713. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 198–202.
Torquay–
Septr 27th 1839.
Thank you again & again my beloved friend for your kindest solicitude. Since I wrote to you last I have been much grieved & very anxious. Poor Dr Barry’s illness cd not have been simple rheumatic fever. At any rate, a few hours after Mrs Barry had written to beg that I wd write to him most particularly about myself as he was much better & very anxious on my account, a relapse came, & for a night & a day his medical attendants had little or no hope of him. He lay for hours between life & death. I knew nothing of this until he was better—indeed until the crisis was quite over; and when I heard of it, even as a past, I was of course much moved by the thought of what might have been & of what still remained so precarious—especially with the thoughts of his late anxious kindness about myself warm beside that thought! I do thank God—everything is going right now, & there is no room for fear. I do thank God. Had the worst happened, I shd have scarcely borne to stay here! and I cd not ever have shaken from my mind, in any case, that I must have been the involuntary cause of some of the evil,—poor Dr Barry having risen from his bed two days before he was quite confined to it, for the purpose of coming thro’ an atmosphere saturated with rain, to see me between nine & ten at night. [1] I said at the time “Oh how ill you do look! How cd you come out in such weather!” little thinking what was impending. Well—I thank God that all is bright or brighter now. And as to my sending for a substitute my dearest Miss Mitford, if you knew how I shrink from a stranger in the shape of a physician, you wd not ask it. I dare say I shall see Dr Barry next week: and in the meantime I am better—the bad symptoms having receded, & the worst discomfort remaining, in an oppression upon the chest which impedes my voice very disagreeably—the effect probably of all this atmospheric changeableness & moisture. What weather it is .. even here where we are safe from the frosts of which you speak. How very very happy I am dearest dearest Miss Mitford to read your accounts .. or rather your expectations .. of improved health. God grant a realization to them all. It will be felt by me as a happiness. Mr May must be an admirable person—& I have a high respect for him all these miles off!——
Your view of things in relation to Miss Shepherd is right & bright together, I do not doubt. Sir Samuel Shepherd loved her dearly, when she was with him at Malvern––(that was when he was chief Baron of Scotland)––and if tender dispositions were suffered to evolve naturally from feelings naturally intense, she must have become year after year a more loveable person. Lady Mary is a singular woman. I think gratefully of her from some passages of kindness which passed from her to me, when I wanted kindness most, & the saddest of domestic losses was nearer than I thought or would think. [2] I believe her to be a kind woman—a better if not a higher name than a great metaphysician. Have you seen her books upon the External Universe & Cause & effect? [3] She has high talents—but has not perhaps been operative enough to have done much undone before, altho’ quite enough to raise her own name above the multitude. Metaphysicians, & I suspect, poets shd live in a cave,—or at least live so, as to form habits of concentration & abstraction. Lady Mary (so her daughter told me) used to waltz until she was tired, & then sit down to write about algebra. Her daughter at once admired & feared her—feared her very much—& nobody else in the world. She seemed to love—in the clear meaning of love .. her father—with no fear in that love. There was love too in abundance, I am sure, between the metaphysician & the dramatist—& Lady Mary used to say jestingly—“We are very much in love with each other”. Notwithstanding which, he used by her own account to take up his hat & walk out whenever she began to dissert (she does dissert you know) upon primary & secondary qualities in matter—and she on the other hand was the authority in all domestic matters & would’nt suffer any interference– “What can he know about children? Why he was only a boy when I married him”. [4] Just those words! I am certain this time about the syllables. They are unforgettable.
Now you see what a gossip you have made of me. Dont tell it all again to Sir Samuel.
She used to keep Miss Shepherd up to three or four in the morning after a conclave of waltzers, to hear (she being “sole auditor”) vocal dissertations upon spirit & matter & such high arguments,—then suddenly check herself with––“My dear!—how can you stand with your left foot before your right”! The most eloquent woman I ever heard speak, certainly—and the vainest in speaking of herself. But she is boldly vain. She justifies (almost) her vanity by her simplicity. She does not lay nets for praises.
When Miss Shepherd (to go back to the daughter) told me that she herself had not genius, I doubted her words. I used to think that she might be almost anything. She often wrote to me while she was at Malvern—years ago; & yet I have kept to this moment every line she sent me [5] —a sure sign—since they were not consecrated to me by any strong attachment—of how I thought concerning their writer—of how entirely she interested me. I remember her seal now,—Per sempre, [6] —& how in some of my musings about her, I used to lay the motto in contrast with others of her fancies, as things most contrastible.—— Tell me, when you hear anything about her.
The china asters are beautiful—rayed brightly as any stars of earth can be. Your flowers have grown in the desolate garden of that empty house [7] as beautifully as if my darling Ibbit Jane’s blue eyes were looking out of the window upon them—or as if they had never left you. Nosegays upon nosegays of them have been gathered for me, & bloomed & blossomed with & been survived by thoughts of you, in my room. Thank you for all!–
Poor poor Lady Flora Hastings! Sir James Clark has hallucinated considerably from the high sphere in which you place his profession. The ignorance was the least of the injury. It appears to have been combined with coldness & coarseness of feeling. I wd give much to rescue the young queen from any such imputation. Can it be done? I heard gladly of the tears she shed when tears were vain—but still the circumstances can scarcely be effaced by tears—& perhaps the most ineffaceable of all, was her cold long silence to the poor victim whose innocense was proved,— in consequence of her uncle’s publication of facts. [8] That the queen could have been provoked by any publication, by any insult which that publication was not, by any injury which that publication was not, to give more pain to a heart so pained by herself, is an atrocity I wd fain hear explained away.
So much for human ties in royal breasts!
Why spare men’s feelings when their own are jests? [9]
But surely surely the young Queen with her fair happy-looking face, & her warm ready childish tears for the departure from office of her political friends, cannot be a mere Queen Stone, co-regnant with King Log. [10] I wd fain hear differently. Have you heard anything?
In regard to poor Lady Flora, she was to my apprehension perfectly wrong in sacrificing her personal delicacy to any court slander upon lips noble or royal. She might have called in other medical men & insured their close attendance, & testimony together with Sir James Clark’s. [11] And if such limited measures did not suffice to save her reputation if I had been she, I wd have lost it. Let it go. I do not see why women shd not take as high ground in respect to one virtue as in respect to the rest. If anyone were to accuse me of secreting stolen goods, I wd scarcely condescend to empty my drawers into the street, & so clear my character. Oh! this world! How we shake & crawl & die before it, if it do but bluster!–
And then surely the whole conduct of her family in regard to the publication of the letters is most blame-worthy. Tell me if you do not think so. I do, for many reasons: and everybody will consider one admissible if it go to prove that the publication is calculated to diminish rather than to heighten the interest & compassion. It has done so with me in this manner– I did not quite like poor Lady Flora’s letter to her uncle. It did not seem to me the letter of a woman of deep sensibility, wrung to the cruellest. An amiable excellent woman I do not doubt her being,—& cruelly wronged she was—but after reading that letter, my mind is easy as to the wrong bringing her a step nearer to death. There is something in it, which if she were not in the grave, having put off, only with her living garments the aspersions of slander .. I shd be inclined to call, almos<t> a flippancy. At any rate it was not, it cd not have been, written in any degree of mental agony.
You have made me uneasy by your allusion to the Findens—& with the volume, too, in this unpromising state. But your prose is in it. [12] I always think that when I want to be comforted. Do give my love to Dr Mitford. We go to number one on this Terrace, on Monday or tuesday—& there wont be much risk for me in the removal for so short a distance. My brother means to fold me up in a cloak & carry me.
May God ever bless you!– Pray don’t throw away more anxious thoughts upon me. If I had any really bad symptoms, I wd call in another physician. As it is do let me enjoy the luxury of being obstinate—perverse as Mr Kenyon calls it–
Your obstinately affectionate
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 153–157.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. It is interesting to note that, for all Dr. Barry’s devoted attendance, he had “not received as yet a farthing” and that EBB had had to write to him to enquire the extent of her indebtedness (see SD1042).
2. i.e., the death of EBB’s mother in October 1828.
3. In 1828, Lady Mary had presented EBB with copies of her books, Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (1827) and An Essay Upon the Relation of Cause and Effect Controverting the Doctrine of Mr. Hume (1824), (see Reconstruction, A2124 and A2123.1).
4. Henry J. Shepherd, born in 1783, married Lady Mary in 1808, so was hardly “only a boy”!
5. As far as is known, these letters are no longer extant.
6. “For ever.”
7. i.e., the one vacated by the Hedleys in July, when they moved to Southampton.
8. The Times published, in its issue of 12 August, two letters: one dated 8 March 1839 from Lady Flora to her uncle, Hamilton Fitzgerald, in which she expressed the belief that she was the victim of a conspiracy; the other, from Fitzgerald, dated 30 May 1839, explaining that his purpose in making public her letter was to counter suggestions that she was “guilty as charged.” For details of the scandal, see letter 702, note 12.
9. Byron, The Age of Bronze (1823), 763–764.
10. When the frogs asked for a king, Jupiter threw down a log; when they complained, he then gave them a stork, which devoured them. “King Log” therefore symbolizes an ineffective, spiritless ruler. Suggesting that Victoria was “a mere Queen Stone” reflects a general feeling that she had been insensitive and ungenerous in her attitude towards Lady Flora.
11. The statement issued after Lady Flora’s medical examination was, in fact, co-signed by her personal doctor, Sir Charles Mansfield Clarke (1782–1857), physician to Queen Adelaide.
12. Six of Miss Mitford’s prose pieces were included in the 1840 Findens’ Tableaux.
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