1826. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 45–49.
[London]
Tuesday. Jan 28. 1845.
Ever dearest friend, your delightful, delightful letter drew me to it, .. has been drawing me these two days—& I have been resisting for the sake of necessary letters of which “my soul said, there is no pleasure in them.” [1] And now that at last the staff of resistance seems broken, Mrs Jameson may be coming in at any moment, to put analysis into the place of impulses,—very kind as she is to come, & very welcome in many ways! She was to have come yesterday,—& there was a mistake, Mr Kenyon tells me,—& for today, it is settled. But now, about you & nobody else! I must not lose my time.
Delightful it was for me to hear of your avatar with the two hundred & ninety [2] —though I grudge the honour a little to the Majesty who appeared so ignorant of the best means of honoring itself. To think of the queen’s going to Sir John Cope’s old house, as “an object,” instead of your garden! The pity & disdain with which I read it in the newspaper, [3] you wd have smiled to see. Poor, foolish queen. The Hanoverian wits, to say nothing of royal wits in general, are apt to have a ‘divine wrong’ [4] in such matters—they cannot see or understand– Rogers has his poetic ‘claims allowed’ at Buckingham palace, just because he is Rogers the banker, & has ‘a taste’ & a fine house to show it in. Oh this world! & these kings & queens of the world! I mean these kings of Bokhara [5] & these queens of England! for in France & Prussia the crowns go together with more civilization. And now I have talked enough high treason for one morning.
Mrs Jameson has come too in the midst of it. We have been talking of Lady Byron—& she has been desiring me to ‘keep my mind open’, while I was thinking of the difficulty of shutting up my temper. Evidently she knows the mystery—she is Lady Byron’s friend,—& she considers her to be more than justified. Can it be possible, I say to myself (& to you) that anything in the world can untie this knot & justify Lady Byron.? The question is a first gesture in the struggle to keep one’s mind open. Do you think it can be possible? I wish I cd think & believe so. Yet, of Marie Antoinette & Lady Byron I have dreamt daggers all my life [6] —& if ever, in the one case, it shd prove to be most murderous wrong, why I must suffer the remorse of it. She is not a mathematician, says Mrs Jameson––not scientific .. not cold & perfect—on the contrary the poetical element is the chief thing in her—the imagination is the strongest element. Can you conceive that of Lady Byron? It has reversed my image of her, whether it has or has not opened my mind. She, Mrs Jameson, has been breakfasting this morning with Rogers & in company with Hallam—& she tells me that she is quite “sick” of the perpetuity of the everlasting talk about mesmerism. There seems to be, according to her account, enough of “damnable iterations,” [7] & no conclusion in any sense .. no end of it. Between scoffers & enthusiasts, there is no middle. She believes to a certain point, but resists the clairvoyance. I wish I could do the same–
I have seen a page from the Lancet (which Nelly Bordman sent me), with extracts from the abominable ‘case’. It is plain from the extracts printed by Mr Greenhough in a letter to the Chronicle yesterday, [8] from H Martineau’s notes to him, that she understood & was ready to permit a partial publication. But what she did not expect, was an independent pamphlet filled with the most offensive details possible. Could any woman (grant her the common feelings of a woman) have expected patiently such a disclosure, so made?– Most dreadful & disgusting, certainly! Oh—I do feel for her! & so do you at bottom. And then, my dearest friend, she is not making a ‘progress,’ you see. She only went from Tynemouth (which she has left for good) to Mr Gregg’s house at Winandermere,—from whence she goes in three weeks to her friends at Liverpool. She may not be in London for months & months. J_____ the clairvoyante, is engaged, I hear, as nurse to some part of the Liddell family,—so that she will not be cast out of her sphere: & Mrs Wynyard, the mesmerist, is on the point of leaving Miss Martineau, to exercise her profession on another patient. I have seen the copy of a letter of Lord Morpeth to Miss M. in which he calls the phenomena he witnessed, “equally wonderful, beautiful, & indubitable”—but he desires that his letter shd not be made use of .. which is discreet of him. Wordsworth is a disbeliever.
My dear, dearest friend, .. how we do meet in coincidence & similitude!– Well—I never shd have taken you to be a dreamer in the emphatic sense of Modeste Mignon & me—& even now, delighted as I am with the similitude (& I quite clapped my hands over your letter) I cannot make out how it could have been precisely so—you in the midst of that thick, gay country neighbourhood—& I, living from one end of the year to another without the sight of a face beyond my own household, .. nay, isolating myself even from that, except during the evenings, in my little room at the top of the house! You never could have lived such a life—surely never,—you who glorify the social spirit in the very inner movements of your mind. The house we lived in, lay in a hollow of hills,—& from one of the hills I used to gaze away my sight on a white ribbon of a road which unrolled itself along the green distance, & was called the London road. I used to think that it tied us to the world––that white ribbon—& that if an angel wd take it up in his hand, & draw us nearer, how my heart wd beat with a strange emotion!
Ah—if I had known you, when I was at Lyme Regis, not many years ago! [9] To think of my having walked down those steep streets, built as if the whole town had tumbled down a cliff, & was struggling up out of the sea again .. without a thought, except of the picturesqueness of the situation!–
My dearest friend, we are always disagreeing, just because we agree so deeply. Now I forgot to tell you about Mrs Jameson! I do not think that she is pedantic. She does not seem to me to speak in sentences. It strikes me still that she wants impulse a little—& what the French call abandon: but this does not seem to me to arise from overcarefulness as to what she shall say, or how she shall say it—I think it does not. I like her very much—but I have not fallen in love with her at first sight, as you know, I did with you. But to fall ln love at first sight once in a life, may be as much as is necessary.
For the matter of corn law rhymes, you decide generously & discreetly .. which is the perfection, I suppose, of good counsel. We shall see. I think it very likely that the lady who wrote to me, belonging to some ‘Ladies committee’, might be speaking quite wildly in what she said, .. & that beyond her own particular unanimity, nothing more may be thought of it by anybody. I answered slightly & cautiously, that I could not say a word on the subject without knowing what was expected from me, & who expected it,—& whether it wd be in my power or not, to do what she suggested. Indeed I by no means understand the sort of thing likely to be required of me—nor do I (on reconsideration) much expect to hear of anything being required of me seriously. There are writers infinitely better qualified—& they need not go further than their own Corn law rhymer, Elliot. Also I suspect my female correspondent with her foot in the ladies’ committee, to be a wandering Pleiad, [10] gone astray through a fancy for me, from the probable views of majorities male & female. I do not know her personally—but the thing may be so: and not a word therefore have I said to mortal ear about the hint delivered to me, except to your ear. If I learn more to any intent & purpose, I shall of course speak to Papa—so as to be sure of not vexing him—but really I dont expect to learn more. The probabilities are against it. [11]
Talking of the subject of verses, I must tell you who are so tenderly kind & quick of sympathy, that the good accounts of the poems continue,—& that Moxon told Mr Kenyon the other day, of the second edition being at hand, & of his intention of proposing to me a cheaper & more popular form for the work. [12] That is good news, (—is it not?..) past any prudent expectation! Six months have not passed since the publication—indeed five have not—& the second edition & the cheaper form both sound very well. Of course I am pleased. Why should’nt I be pleased? Dont forbid the bans for my being pleased .. if you please.
There now! That must be enough for today. The poor Duchesse d’Abrantés! It must have been in Mr Chorley’s book that I read the account. [13] Her mother might have fascinated Napoleon, I think, by a ‘guarda e passa’ [14] sort of liking. Balzac arranges exquisite beauty & faultless grace for women of fifty nine, & without being afraid of showing their shoulders!– [15] His beauty-queens are very bewitching, & “long to reign!”. [16] I almost wonder how you bear it,—you, who made up your mind so long to grow old in spite of your fate!–
Now this positively is the last of me for today.
Hic jacet
your most affectionate
EBB.
What a Duke to be Napoleon’s victor! [17] For shame!–
Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 64–68.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Cf. Hebrews 10:38.
2. See letter 1822.
3. According to The Times, on 21 January the Queen visited Bracknell House at Bramshill, seat of Sir John Cope (1768–1851), 11th Baronet, who was out shooting, expecting the Queen the next day.
4. Cf. Pope, The Dunciad (1728), IV, 188.
5. EBB is comparing the Hanoverians, i.e, Victoria, to the rulers of Bokhara (in Russian central Asia) who were inclined to act spontaneously and irrationally as in the incident involving the murder of British envoys Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly by the Khan in June 1843.
6. In letter 1206, EBB told Haydon that there “are two false wives, within the last century”; i.e., Lady Byron and Marie Louise, not Marie Antoinette which EBB corrects in letter 1830.
7. I Henry IV, I, 2, 90.
8. Greenhow’s response to Harriet Martineau’s letter in The Morning Chronicle for 13 January 1845 (see letter 1815) appeared in the same newspaper for 27 January. EBB had previously told Miss Mitford (no. 1815) that Kenyon had advised her not to read The Lancet article, which had appeared 30 November 1844, and she later asked Miss Mitford to procure the article for her (no. 1819).
9. EBB speaks of visiting there when she lived at Sidmouth (see letter 684), and Miss Mitford lived there briefly as a child (see no. 685).
10. The Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, transformed into stars after death; one of the stars cannot readily be seen and is known as the lost Pleiad, held by some to be Electra mourning the destruction of Troy.
11. See letters 1832 and 1833 in which EBB tells Kenyon and Miss Mitford that she has received an official invitation to write a poem for the Anti-Corn Law Bazaar.
12. A second edition of Poems (1844) was never published.
13. Doubtless EBB alludes to her previous comment that Mme. D’Abrantés died in a hospital (letter 1793); there is an account of the Duchesse D’Abrantés’s last days in Chorley’s Music and Manners, III, pp. 259–260.
14. “Look, and pass on” (Dante, Inferno, iii, 51, trans. Laurence Binyon).
15. Perhaps an allusion to Eléonore, Mme. de Chaulieu, the aging but beautiful duchess who is the lover of Canalis in Modeste Mignon.
16. Cf. “God Save the King,” attributed to Henry Carey.
17. i.e., Wellington (see letter 1822).
___________________
