1032. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 119–121.
[London]
Oct. 23d 1842–
My beloved friend I have not heard from you this morning & I must write a few words notwithstanding, or in answer to the silence. Silence never seems to speak quite good news to me, & now less than ever—and yet you may not perhaps be more unhappy than usual & I do hope & pray that you are not so.
Well—I have heard of the Kenyons at last. Our Mr Kenyon is to return on friday; and the married ones have changed their plans & do not come at all until the spring. Mr Kenyon’s servant must be a “character,” from what Crow tells me of him; & I have often & often been amused at her report of his way of talking grandeur & literature, as to how “we had conversation-parties” and how “we dined all the cleverest people in England” and how “my master talked better than .... any woman in the world”. There, was a comparison!– And he says, I understand, of the marriage .. that “the young lady was so very kind to Mr Edward Kenyon he cdnt help marrying her.”– I tell you all this to make you smile, if there shd be a possibility for you of smiling. Is there my dearest friend? May God grant it! Mind you never divulge my impertinence to dear Mr Kenyon or he may be angry with me & his ‘gentleman’, who is a very learned gentleman, be sure, with an air of sitting “on Olympus’ top” [1] all day long, & of counting poets, if not their syllables, on his fingers, .. ‘siding the gods’. [2] Crow ‘cdnt remember’, she said, all the poets he talked about,—but “we live very much with the poets”!– I hope you smile a little.
The lions roar even down the backstairs, dont they?– [3] At any rate I am very very glad that dear Mr Kenyon is coming back. I do like to see him & to hear him talk! He comes into this room like a flash of lightening, for suddenness & contrast & power,—& like sunshine, for calmness & gentle cheerfulness. He is my epitome of society—& even apart from the regard I have for him, I shd miss him exceedingly, & rejoice that he has done for the present with Italy & Germany.
Mr Serjt Talfourd! How vexed I am that I forgot to send you Georgie’s copy of that book of his, [4] —& how strange if not unkind you must have thought such an omission in me. The book, in fact, did quite pass out of my head when I had an opportunity of sending it,—and now you may laugh to scorn my carelessnesses, having a book of your own. I agree with every word you say of it. Vividly written—but more expressive of the author than of the subject; and those characteristics surprisingly sensual rather than intellectual & poetical. Wine, cookery the grand salient points! Oh! that singular record of Mrs Talfourd’s abnegation of luncheon, that she might eat twice as much at a Parisian dinner! [5] That wonderful oblivion by Mr Talfourd of a certain Swiss supper—or breakfast, was it?—the only supper or breakfast the details of which were forgotten on the route!– [6] Those admirable “sortes Virgilianæ” [7] of precocity, whereby Master Talfourd heir to his father’s genius & mother’s .. what shall we call it? .. selected the best wine possible, in the Alpine solitudes!! [8] The book is not near me, but I fancy I am right in my localities. What offended me most of all however was, the affectation of scorn, in which he refused to visit Manfred’s castle, & looked coldly around him, from ground touched once by the foot of the great though mistaken genius, Rousseau. [9] A sensual genius, to be sure—and not on that account, to be disdained by an amateur of Sauterne & Champagne!
After all the little book, if quite unworthy in all ways, of the poet of Ion, is clever & vivacious, & amused me a good deal.
I have had another very interesting letter from Mr Haydon, in which he says that he has sent my sonnet to Wordsworth!!!––and desires his ‘kind love’ to you!
May God bless you my beloved friend– I think of you continually–
Ever your attached
EBB–
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 57–58.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Cf. Titus Andronicus, II, 1, 1–2.
2. Cf. Θεοι παρεδρος, “those sitting near the gods”; EBB alluded to this phrase in Diary, p. 48, and also in letter 840.
3. Meaning that even the servants take pride in the social “lions and lionesses” entertained by their employer (see letter 974).
4. A reference to Talfourd’s gift of his Recollections (see letter 993).
5. While the others of the party “partook of a little dinner … quite as good as anything we enjoyed in our whole experience of continental cookery,” Mrs. Talfourd, “reserving herself for a Parisian supper with heroic self-denial,” abstained (Recollections, p. 30).
6. “After breakfast (which, strange to confess, I do not particularly remember) we began another and longer ascent leading to the highest point of the Jura road” (op. cit., p. 91).
7. “Sortes” (from the Latin word for lot or chance) denoted a form of divination by opening a book at random and interpreting the passage thus found as an oracular communication. The Æneid was a popular choice, hence “sortes Virgilianæ.”
8. Francis Talfourd (1828–62) was the Talfourds’ eldest son. He later became a lawyer like his father, but is mainly remembered for his ephemeral but popular dramatic pieces. At lunch at St. Martin, the choice of wine was “committed to our unsophisticated youth … With that felicity which inexperience sometimes hits on, he selected some wine called St. Ainge—an admirable choice” (op. cit., pp. 116–117).
9. Talfourd recorded that, while the rest of the party visited “the ruined castle of Unterseen which is said to have been in Byron’s contemplation as the abode of his Manfred,” he took a stroll, as he did “not care either for Manfred or Byron.” Earlier he had confessed to failing to “seek the house where Rousseau first breathed the breath of feverish existence,” feeling that Rousseau’s affections “were, at their first spring, disturbed and poisoned, and with them the entire intellect was shaken and perverted” (op. cit., pp. 102–103 and 177).
___________________
