradventure in the eternal mist of Niagara. Seriously & certainly I should very much like to spend the next three years in the midst of new lands & strange souls– I should very much like it——but far, far is the dream of it!——
I agree with you in every thought & word you spend upon public weddings,—& am happy to tell you that I never was at such a thing in my life as any one of them. Once indeed I was at a wedding .. poor Annie Boyd’s [18] —but we met at the church & separated there; & that was enough of it—& too much for her, poor thing, who has had reason to sit in ashes ever since.
My dearest friend, I take your view of the inscription. Is it not rather a common form? Yet being the expression of a universal feeling, & simple, we need not perhaps on that account object to it. I think however that I would say “in the full hope of a joyful resurrection” [19] —& certainly I wd insert the “joyful”—because otherwise the words fall into rather a doubtful expression of “general credence[”] than as you say, the defined & happy expectation of a dying Christian. Who did the Latinity? It is not elegant, I fancy—& the closing expression is objectionable on another ground. [20] Why not send it to an orthodox scholar—you, who have many friends among the learned.
It is because you have many friends, my beloved Miss Mitford, that you lose many—; there is consolation for you in the very quantity of the pain. Nobody surely in the world has more friends than you have—I know not one who has so many .. active admiring & faithful friends. Still, there is reason in your pain,—& I understand the degree of it—& how you must seem to lose the past again in losing those who were associated with it in your life. Only One divine friend ‘Jesus Christ the righteous’ is “the same yesterday today & for ever”: [21] and it is pleasant to think that the same Love which has worked from above in relation to us, will work for ever all things into good for us; [22] & that we cannot outlast or out-wear it.
May God bless you my dearest friend! Not until October? I sigh to think of that. George says that Orion is much admired upon the circuit—and .. I sent you a salmon yesterday.
Most affectionately yours
EBB.
Mr Horne has probably left you, or I wd send my very kind regards to him.
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 278–283.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by the reference to Horne’s visit to Miss Mitford. In letter 1349 (7 August) it is still impending; by 17 August (letter 1357) it is over, so this letter falls somewhere between these dates.
2. i.e., of Horne.
3. A lively Spanish dance (OED).
4. Cf. Milton, “On the Death of a Fair Infant … Dying of a Cough” (1673), line 39.
5. Cf. King Lear, V, 3, 273–274.
6. A reference to the plagiarism of which Reade was accused; speaking of his Italy in letter 643, EBB had numbered as “seventy times seven” the echoes of Byron.
7. I Henry VI, II, 3, 57.
8. Alfred Swaine Taylor (1806–80) was Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Guy’s Hospital 1831–77 and an expert witness in criminal trials involving poison. He was also interested in the photographic process pioneered by William Henry Fox Talbot, publishing The Art of Photogenic Drawing in 1840.
9. It seems probable that Miss Mitford had drawn EBB’s attention to an article on mesmerism in The Lancet, detailing “the complete exposure of the roguery which took place in Bedford-square.” Although published in 1838, it was referred to in the course of brief remarks on mesmerism in the issue of 15 July 1843 (p. 534).
10. Numerous Cases of Surgical Operations Without Pain in the Mesmeric State (1843).
11. Cf. Macbeth, III, 4, 94. EBB perhaps refers to the showmanship surrounding his experiments with the O’Key sisters (see letter 1347, note 5).
12. Karl Theodor Körner (1791–1813), poet and dramatist, was a friend of Schiller. “Somebody else” is obviously EBB, whose poetry Taylor must have praised.
13. See letter 1210, note 10.
14. Miss Martineau, in her Autobiography, recorded her association with Miss Mitford, saying “my own opinion always was that her mind wanted the breadth, and her character the depth, necessary for genuine achievement in the highest enterprise of literature. I must say that personally I did not like her so well as I liked her works.... What concerned me was her habit of flattery, and the twin habit of disparagement of others” (I, 419).
15. This prospective wife for Kenyon has not been identified.
16. We have not located the source of this comparison; it apparently refers to the pairing of a young, pretty woman to an older, wealthy man.
17. The setting for the witches’ revelry on Walpurgisnacht, on the eve of May Day.
18. See letter 578.
19. Miss Mitford accepted this suggestion for the wording of her parents’ memorial plaque in Shinfield church.
20. There was no Latin in the final wording of the inscription.
21. I John, 2:1 and Hebrews, 13:8.
22. Cf. Romans, 8:28.
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