829. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 80–84.
[Torquay]
July 18. 1841
And now to finish yesterday’s letter. With a deep true sense of the value of every word from you & of the love-value of these particular words, & thanking you over & over again for a frankness so dear to me, I shall yet be .. I shall therefore be correspondingly open with you & confess that I have not for a moment since the ringing of Mr Chorley’s alarm-bell, [1] felt frightened or embarrassed or distrustful of my invisible friend with his visible kindnesses .. Mr Horne. Certainly the dreadful black book, “The false medium between men of genius & the public” [2] is his own perpetration. It is his acknowledged work. There is no mystery about it. I never read it: & I remember hearing of it, long before the Medeist [3] & the poet became identified in my knowledge & still longer before I knew Mr Horne under either character,—as a clever & eccentric work—eccentric—no more– Mr Chorley’s “silent gravity” being ‘the full sum’ [4] of evil imputation in relation to it that ever reached me. Again & again I meant to get it—but never did. I never did read it, or look at its outside—never, up to this moment.
“And now’[’] (you are murmuring) “what is she going to do?[”] “What (as Mr Kenyon says) will come next?” [“]What will she do? Defend thro’ thick & thin the infallibility of a book she never read, for the sake of a person she never saw? Walk into “good-for-nothing-ness” deliberately, leisurely, & without holding up her petticoats.”!!
You see how I want you to smile a little, & draw from Mr Chorley’s “gravity,” something scarcely as grave as the first deduction. Let us consider. Perhaps the book may be ‘black’ from its politics!– Wd Mr Chorley look grave over a levelling principle? He might, you know!– But I will get the book & read it & put off my apology for it until then. I shall be worth just as much as a defender, after I have read it—dont you think so?–
But dearest kindest friend, why wd I talk lightly when you spoke to me with such serious kindness. Perhaps I ought not. I am serious enough within– And the seriousness is within & without too, indeed, .. it spreads itself all over .. while I look back & consider the whole long story of this unseen friend’s kindness to me. Surely he must have in him an abundant goodness to have done by me as he has. What claim had I in my solitude & sadness & helpless hopeless sickness, such as he believed it to be, upon a literary man overwhelmed with occupation & surrounded by friends & fitnesses of all sorts in London? Nevertheless from the first kind little note which he sent to me on learning the straightness of my prison (he learnt that from a mutual friend) [5] to ask me to allow him to help in amusing me, he has never forgotten or seemed to forget me. There has ever been coming some slight detail, some witty word, some notice of book or writer—the whole made acceptable & even touching to me by a delicacy & unostentatious sympathy which are rarer even than the attention. But the attention itself is rare. How few wd have thought of the thing!– How fewer still wd not have wearied of it?– There is your own beloved self who are never tired of me!– And there are my own dearest ones at home who are never tired of me!– But although I have nothing to complain of, & have received from my slight intercourse with the world a more than proportionate good will, there is scarcely another .. yes, scarcely another, who continues writing, writing to me as if I were well & cd amuse them back again. So that it wd be impossible for me not to feel this strange kindness from a stranger, or not to dismiss, so, the thought of strangership. Why even our dear Mr Kenyon, with all his overflowing benevolence towards all, & that regard for myself which I shd be both unjust & sorry to doubt, .. why even he cant find time to spend in such a way. He scarcely ever writes a word to me—scarcely ever!– Never above twice indeed, since I was exiled.
Well– You will grant then the reason I have for gratitude. But that, you will say, is not a reason against the intimation conveyed in the “silence”!
But then I recur to this sa<me> correspondence. It has been very frequent—short letters but many of them—and perfectly open & unceremonious on each side. We became quick friends—& by passing through a multitude of subjects, cannot be ignorant of our mutual modes of thinking & feeling upon many. And I have liked very much my knowledge, so derived, of Mr Horne. I have liked & estimated it all. And if he is not a true gentleman, of “fancies chaste & noble” [6] I shd not recognize one anywhere.
True, that Leigh Hunt is his friend! Poor Leigh Hunt!– I never cd help to cry down that hapless, industrious, imprudent man of genius—loved much by the few—scorned much by the many,—& to be extolled & respected by more future generations than he can reckon now, individual well-wishers. Will the Roggers’s, or even the Moores measure genius with him hereafter? “I trow not”. [7] You wd not wish me to speak or think lightly of the true poet Leigh Hunt—& for the universal reason which as far as I can understand it is no reason at all. You wd not yourself. When Mr Horne told me once that Leigh Hunt spoke affectionately of me, I felt proud all the day after.
Of Fox I never heard—except—is’nt he a unitarian preacher?– There is another friend—a Mr Powell, who is a very dear friend also of Wordsworth’s. Mr Powell has written to me two or three times, & sent me his poems, which are marked by poetical sentiment & pure devotional feeling, but by no remarkable power. You know we had him with us in the Chaucer. Then there’s Dr Southwood Smith [8] —& Mr Bell, [9] editor of the Monthly Chronicle, & the Monthly Chronicle people perhaps, generally, Mr Carlyle that profound thinker, is a friend of Mr Horne’s: & the Landors & Milnes’s & Talfourds visit him at least—to say nought of Ld Northampton’s soireès. [10] Oh!—it almost seems to me a wrong, to set up all these paltry wooden props for a circumstantial respectability—yet let them stand! And so it stands “proven” I think that he does move in a society which the world accounts “respectable”—Mr Chorley’s expression, when he was not silent, rather intimating the contrary.
Does this sound as if I were angry! No no!—indeed, indeed my beloved & kindest friend, whom I shall love dearly when hereafter you have found me out to be far less worth loving than you first supposed .. indeed I am not angry. I love you & thank you from my heart for the interest which led you to write the words you wrote. I am grateful—& you will be understanding. For you, who are of a generous trusting nature, will understand how one cant help springing up warmly when persons we esteem & have learnt to be obliged to, are depreceated by others. Not by you! You are not the depreceator! You have only performed a necessity of love in telling me what you thought I shd know– And I on the other side, have told you everything I remember & as far as I remember it, about the individual in question—and all my thoughts besides.
Papa who hates visiting to the point of desease—so painfully that I cd not ask him to call upon anybody—was yet moved to leave his card upon Mr Horne. And they seemed to meet with mutual satisfaction—one saying—“I seem to have known him a hundred years” (Mr Horne said that of Papa—) and the other—“A gentleman—plain & quiet manners—not ætherial enough (so said Papa!) for a poet.”– Papa had been touched too .. soothed back into gratification after his furious anger with the Quarterly (because Mr Lockhart did’nt seem to love me as himself did) [11] by those beautiful stanzas of Mr Horne’s in the Monthly Chronicle. [12] And those pleased me! Not that I cared after the manner of my own dear Papa, for the Quarterly’s stripes. Perhaps they were as ‘gently done’ [13] as I might hope for. And then few things moved me at that time. The review was one of the first readings I got through with—& even in accomplishing that, it was by a painful mental effort that I cd compass the meaning of it, sentence by sentence. If they had set me up on the top of a pyramid with a foolscap on, what wd it have been to me?–
Oh my dearest friend! That was a very near escape from madness, absolute hopeless madness– For more than three months I cd not read—cd understand little that was said to me. The mind seemed to myself broken up into fragments. And even after the long dark spectral trains, the staring infantine faces, had gone back from my bed,—to understand, to hold on to one thought for more than a moment, remained impossible. That was, in part, because I never cd cry. Never! The tears ran scalding hot into my brain instead of down my cheeks– That was how it happened. [14]
But I might well spare you this– The Athenæum has not done the most limited justice to Mr Horne as a poet. I like the Athenæum!– I am interested in it, & Mr Dilke is kind enough, do you know, to send it to me regularly. But I wish sometimes that it’s poetical were like its musical criticisms, justified & beautified by the love of art. [15] When however the critic passes to the poets, he grows blue with cold, & his finger-ends insensate! Not that bad versifiers do not depreciate poetry more than cold critics. Not that we have poets to spare!– But surely there are poets! <***>
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 240–244.
Manuscript: Folger Shakespeare Library and Wellesley College.
1. As indicated later in this paragraph, Chorley had expressed to Miss Mitford some reservations about EBB’s relationship with Horne, due in part to his reputation for eccentricity.
2. Horne’s book, Exposition of the False Medium and Barriers Excluding Men of Genius from the Public (1833), had earned him a certain opprobrium for his dismissive comments about various literary figures of the day (see, for example, the reference to Fanny Kemble’s Francis the First in letter 839).
3. Medism described the attitude of Greeks in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. who unpatriotically sympathized with the Persians; hence, by extension, it connotes the holding of unpopular opinions.
4. The Merchant of Venice, III, 2, 157.
5. Mrs. Orme, the former governess at Hope End.
6. We have not located the source of this quotation.
7. Luke, 17:9.
8. Thomas Southwood Smith (1788–1861), preacher and physician, advocated major improvements in sanitation to reduce disease and mortality, especially among the poor. He was one of the personalities treated in Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age. Coincidentally, he died in Florence a few months after EBB.
9. Robert Bell (1800–67), journalist, author and playwright, collaborated with Bulwer-Lytton in establishing The Monthly Chronicle in 1838, subsequently becoming its editor. He was one of the contributors to Chaucer, Modernized (see letter 780), and later produced a 24-volume annotated edition of English poets (1854–57).
10. Spencer Joshua Alwyne Compton (1790–1851), 2nd Marquis of Northampton, was President of the Geological Society and (1838–48) President of the Royal Society. A minor poet, he assembled a miscellany of verse, The Tribute (1837), which included, as well as some of his own poetry, contributions by many of the foremost poets of the day, such as Wordsworth. RB attended at least one of Lord Northampton’s soirées (see letter to EBB, 20 February 1846).
11. In an article entitled “Modern English Poetesses” in The Quarterly Review (no. 66, September 1840, pp. 382–389), John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), the editor, spoke of EBB’s being “too dogmatic in her criticism … too positive in her philosophy” and lacking “that clearness, truth, and proportion, which are essential to beauty” (for the full text of his comments, see vol. 4, pp. 413–416).
12. In The Monthly Chronicle for November 1840 (p. 480), Horne contributed a 19-line poem “To the Greek Valerian; or, Ladder to Heaven. Addressed to Elizabeth B. Barrett, on the inadequate notice of her Poems in the last Number of the Quarterly Review.” A footnote qualifies his comment: “Inadequate, except in conferring upon her the above most appropriate title.”
13. Cf. The Tempest, I, 2, 298.
14. EBB refers, of course, to the trauma of Bro’s death.
15. Chorley contributed both literary and musical reviews to The Athenæum, but EBB felt that his primary interest was in music and that his remarks were kinder to musicians than to writers.
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