1441. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 57–60.
[London]
[24] Nov– 1843. [1]
My dearest friend I thank you for permitting me to see Mrs Niven’s admirable letter. Her descriptions strike fire out of my desires, & leave me longing “Oh, for a horse with wings.” [2] Am I never never to see Italy with my eyes? Never, in all probability: & it makes me sigh like furnace [3] to think out such a melancholy to an end. If I could go,—if I had strength & liberty,—I would go tomorrow, & divide two or three years between France, Germany, & Italy,—& stay longest perhaps in Germany. France, I say,—but it shd rather be Paris—because I shd care for the insight into men, nearly as well as for the prospects from mountains. What help it wd give to the mind,—what help in versatility & aptitude, & variety of appreciation .. to any thinking active mind, alive to clasp, with both hands, the advantages on every side!– Is it not true that change in the sensations, .. & in those ideas more closely connected with the external world, .. must react strongly, deeply, & freshly on the inner Being,—conducing to the fuller development of the Imaginative & Reflective powers? I think so. Not that travelling will make a man wise or imaginative—but that its tendencies are to increase the wisdom of the Thoughtful, & multiply the images of the Poetic. Now I hope you are much the better for this treatise .... not pure Bridgewater. [4]
Mr Kenyon goes out of town today for a week, & came in his kindness to wish me ‘good bye’ yesterday. We talked of you—and Mrs Dupuy, he said, had written to beg you to pass a few days at her house, with a promise of giving you away in charity to me by a thousand pounds at a time. Ah, if you were to come! I dare scarcely hope it,—knowing your indisposition to sleep in other people’s houses—but still, considering the largeness of the Welbeck Street house in proportion to its inhabitants, & how you wd have nearly the whole house to range in, .. you & K .. & perfect liberty to go out of it at pleasure,—it strikes me that you may relent & be drawn over into ‘enemy’s ground,’ as in the old child’s game which used to dislocate my wrists. [5] If you are inclined to relent, I will not be jealous .. I promise so far, boldly. Is there a chance of a relenting? I shall consider,—as you may do,—my dearest Miss Mitford, that you would have been in a crowd here, at the best, .. & even while the crowd cheered you,—while there, you wd have the advantages of lodgings—. What say you?—or think you? As for the plan of coming every week, or even very often, if you cd come at no expense,—why is there not a way of coming at no expense? I mean,—of taking a ticket for the year? Do tell me. What a luxury that wd be .. not to you .. but to me! I covet it as I do Italy—& more reasonably.
Well—your speculation about Orion & your “cynosure of neighbouring eyes,” [6] made me open mine a little!– Can it really be founded—or feasible? It is impossible of course, for me to judge—but I shall be, for all your prophecy, exceedingly surprised if the intended poem with the locality in Bearwood, shd stand confessed as a marriage. If the young lady’s heart shd be pricked through, why, there, will be a change upon the shooting of rabbits!– Do tell me all you hear or fancy. [7]
Mr Horne is very kind to “intend to do” me “himself”—and although the intention seems to imply what you suggest, perhaps he meant some reference to ‘autobiographies’ which he may have received from such persons as keep memoirs of themselves in their table drawers for the convenience of editors. I had a note from him this morning—& he tells me not only that the work is to be in two volumes,—but that the two (with 360 pages in each) are, by contract, to be finished by the middle of next month. [8] Now unless he does it by machinery, or by a flash of lightening, the possibility of this rapidity I can scarcely, understand. For the rest, it seems to me that he must write more quickly than you think,—Orion having sprung upon his feet within this summer,—& Napoleon within a year, together with a tragedy. [9] When he was with you .. how cd he be expected to abstract himself away from you?—to say nothing of the two angels (hight Katy & Bessie) keeping the background, one on each side!–
Did I tell you that Henrietta had been thrown into Mesmeric trances by her friend Mary Minto, four, .. five times lately? The insensibility is not complete, she says,—but the happy impossibility of moving hand foot or eyelid, she has arrived at,—& describes the sensation as a delicious mystery of something!– Moreover Mary Minto begged Arabel to get a lock of my hair which none but myself had touched, by diplomacy, & wrap it in oilskin,—that she, Mary, might send it to a chief Rabbi of the Magnetisers in Paris, who was to declare straightway the nature of & remedy for my complaint. [10] Instead of being diplomatic, Arabel brought me the note,—and I refused to part with my locks for any such purpose of witchery. My dearest friend, it wd have made me as nervous, as nervous & as fanciful as I could well be!– I shd be lying here by myself, & fancying the mystical presence of a Clairvoyant French soul of a professor! Even Flush wdnt have been a guard to me! The candles wd have burnt blue,—& not a symptom, should I have lost, of being haunted!– Mr Kenyon told me I was quite right in refusing the hair. And oh, if you were to hear some of Mr Kenyon’s stories in their grand details—how one body’s soul was sent to Bath, & saw such & such a house with such & such pictures, & such & such persons with such & such peculiarities of dress [11] —and how another body’s soul went to another house in the country, & described everything in it, except a bronze ornament on the chimney piece, which, upon enquiry … had been sent to be mended.!! .. and how another uneducated body’s unrefined Soul, did, in a trance, utter, in eloquent language, thoughts as deep as Emerson’s!! And then think of me .. full of all these traditions, & with my own natural leaning towards mysticism to give them effect,—left in my solitude to the mercy of my imagination, while a clairvoyant Parisian professor had as tight hold of me by a lock of hair, as the angel of Death could be supposed to have, of a devout Mussulman!– [12] Was it not wise of me to deny the hair? ‘Very wise,’ thought Mr Kenyon!–
Thank you,—thank you & Ben, .. for your kindness in the violets. What a sweet memory of the summer,—or promise of the spring! & I shd be puzzled as which, to accept them,—if they were not more fragrant still as a thought of you!–
May God bless you, my dearest Miss Mitford!
Ever & ever your
EBB–
Oh—do tell me the tale illustrative of the royal race of Flush. I am prepared for everything from “all the blood of all the Flushes.” [13] By the way my Flush learnt to count to three, in ten minutes yesterday.
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 345–348 (as [?22] November 1843).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by the receipt of letter 1440.
2. Cymbeline, III, 2, 48.
3. Cf. As You Like It, II, 7, 148.
4. A reference to the eight essays written as a result of the 8th Earl of Bridgewater’s bequest (see letter 510, note 3).
5. i.e., tug-of-war.
6. Milton, “L’Allegro,” line 80.
7. It appears that Miss Mitford believes that Horne hopes to advance his supposed wooing of Miss Walter by poetical means.
8. Horne gave the figure of 320 pages per volume (see the previous letter). In fact, when published the first volume contained 332 pages, the second 310.
9. It is not clear whether EBB means Gregory VII, published in April 1840, or whether she was aware of Horne’s unpublished epic, “Ancient Idols, or the Fall of the Gods,” completed in 1842. The History of Napoleon appeared in 1841, after being published in monthly instalments in 1839.
10. We cannot identify “the chief Rabbi of the Magnetisers”; there were several practitioners who could be contenders for such a title (see Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France, by Robert Darnton, 1968, pp. 139–141).
11. See letter 1432.
12. In Muslim theology, Azrael, one of the four highest angels at the throne of Allah, watches over the dying and takes the soul from the body.
13. EBB adapts Pope’s “All the blood of the Howards” (Essay on Man, IV, 216).
___________________
