1807. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 7–11.
[London]
Jan. 6 [–8]. 1845. [1]
Nay, but my dearest friend, surely you do not call the author of the ‘Marguerites’ a poet, as Byron was! But you will remember that D’Arthez himself makes the distinction between ‘l’homme de poesie’ & ‘le poête,’ calling Lucien the former & not the latter. [2] We have a fundamental difference somewhere underneath our superficial differences & agreements, touching on genius & its requisites—& I cannot help plucking your sleeve till you remember that I, in my contempt for the Luciens, exclude by a bold sweep, my heroic idea of the true poet from all defamation.
This I wrote off my mind on the impulse of your letter before last,—& then came something less pleasant to ‘push me off my stool,’ [3] & force me to another occupation. In the meantime I receive your last letter, .. this morning, .. & thank you for it delightedly.
My news is, that Tennyson is about to have a pension of a hundred a year, which I am sure you will be glad of [4] —that Sir Richard Vivian is not the author of the ‘Vestiges of Creation,’ & is very angry at the attribution [5] —& that Harriet Martineau writes to Moxon to the effect that on saturday last “Lord Morpeth was down on his knees” in her room, talking Latin & Greek with J___ the somnambule, the four Miss Liddels being present, [6] —& that in the course of the séance they five conversed in five foreign languages with J___ she answering in English. It appears that when a foreign language is addressed to her simultaneously with the touching of her organ of imitation, she translates into English what is said—but when simultaneously with the touching of the organ of language, she contents herself with simply replying. And these effects are invariable. How & why the noble Lord subsided to his “knees,” I do not know & cannot tell you,—but it was mentioned just so in the letter. I had the kindest letter from her on new year’s day,—too kind. She goes to Mr Greg’s house at Winandermere tomorrow, the thirteenth, [7] & intends to come to London in time, but a long time.
If I can find a letter I have just received from Mr Horne, I shall send it for you to see his own account of his misfortune lately—the dislocation of his left shoulder in skating on the Elbe. I am so sorry! Poor Orion—we must all give him our sympathy– No ‘merry Christmas’ for him, whatever the new year may be in happiness! You must try to draw some ‘melodious tear’ [8] from his new Katy before she attains to the audience of the viola & coocooroocoo!– [9] For my own part, though I speak lightly, I felt quite mournful in reading the letter, & thinking what it must be to be in pain among strangers. Yet he writes gallantly enough of it, you will see.
As to Napoleon, if he had walked less in blood, I could have given him a fuller sympathy—but there were fine things in him, I grant you willingly. Las Casas [10] I read years ago, & will read soon over again. Do you know Segur’s memoires, .. apart from the Russia? [11] And Fouche’s memoires? Bausset’s (a man of inferior mind as of situation) ‘Mémoires sur l’interieur du palais’.? [12] Also there are several memoires of Josephine [13] —oh—there are very many, .. almost infinite traces upon paper, of the colossal footsteps, .. & you will find your way to them in looking over your French catalogue. I think that nearly every friend who remained with him at St Helena, wrote of him afterwards: it is my impression. [14]
I differ a little from you my dearest Miss Mitford, in your deductions from the expressions used by him then & there, in respect to the Duchesse d’Abrantés & her family. [15] You ought to remember, I think, that by her coquetting with the Allies, in behalf, as she says, of her children, she had precluded herself from the possibility of approaching him with any grace during the Hundred Days,—& that altogether he probably confounded her with the great body of traitors, in suc<h> of his retrospections which included her at all. Also, at the time he refers to, when he was “not in love with Junot’s wife,’[’] he might not have then been in love with her,—& yet he might have found her somewhat too winning at Malmaison, years before, during his consulship. Have you read in her ‘mémoires’ what I refer to—where he came into her room early & found Junot? To my mind, there is a tone of truth in the story,—& it is prettily told too—with naiveté, & without levity!—and then, the image of Junot asleep with his scarred breast, had so much nobility to me, that I wished it to be true!– I like Madme d’Abrantés—& I like believing her; & upon the whole, it seems to me that Napoleon does not suffer from our believing her, while we gain by it. [16]
I have been passing letters with Mr Chorley who has reviewed me in the kindest manner in the New Quarterly, in company with Mrs Butler. [17] Do you know, by the way, that she is separated from her husband, on grounds of incompatibility of temper!—& that, but for her children, she wd be in England, & probably on the stage again? She sees them an hour a day—& it is said of her, that for the rest of her time, she is trying to divorce her husband, whose habits are not regular. He, on the other side, blames your Sedgewicks, (all the family except Miss Sedgewick) whom he does not take to be peacemakers. [18] Did you see her late volume of lyrics? Mrs Butler’s, I mean. Carlyle wrote the review on Dickens in the Quarterly. [19]
As for Lamartine, I am glad you like Jocelyn, but I think you will find that the hold he took of fame was taken in his Meditations & minor poems generally. [20] You do not speak of them—& why? They are beautiful, of their class, surely,—& the first flying of French poetry towards the light, ‘as the doves to the windows,’ [21] is to be recognized in this poet. Something new was felt & confessed in his poems—& no ‘femme de quarante ans,’ [22] & no inherent monotony of their own, shd be permitted to depreciate them to our minds, by a foul association or a heavy experience. Grant it to me, my dearest friend– And then I will join you in liking Jocelyn .. in its place. Only I could not bear that killing of the dog in the dark, for a wild beast. If it is probable, it is so very unpleasant that I choose to consider it impossible. Do agree with me.
Oh—if, because we disagree, you begin to think of coming to London to lay matters straight, I shall grow more & more quarrelsome, be sure. It will be highly expedient in me to be quarrelsome—& I shall cultivate, on principle, my anger, malice, & all uncharitableness, to come in with the earliest turnips. Beware of me from this moment.
I cannot find Mr Horne’s letter—have looked everywhere but in the right place, & must give it up for tonight. So I must tell you that he wrote it, “banked up with pillows,” & three days after the accident—a severe one—an extreme case of dislocation, the ball of the shoulder thrust forwards on the breast. He had been living in ice, .. covered by it,—& the swelling & inflammation had subsided; & there was no pain, he said, to speak of. Still it had taken him three hours & a half to write the note to me, & his left arm was quite immoveable, of course. In consequence, he is not to return so soon.
I shall try to find the letter—& when I do, you shall have it.
May God bless you my dearest friend!
Most affectionately yours
EBB.
My voice is itself again [23] —& I am very well indeed. I wont send for Beranger again—I mean to buy him– [24] I like to have poetry.
Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 50–54.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Inclusive dating suggested by EBB, and Reading receiving postmark of 12 January.
2. See letter 1794 for EBB’s previous comments regarding principal characters in Balzac’s David Séchard and Un Grand Homme de Province à Paris.
3. Cf. Macbeth, III, 4, 81. In this and subsequent Shakespearean quotations, the line numbers correspond to those used in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).
4. EBB had probably heard rumours about the relief grant Tennyson was offered about this time, which he declined to accept. In September 1845, however, he was offered, and accepted a pension of £200 per year. See Tennyson, I, 242–243.
5. See letter 1805, notes 2 and 4.
6. Daughters of Henry Thomas Liddell (1797–1878), afterwards 1st Earl of Ravensworth (1874). They were the nieces of Jane Elizabeth Lady Barrington mentioned in letter 1798; in that same letter Miss Martineau remarked that Lord Morpeth (George William Frederick Howard, 1802–64, later, 1848, 7th Earl of Carlisle) was planning a visit.
7. As Miss Martineau explained in letter 1798.
8. Milton, “Lycidas,” 14.
9. See letter 1788.
10. Memorial de Sainte Hélène by Las Cases appeared in 1823 (see letter 1796, note 5).
11. EBB seems to be confusing the Histoire de Napoléon et de la grand armée pendant l’année 1812 (1824), by the French historian Paul Philippe comte de Ségur (1780–1873), which is an account of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, with Memoires (1824) of his father, Louis Philippe comte de Ségur. Paul Philippe’s Mémoires appeared posthumously in 1873.
12. The Mémoires of Louis François Joseph Bausset (1770–1830), Napoleon’s chamberlain and Prefect of the Palace, was published in 1827. Mémoires by Joseph Fouché (1763–1820), Minister of Police 1799–1815, appeared in 1824.
13. Josephine’s Mémoires historiques et secrets de l’impératrice Joséphine (1820), as well as Mémoires et correspondance de l’impératrice Joséphine (1820).
14. There were numerous memoirs written by those who accompanied Napoleon to St. Helena, including both doctors assigned to him: Francesco Antommarchi (1789–1838) wrote Mémoires du docteur F. Antommarchi, ou les Derniers momens de Napoleon (1825); and Barry O’Meara wrote An Exposition of Some of the Transactions That Have Taken Place at St. Helena Since the Appointment of Sir Hudson Lowe as Governor of That Island (1819) and Napoleon in Exile (1822). Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon by Betsy Balcombe appeared in 1844.
15. EBB is responding to Miss Mitford’s remarks in letter 1796.
16. For the complete account of these incidents, see Memoirs of the Duchess D’Abrantès, 8 vols. (London, 1831–35), vol. 2, pp. 428–454, and vol. 8, pp. 255–259.
17. EBB’s Poems (1844) were reviewed by Chorley with Poems by Frances Anne Butler (“Fanny” née Kemble), as well as The Star of Attéghéi by Frances Browne. See pp. 344–349 for the text of the review pertaining to EBB.
18. When Fanny Kemble, the popular actress, and her husband Pierce Butler, an American plantation owner, began having marital problems in 1838, Butler asked friends, Charles and Elizabeth Sedgwick, to intervene on his behalf. Butler eventually turned on the Sedgwicks, accusing them of supporting his wife’s efforts to leave him (see Affectionately Yours, by Henry Gibbs, pp. 134–140). The exception EBB makes is for Charles’s sister, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867), who was a novelist.
19. We have not traced a review of Dickens in either The New Quarterly Review or The Quarterly Review for this period, and no such review is listed amongst Carlyle’s contributions to periodicals in Rodger L. Tarr’s Thomas Carlyle: A Descriptive Bibliography (Oxford, 1989).
20. EBB is responding to Miss Mitford’s letter (no. 1810) which was received while this letter was in progress. EBB had recommended Lamartine’s poetry in October 1844 (see no. 1736).
21. Cf. Isaiah 60:8.
22. Charles de Bernard’s work which EBB had suggested to Miss Mitford in letter 1779, and which Miss Mitford comments on in no. 1810.
23. In letter 1790, EBB explained that she had to cancel a visit with Mrs. Jameson because her voice was gone due to the cold weather. In no. 1794, she told Miss Mitford that her voice was “coming back fast.”
24. There is no evidence that EBB ever owned Béranger’s works.
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