1390. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 345–348.
[London]
Oct. 2. 1843
My ever dearest friend I was afraid for you & for me,—and fancied, from the unusual silence, that something in the way of illness was the matter––unless indeed, thought I, she has had a coup de grace [1] from Araminta. [2] Ever dearest Miss Mitford, how grieved I am that you shd suffer so from the obdurate sickness! It is wearying & distressing,—& I do not wonder that your spirits fail & that you begin to think of yourself in hyperboles of sadness,—since no sort of illness wastes the spirits so much as biliary affections are recognized as doing. Still you shall not droop overmuch––you must re-bloom again, & have two seasons like some of your flower-queens—and indeed I cannot but be sanguine in the probability of this malady, which has obviously been aggravated by various excitements of the last year, wearing itself out by its own violence & leaving you in better & stronger health than you count upon at this moment. As to dying, my beloved friend, from an affection of this sort, you shall not make me afraid of such an hypothetical danger—you shall not persuade me that it is not more harassing & pitiable, than dangerous & terrible. If you could, why your moralizing is terrible too .. terribly bad .. very ill fitted for such an occasion. You not to be missed? Why who in the world wd be missed, if not you? First of all (I say modestly “first of all”; but you know I am nearest to myself!) first of all, there is Elizabeth Barrett who would miss you for all the rest of the time she had to live!– And then there are the hundred adoring friends (of whose adorations she has a tolerable degree of green eyed jealousy), [3] who wd make, I suppose, a point of missing you! And then there is the public at large who wd talk eloquently of vacancies nevermore to be filled. Add to these, if you please, Flush & sundries—and then ....! But why am I writing so? Just because you are not likely to die at all (I mean not at all likely to die!) If you were .... “sure, it is not writing so, I shd be!”
Well!—I take Araminta’s part about Bear Wood [4] —and yet have swallowed no philter. I believe the facts to be precisely as they are stated,—& that he was honestly sorry to be constrained into breaking the engagement you made for him—& I am perverse enough to like the tone of both of the notes which he wrote on the subject. Moreover I must direct your attention to the fact that the manner in which he speaks of travelling about with his mother, [5] is expressive of no neglect on his part, even of her caprices. Now, he has not written to me for some time .. and I think sometimes that he does not much like writing to me, .. I have not been flattered into an impressionability,—nor have been practised upon by charm or philter, .. and yet I do, notwithstanding every disadvantage of denuded pate & elaborated ringlets, [6] go on obstinately to believe him to be a kind-hearted highminded & generous man. Of his genius I think with great respect, & really do consider, my dearest friend, that the genius of itself renders him worthy of the respect & social attentions of persons richer & better born & more conventionally refined (to gild refined gold for a supposition) than the family at Bearwood & their peers, even were the luckless ringlets longer by two inches and a half. Of money, & conventional refinements, the world is full!—— Of such genius as Mr Horne’s, it is very empty. I shd respect his genius in him, if he took a fancy to walk into this room without his shoes—there is the consequence of being a hero-worshipper,—which I am, you know, down to the sole of mine!—while you are a little little little bit of a desecrator. Oh, and you will tell me, & with excellent reason, that you have seen more of the cobwebs in Westminster Abbey than I have been in the way to see. Still in my ideality of cobwebs, I can look past them to the architraves—and I look past the ringlets pendent, to the Orions triumphant … forgive me for doing so!– And quære .. if dearest Miss Mitford, in her foul-speaking about genius, is not desecrating her own altars. And nota bene, this is not wickedness in me—it is simply logic.
As your Flush, .. is my Flush. If he sees me cry, he throws himself upon me as consoler general. When my uncle Hedley was here the first day, I, who had had my heart full for hours, took advantage of an early moment of solitude, to cry in it very bitterly. Suddenly a little hairy head thrust itself from behind my pillow into my face, rubbing its ears & nose against me in a responsive agitation, & drying the tears as they came. I had forgotten Flushie, & was startled at the apparition, or rather the sensation, of the hairy head——it was a Faunus or a Pan! [7] In a few moments however, my heart was led away from itself into an assuaging of Flushie, who, if I were determined to cry, was bent upon crying too. Flushie was my Faunus, & powerful for the occasion (.. for ‘cutting the knot’ [8] as the dramatic critics say, ..) as any sylvan god of them all.
Talking of the Sylvanities, how kind you were to think of me in relation to the ‘Gods of Greece’ in Blackwood! Yes, and I agree with you in considering Sir Lytton Bulwer’s translations of Schiller’s Lyrics as failures in communicating ‘the God’ in the poet—& also as productions unworthy of the very genius of the translator. [9] Is it not a phenomenon curious & wonderful, this division we are forced to make between poetical minds, and poets in the distinctive sense? Here is Bulwer with an undeniable display of high poetic faculty in his romances—imagination—descriptive & constructive power .. the command of beautiful metaphor—of passion, pathos,—effective situation!—and let him attempt professional poet’s work, the rhythm & the rhyme, .. straightway the sceptre falls from his hand, the light from his brows, & he stands confessed a common & ungifted man. Is it not so? and is it not strange? All his poems want verve, .. the poet’s heart & hand: and even, leaning upon Schiller, he cannot make it otherwise. I understand that Mr Merivale is engaged upon a translation of these lyrics of the German poet, .. I mean the Merivale of the Greek Anthology, [10] .. who is scarcely likely to rise upon Bulwer. Ah yes! your suggestion is an inspiration! If we had Him of the Roman ballads, [11] we might (and Schiller also!) be glad indeed.
How eager I shall be for you to smile, or not, at least, to frown very heavily, upon my respondent Pan! [12] I do not print it—because, since Mr Kenyon & perhaps I myself think it superior to any preceding poem of mine, I like to keep it for my volume in the clouds. By the way, my ‘Vision of the Poets’ has developped into something beyond eight hundred lines [13] —& now I am finishing <***>
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 314–317.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. “The finishing stroke.”
2. See letter 1369 for the first reference to Horne as Araminta.
3. The Merchant of Venice, III, 2, 110.
4. The home of Miss Walter (see letter 1377).
5. Maria Horne (née Partridge, 1784–1847) was widowed in 1810.
6. See the portrait reproduced in vol. 5, facing p. 213.
7. Faunus, half brute, half human, was the leader of the wood sprites, who attended Pan, chief of the lesser deities and protector of shepherds and huntsmen.
8. i.e., resolving a difficult situation by cutting the Gordian knot. EBB had not seen her uncle since Bro’s death in 1840 (see letter 1292).
9. Translations of Schiller’s poems and ballads by Bulwer appeared in nine issues of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between September 1842 and August 1843. His version of “The Gods of Greece” was in the August 1843 number (pp. 146–149). Miss Mitford was aware that EBB’s “The Dead Pan” was inspired by Kenyon’s paraphrase of Schiller’s poem.
10. John Herman Merivale (1779–1844) had collaborated with Robert Bland in publishing Collections from the Greek Anthology and from the … Poets of Greece (1813). As EBB indicates, he was preparing for the press The Minor Poems of Schiller, published in 1844; it contained some translations previously printed in 1840 in The New Monthly Magazine.
11. i.e., Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), author of Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).
12. “The Dead Pan” was included in Poems (1844).
13. When published in Poems (1844), “A Vision of Poets” comprised 1,005 lines.
___________________
