Correspondence

1856.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 109–111.

[London]

March 5. 1845.

Ever dearest friend[,] It is delightful to know (so far) that you have not paid the cost in your health on all the great, great pleasure you vouchsafed to me on monday. I have seen nobody since, & have been thinking over & over the talk we had .., which left so much to be said that I am provoked as usual. But the cold! It over-rides me—& not even your “sweet influences” [1] could set me free altogether from a sense of treason in the air which is very oppressive to the spirits. When we are imparadised at Hyeres, [2] it will be otherwise—wont it? What a dream! It is an agreement too (has been since last year) that when I go up the Rhine, Mr Kenyon will go too—so that, I shall have patron saints the whole way of it!–

And in the meantime, I am delighted that you got home safely, & had a bright welcome from Jane,—it is worth so much!—& that you consider yourself under a vow to come here for good & something, about April, .. if not earlier. Oh!—I assure you, I lean with emphasis on the “if not.” And when you come we shall say all manner of things which were “skipped” on the “Blessed Monday,” & fill up every possible hiatus. That you did not materially suffer by your kindness, your dear kindness, of keeping faith with me through the rain & the headache, is a sort of omen for good in the future. Yet you shall not do so again. I mean, my dear dearest Miss Mitford, you shall not again run such risks for me,—because you see if you had [3] suffered, I might have been savage enough, in my disconsolation, to reproach you for the very kindness,—and to abuse it as a naughtiness & a foolishness. So, recollect! no vow is to hold for the future, between you & me, in the face of a headache. Your health is a better thing in my eyes than your presence,—& I beg you to remember it loyally.

While I write, comes a note from dear Mr Kenyon, & among other things in it, is a little bad news. I have no right I suppose to call it bad news—& perhaps as Mr Hunter says, I am spoilt. But, repeats Mr Kenyon from Moxon, .. ‘The book has somewhat relented in sale, though six copies had been sold the day before.’ So now, suppose after all, Mr Moxon was romancing when he talked of the second edition?—. I tell you the whole argument, you see,—& let you see that I am a little nervous about the “relenting.” Well!—there’s Balzac to go back to—and I am in the midst of ‘La Femme superieure.’ [4] The truth of this work & the subtlety & deepness of the life in it .. for I will not call it portraiture, .. are wonderful—but certainly it justifies the attribute of heaviness & slowness we talked of the other day. Also your observation on the details of dress, came home to me with my own counter-thought in rebound—and it does appear to me more & more, that he does not stoop to these things from attaching too much importance to them, (bearded man as he may be!) [5] nor as a costume-writer with scenic intentions,—but from seeing in them, with that subtle power of apprehension & combination peculiar to him, the outward expression & sacramental sign of the inward man. [6] Be sure, that for Balzac, a man’s soul has a lineament in his gilet. [7] As my Greeks read the will of their gods in the viscera of animals, [8] so does he take the measure of a piece of human nature, “all round his hat,” [9] & in the pantaloons. At any rate his treatment of these outsides comes to my mind with quite a different degree of significance, to the same thing in the hands of other writers,—of Scott, for instance—or lower down, of James, [10] who has vexed me twenty times with his costume-minuteness. Do you not think so? Is not the effect on the mind of the reader absolutely different?—which difference proves a peculiarity in the writer’s intention. Now just look at the catalogue raisonné of the Rabourdin clerks [11] —& grant the wonderfulness of the characteristic emphasis which comes in the dress. We do not so much see the men more for it——we know them better for it!

Then I have the ‘Ecole des Journalistes,’ & shall have deep interest in it, I know—. Oh, my dearest Miss Mitford, .. I go back in my thoughts from all this to you. I cannot help thinking of you! How great is your affectionateness—& how dear to me! How unworthy I am of half of it, except by loving you!——

May God bless you. It comes to that,—& silence.

Your ever attached

EBB–

Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 89–90.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Job 38:31.

2. A fashionable resort in S.E. France. Apparently, Miss Mitford had suggested earlier that they spend the winter there.

3. Underscored three times.

4. EBB had mentioned several times previously that she was having difficulty obtaining Balzac’s novel; see letters 1759 and 1779.

5. See letter 1836.

6. In The Book of Common Prayer, the form of catechism prior to confirmation includes the question: “What meanest thou by this word sacrament?”; and the response is: “I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”

7. “Waistcoast” or “vest.”

8. The ancient Greek practice of animal sacrifice included inspection of the size and shape of the victim’s entrails as a means of divining the will of the gods. The way in which the organs burned on the altar was yet another way of interpreting the gods’ will.

9. The allusion is to Thomas Hood’s poem, “All Round my Hat” (1839).

10. George Payne Rainsford James (1801–60) was a successful novelist whose style was influenced by and imitated that of Sir Walter Scott. Horne commented on James’s attention to costume details in A New Spirit: “He accumulates names, dresses, implements of war and peace, official retinues, and the whole paraphernalia of customs and costumes with astounding alacrity” (I, 230).

11. Xavier Rabourdin is the head of a civil service office in Balzac’s La Femme supérieur.

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