598. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 301–302.
[London]
Monday– [4 December 1837] [1]
A very few minutes my dearest Miss Mitford I must inflict upon you this morning. In exchange for the ghost of your suffering more, has come the phantom of your going to Wales—and tho’ my own fear of it & selfishness about it wd give me no courage for exorcising,—yet here is Mr Kenyon who does!– Papa was with him yesterday & mentioned the tendency towards Wales—and he desired him to desire me to beg you to beware of it—inasmuch as the part of Wales to which you think of going, is very unhealthy & its inhabitants, vexed with such rheumatisms & cramps as are only fit for Caliban. [2] And so dearest Miss Mitford, I felt impelled to write to you, to warn you of all this. I have many groans of my own—of the Testy & Sensitive school [3] —against it besides. I cant bear to think of your going away the whole breadth of England, & shall not like directing ‘Wales’ to you. And another feeling is—& that for shame’s sake, should have been mentioned first—that you would miss your old associations, & be desolate in spirits whenever you were inclined to be low-spirited at all. Oh! I do hope the rheumatic cramps may frighten you away from this plan altogether—& hoping so, I am not hard hearted to the affectionate friend, so much of whose happiness depends upon your adopting it. Only you know I must care for my own dear friend more.
It grieves me to think of her suffering such pain, or rather, I hope, of her having suffered it. Pain is a grievous feature of illness—because it breaks the attention into fragments, & wont allow of your roaming away from yourself into pleasant abstractions. I am thankful for my own case, to say that I have felt very little pain. The cough is wearing enough sometimes,—& the sense of lassitude, & consciousness that
——‘to be weak is miserable,’ [4]
sufficiently uncomfortable. But there is not much besides—& often my dear friend, in some sleepless nights of mine, have I thought of your sleepless & painful ones. That was not a “pleasant abstraction”—except as far as your illness brought to mind your affection .. all your goodness towards me!–
And that brings to mind now, that I did not “offer” or “proffer” any literary service to you. I should not have presumed to do such a thing. It was in reply to a question of yours that I said, & say again dearest Miss Mitford—you may command my will in any way you please, as long as it goes the way of Papa’s will—on which you know mine is dependent, & which, I know, will always please to please you.
Am I to admire the French tragedies & literature, with you, as well as Hayley’s [5] poetry? It would not be “We two only” [6] there– And so in default of the “bribe”, I shall confess that I never could bear French poetry in any shape. Lord Byron’s “monotony in wire” [7] is just the expression for it. If Shakespeare had been born a Frenchman, he would have stood dumb—but how monstrous is the hypothesis .. “if Shakespeare had been born a Frenchman”. And when you said that the French tragedians were far below my Greeks, I wish you had seen what a smile Hyperion sent from under his golden locks, to the Satyr! [8] There was kingly contempt in it! Yes! far below “how inferior”! indeed! And the provoking part of it is, that the French tragedians call themselves “classical” & ‘Greek’ par excellence—whereas I am sure you <***>
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 51–52 (as [6? November 1837]).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by Miss Mitford’s reference, in the previous letter, to the offer of a house in Wales.
2. Cf. The Tempest, I, 2, 325–326.
3. A reference to James Beresford’s The Miseries of Human Life; or, the Groans of Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy (1806).
4. Paradise Lost, I, 157.
5. William Hayley (1745–1820), poet, friend and biographer of Cowper, was best known for The Triumphs of Temper (1781).
6. Cf. King Lear, V, 3, 9.
7. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth (1818), stanza 38, line 342.
8. Cf. Hamlet, I, 2, 140.
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