1759. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 225–229.
[London]
November 14. 1844
Every day I have been going to write to you my ever dearest friend,—& certes, the first letter in the letter would have been a very great O, without these sayings of yours today which seem to come on purpose to modify it. I thought to myself, & shd have told you in the neighbourhood of the ‘O,’ that if you really incited Mr Lovejoy into ordering “all Balzac” for the amusement & edification of English country houses, you wd both have to take your chance as Guy Fawkeses, & enjoy a gunpowder day set apart for your honour. Mrs Gore who translated something into very fair decency, was called up to judgement for it .. as I forgot to remind you when you talked of translations. She said in her preface, apologetically for French literature, that no young woman in France ever thought of reading these naughty romances, to which the Athenæum responded that what was impure to the young, was also impure to the old, & that Mrs Gore shd have learnt her morals better. [1] Indeed I think it wd never do, to give out Balzac to miscellaneous readers—it wd do neither for him nor for them. Where you see art, they wd see evil—& the influence wd be according to the mode of the apprehension. But I am beating the air [2] in writing so. You are not thinking of doing as I feared you thought of doing– And as to the list, it can hurt neither Mr Lovejoy’s reputation as a discreet bookseller, nor the “prude d’Angleterre,” [3] to procure such books as are clean––if indeed it does not provoke a curiosity about what is kept back. Remember, my beloved friend, how you yourself who are by no means a “prude d’Angleterre,” & have been used to the old plays, were affected at first. Do try to remember. You used such words to me, as .. “blushing in every vein, I read” so & so. You spoke so strongly that I was afraid to mention some books, & drew off a little from the subject. The “abominations of young France” were strong in your nostrils—& now, you know, they are none the less abominable, although you are “acclimated,” so as to be able to contemplate the genius & the power of Art in a serene & pure abstraction. How many are able to do this with you? And to how many, wd not the attempt be dangerous? Books are living creatures. You see I am half afraid of you still. You have a generous Sympathy—a sympathy that gives & takes with both hands!— You cant help breaking every golden pleasure in two, that the world may have half of it! It is your tendency—your impulse! But I pull your gown, [4] & beg you not (in this one instance of profuse charity at the door!) not to injure the interests of the parish.
In agreement with what is written above, I vote against “Le grand homme de province”. Remember what scenes there are in it, running wine, & spirits of wine in a blaze. Who wd dare to snatch the raisins out, except “acclimated” hands? I vote against that powerful book, full. I have marked, besides those marked by you, “Le Centenaire” which I think is pure, but which is inferior—and Don Gigadas, [5] which I also think (as far as my recollections go), has nothing objectionable. It is very hard in relation to these books to disentangle one’s recollections of them, so as to be sure of any one of them being quite clean & pure—the conditions under which one reads them, come by habit to be so peculiar. Unless there is something very outrageous indeed, one is not startled easily on that road. The whole atmosphere takes so much evil odour for granted. To be hot for the dog days [6] argues a very excessive heat indeed. I doubt if in ‘Annette et le criminel’ for instance, all is clear—and the ‘Illusions Perdues’ [7] which you have not marked, but mention, wd not answer in England, .. that is in a country reading society, .. according to my impression. I want you to read Mdme Reybaud. Unequal to such writers as G Sand & C Bernard (how you made me laugh about the cigar & trowsers en perpetuité!) She has much talent. Arnaud is the mask-name. [8] Then Madame Camille Bodin (late Jenny Bastide) [9] is another female writer,—but inferior to all the three, & below naming with the two.
I have not got the Femme superieure yet—tiresome people! They lose their books every now & then—& “the boy who understands French” is walking out!—& “Femme superieure” cant be read on the title, without him!– As for the ‘Medecin de campagne’ [10] I certainly do not like it as well as you do. It appeared to me heavily didactic—with a good deal of power of writing & thinking,—but not an attractive book.
Yes—I have read much of Emerson. He has a fine chrystalizing way with him. His thoughts & sentences all fall into chrystals, & are worth examining for their beauty & clarity. But there never was a writer of more distraught paradoxes than this same Emerson, & a more uncompromising denier of first principles & first instincts. He is a paradox himself—being a devout atheist. He neutralizes the idea of Deity he admits. He makes a great blot over his idea of God with his idea of Man, & vice versa. The mind of a man, he says, is a porch to Deity—& what is behind .. the great temple-background, .. is Deity. [11] So Judas Iscariot is one porch, & the apostle Paul, another, and Paul de Kock, another, and every thought of evil or good which traverses those several porticos, is an emanation from God’s Divine. This is all mere distraction, surely. Yet the man thinks closely, & speaks beautifully. For the rest, he is not such a poet for richness of imagination as Carlyle,—and as he succeeded instead of preceding him, we must not talk of Carlyle’s plagiarizing him. In fact, Emerson is called a disciple of the school of the English philospher. “This brave Emerson,” Carlyle calls him! [12] But this brave Emerson has too much power of his own to be a mere ‘disciple’ to any man. I am glad you are struck by him.
In the matter of Harriet Martineau, I agree with you about the inconsistency of the letter-opinion, as much as you please: it always struck me as wonderfully inconsistent; [13] but I cannot blame, .. I can only admire .. that work by which she drew good for others out of the personal evil of her illness,—or her present intention (whether founded, or not, on mistaken impressions) of being a witness to the truth of Mesmerism, by which she considers herself cured. Surely these two acts are the acts of a disinterested & benevolent & honorable woman, & no proofs of a striving after notoriety.——
By the way, I had the other evening about six, a note from Mrs Jameson who could not be at fifty one in Wimpole Street, [14] she said, without writing to enquire after the dweller in fifty. It was very kind. She spoke of Miss Martineau’s recovery—using the term “miracle”. In my answer, I said that if I had had the note an hour before, I shd have asked her to come & see me—the circumstance of her taking the trouble to write appeared to me very kind. She said that she had been in sorrow—— Is it, do you think, from the death of Mrs Henry Siddons? I thought I recognized her style in the short panegyrical paragraph in the Athenæum. [15]
Have you Mr Reade & the Grecian column still in your neighbourhood?–
Write to me soon—do! Tell me of the mesmerism. May God bless you, my dearest friend! Oh yes—you will ‘come home’ .. soon! Think of it!– How I thank you for the kindness of such words!
Your most affectionate
EBB—or more properly
Ba
I was so provoked—I wanted to send you some of your favorite ginger—& could not. None was sent to us from Jamaica this year.
Mr Kenyon is not at home yet.
No—I recall my opinion of the innocence of Don Gigadas—I think I remember that it wd not quite do– But <“Une tenebreuse Affaire” [16] is blameless. Do you know, .. you who are fond of descriptions of tropical scenery, .. Outre Mer by De Queille? [17] Read it. It is tropical in all ways.> [18]
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 16–19.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. EBB refers to The Lover and the Husband; The Woman of a Certain Age (1841), which was Mrs. Gore’s translation of Gerfaut (1838) by Charles de Bernard. In her preface, Mrs. Gore wrote: “In France, young persons are not permitted to read novels.” The reviewer in the 7 August 1841 issue of The Athenæum (no. 719, p. 591) argued “that if ‘young persons’ are not permitted to read these novels in France, they cannot be proper for ‘young persons’ in England; and we doubt whether any woman of reputation, notwithstanding the miserable compliment to her ‘firm principles,’ would choose to open a work which is avowedly seasoned with immoralities to suit the vitiated and palled appetite of middle age.”
2. Cf. I Corinthians 9:26.
3. “English prude.”
4. Cf. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770), line 184.
5. Dom Gigadas (1840) first appeared in the complete works of Horace de Saint-Aubin (one of Balzac’s pseudonyms—see letter 1727, note 7). His Le Centenaire was published in 1822.
6. According to the Romans, the dog-days (dies caniculares), occurring at the time of the rising of Sirius, the dog-star (July-August), were the hottest and most unwholesome period of the year.
7. As previously noted (letter 1727, note 5), Annette et le criminel appeared in 1824. Illusions perdues was published in 1837.
8. See letter 1739, note 9.
9. Jenny Dufourquet Bastide (pseud. Camille Bodin, 1792–1854).
10. Balzac’s Le Médecin de Campagne appeared in 1833.
11. Cf. “A man is the façade of a temple, wherein all wisdom and all good abide” (Essays: By R.W. Emerson, of Concord, Massachusetts, 1841, ed. Thomas Carlyle, p. 273).
12. EBB refers to the following passage in the preface to Carlyle’s edition of Emerson’s Essays: “For myself I have looked over with no common feeling to this brave Emerson, seated by his rustic hearth, on the other side of the Ocean (yet not altogether parted from me either), silently communing with his own soul.”
13. See letter 1502, note 3.
14. See letter 1756.
15. The Athenæum first mentioned the death of Mrs. Siddons on 26 October 1844 (no. 887, p. 973); however, EBB is referring to a subsequent mention of it in a letter The Athenæum published on 2 November 1844 (no. 888, p. 1002) wherein an unidentified correspondent, who EBB is suggesting was Mrs. Jameson, requested that Mrs. Siddons’s death be noticed.
16. Balzac’s Une Ténébreuse Affaire (1841).
17. Outre-mer (1835) by Louis de Maynard de Queilhe.
18. The text in angle brackets is written on one side of a scrap of paper.
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