938. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 298–302.
[London]
April 1st 1842.
Is’nt it spring?
Your dearest & too touching letter O my beloved friend, is among the things for which I cannot thank you adequately when my heart & eyes are fullest!– May God bless you—love you!
For my own part you have mistaken my figures—my 3’s you have read into 8’s, my 0[’]s into 10’s—“the full sum of me” [1] must of course be wrong. And, some time hence, when the sun shines upon the slate & the dimness passes from your eyes & you find it out to be wrong,––will you promise me now, my dearest friend, to struggle then with the new wisdom & try in spite of it to love me further & longer than you cd overvalue me? Will you try to do it? Perhaps you will, for the sake of this love which goes out to you truly & clearly & cannot be exaggerated like the rest.
Do you remember what the old poet said of love[:] “It is the toothache or like pain—”? [2] Well! your toothache or face ache seemed to act like that poetical aching. It acted like love! “Embittered your letter”! No indeed! I felt no bitterness, I tasted none—& my lips were close enough to the paper to do so if any bitterness had been there.
My question was—wasn’t it?—“Can you guess the three reasons why I wished you to hear Mr Kenyon talking of you?”– [3] You guess only one of them—& here are all three. 1st Because it wd have pleased you. 2d Because it wd have pleased me to see you pleased. 3d Because you wd have been here. There’s my climax of a reason! Guess why I sighed in writing that. 1st Because of my selfishness! 2d Because you were not here! And there’s another climax. How improveable the world is, to begin with me!
Well! but he was here again yesterday, & we had more talking of you—& he told me how a certain society in which he had been the day before, was talking incense about you .. & how Mr Harness extolled the magnificent positions in your Otto—& how the novel was marvelled at, that it had been cast down [4] —& how delightful it wd be for you to come to London & light up the smoke of it with the shining of you. Then Mr Kenyon & I talked of the novel, & I denied the casting down of it in what some of Mr Kenyon’s friends call my “insolent” way, & felt sure of its being up on its pedestal ready for all worshippers before very long. He told me that you had developped something of the story to him & that it promised everything. Was’nt the name “Mary Gray” thought of for it? I think you told me so once—long ago—& that was the second day we met.
Often & often do I look back, leap back in spirit over the great gulph of darkness between my now & my then, & think of the moment when the door was first opened to me of the permission to love you. Did I ever tell you just how it was? Mr Kenyon had been asking me, asking me,—like a king beseeching a beggar to take a dukedom—pressing me on all sides with kindness to pass an evening at his house & see Wordsworth. Now I wd have gone on a pilgrimage to see Wordsworth ever since I was eight years old—& if the indispensable condition had been pebbles within side of the pilgrim shoon, [5] I wd have gone even so. But at the end of a pilgrimage, I shd have seen Wordsworth alone in his niche,—kissed his feet & come away .. & he peradventure wdnt have seen me! It was altogether different going into Mr Kenyon’s den of lions & lionesses—& I was frightened into absolute shame at the sort of roaring implied by my imaginativeness. I know Mr Kenyon was half angry, thro’ all his kindness, at my long drawn perversity—& I was near crying in the conflict between what I wished & feared, & what dear Mr Kenyon tried to press beyond the fear. Who can judge aright for another who has lived a peculiar life, in no sort of society except of books, & shy at the best, as to manners—? “I loathed that I did love”!– [6] Well—at last the temptation took the form of a softer devil. He, not the devil but our dear friend, asked me to think no more of the great party but to consent to come to a very small one, where Wordsworth wd be again—& Miss Mitford .. & then he told me of your gentleness & dearness. So then I said “Yes”—half ashamed & half afraid still!—and then again in the morning came a note from him to propose my going with himself & you .. & you! to the Zoological gardens. Oh how I remember the words? I am sure he measured them so as to encourage me into some estate of common sense—“you will become acquainted” (thus they ran) “with an amiable person whom you will be certain to like, & who is prepared to like you”. Prepared to like me! I resolved at once to go, & set my teeth as for the desperate purpose of it—couldn’t do anything during all the interval at books or writing .. dawdled about .. walked up & down stairs, looked out at the window—said to myself so as to keep myself firmly buckled up in resolve, “I shall be glad after it is over! I shall be glad I have seen her, all my life afterwards (O unconscious prophetess!) & in the meanwhile it will only be a few hours pain”. Think of me as you please, but I do assure you that when the carriage was heard to be at the door, my knees trembled so that it was a hard thing for me to get down stairs to it. And then, .. the first sound from your lips which reached my ears .. embleming all the rest .. was said in reply to something Mr Kenyon said & I cd scarcely hear in my confusion, something to the effect that I “shd have a protectress now”—“I hope, a friend”. Those were the first words I ever heard from your lips—& there was a tone, a significance of kindness in them which went beyond the words & made me love you in [a] moment. I loved you before as all the world does & for much the same reasons—but the heart-to-heart love began just then! You were Cæsar to me in a moment!– [7] Dearest friend .. bear with me as you have done. It is for you to bear with me!
Your eyes are growing older you say & you cant see the violets so well this year as on others. Now do not anticipate the growing older. When your eyes grow older,—I mean when age begins to affect them,—you will see more clearly than you do now. You are short-sighted—are you not?—like me & Mr Kenyon & Papa. Well—that species of defective sight improves with age—because it arises from the too great convexity of the pupil, which it is the effect of age to flatten. So you see you have made a mistake & are growing younger instead of older. I am so glad!–
Poor Mr Browning! Was that extreme irritability of nerve supposed to be occasioned by the disappointment, or the exercise of an overwrought faculty? [8] After all I cannot wish with you that he be turned to occupations of less excitement. In the first place, CD he so turn? In the second, dare we ask silence from such a poet? It wd be like asking a prophet to forbear his prophecy—he has a word to speak from Nature & God, & he must speak it!–
Certainly Mr Browning does speak in parables—& more darkly than .. even .... some other of your friends. But he is a true poet. I estimate him very highly—& so do you—& so must all who know what poetry is & turn their faces towards its presence willingly.
The ‘Rhymed Plea’ [9] is admirable “after its kind” [10] —but with all my true & admiring regard for its author & his writings I could not be content to receive it as sole comforter for the absence of higher inspirations.
My prose style like Carlyle!– To remind anyone in the world of Carlyle were praise enough & too much! Miss James’s [11] praise made me feel glad for a moment .. as if it cd be true.
And yet you are quite right. He does not write pure English .. no, nor quite pure German—nor pure Greek, by any means. But he writes thoughts. He reminds me of Leibnitz’s plan for an algebraic language, [12] —altho’ his plan is not algebraic—but he writes thoughts. There is something wonderful in this struggling forth into sound of a contemplation bred high above dictionaries & talkers—in some silent Heavenly place for the mystic & true. The sounds do come—strangely indeed & in unwrought masses, but still with a certain confused music & violent eloquence, which prove the power of thought over sound. Carlyle seems to me a great prose poet. At any rate he is a man for the love & reverence of all poets, seeing that he, almost sole among the present world’s critics, recognizes the greatness & the hopefulness of their art.
I, presume to offer my admiration to Mr Carlyle, my dearest friend! No—you have not spoiled me quite up to that point or pinnacle yet.
Thanks upon thanks for the lovely violets. They deserve to lie enfolded in your letters– I wish I deserved to receive them, as well!
May God bless you ever. They always drive me away from you with this post hour. Say how the face-ache is! & go on to love
your own grateful
EBB–
I read the Beggar girl, when I was very young—‘Vicissitudes’ I must try to get. [13] Always I remember too late so much I forget to write to you of—my remorseful memories beginning with the sealing up.
Poor Mr Haydon! Indeed it was an accident suggestive of less martial ideas than seem to have occurred to him. [14] You amuse me so with your description of Mr Darley and Mr Darley’s handwriting—“turned the wrong way”. Have you any philosophy on the subject of handwritings? Mr Dilke’s is a very strange one—sufficiently retorted too!–
Dear Set is quite well, & nobody else ill.
Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / Near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 383–387.
Manuscript: Eton College Library and Wellesley College.
1. The Merchant of Venice, III, 2, 157.
2. Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Shepherd’s Description of Love,” line 15.
3. EBB’s question was contained in the postscript to letter 931.
4. These references are to Miss Mitford’s play, Otto of Wittelsbach, and Atherton, the novel not published until 1854. Harness had pronounced Otto to be “quite excellent” but feared that “If Bunn and Kean were to write to you to-morrow and promise that the play should be acted … my opinion of them is, that they would make no scruple of flinging you and the play over on the most frivolous pretence … So don’t depend too much upon them, and go on with the sure game of the Novel” (Miss Mitford and Mr Harness: Records of a Friendship, Caroline M. Duncan-Jones, 1955, p. 51).
5. Cf. Hamlet, IV, 5, 26.
6. Thomas Vaux (1510–56), “The Aged Lover Renounceth Love,” line 1, in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises.
7. EBB first met Miss Mitford in May 1836 (see letter 527, note 3). The reference to Cæsar, of course, is as conqueror.
8. Miss Mitford had obviously added her own comments on RB’s health, following EBB’s speaking of his “swimmings in the head” in letter 931.
9. Kenyon’s Rhymed Plea for Tolerance was first published in 1833. EBB’s copy of the second edition (1839) formed part of Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1362).
10. Genesis, 1:11, 12.
11. Miss Mitford’s Richmond friend, who stayed frequently at Bertram House prior to the Mitfords’ moving to Three Mile Cross. Miss Mitford tells how, on being driven into Wokingham by her, Miss James was unruffled by Miss Mitford’s erratic driving, saying “she was not at all afraid, being so assured of my being reserved to be hanged, that she would not mind going with me even in a balloon” (Vera Watson, Mary Russell Mitford, [1949], p. 119).
12. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716), philosopher and mathematician, had invented a calculating machine in 1673 and in 1676 formulated the differential and integral calculus, independently of Isaac Newton.
13. Agnes Maria Bennett (d. 1808) had published The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors in seven volumes in 1797 and Vicissitudes Abroad; or, The Ghost of My Father in six volumes in 1806.
14. For details of Haydon’s accident, see letter 934, note 9.
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