1094. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 232–235.
[London]
Dec. 21. 1842.
My beloved friend, you were magnanimous in not adding to the opium—far more so than I shd be. I say nothing against opium. It wd be mere hypocrisy if I did. Under the denomination of morphine, I take life & heart & sleep & calm from opium, & praise it gratefully whenever there is room for my voice—and am persuaded that it not only assuages the spirits but in my particular case does positive good to the lungs by equalizing the general circulation. Vivat opium! [1] And may you & I live by its means!—moderation which is good in all things, say the copybooks—being very particularly good, we must admit, in this.
Still, with your peculiarity of bodily habit, I can understand how even a ‘moderation in opium’ may affect you injuriously—& why you shd be more than others, guarded against an excess. The sleep after the nine miles’ walk, was better than an opiate sleep. Do go on walking, that you may sleep sound, as by a cornfield of poppies—& have their colors in your dreams. And tell me if you sleep. And tell me if you dont sleep. Because as you have discerned, it is right of you to tell me the real bare truth, so that I may be glad & sorry accordingly & unmistrustingly.
Your righteous indignation on the subject of Madme Dudevant, is responded to from the foundations of my temper & moral economy. It is precisely what I expected from you—and I beseech you to understand clearly that I did not send Jaques [2] to you with any idea of his being admired. I wanted you to see to the horizon of the moral turpitude as well as of the intellectual power—& because I would not, could not, send you Leila a serpent book both for language-color & soul-slime & one which I could not read through for its vileness myself, [3] .. I sent this Jaques, which seemed to me to stink less in the phrase, altho’ the bearing & countenance & general moral tone are identically bad. Your observations seem to me the very lightenings to suit the offence. The triumph of sensual tendencies over, we will not say personal purity, but the common virtues of gratitude, friendship, & maternal duties,—& the representation (which the thing called a struggle is simply intended to make) of the impugnable nature of those same sensual tendencies .. wd be vile & debasing to the very eyes which read of them, if they were not read as a lie, & a gross lie, against the humanity of womanhood. All that you point out, of contradiction & absurdity, is precisely designated—I go with you pulse by pulse, in indignation. And the impotency of the logic of the argument strikes me as clenched in proof, by the carrying out of it into the consummation among the Alps—where the generous husband puts himself to death that his wife may pursue her crime into the ordures of its criminality & secure her shame. Does anybody in the world not laugh—if they can for indignation—at this catastrophe? The sublime of the author is the ridiculous of the reader, [4] —& cuts the knot of the doctrine of the book. Indiana, [5] less revolting as a whole leans alike & with the bent of the author’s peculiar womanhood, to the sensual & physical—and yet that work does appear to me very brilliant & powerful, & eloquent beyond praising. Nay, I do consider Jaques to partake of all high qualities of rhetoric & language, on each side of the serpent’s hiss. I am very sensitive,—I believe far more than I ought to be, .. to style & language. I could read a book upon a walking stick, if it were written eloquently, & delight in the eloquence. Style is music to me; I cannot help my pleasure in the beauty of it. Now, to my mind & ear too, the bare french of that wonderful genius Victor Hugo & of this brilliant monstrous woman Madme Dudevant, is french transfigured. The language which we have called “monotony in wire”, [6] resounds, with them, like the wire of a lute beneath a muse’s hand .. thrills with a sharp throbbing music,—throbs with ecstatic harmonies, & throws off deep & sounding concords lapsing into an all-various sweetness. The language is changed. It is not french—it is french no more. We recognize nothing like it in Voltaire—& the previous (so called) classical writers. It is too sweet for french,—& too strong—& above all, too numerous. It is something like the ‘voice of the charmer’ [7] .. to me.
In regard to Victor Hugo, I do certainly (ah my dearest friend, it is best to speak the truth!) differ a little with you– It is easy you say ‘to be monstrous[’]. So it is—very!—far be it from me to deny the facility: but the extravagances of genius are very different I must observe to you, from the exaggerations of mediocrity. The extravagances of genius are easy only to genius: and genius is not common. I honor Walter Scott for much—but never for his knowledge of human nature. It seems to me that he paints human nature—that he looks at it pictorially & conveys it to his canvass in its attitude & garment of picturesqueness—thinking at least as much of the setting of the folds, as of the beating of the heart. He is more a painter than a poet or philosopher. It is an outside view of humanity—not the view our Shakespeare took! Am I very very wrong. I speak as it appears to me.
Your metaphor about the necessity of proportion, taken from sculpture, applies very justly—but we shd consider that a statue without proportion must be a failure altogether, a monster in art,—whereas altho’ in literature a character without proportion is a character manquè, [8] there are other points, for excellence in relation to which, a book may be praised & admired & take rank as a work of genius. You are so dramatic my dearest friend—that you are severe sometimes in the universal application of your high theatric laws.
Post going—I break away from I cannot wait to examine what critical nonsenses. But ever yours—that is sure––
Ever your
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 126–128.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. “Long live opium!”
2. George Sand’s Jacques (1834).
3. George Sand’s Léila (1833), which, said EBB in letter 1063, “made me blush in my solitude to the ends of my fingers”.
4. Cf. Napoleon’s comment after the retreat from Moscow in 1812, “there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
5. George Sand’s Indiana (1832).
6. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, 38, 9.
7. Cf. Psalms, 58:5.
8. “Deficient.”
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