Correspondence

729.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 229–231.

[Torquay]

Friday– [late January 1840] [1]

Ever dearest Miss Mitford

Our letters passing on the road without speaking, I must write a little more, too soon I fear to be at all in reason, in reply to your question as to whether Mr Shepherd’s poem has reached me—which it has not done. I am very thankful to him & to the author of the Happy futurity for their kind intentions [2] —& certainly not less so to your own dear self who are at the bottom of so many of my pleasures of this sort. You know you are.

But I wish I could owe a better one to you, and hear that you are quite as well as my thoughts & prayers would make you. That rheumatic haunting pain in the face must be so worrying & incapacitating—& then the “only two” fits of sickness in a fortnight, sound anything but satisfactory to me. On the other hand I would not be unthankful to the mercy which has arrested the worse pain of mental anxiety. Dear Dr Mitford is pretty well—& you are easy about the Findens.

Is Mr Kenyon at Rome? [3] I do not quite make it out from what you say—& am willing to hope that he is not, .. that he will be in London, on the contrary, to praise Otto’s cothurni [4] & see how you look in a new crown. Do tell me all & everything– I am very anxious to know. In the midst of the anxiety, I stop short to sigh, & think that whoever may be in London, I [5] shall not & you will. I [5] shall not see you in the new crown, or in any other—in truth the old one was regal & redolent enough for me!– Well!– I must be content with the smell of the new bays at a distance, & persuade some one shower out of a hundred to go away from this rainy cloud-land of Devon, & take my love with it & water them & keep them green.

Very green sort of writing is written up there—but when one is shut up in the dark, curtained all round, & under blister-torture, as I am “at these presents”, one is glad to wander away from one’s self & one’s dreariness by favor of any sort of metaphor green or yellow,—without classical leave. Dr Scully has condemned me to a dynasty of blisters—each to be applied to the chest every three days for two or three hours at a time [6] —which just answers the purpose of a minor kind of flaying– Not that I am worse. But the spitting of blood which never has quite ceased, always increases with the fall of the thermometer—& it is found absolutely necessary to divert as far as possible (which is not very far) the morbid course of the circulation.

Have you seen Mrs Gore & Mrs Trollope in their late avatars? [7] “Preferment”, with an undeniable cleverness, is dull & heavy—besides the hardness, as inseparable from that world-illustrating species of composition as from an old walnut shell. As to “One fault”, with neither dulness nor heaviness, the book seems to me far less clever than Mrs Trollope’s books generally or always are—and I am at a loss about the title, the applicability of the title, seeing that it is suitable neither to the work which is far from having only one fault, nor to the hero who really does in my eyes concentrate in his magnificent person most of the faults [8] & the worst ones, I can remember without “farther notice”—while the poor persecuted & perfect heroine has no fault at all .., if it be not that she might “have done it” more gracefully, in making her proposals to that second husband with whom the third volume leaves her– But then again she was wet & in a hurry—there are excuses for her. [9] It wd have been different if she had waited to change her stockings—& by the way, Eureka,!—in that one omission lies the one fault!——

Talking of Geraldine & converts, [10] —did you ever meet with an account partly translated partly composed by Miss Schimmelpenninck, of the Port Royal? It is long since I read, & will be longer before I forget that most interesting account of the most interesting establishment which ever owed its conventual name & form to the Church of Rome, & its purity & nobility to God’s blessing & informing Spirit– [11]

They have come to warn me about the post. My beloved friend, do write whenever you can without crowding your employments unpleasantly, & never at another time.

My sisters say they wd intrude their kindest regards—& mine are with dear Dr Mitford by permission––& intrusion too—fancying & wishing all sorts of seasonable good to both of you!–

Your most affectionate

E B Barrett–

Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 172–174.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Dated by the further reference to the books EBB was awaiting from Wimpole Street. EBB’s references to Miss Mitford’s health place this letter after no. 727.

2. See letter 727, note 20.

3. Kenyon was travelling in Italy (see letter 734).

4. The thick-soled boots worn by tragic actors. There was at this time a revival of interest in Miss Mitford’s ill-fated Otto of Wittelsbach; she speaks of “present expectations” of the play’s being staged in April (Chorley, I, 171). Nothing came of these hopes.

5. Underscored twice.

6. See letter 599, note 2.

7. Preferment: or, My Uncle the Earl (3 vols., 1840) by Catherine Grace Frances Gore (née Moody, 1798–1861), and One Fault. A Novel (3 vols., 1840) by Frances Trollope (née Milton, 1779–1863).

8. The “one fault” ascribed by Mrs. Trollope to her hero was his shortness of temper towards his wife.

9. After her husband was killed in a duel, the young widow was able to ensnare a former lover at the sea-shore during a storm.

10. See letter 720, note 16.

11. Port Royal, founded in 1204, was a Cistercian abbey a few miles S.W. of Paris, authorized by the Pope in 1223 to offer a retreat to women anxious to withdraw from the world without taking vows of poverty, obedience, etc. It later supported the Jansenists, who emphasized the personal relationship of each soul to God. The Jansenist doctrines were condemned in 1653 by Innocent X, and the abbey was forbidden to receive new members. After a brief rapprochement under Clement IX, Clement XI again condemned the Jansenists’ teachings; in 1709 the nuns were forcibly removed from Port Royal, and in 1710 the abbey was razed.

Mary Ann Schimmelpenninck (née Galton, 1778–1856) published Select Memoirs of Port Royal (3 vols., 1829).

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