Correspondence

828.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 77–79.

[Torquay]

July 17. 1841.

My impulse was to begin answering your letter before I reached its end!– Am I in a scrape? Am I not in a fright? To be sure I am!– And was it not a cross destiny which led to such a “hands across” [1] as our crossing letters? To be sure it was! But then there’s another “to be sure” surer than all the rest & that is your indulgence to me. You will have mercy, as Flush has for the kitten—carrying it about softly with its head in his mouth, tho’ without biting it off. I mew a little, & you let me fall softly. To be sure it is so, or will be so, or at least may be so. I will thank you as if it were so—& I will love you my ever beloved friend, if it be so or not.

I have been beating my brains to remember exactly what the nonsense of my last letter was. I beat them—and the chaff flies up in my eyes & blinding me leaves me my obscurity. But you will do me the justice (this is my hope) of inferring from the very nonsense, that I could have seen only the corrected Athenæum & was altogether unaware of the want of delicacy & respect towards you, demonstrated in the work itself. [2] The little vision of you made me feel glad .. something as if I really had seen you. There seemed to me nothing in it which was not true to your nature, & therefore pleasant & good for other natures to contemplate. And I was pleased—as I always am when you are brought closer to me by thought or word—& in the crisis of my good humour, achieved every sort of benediction for all sorts of literary gossippers. Well!—I do like them after all. And if I did’nt, the generations after me, would!—now, would’nt they?– Oh yes!– I do like,—with the strong eager earnest liking of an enthusiast in books, shut up a life-long among books only, .. to look at the book’s motive-power & externity! You do not feel this so strongly—just because you have “seen, touched, & handled”!– [3]  You cant imagine how happy I felt once, to know,—nay, to have beheld with my eyes, that the poet Campbell had red stuff curtains in his dining room. [4] But push back the clock—& think! Push it back to Shakespeare’s day! The colour of his hose—or was’nt it of his garters—did’nt I say his garters?—their colour is a case in a point—. Think of ‘The Shakespeare garters’!

But you must do me justice, & believe in the breadth & blackness of the line I draw between innocent & objectionable gossippings. That line shd be very broad & very black. For without any absolute falseness, or positive breach of confidence, details may be given & tittle-tattle re-tittle-tattled, in a way most vexing & improper. Dont, therefore, call up an image of me, clapping my hands over Miss Sedgewick’s sins of indelicacy—oh dont!– Think how the thorns ran into me all the time I read the first part of your letter, & dont give me up—dont love me less—dont even set me down among the “good for nothing poetesses”.

After all, was it so very bad of me to like that vision of you, given in the Athenæum? Read it over again, & think! Now was it?– My only word against it at the moment, was to my sister who happened to stand at my bedside! And what do you guess it was? .. “Why there is one peculiarity in her face without a notice! The eyes!—and not the forehead! Oh something shd have been said of her forehead”.

Is it very very wrong of me?– But you have, you know, a peculiar, massive forehead. Coleridge was

 

“The creature of the godlike forehead”— [5]

& Mr Kenyon once said to me (There!—now I [6] am the gossipper!) Mr Kenyon once said to me, “I never saw any forehead like Coleridge’s, except Miss Mitford’s.”

Try to forgive me. I may be forgiven—because it was my love of you which did wrong .. by being pleased. But it did not know—it cd not see!– It was love in a poke! [7]

Thank you, thank you for Browning’s poem. My thought of it crossed your question about my thought, Mr Kenyon having kindly sent me his copy ten days since. But I must tell you besides that I read it three times—in correspondence with Mr Chorley’s four—& in testimony both to the genius & the obscurity. Nobody shd complain of being forced to read it three or four or ten times. Only they wd do it more gratefully if they were not forced. I who am used to mysteries, caught the light at my second reading—but the full glory, not until the third. The conception of the whole is fine, very fine—& there are noble, beautiful things everywhere to be broken up & looked at. That great tragic scene, which you call “exquisite” [8] —& which pants again with its own power! Did it strike you that there was an occasional manner, in the portions most strictly dramatic, like Landor’s, in Landor’s dramas, when Landor writes best. Now read—

 

—“How these tall

Naked geraniums straggle! Push the lattice—

Behind that frame.—Nay, do I bid you?—Sebald,

It shakes the dust down on me! Why of course

The slide-bolt catches—Well—are you content

Or must I find you something else to spoil?–

Kiss & be friends, my Sebald!” [9]

Is’nt that Landor? Is’nt it his very trick of phrase? Yet Mr Browning is no imitator. He asserts himself in his writings, with a strong & deep individuality: and if he does it in Chaldee, why he makes it worth our while to get out our dictionaries! [10] Oh most excellent critic ‘in the glass house[’]!– [11]

After all, what I miss most in Mr Browning, is music. There is a want of harmony, particularly when he is lyrical—& that struck me with a hard hand, while I was in my admiration over his Paracelsus.

This is for you—I do not know him.

Ten oclock—& not a word of the last subject—the last dread subject!– [12] I will write tomorrow. But I must say before my eyes shut tonight, that I thank you most gratefully & fondly, beloved kindest friend, for the frankness of your words. Oh advise me always—tell me always what I ought to do—or ought’nt!– It is so, that I feel sure of your loving me.

I will write tomorrow—but do not wait until then to be in true grateful attachment

Your EBB–

Can you read? My hand shakes, .. goes east & west .. today—& it is tonight now.

I have sent for the Literary Gazette. [13]

Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 237–240.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. “The Belle of the Ball,” verse 2, by Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–39).

2. See letter 827, note 4. The extracts in The Athenæum did not disclose the remarks to which Miss Mitford took exception; EBB later saw these in The Literary Gazette (see letter 834, notes 1 and 3).

3. Cf. Colossians, 2:21.

4. See letter 706.

5. Cf. Wordsworth, “Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg” (1835), lines 17–18.

6. Underscored twice.

7. i.e., blind love; cf. the expression “a pig in a poke.”

8. The work under discussion is Pippa Passes, published in April. The scene praised by Miss Mitford may be that between Ottima and Sebald in part I.

9. The lines quoted appear in part I, “Morning,” (lines 7–13).

10. A reference to criticism of RB for obscurity, particularly in his previous work, Sordello.

11. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”—a wry reference to criticisms of EBB’s own style (see, for example, letter 538, note 20).

12. The “last dread subject” was her developing relationship with Horne, discussed in the following letter.

13. As noted above, The Literary Gazette (10 July 1841) contained more extensive and more offensive extracts from Miss Sedgwick’s book than those EBB had read in The Athenæum.

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