2831. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 56–60.
Florence.
Feb. 18. [1850] [1]
Ever dearest Miss Mitford, you always give me pleasure, so for love’s sake dont say that you “seldom give it”—and such a magical act as conjuring up for me the sight of a new poem by Alfred Tennyson, [2] is unnecessary to prove you a right beneficent enchantress. Thank you, thank you. We are not so unworthy of your redundant kindness, as to abuse it by a word spoken or sign signified. You may trust us indeed. But now … you know how free & sincere I am always! .. now tell me. Apart from the fact of this lyric’s being a fragment of fringe from the great poet’s “singing clothes” [3] (as Leigh Hunt says somewhere, ..) and apart from a certain sweetness & rise & fall in the rhythm, do you really see much for admiration in the poem. Is it new in any way? I admire Tennyson with the most worshipping part of the multitude, as you are aware, but I do not perceive much in this lyric,—which strikes me, & Robert also (who goes with me throughout) as quite inferior to the other lyrical snatches in the Princess. By the way, if he introduces it in the Princess, it will be the only rhymed verse in the work. Robert thinks that he was thinking of the Rhine-echoes in writing it, [4] & not of any heard in his Irish travels. I hear that Tennyson has taken rooms above Mr Forster’s in Lincoln’s Inn fields, & is going to try a London life. So says Mr Kenyon. Grieved I am, dearest Miss Mitford, that you should have suffered all this pain, anxiety & fatigue through the smallpox, & the quickness & warmth of your generous sympathies. Poor little Henry! that he should have been spared, will be recompense to you sufficient– It must indeed have been a time of agony to his mother. Will he be marked, do you think? For my part, I have a horror of smallpox .. too much so, to take your advice about inoculation. There are exceptions to every great fact, & you must be aware, that, just as some vaccinated persons are liable to smallpox, some inoculated ones have been known to die under that remedy. Also, I have faith in vaccination, & I believe that the exceptional circumstance of vaccinated persons catching the smallpox, is resolvable into the other, that individuals are liable to catch the smallpox twice. I have faith in vaccination—we are a large family, all of us were simply vaccinated, & though the smallpox was in the house, only one of us was affected, & he very slightly. [5] We had our baby vaccinated when he was six weeks old, the smallpox having raged in Florence at that time—the people here dont like vaccinating their children till they are some years old, & then it is often forgotten, .. & we used to see dreadful spectacles of smallpox on all sides of us in the streets. Do write soon & tell me that you are recovered, with your household, from the effects of this suffering & anxiety– I long to hear from you. I am writing with an easier mind than when I wrote last—for I was for a little time rendered very unhappy (so unhappy that I could’nt touch on the subject, .. which is always the way with me when pain passes a certain point) by hearing accidentally that Papa was unwell & looking altered. My sisters persisted in replying to my anxieties, that they were unfounded .. that I was ‘quite absurd’ indeed, in being anxious at all!—only people are not generally reformed from their absurdities through being scolded for them. Now however, it really appears that the evil has passed. He left his doctor [6] who had given him lowering medecines; &, coincidently with the leaving, he has recovered looks & health altogether. Arabel says that I should think he was looking as well as ever, if I saw him—and that appetite & spirits are even redundant. Thank God! The evil seems to have begun by an attack which was mis-treated for Asiatic cholera by violent remedies,—the succeeding weakness & uncomfortableness lingering. Yet, as he went every day, after the first two or three, to the city from Wimpole Street, of course there could not have been much exhaustion. Asthma too, to which he has always had a tendency, had annoyed him in the intense cold. To have this good news, has made me very happy, and I overflow to you accordingly. Oh, there is pain enough from that quarter, without hearing of his being out of health. I write to him continually,—& he does not now return my letters .. which is a melancholy something gained. Now enough of such a subject!——
I certainly dont think that the qualities, half savage & half freethinking, expressed in Jane Eyre, are likely to suit a model governess or schoolmistress; & it amuses me to consider them in that particular relation. Your account falls like dew upon the parched curiosity of some of our friends here, to whom, (as mere gossip, which did not leave you responsible) I could’nt resist the temptation of communicating it. People are so curious .. even here among the Raffaels .. about this particular authorship—yet nobody seems to have read ‘Shirley’—we are too slow in getting new books. First Galignani has to pirate them himself, & then to hand us over the spoils. By the way, there’s to be an international copyright—is’nt there? something is talked of it in the Athenæum. [7] Meanwhile the Americans have already reprinted my husband’s new edition—“Land-thieves, I mean pirates”. [8] I used to take that for a slip of the pen in Shakespeare; but it was a slip of the pen into prophecy. Sorry I am at Mrs Partridge’s falling short of your warmhearted ideas about her! Can you understand a woman’s hating a girl because it is not a boy—her first child too? I understand it so little that scarcely I can believe it. Some women have however undeniably an indifference to children, just as many men have—though it must be unnatural & morbid in both sexes. Men often affect it—very foolishly, if they count upon the scenic effects: affectation never succeeds well, & this sort of affectation is peculiarly unbecoming,—except in old bachelors, for there is a pathetic side to the question, so viewed. For my part & my husband’s, we may be frank & say that we have caught up our parental pleasures with a sort of passion. But then, Wiedeman is such a darling little creature, .. who could help loving the child? He comes running like a dog, on all fours, from the other side of the room, & climbs up at your knees to be taken up, with such a radiant little upturned face!—and he cries after me, think of that, he who scarcely ever cries for anything! The monthly nurse said that when he was born, he had “the judgement” (mark the expression!) “of a child a month old”—and now we are told that no child of two years can exceed him in intelligence. Which wd make me half uneasy; for I am not ambitious of precocities, .. if it were not for the great rosy cheeks, & sturdy legs & arms. Physically, there could not be a stronger child. Then he has passionate fits of affection—hugs & kisses Flush, till Flush does’nt quite like it .. siezes me by the head half in love, with his clasping arms, & half in a design to pull out my comb behind: he has a manner of kissing everything he likes .. a picture-book, a fan, .. it’s his way of expressing approbation. Little darling! So much mischief was not often put before into so small a body. Fancy the child’s upsetting the water jugs, till he is drenched, (which charms him), pulling the brooms to pieces, & having serious designs upon cutting up his frocks with a pair of scissors. He laughs like an imp when he can succeed in doing anything wrong. Now, see what you get, in return for your kindness of “liking to hear about” him! Almost I have the grace to be ashamed a little. Just before I had your letter, we sent my new edition to England. I gave much time to the revision, & did not omit reforming some of the rhymes—although you must consider that the irregularity of these, in a certain degree, rather falls in with my system than falls out through my carelessness. So much the worse, you will say, when a person is systematically bad!—— The work will include the best poems of the Seraphim-volume, strengthened & improved as far as the circumstances admitted of. I had not the heart to leave out the wretched sonnet to yourself, for your dear sake—but I re-wrote the latter half of it .. (for really it was’nt a sonnet at all, and ‘Una & her lion’ are rococo ..) [9] and so placed it with my other poems of the same class. There are some new verses also– [10] The Miss Hardings I have seen, & talked with them of you—a sure way of finding them delightful. But, my dearest friend, I shall not see any of the Trollope party; it is not likely. You can scarcely image to yourself the retired life we live, or how we have retreated from the kind advances of the English society here. Now people seem to understand that we are to be left alone—that nothing is to be made of us. The fact is, we are not like our child who kisses everybody who smiles at him! Neither my health nor our pecuniary circumstances, nor our inclinations perhaps, wd admit of our entering into English society here which is kept up much after the old English models, with a proper disdain for continental simplicities of expense. We have just heard from Father Prout, who often he says, sees Mr Horne “who is as dreamy as ever”. So glad I am—for I was beginning to be uneasy about him. He has not answered my letter from Lucca. Mr & Mrs Ruskin are expected in Florence by friends of hers. [11] They are to stay some time, I hear. The verses in the Athenæum are on Sophia Cottrell’s child. May God bless you, dearest friend. Speak of yrself more particularly to
your ever affecte
EBB.
Robert’s kindest regards. Tell us of Mr Chorley’s play—do.
Address, on integral page: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 291–295.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. Perhaps “The Bugle Song,” sometimes known as “The Splendour Falls,” which was inserted between the third and fourth parts of The Princess in the 1850 edition.
3. Cf. Leigh Hunt, “The ‘Choice’” (1823), line 9.
4. Tennyson had toured the Rhine in 1832 and 1846.
5. EBB’s brother George contracted smallpox in the autumn of 1837; see letter 595.
6. John Elliotson (1791–1868); see letter 686, note 17.
7. A paragraph in the “Our Weekly Gossip” column in The Athenæum of 26 January 1850 noted that the law had changed in England so that authors on both sides of the Atlantic were at a disadvantage without a copyright law to protect their interests (no. 1161, p. 102). The first international copyright act was not passed until 1886.
8. The Merchant of Venice, I, 3, 23–24. American copyright laws held that a work entered public domain as soon as it was published; consequently, RB received nothing from Ticknor, Reed, and Fields when they published an American edition of Poems (1849). It appeared on 24 November 1849 under a Boston, 1850, imprint.
9. The last two lines of “To Mary Russell Mitford in Her Garden,” as published in The Seraphim, and Other Poems (1838), read: “As Una’s lion, chainless though subdued, / Beside thy purity of womanhood!” The poem was placed in the “Sonnets” section of Poems (1850), I, 321.
10. Sonnets from the Portuguese, among others.
11. Unidentified. Ruskin was at this time in Venice completing work on The Stones of Venice. He and his wife did not visit Florence prior to leaving for England in March 1850.
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