1155. EBB to Cornelius Mathews
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 329–332.
London 50 Wimpole Street.
[mid-February 1843] [1]
My dear Mr. Mathews,
I scarcely know how to thank you for all the kindness you have spent upon me—and yet I may assure you that my heart opens to do so .. to do its best in gratitude, as you have done in good nature. Your letter was ten times welcome; & the packet which came later with the proofs of the trouble you had had in collecting newspapers to give me pleasure, gave it indeed .. touched me nearer than my vanities—which, considering my womanhood, is, you will say, abundant measure. So I thank you warmly—& I thank (to myself) all the kind speakers of kind words in America who have associated my selflove so pleasantly with my true love for a great people that I am able to think sometimes, .. on sunny days, .. [‘]‘a few among them think of me with gentleness” .. or “gentillesse” .. to use the pretty Norman word as Chaucer wd have used it. I must tell you too (because if we can talk down “the long table” we can be friends otherwise) that in speaking kindly to me you have spoken cheerfully to a prisoner through the bars of her prison. I am a poor invalid, set apart from the open-air pleasures of the world for the alms of the charitable. I have been ill with a weak chest for several years; and altho’ surprisingly better & with hope of being better still, the winter keeps me on my sofa bound hand & foot from leaving one room or seeing many faces. Now you see why I tell you this? To prevent you from repenting your goodnature to me! to prove that while you meant chiefly to be courteous to me, you were in the actual unconscious & meritorious performance of one if not two of the cardinal virtues!.
I found myself both onymous & anonymous in the papers you sent me .. oftener than you cd guess of; the review of Wordsworth extracted from the Athenæum being mine, [2] & forming a corollary to a succession of papers on the English poets which (under the pretence of reviewing the ‘Book of the Poets’ an imperfect collection lately published here) I had the courage to print in that literary journal. If you know the Mr Jones who prescribes the bounds of ‘ladies’ literature’ like a very Canute in Graham’s Miscellany, dont tell him this—because he says in the number lying by me, that when women review they fall into scandal; [3] & I wd willingly spare myself the hard imputation & not be held up by him as a warning to my sex oftener than once. On the point of the Prometheus, I deserve all the harm that can be said. Nobody shall beat me in abusing it. That such unworthy misprision of the Greek shd have wandered to America is not the fault of my wishes—& the truth is, that as far as lies in me, I prevent its circulation whether here or there. [4] The translation was made years ago, & in the course of twelve days—and I am well aware that altho’ now I could do it better, I could not do it in any sense worthily in the course of twelve days– I can however repent at leisure—& do!—& I tell you all this, dear Mr Mathews, that you should not imagine of me that I now, in my awake & mature senses, consider that cold stiff clay mask taken from a dead face, a representation of the poetry of Æschylus– No! My father has locked up by my desire as many copies as are capable of running away & spreading my dishonor,—in the next room!.
Your sonnet on Dr Channing’s death—(your greatest genius .. was he not?) is vigorous & striking,—& I thank you much for permitting me to see it. [5] I perceive also that you are the writer of several works of fiction which I mean to try to feel my way to in our English libraries– [6] Have you written any poetry—published it I shd say—before Wakondah. Pray tell me if you have. Miss Mitford seems to call ‘Wakondah’ obscure—which I do not, beyond its fragmentary necessities—but then people wd say to me that I am used to see in the dark– She expressed herself much gratified by the word you said of her ‘Rienzi’, which I extracted for her pleasure [7] —& the more so, she says, because Rienzi appears to her, her best work– It does not so appear to me. She will be known hereafter by her Village & Belford Regis, when her Rienzi will be known by her.
I am not acquainted with Mr Tennyson personally I sigh to tell you—but I ventured to forward the newspapers to him with a note in which I mentioned your name—& a friend of his promised to convey the parcel safely. Mr Tennyson is not at present in London & it is probable that he has not yet received it—in any case I have heard nothing. Jove has not thundered, though the incense has gone up. [8] If he is a man & not Jove, & has an English heart, it must beat faster I think for American praise—& particularly after he had been told by your North American review that you of the new world did not ‘want him’. [9] (Mr Browning in his successive “Bells & Pomegranates” .. nay, not only there but at the theatre,—has brought out lately a new tragedy in three acts called ‘The Blot on [sic] the ’Scutcheon’, of great power & beauty. He emerges from the cloud—& the cloud itself is thunderous & indicative. I have a high respect for Mr Browning’s genius—not only thro’ a fellow-darkness, believe me, .. “altho’ by your smiling you seem to say so”. [10] You may smile too for another reason, & discern a difference between a cloud, like his obscurity, & a fog, like mine!)
Your account of the evils heaped upon your native literature is melancholy indeed—and the papers you sent me reiterate the proofs by their English extracts– Yes, it must be terrible! And then under another aspect you may mourn for it—for the sake of the readers as well as writers among you. Because we English,—let us smooth the case as we may, & count upon our fingers the names of a few powerful thinkers,—must be inwardly aware & persuaded that our literature of the day is, as a whole, thin & inconsequent—& no fit intellectual diet for two worlds. I earnestly hope that you may soon look to your own literature as you look to your own mountains & cataracts. (In the meantime you are very good—you individually, dear Mr Mathews,—to be tolerant of Mr Dickens’s Pickwickisms in America—so he shd have called his book. I admire Boz with everybody who can read, think & feel,—and I do not doubt that he was, as you say, “honest,” i.e. true-hearted, in those ‘notes for general circulation’. [11] Still, he knows mankind in the mass too well, to be quite justified, I fancy, in passing such a set of judgments, authorized by such a set of evidences, formed upon such a set of opportunities, .. upon the special humanity of a nation: and even the nascent Pecksniffs & Pinches [12] have not quite restored my goodhumour to him.) Luckily he can do without it. He lives some hundred yards or a hundred & fifty from this door—& Barry Cornwall is still nearer—& Mrs Butler (who is half yours) inhabits the next street. [13] I am not personally acquainted with any of them—& indeed, as I explained, I am not in a state, in spite of all my betterness, to see & talk to anybody. Mr Kenyon whom you must have heard of I fancy through the multitude of his American friends, & who is a cousin besides being a friend of mine, is my chief visitor & carryer of green olive boughs from the outward world– A more delightful one, it were hard to find.
I enclose to you a few poems according to the desire of the editor of Graham’s Miscellany, [14] —finding it impossible to say ‘no’ to an American request just now,—& if you wd place them in his hands I shall thank you. Still—my conscience pricks me for giving the trouble to you: & then, the matter of postage, how shall it be arranged for the future? Will you suggest—or will he—‘the way I shd take’.? Some months ago I had a proposition of the same sort from Mr Lowell of Boston & sent him a few MSS. [15] That my ‘Cry of the Human’ shd have found any favor in your sight, is very pleasant to me. Oh that I may yet have health & life to do something worthy of my own aspiration, .. something to justify your kindness to yourself, & my intention as a poet to myself!– Health & life for that!
May I hope to hear from you sometimes, when your thoughts like our swallows are inclined to cross the waters? Whenever you do write, you may be sure of conferring a pleasure.
Sincerely yours,
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett–
Are the four sonnets in Graham, & the Cry of the Human the only poems I ever sent you? I ask that I may not double myself in my visits to you! Will you be so kind as to mention, therefore, whether I sent others, & what they were–
With a late repentance, I perceive, when the post is going, that one of the two sonnets which go with this letter, is over-mystical for magazine readers—or perhaps any others. If you think so, do not use it.
Publication: The Collector, November 1891, pp. 35–36.
Manuscript: Eton College Library.
1. Dating based on publication of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, 11 February 1843, and receipt of the magazines and newspapers mentioned in letter 1153.
3. EBB refers to an article by William Alfred Jones (1817–1900) in the December 1842 number of Graham’s Magazine, in the course of which he says: “Criticism is for men; when women assume it, they write scandal” (p. 335).
4. Mathews may have seen the copy sent by Kenyon to Ticknor (see letter 936, note 2).
5. This sonnet, signed and dated 5 October 1842, was printed in The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review, November 1842, p. 554.
6. Works by Mathews included his Motley Book (1838); Behemoth, a Legend of the Moundbuilders (1839); The Politicians (1840) and The Career of Puffer Hopkins (1841).
8. Cf. Coriolanus, III, 1, 256. EBB reported the response of Tennyson-Jove to Mathews in letter 1176.
10. Hamlet, II, 2, 309–310.
11. For earlier comment on Dickens’s book, see letters 984, 1059 and 1141.
12. In Martin Chuzzlewit.
13. Dickens lived at 1 Devonshire Terrace; Procter (“Barry Cornwall”) at 13 Upper Harley Street and Mrs. Butler (Fanny Kemble) at 81 Harley Street. Her husband was an American, hence “half yours.”
14. No longer with the letter, these poems must have been those printed in Graham’s Magazine, starting with “The Soul’s Expression” in the July number.
___________________
