Correspondence

3204.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 19, 98–102.

Florence.

May 20. [1853] [1]

I am so disappointed, my dearest Miss Mitford, so grieved at this new account of you. [2] May the evil be turned aside before my lamentation over it can reach you! In the meanwhile I shall be perforce very anxious. The weather must be warmer even with you at the present depth in May, and you will be receiving & reviving under, I pray God, its happy influences– Do let me hear without delay– A short letter, if a long letter tires—but a letter in any case!—— I throw myself on your proved kindness for this.

We dont go to Rome till later—we could’nt help ourselves—& the only vexation of it is, that we shant probably get to England till next spring– So looks the probability at least. I have strong faith—credulity, say my friends, .. Mr Chorley, for instance, who is “fretted” about my tenderness towards the “rapping spirits.” (After all it’s an open question whether the man who affirms most or the man who denies most, arrives at most of truth.) Well—I have strong credulity, say my friends—and among other figments, I have an undeniable tendency to believing in the falling of skies & catching of larks. [3] So we may get to England this summer—who knows? Only the probability is against it certainly as far as we can see yet.

You dont like the restoration of the punishment of death for political offences in France, do you? [4] I dont. Your hero does’nt do all things well. He has however great & intelligent care for the poorer classes; & what the provisional government attempted to do, & failed, in this way, he has compassed & is compassing– Paris will be transfigured under his hand. Always beautiful, it will become wonderfully beautiful as by the stroke of a wand. [5] Were you not sorry for the Empress’s misfortune? [6] He has taken it much to heart, I understand. Also she seems to suffer in general health. She was always weak in the chest: & it was on that account, that she went yearly to the Pyrenees. [7] Previous to the accident, the castle at Pau (Henri quâtre’s) was being prepared for her; [8] & courtly etiquette was likely enough to disagree with a woman spontaneous in her nature & ways to the verge of what is called wildness.

Yes, the moving of tables is an incontestable fact. A phenomenon of a magnetic character, involved in the curious history of the American manifestations, & from which other phenomena will probably be evolved if we have patience to wait. A year ago when the subject was talked of in Paris (where it was much talked of) I have heard sceptics say .. “Yes, let me see a table move, & I will believe anything”. Now the table moves, all Europe witnessing—“E pur si muove” [9]  .. being the motto to an Italian pamphlet on the subject which has just come out! People never meet now-a-days in Florence, except to move tables. And I must turn the tables on unbelievers in general. As to the “rappings”, .. the wonderful things narrated to me by persons who have “mediums” in their families, or who have been “mediums” themselves .. tears running from the eyes of the speakers—(intelligent eyes, too.) I do not dare to tell you. We have a number of American visitors, & of the more cultivated order of Americans—& nearly everybody is more or less a believer. Then I always believed in a spirit-world & in the possibility of communications, & I believed long ago in the fact of such communications having taken place in Germany & elsewhere; [10] (what is peculiar in the actual movement is the universality of it—) so I have less to get over than persons of a less speculative tendency. Somebody came to us the other day straight from Mrs Trollope where they have been trying table-experiments .. he is an Englishman, & a Chinese & Japanese scholar, & a cutter out in black paper of characteristic profiles. [11] After testifying to the moving tables, he insisted on cutting out me & Robert. [12] I am in a dreadful state of humiliation after the operation .. which is natural enough .. for why should people without features (like me) allow themselves to be agonized into a black profile? why, I wonder. I resisted as long as was decent—that’s all that can be said for me. Mrs Trollope is better again. [13]

You heard of her friend Owen of Lanark yielding up his infidelity to a future state, at the bidding of the “Rappings.” [14] You ask for a use. There’s a use for you!–

Besides I am never disquieted about uses. Let a fact be attested, and we may attest the utility of it. But that’s an after consideration.

Do you know Whittier’s poems? Yes. Some extracts, I have seen, are direct & noble, I think [15] —but I dont care for Dr Parsons’ stanzas on the bust of Dante. [16] Then the view of Dante’s soul is wrong & contracted, .. and the engraving of the portrait, a thing most unlike. Emerson & Lowell are the best poets in America, according to my creed. Emerson would be great if he had the musical faculty which he wants. As it is he is the torso of a poet. Lowell is completer, & really fine in some of his later poems, .. for he is vital & grows– Also he is one of the wittiest of writers when he pleases– I think highly of him—& I liked him personally & his interesting wife, when we met in London. [17] As for yourself, may your laurels flower more & more– I like to hear about your letters—about everything relating to you–

Among our Americans we have seen lately Miss Clarke, .. who writes under the pseudonym of Grace Greenwood. People had prejudiced me against her by denouncing her as a Corinna as to manner & costume, but I had a very different impression when we met– We both liked her much– Yes—Robert’s play succeeded, but there could be no “run” for a play of that kind—it was a “success d’estime” & something more, which is surprising perhaps, considering the miserable acting of the men—Miss Faucit was alone in doing us justice– God bless you & keep you & love you, dearest friend. Do write, & believe that I think of you tenderly–

Your ever affecte

Ba.

Robert’s truest regards—as always. Tell me everything about your health.

Address: Angleterre viâ France / Miss Mitford / Swallowfield / near Reading / London.

Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 384–387.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Year provided by postmark.

2. Miss Mitford had been incapacitated since her carriage accident the previous December (see letter 3167, note 2). More recently, she admitted to William Cox Bennett, in a letter dated 25 April 1853, that she had been “very ill with a terrible attack of piles—but hoped it would go off– Ever since however” she was confined to her bed and “still in a state of pain” (typescript at BRO).

3. See letter 3197, note 4.

4. The Times of 14 May 1853 (p. 6) carried a report from its Paris correspondent that on 12 May a “bill restoring to the Penal Code the punishment of death in political matters, which had been abolished by the Provisional Government [in 1848], has been laid on the table of the Legislative Corps.” The bill contained revisions of articles 86 and 87 of the Penal Code. Article 86 called for the death penalty for any attempt on the life of the emperor or a member of the imperial family. Article 87 read: “Any attempt the object of which shall be either to destroy or to change the Government or the order of succession to the Throne, or to excite the citizens or inhabitants to take up arms against the Imperial authority, shall be punished with death.” A more benign version of the bill was passed on 28 May 1853. Although the death penalty was retained in article 86, it was replaced in article 87 by “the penalty of transportation to a fortified place” (The Daily News, 30 May 1853, p. 2).

5. In the issue of 10 May 1853, The Times ran a translation of an article that had appeared in Le Moniteur (the French government’s organ) on the public works planned for Paris. After describing various projects such as the transformation of “the Bois de Boulogne, the construction of the central markets, the prolongation of the Rue de Rivoli, [and] the enlargement and embellishment of the vicinity of the Louvre,” the article concluded: “France has entered on a new path; she has placed at her head the heir of the man who desired only great things for her. The Government, the Administration, and artists—all should rival in efforts to cause the works of our epoch not to be inferior to those of the renowned centuries” (pp. 8–9). A month later, Napoleon III appointed Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809–91) Prefect of the Seine. During the next eighteen years under his direction, a drastic program of urban renewal was implemented that included clearing slums; building or restoring monuments, public buildings, parks, churches, and residences; and replacing the narrow streets of medieval Paris with the wide thoroughfares of a modern metropolis.

6. Empress Eugénie had recently suffered a miscarriage. The Daily News of 2 May 1853 printed a translation of an item from the 1 May issue of Le Moniteur that announced “an event which has hitherto been spoken of only in whispers: ‘Her Majesty the Empress, who for the last two months has been enceinte, and who has been unwell for several days, miscarried in the evening of April 29. In other respects her Majesty’s health is as satisfactory as possible’” (p. 4).

7. Many years later, the Empress recalled that before her marriage, she and her family “often used to take the waters at various health resorts in the Pyrenees” (Augustin Filon, Recollections of the Empress Eugénie, 1920, p. 20).

8. The Paris correspondent of The Morning Chronicle, reported: “The Empress is very anxious to go as soon as possible to the Pyrenees, for the benefit of her health, and it is understood that the Emperor and Empress will leave Paris for that purpose as soon as the season is sufficiently advanced. They will go in the first instance to Pau, where the château of Henry IV. has already been prepared for them. From thence they will proceed to Les Eaux Bonnes” (4 May 1853, p. 5).

9. “Nevertheless it moves,” reported to have been said by Galileo in 1633 after he was forced by the Inquisition to recant his belief that the earth orbited the sun.

10. Years before, EBB had indicated a willingness to accept some of the findings and revelations of German writer Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling. See letters 873, 874, and 1959.

11. Joseph Turner, son of a Colonel Turner of Newark, Nottinghamshire. EBB provides more information about him in letter 3220.

12. Turner also made a silhouette of Pen. EBB later sent all three to Arabella with letter 3220. The three silhouettes are now at Eton. They are reproduced in the frontispiece to this volume.

13. After her “attack of bronchitis” mentioned in the third to last paragraph of letter 3189.

14. See letter 3195, note 7.

15. John Greenleaf Whittier had recently published The Chapel of the Hermits, and Other Poems (1853). A review of it in The Athenæum of 2 April 1853 (no. 1327, p. 411) contained an extract from a poem entitled “Remembrance.” Whittier was one of the “American Poets” Miss Mitford had featured in Recollections of a Literary Life (1852).

16. “On a Bust of Dante” by Thomas William Parsons (1819–92), American poet and translator of Dante. The poem was first published in The Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot for 7 October 1841 and later appeared as a prelude to Parson’s privately printed and anonymous translation of The First Ten Cantos of the Inferno of Dante (Boston, 1843), where an engraving of Michelangelo’s bust of Dante appears opposite the poem. Miss Mitford described Parson’s poem as “amongst the finest ever written in the language, whether by American or Englishman” (James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors, Boston, 1872, p. 332).

17. The previous autumn.

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