Correspondence

534.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 185–188.

74 Gloucester Place

Wednesday. [Postmark: 10 August 1836]

Who was it among the French who first imagined the horloge des fleurs? [1] My flowers once so fresh & beautiful & from Miss Mitford’s garden, are striking their vesper hour—fading down to the stalks—defying the power of Undine’s Kühleborn [2] to keep their souls in them. They shall not quite die before I thank you for them & for the note travelling in their company. I could not thank Mr Chorley for bringing them to me, because almost wonderfully, I was out when he called. It was unfortunate. I shd have liked to thank him & see him not only for the sake of esteem due to him & your praise, but also & most (dont tell him so) for those words of dearest Miss Mitford’s—“He will tell you all about us”.

I am indeed grateful to you for the kindness of your praise & the greater kindness of your criticism. The last is harder to say to some lips, & being less within the reach of the affectionate exaggeratingness (that is not pure English either!) of your feelings, does of course stand nearest to the verity of the case. So I shall call the criticism & praises—a “truth severe in airy fictions drest”, [3] —which quotation is truer in this application than in others—seeming as it does, to uphold the beauty of truth but to deny the truth of beauty. [4] And—not to wander into that favorite subject of mine—I am afraid I am very apt not to speak plain when I write. Even Papa has sometimes told me so; and in different respects my own faults are so various in my own eyes that I can easily believe this fault of obscurity, which is of necessity less visible to the committer than to standers by, to be an additional one. I assure you that after the first complacency of composition, without which no one perhaps cd write at all, I never thoroughly like anything of my own, & am ready to believe every kind of harm of it. Therefore the “terrible liberty” need not have been talked of—unless a terrible mockery was intended. Dear friend! you will always—will you not? care enough for me to tell me the truth without apology, & I will care enough for myself to try to make a use of such truth. When the Athenæum kindly & unexpectedly mentioned Margret, she was reproved for mannerism [5] —& I puzzled, being sure that I had not written in affectation or out of my own nature. But this is quite enough about my faults—I mean, about myself—& not that the faultiness is an exhausted subject.

A fame reached me two days ago of “Miss Mitford’s having received a silver medal at the Reading horticultural show for” .. for what I did not hear; [6] perhaps—even before the publication of the novel—for parsley. Yet no! Mr Kenyon says that all the vanity lies in the flowers!– But you will let me congratulate you on the new horticultural dignity whatever might have been its occasion; & then I can go on with Mr Kenyon’s name & tell you of his having given himself a great deal of kind trouble in finding the Countess of Essex [7] for me and of my reading it and Paracelsus [8] besides which he also lent me. As to the play, its talent may be both felt & seen—but felt & seen in parts. It seems to me—if I dare say so—that the conception of the tragedy did not arise in the author’s name [sic] as one, & that as a consequence the impression on the reader’s mind, when all is read, is not a settled & lasting one. Was not the work rather constructed than created?—and is it not observable—or is it only imaginable—that in the selection of his scenes he picked Nature for dramatic situations & did not mingle the browns & greens & yellows after the manner of Nature’s self & Shakespeare & Shakespeare’s contemporaries? But this may be only discontent. People who can be pleased & touched as Mr Shepherd’s readers can, have scarcely a right to find fault—I mean, such people & readers as I!– But have you seen Paracelsus? I am a little discontented even there, & wd wish for more harmony & rather more clearness & compression—concentration—besides: but I do think & feel that the pulse of poetry is full & warm & strong in it, & that,—without being likely perhaps to be a popular poem,—it “bears a charmed life”. [9] There is a palpable power! a height & depth of thought,—& sudden repressed gushings of tenderness which suggest to us a depth beyond, in the affections. I wish you wd read it, & agree with me that the author is a poet in the holy sense. And I wish besides that some passages in the poem referring to the divine Being had been softened or removed. They sound to me daringly; and that is not the appropriate daring of genius. [10] Poor Burns felt in his darkness one truth near to him—“an irreligious poet is a monster”; [11] and men who thank God—sometimes—when they think of it—for the dews & sunshine, shd surely do it in an intenser gratitude for those refreshing & bright & deathless imaginings which come from above like them.

Do you know I dont believe in Mr Kenyon’s requiring any praying from anybody to spend as much time as he can with you. I am sitting just now on a four legged chair instead of a tripod; [12] yet my oracle is that he will see not one sun only go down at Three Mile Cross. [13]

Jesse Cliffe [14] —I have read it! Thank you for it! and you must hear that from so many! Even your idiots have a sense of the beautiful.

They say, London is ‘growing very thin’—which sounds to other than a Londoner, very ludicrous. There seems to me as much noise as ever—& for the rest I do not care. We are still unsettled as to a house, without being in the least likely to have a vision of the country this year; and instead of it Papa has given me two Barbary doves which I am sure Mr Mitford wd admire & in whose voices I seem to hear the waters & waving leaves faded by this time from their own memories & dreams. A dove’s voice gives me more delight than a nightingale’s—than even a nightingale’s,—tho’ I suppose I must not dare to say so to above one poet at a time. And voice & eyes & plumage go together—so beautiful & soft & calm. Is not all calmness, in this working grieving restless world, a solemn thing. I recognize sublimity in all calm moving living things, from the falling snow to the sleeping infant—notwithstanding Burke. [15]

Goodbye dear Miss Mitford. When you have a moment to write in, do not care for opportunities & franks which are not to be looked for from the country,—but remember how glad & thankful I shall always be to read your writing.

Your affectionate

E B Barrett

Addressed and franked by Charles Augustus Tulk on integral page: London August Ten 1836 / Miss Mitford / 3 Mile Cross / near Reading / Cha: Aug: Tulk /.

Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 11–14.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. “Clock of flowers.” The Swedish botanist, Carl von Linné (1707–78), had used this term to describe a series of flower classes, each closing at a particular hour.

2. In Undine (1811) by Friedrich Heinrich Carl de La Motte-Fouqué (1777–1843), the marriage of the water-sprite Undine to a mortal endows her with a soul. In chapter XVII, she says to her wicked uncle, the goblin Kühleborn, “Though I am condemned to live under these deep waters … I have brought my soul with me; therefore my tears cannot be understood by thee.”

3. Gray’s “The Bard” (1757), line 127, slightly misquoted.

4. Cf. Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 1819, line 49).

5. “The Romaunt of Margret” had appeared in The New Monthly Magazine, July 1836 (pp. 316–320).“Our Weekly Gossip” in The Athenæum of 9 July 1836 (no. 454, p. 491), said of it: “We have not read such a ballad for many a day; and if its writer will only remember, that in poetry manner is a blemish to be got rid of, and not an ornament to be worn and cherished, he (or she) may rank very high—what if we say, among the highest?”

6. For seedling geraniums (Reading Mercury, 26 July).

7. Henry Shepherd’s tragedy, mentioned in letter 530.

8. RB’s poem had been published on 15 August 1835.

9. Cf. Macbeth, V, 8, 12.

10. In these comments, EBB echoes the reviewer in The Metropolitan Journal (16 April 1836, p. 20), who wrote “Our only fault is with one word. The name of God is introduced sixty-four times in this poem, without it being necessary once; and this, too, in a manner perfectly indecent, not to say blasphemous” (see p. 385).

11. Burns’ letter of 12 February 1788 to Mrs. Dunlop (The Works of Robert Burns, ed. Allan Cunningham, 1834, VI, 228).

12. At Delphi, the oracular utterances were made by a priestess sitting on a tripod over a cleft in the rock. EBB used this quotation in the preface to The Seraphim.

13. The location of Miss Mitford’s cottage, some four miles from Reading.

14. See letter 530, note 1.

15. Burke, in his Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), had equated sublimity with that which is awe-inspiring or which evokes the thought of pain or danger.

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