Correspondence

879.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 181–184.

[London]

Decr 6. 1841

A bunch of thanks in change for such a nosegay of flowers is shabby merchandize. Yet thank you, thank you. Beautiful flowers they are, & just in time to help the unseasonably warm weather to confront this December of ours which does’nt “behave as sitch”. Was there ever such a winter? For three successive days I & my thermometer looked at each other confessing that we cdnt bear a fire. No fire in December for three successive days! Think of that! It is wonderful. And I only wanted the flowers you sent to complete the scenery & confirm the illusion. Thank you my dearest friend. Now it is August.

But in regard to Stilling—and in regard to you—and in regard to me who have something to do with it too since I love you so .. oh no—my beloved friend! dont be a Roman Catholic—dont ever. My heart is white of bitterness towards that sect, as my conscience knows. Their great men—& their poor men—have achieved love upon earth. Their saints shine brightly in Heaven. But I cant call their faith “the old faith”—& what is more uncommon, my imagination is never pricked to lean on their side. The old faith was,—by the witness of the Scriptures & the early Fathers,—an older & holier & higher thing. And for the imagination—there seems to me more room for it with the Covenanters [1] under the broad slope of heaven, or with the puritans [2] before they grew narrow & decrepid thro’ the force of external pressure, or with the German Lutherans [3] who see celestial visions between the tops of the pines, or with the best of our own dissenters, as they worship God in their simplicity, in words fresh-shed from the heart, & with no other ceremonial that [sic] the lifted eye & bent knee—there seems to me more room, more fit & noble room for the imagination with all these, than in any forms & festivals peculiar to Roman Catholic observance. That is not, to my mind, what it is often called “the religion of the imagination”, but the religion of the senses—nay it is—is it not?—religion sensualized. The opera in the place of the tragedy! The dancers in the place of the poet. Theatrical effects in the place of God’s grand scenery! My imagination pricks me away from it all, instead of into the midst of it.

What a singular movement is this Puseyite one [4] —this new emeute [5] in the Church of England! If I got as far as Puseyism I wd go the whole way to Rome. Mr Milnes is a Puseyite & wrote the “One tract more,” [6] which I read at Torquay by grace of Mr Kenyon’s kindness, but thought little of. It is an aspect unworthy as it seemed to me, of so true a poet. I kiss his feet as a poet!– I am so glad you estimate the sonnet. [7]

No—again, no!—my dearest friend. I am obliged to say another ‘no’ to you!—— My feeling is that when our beloved go from us, The beloved, he who is so to God & man by right of title, stands there in the chasm—there, to be cried to—there, to be wept before,—there, to lift up the bruised affections—there, to be all-sufficient. Our dead are our absent ones!—and if as Stilling thinks their spiritual abode be in the midst of us, it is not less a state of separation, [8] —& our cry, (happily for that new blessed peace they have won) cannot more reach & wound them. How can they hear any cry of ours?– Does Death invest them with ubiquity—with omnisciense—with God’s own attributes?—or are they forced to walk step by step with us—they in their divine sympathy, and we in our earthly sorrowfulness—the one rent by the other?– No—it is not reasonable, I think, that we shd wish it—nor is it scriptural that we shd believe it. They suffered enough here for some of us—and now He the blessed divinest Saviour who suffered all, both for them & us, offers on .. His unwearied sympathy, His pitiful consolation, His witness to what man is & what God is. He is enough for us my beloved friend. Let us not wish to trouble the new peace of our dead.

I am very glad you like Stilling—very—and—oh I quite agree!—there is in his interesting book, a good deal of very perceptible credulity. La Harpe’s story, besides others, is self-confutable— [9]

Thank you for your delightful letter. I fell down flat under the spell of K’s story [10] —and felt my wings grow in the ghostly atmosphere of the whole. But it is’nt possible to write much more just now. I have written myself into such deep gravities that it is’nt possible to emerge all in a moment. Oh letter of mine!—you must be a grave dull letter to the end!——

It was wrong of me, not to have followed close the title page which went before [11] —but just as I took up my staff,—sundry persons insisted upon being written to—sundry persons, not one of whom was half as dear as you!– Yet I obeyed then by a solemn necessity.

Not to forget the question—Mr Garrow was not Sir William Garrow’s son in any sense—but he was his natural brother—Mr Garrow’s father not having married the “dark ladie”– [12] To the darkness, his own complexion is said to testify—but he is a sensible intelligent man & an active magistrate & useful citizen, sufficiently so to put his pedigree out of people’s heads!

God bless you my dearest dearest friend! I have’nt seen Mr Kenyon. He has not tried again. But as to my anger, it is so old that it’s quite worn out. Miss Clarke comes to us today– Say how you both are, & if there is a breath of news, or uncertain gossip even, about the tragedy. [13]

Your own attached EBB.

Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / Near Reading.

Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 314–317.

Manuscript: Eton College Library and Wellesley College.

1. The Covenanters were Scottish Presbyterians subscribing to a covenant for the advancement of their cause; their aims included the extension of Presbyterianism to England and Ireland, and suppression of the prayer-book mandated by Charles I.

2. The Puritans, one of whose principal adherents was Oliver Cromwell, sought the simplification and purification of the forms and rites of the Church of England and looked increasingly to the Bible as the sole authority in religious matters. After the restoration of the monarchy, they became known as Dissenters or Non-Conformists.

3. The Lutherans opposed many of the practices of the Roman Catholic Church, challenged the supreme authority of the pope, and advocated a more personal approach to faith.

4. Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–82), Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, became fearful that the advance of rationalism would undermine the concept that the church was divinely instituted. With Newman and Keble, he commenced a series of Tracts for the Times with the object of reviving and strengthening obsolescent doctrines—efforts that became known as the Oxford Movement. His particular contributions to the movement’s publications related to baptism and the eucharist.

5. “Disturbance.”

6. One Tract More, or, The System Illustrated by “The Tracts for the Times,” Externally Regarded: by a Layman [R.M. Milnes], 1841.

7. Milnes’s lines on the death of the Princess Borghese, in The Keepsake, called “exquisite” by EBB in letters 874 and 875.

8. Jung-Stilling postulated the notion that spirits are not removed to some far-off heaven, but remain close to their loved ones, to act as intermediaries between man and God.

9. Jean François de La Harpe (1739–1803) was a member of the French Academy of Sciences. In his private papers, he left an account of a dinner in 1788, during which he and the others present were amused when Jacques Cazotte (1719–92), a man of great piety, prophesied the specific manner in which each of them, de La Harpe and the host excepted, would die, all within six years. When de La Harpe, a freethinker, queried his omission, Cazotte told him he would die a Christian. Cazotte also prophesied the Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI. All happened as he had predicted. Jung-Stilling, who included this account in chapter 3 of his Theory of Pneumatology, accepted de La Harpe’s words as true, advancing reasons for dismissing suggestions that they had been written after the event.

10. See letter 877.

11. EBB had said that letter 875 “must serve & be received as a title page to the letter to come.”

12. A reference to the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets and to the fact that Joseph Garrow’s mother was a high-caste Brahmin. EBB’s remarks are contradicted by T.A. Trollope, Garrow’s son-in-law, who states that a marriage did take place, and, further, that Sir William Garrow (1760–1840) was Joseph’s great-uncle (What I Remember, 1887, II, 150).

13. A further reference to revived hopes for the staging of Miss Mitford’s Otto of Wittelsbach (see letter 729, note 4).

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