Correspondence

1913.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 210–213.

[London]

May 13th 1845

Ever dearest friend, It is delightful as music to hear that I shall hear anon of your settling about the London visit. The truth is, that sometimes, when I have been given to brown diablerie, [1] I have misdoubted whether you ever seriously intended to come for longer than a day—what with gardeners & other supernatural machinery which seemed for ever in a tangle. Well—you will come!– I give a great sigh of contentment (“just like Flush”!) at the assurance of it. And now,—before I say a word more, .. let me gently upbraid you my dearest friend, for your sin in offering to pay Rolandi. Now really that struck me almost like an unkindness. It was agreed between us from the first, that you shd allow me to consider that department as mine,—& I, who forget all manner of dates, have regularly remembered to be in time, & two or three days in advance of the time, for this payment, which is my business & nobody’s else in the world. I do beseech you never to interfere again—unless you wish to grieve me! If you do it, or attempt to act as if you thought of it again, I shall “consider myself horsewhipped” & be offended accordingly. So remember.

I forgot to say in my last letter, by the way, that your argument for Charles de Bernard is, in my mind, not to be received. Surely a writer whom you compare (I will not say justly … because I more than suspect an exaggeration) to Shakespeare, for fulness & livingness of character, cannot be as innocuous in his immorality as a mere witty caricaturist like Barham. [2] You cannot mean such a thing. The more lifelike he is, the nearer he is to Heaven—& the more incumbent it must be in him to appear as if he believed a little in the reality of virtue & honour. He is something better, we must all agree, than a farce writer & a caricaturist; & has higher responsibilities accordingly. And really for my own particular part, I prefer the passionate wickedness of the Balzac & Sand heros & heroines, to the vile expedient virtue of Bernard’s. It is vice pour rire—dishonor, pour rire. [3] Clever as he is, I cannot talk of him as of a favorite writer. I prefer licence to calculation, .. if we must have either. And in France we must have both, it appears.

I am delighted that you confess Stendhal. [4] He reminded me of Balzac, & really has almost equal power. Do you know, I put Eugene Sue far below both of them? Sue has great brilliancy, .. great lightning of imagination—but for sustained power, he fails, it seems to me, & is a far inferior artist. Then he looks less deeply, as well as not so largely. I think he is inferior. How patchy the ‘Jew’ is,—for instance!—of purple & gold, as are the patches! [5] What I meant about ‘Rouge et Noir,’ was not by any means an apprehension that you might shrink before an ‘improper’ ‘incubus,’ but before a ghastly impression,—such as Balzac often produces, & such as you used at first very much to dislike in him. No—you are passed the ‘impropre’ stage; & I was not so stupid as to fancy otherwise, in thinking of you. The ‘Livre d’amour,’ I have not read, .. & (do not laugh) I am half afraid to send for. It may be— .. what may it not be? Tell me if you read it. There is the work of French travels by Stendhal, which I mentioned to you before,—& there is (I see in the catalogue) ‘L’Abbesse de Castro’ [6] by the same writer, which perhaps I mentioned also. But there must be, I agree with you, some more fruit of this tree, than we see between the leaves. The catalogue is infamously arranged—& oh! I do so wish that Mr Lovejoy had left the Brussels catalogue longer in your hands. We might have organized Rolandi’s by it, & ordered new books besides. Tell me if you make any discoveries—do!– I am beginning to stagger & hesitate how to make out my lists,—for I hate Elie Berthet, & “that kind”! .. one might as well read one’s fate in tea leaves at the bottom of a gossip’s cup. Esther will cure you of your love for Lucien, .. unless you are desperately affected indeed. The book is very powerful, & throbs like a heart,—but here in England, it could not live a day, constituted as society is.

Talking of society I shd congratulate you on ‘Miss Angélique’s visit’ & the circumstances thereof. [7] Your history altogether is ‘impayable,’ [8] & made me laugh out, to Flush’s astonishment. What an ‘article’ it wd make for a magazine! what a chapter, in a Belford Regis continuation!– And really they both deserved, father & daughter, to be put into a book, & made to sit in the pillory of it. The selection of you as converter & matchmaker, was perhaps not the happiest for either them or you, & was certainly not expressive of much discriminating faculty on the side of the oppressor. You were an injured innocent, to be taken for an expounder of the thirtynine articles,—that must be admitted. Why what would you have done with the young lady & her angelical name, if she had stayed with you long enough to unpack the ‘chests’ & put the ‘musical instruments’ into order? read ‘Les amours forcés’ [9] with her? She wd have been married to the Catholic lover in a fortnight, I guess,—& if you had ended by being the bridesmaid, I shd not have been very much surprised. Should you?–

The silliness of people, not idiots, is really remarkable. The daughter was silly perhaps in this case,—but the father was silly in the extraordinary degree. And then, the audacity in the application of the silliness! It is wonderful. Why did’nt you advise him to send her to Mrs Sherwood? [10] You might have done it—and he might have done it .. for Mrs S. keeps a school, & wd have taught the catechism & given in the bill in an orthodox fashion. Or why did’nt you fall into a rage & throw the chairs about the room? You wd have been justified in that too.

I have been on the brink of writing to you every day, & something has crossed me. Do you know that Mr Horne has returned? [11] He has been in England some days (several) & has written a hurried note or two to me.

Do write soon, my dear dearest friend, & say how you are. “Wet through six days running!” How wrong—how wrong!—— Nobody shd do such things, who has any one to love him or her!—& you .. how precious you are to

your ever affectionate

EBB–

Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.

Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 106–109.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. “Brown devilment,” or “machination.”

2. The handwriting is unclear, but perhaps EBB has written Barham for Richard Harris Barham (pseud. Thomas Ingoldsby) who “thoroughly naturalised the French metrical conte” and whose “inexhaustible faculty of grotesque rhyming is but the counterpart of his intellectual fertility in the domain of farcical humour” (DNB). It was this humour that the critics accused Horne of misunderstanding in his treatment of Ingoldsby in A New Spirit.

3. “For a joke.”

4. See letter 1885, note 6.

5. Perhaps an oblique allusion to Horace, Ars Poetica, 14, (trans. H. Rushton Fairclough). From the context, EBB is doubtless referring to Sue’s Le Juif Errant which she first mentioned in September 1844 (see letter 1707).

6. Stendhal’s novel L’Abbesse de Castro was published in 1832, as well as De l’amour. His “work of French travels” is doubtless Mémoires d’un touriste, published in 1838.

7. We are unable to provide additional details relating to this incident.

8. “Priceless.”

9. Béatrix (1839) by Balzac.

10. Presumably Mary Martha Sherwood (née Butt, 1775–1851) who was the author of children’s stories which she began writing in India; she had accompanied her husband who was quartered there with his regiment. Mrs. Sherwood “wrote over ninety-five stories and tracts, all of a strongly evangelical tone, and mainly addressed to young people” (DNB). We have been unable to verify that she had a school at this time.

11. Horne had left for Germany on the previous September.

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