1057. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 162–165.
[London]
Nov. 21. 1842–
Oh the grapes! my beloved friend. What is to be done? Those which go to you today are perishing of over-ripeness I fear, & the people who let me have them tell me that we must not expect any more. There is a fine green grape of which Crow has given me news. Will you have that? Do write & explain what substitute you prefer, .. and if there is anything in the world within my reach besides grapes, which I can send to you with some hope of its being acceptable. Tell me also whether the eau de Cologne is nearly used & you are ready for more—& the same of the pastilles. Now if you wont—if you continue to be silent, I shall be sure to think that you dont care a pastille for me. That is precisely the interpretation I shall put upon the silence.
And silences remind me of my sin against your kind proposal about Mr Stephens’s book. [1] No, my dearest friend, I wont let you send it to me. I can have it at any moment from Saunders & Otley & therefore shd never think of running the risk of using your copy just while you might be caring to do so—but I thank you much for the proposition. I wish the American poets wd awaken & sing something American & not European, & take for their old local classics these reliques of nameless cities—as grand & suggestive in their way as the Roman columnar marbles. Mr Mathews, my New York correspondent has sent me, his Wakondah, [2] which on another day, I mean to send for your perusal. It is an unfinished poem in stanzas, & on a national subject, which is well, .. & altho’ not perhaps indicative of what we should call genius, original power, .. yet has energy & majesty in the march of its versification, & is not without signs of power of thought to match the forcible expression. Still it is a mere fragment (to be continued in case of success) [3] & we cant guess what the general conception is, or what the full poem may be.
Keep my secret—but I have been reading lately a good deal of the new French literature. Not that I wd let it loose in this house for the world, no, nor in any other—but I was curious beyond the patience of my Eve-ship, [4] & besides grew so interested in France & the French through my long apprentice ship to the old Memoirs that I felt pricked to the heart to know all about the posterity of my heroes & heroines. And besides I live out of the world altogether, & am lonely enough & old enough & sad enough & experienced enough in every sort of good & bad reading, not to be hurt personally by a French superfluity of bad. That however is my apology. It shows peradventure a suspiciousness of conscience: & it might have been franker & plainer to have just said “I was curious & a woman[’]’ … the end remaining the same, .. that I have been reading these French books. Do you know much of them? You mentioned Victor Hugo to me, & I had held him, long before, for a wonderful genius. So is George Sand—shameless as she is sometimes .. by which word I mean no activity of indignation against herself & her works generally, which appear to me unduly decried—but a bare expression of the sort of feeling with which one regards a woman whenever she leans to the aggrandizement of the physical aspect of passion. For the rest, she is eloquent as a fallen angel .. and often free from the taint, & great consistently. A true woman of genius! but of a womanhood tired of itself, & scorned by her, while she bears it burning above her head. Then there is Eugene Sue, & Frederic Souliè, & De Queille [5] .. why the whole literature looks like a conflagration—& my whole being aches with the sight of it,—& when I turn away home, there seems nothing to be seen, it is all so neutral tinted & dull & cold by comparison. Full indeed of power & caprice & extravagance is this new French Literature—a kind of practical palinodia to the Louis quatorze glories. The want is, of fixed principle. It is as if the soul of the thinker were given to the four winds & the multitudinous waters, without hold or compass,—& as if in this great tornado of being she lost sight of the localities & relations both of Heaven & Earth. Now tell me, what you think? That it is very naughty of me to read naughty books—or that you have done the same?
You are a rebellious subject, my beloved friend, of her Majesty. ‘No sensibility’! Yet it was said of her that at the period of her expected accession she wept day & night,—which, if it happened to be a story, was a well constructed & devised one. Well! I shd like to know the rights or the wrongs of it—for all the Gods know that I have no peculiar admiration for her because of her queenship. It was only because of something beyond or under it, & taken account of by my fancy. Mdme D’Arblay’s Diary disgusts one, .. & disgusted me to a degree which I will not seem affected by recording, .. of queen’s houses & queen’s servants & above all of queen’s condescendances & sweetnesses. [6] Surely there is more freedom now at Windsor. Surely it is more lawful now to be tired, or hungry even, in the presence of Majesty. Tell me if you do not think there may be some improvement. Otherwise I give her up .. that is, her Majesty, .. & she may go the way of all crowned flesh, henceforward & for me.
I will hope some day to know your Mr Chorley,—because I like so much the most of what you tell me of him.
Your dear admirable Flush! And he has not been well! I am sorry—& glad that he is better, .. & rejoice in his companionship for you. As to his comprehension of language you do not find me an unbeliever, because I know & am assured that my Flush does precisely the same thing. I considered it a peculiar quality, or faculty rather, in him,—& now I set it down as a family faculty: since it never appeared to me, nor does it to others, one common to dogs as dogs. My Flush clearly understands articulate language—only I think, at least I have thought, that it is rather particular words & phrases, which he understands, than the construction & modification of language. ‘Dinner’ ‘cakes’, ‘milk’, ‘go down stairs’ ‘go out’, everybody’s name in the house ‘go & kiss Miss Barrett’, ‘kiss’ (abstractedly)—‘kiss the hand’, ‘kiss the face’—my Flush understands & applies all that as well as Dr Johnson cd have done [7] —yes, all that—& a great deal more. Therefore it is easy for me to believe in your Flush: and I do so, with unaffected admiration.
Your noble apothecary!– I admit the greatness inherent in that action! [8]
But you are not well—you are far far too depressed, my beloved friend! and I can do nothing but pray for some reviving grace to visit & refresh you. He seems to be better. He will last a long time yet, my dearest dearest Miss Mitford—and your excellent Mr May must do something for you [9] that you may have heart & hope for the future. If dear Dr Mitford’s torch (which you are, you know) grows dim, he will be in the dark, & worse than being in the dark, through sadness. May God bless you wholly!
Ever your own
EBB–
Mr Kenyon is absent still.
Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 84–87.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. There are numerous English and American authors of this name; we cannot positively identify the one EBB speaks of. As she refers later in the paragraph to “reliques of nameless cities,” it seems probable she had in mind the American John Lloyd Stephens (1805–52), who had published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan in 1841, which was mentioned by Miss Mitford in letter 989.
2. Acknowledged by EBB in letter 1059.
3. Although EBB’s encouragement caused Mathews to speak, in letter 1103, of finishing Wakondah, he never did.
4. Cf. Genesis, 3.
5. Eugène Sue (1804–57), a prolific novelist whose latest œuvres included Mathilde (1841), Le Morne au Diable (1842), and the first part of Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43); Frédéric Soulié (1800–47), author of Les Mémoires du Diable (1837–38), Eulalie Pontois (1842), and La Confession Générale (1840–46); and Louis de Maynard de Queilhe (?–1837), author of Outre-mer (1835).
6. Before marrying General D’Arblay, Fanny Burney had served in the household of Queen Charlotte from 1786 to 1791; many references to her experiences in these years occur in the second to fifth volumes of Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (7 vols., 1842–46).
7. i.e., in his dictionary.
8. Presumably George May, although his action cannot be clarified.
9. Underscored three times.
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