2447. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 13, 97–98.
[London]
Tuesday. [30 June 1846] [1]
Do come, ever dearest Miss Mitford, & fear neither aunts nor cousins, whom you will escape by just a day. I write this hurried line to say my ‘Do come’, & no more. Long before & much more in detail I should have written, but the shock of poor Mr Haydon’s dreadful death overcame me for several days. Our correspondence had ceased a full year & a half I think,—but the week preceding the event, he wrote several notes to me, & by his desire I have under my care boxes & pictures of his which he brought himself to the door. Never did I anticipate this!—never did I imagine that it was other than one of the passing embarrassments so unhappily frequent with him. Once before, he had asked me to give shelter to things belonging to him, which, when the storm had blown over, he took back again. [2] I did not suppose that, in this storm, he was to sink—poor, noble soul!–
And be sure that the pecuniary embarrassment was not what sank him. It was a wind still more east. It was the despair of the ambition by which he lived, & without which he could not live. In the selfassertion which he had struggled to hold up through life, he went down into death– He could not bear any longer, the neglect, the disdain, the slur cast on him by the age,—& so he perished. The cartoon-disappointment—the grotesque bitterness of the antagonism of Tom Thumb, which he recurred to in one of the notes he wrote to me at the last—these things were too much:—the dwarf slew the Giant. [3] His love of reputation, you know, was a disease with him—&, for my part, I believe that he died of it. That is my belief.
In the last week, he sent me his portrait of you, among the other things. [4] When he proposed sending it, he desired me to keep it for his sake,—but when it came, a note also came to say that he “could not make up his mind to part with it” .. he would lend it to me for a while. A proof (with the rest) that his act was not premeditated. A moment of madness—or a few moments of madness! who knows?
I could not read the Inquest, nor any of the details in the newspapers.
Oh—certain I was, that you would be shocked beyond words. [5]
On thursday then, my very dear friend! Come as early as you can, & be sure that my affectionate thoughts will leap on to meet you.
As ever your
EBB–
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 175–176.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference to Miss Mitford’s impending visit, which took place on 2 July.
2. In June 1843.
3. See letter 2436, note 3.
4. Haydon’s portrait “Mary Russell Mitford” was first exhibited at the Society of British Artists in May 1825. This likeness of Miss Mitford is also known as the “Cook-Maid” portrait. Miss Mitford described the painting as “a head cut out of a great picture larger than life, over-coloured but strangely like” (Mary Russell Mitford: Correspondence with Charles Boner and John Ruskin, ed. Elizabeth Lee, 1914, p. 256). The portrait is now part of the collection in the Reading Museum and Art Gallery, near Miss Mitford’s home at Three Mile Cross. This likeness is reproduced in EBB-MRM, I, facing p. 158.
5. Writing to Emily Jephson in July 1846, Miss Mitford explained that she had “been shocked past expression by the death of poor Haydon” (L’Estrange (2), III, 207). And to another friend, Miss Mitford wrote that Haydon’s “decease, setting aside the frightful manner of it, shocked me as a discrepancy, like the death of a young bride .... the subject possesses me terribly—I cannot get rid of it” (Lee, Correspondence, pp. 55–56).
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