1715. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 136–139.
[London]
Sept. 16. 1844
Thanks warmest & truest, my dearest Miss Mitford, for your delightful letter, which is certainly delightful, as it made me feel just as if I were sitting face to face to you, hearing you talk. And a happy illusion, that must be, in the account of everyone who ever did hear you talk!– And to those who love you, what must it be? And to those who love you as I do, what must it be? Which takes me to the very tiptop of the climax.
I am not as sure as you are, that the fragmentary sentence in the German letter, [1] quite means inexpressible love,—the writer in question being fond of the figure asterick, & often leaving me by the border of an infinite blank, from whence to look out at the heavens & earth. Still I absolutely agree with you that if this broken sentence have a significance, & such a significance as your fancy signifies, .. that the subject of it cannot, as you observe, “enter into the category of great passions”––& that even I cannot, as you say, make it so enter. How you made me laugh at the idea of it! Do you know you really are the falsest of friends, .. & that poor Orion had better, ten times over, have tumbled a quarter of a mile farther down the Drachenfells, [2] than have selected you for a confidante? Shall I bid him beware? I feel half inclined to it sometimes, .. to warn him of the man traps & spring guns upon the premises! .. After all, the clearest thing in Orion’s letter is, .. the undeniable thing is, .. that he has fallen in love with Mr Hayward [3] .. who is only ten years younger than himself. Certainly the daughter thrown into the post[s]cript in a fragment, looks suspiciously—but the other love or tender interest at first sight, is avowed & indisputable. Now if Mrs Jameson were to carry down her “Loves of the Poets” [4] to the present day, she wd have to grow voluminous on this head of Orion. And yet if he loves once he loves for ever, he says. Which makes a pasha of him on a grand ideal scale, at once!–
As for Mrs Jameson, I am pleased of course to hear what she says of me,—& I am interested much & deeply by all you say of her. Oh—I quite, quite agree with you in your dislike of talking in print. It is detestable, to be sure!– I like natural people .. men & women, who are content to speak as they think & feel, without “taking thought” of the form of their sentences. Still, I do not see …! But we will not quarrel about these things. Orion shall give me of his astericks, & you shall read in them of my unconquerable love. For I do love genius .. & men & women of letters .. literature, in all its associations. There will be pedantry in & out of pen & ink. There is pedantry in fashion & sporting, in dancing polkas & leaping hedges,—& it is detestable everywhere,—& I hate it quite as much as you can do, be sure. Still .. still ..! And then, for general society, for the men & women who are ‘par état’ [5] ladies & gentlemen & nothing else, you know them better than I do, & more extensively of course, & certainly have been happier in your knowledge. For my own part, the manner in which the most intelligent are content to take up or rather make up their opinions from periodical literature, is to me extraordinary & repulsive: & the general want of sensibility to poetry & imaginative literature, is to me extraordinary & repulsive. The little I have known of mere “ladies & gentlemen” has not charmed me—but then, I have known very little even of that aspect of society. As for you .. you are very far from being after the type of either the ‘mere lady’ or the authoress– You are just yourself & no other—& nobody in the world wd venture upon calling you ‘common.’ You never were among the beasts in Cornelius’s sheet, [6] & there is no need nor room to consecrate you. Of course ladies & gentlemen like to listen to you & hear you abuse the pen & ink people; and the pen & ink people are proud of you justly, & like to listen to you; and so you, who are, for the rest, a great aristocrat & a great radical,—an adorner of literature & a scorner of letters, live on always happily upon the border. Now you will forgive me for being wicked, because I love you,—& have a right to be wicked if I please. There is nobody loves you better, so as to have a right to be wickeder,—that’s sure!–
What makes me more impudent today, is my triumph at your coming round to Balzac. Really I could quite clap my hands at it!– I could not bear to think that you refused your sympathy to the impression I had of his power & genius—and to my private mind, he is, as a true artist, worth two Eugene Sues, .. notwithstanding the brilliancy of the latter writer. For the “list,” I was coming to you for it—as your Rolandi has a better & fuller collection than Saunders & Ottley, where I subscribe, & where the foreign books are in a very small minority to the English ones—and I do wish you wd write me down a few titles of books which we have not talked of & which are worth my reading. Do not mind consulting what you know to be my tastes & likings,—
<…> [7]
school. Till one is acclimated, it burns & abashes one—and I am not sure that the process of acclimating is the most wholesome. The first book of Balzac’s I ever read, disgusted me so, that I vowed to read no more of him,—& it was by a mere accident that he met me again & overcame me. That first book was his ‘Veille fille,” [8] which I still think a prodigy of noisomeness. Did you ever see it?– But his genius, his genius! There is no denying or wrestling with it,—and his sense of beauty appears to me intense.
Yes—I was delighted for the sake of trial by jury & the glory of constitutional Law, that O’Connell shd be at liberty. [9] I think it a noble triumph, though I am not a repealer. But do you mean to say that when he stood upon the balcony he was equal to his situation as liberated Liberator & triumphant patriot? According to my view he was not—& never did I feel more strongly than in relation to that moment, that he never cd be a hero of mine.
Well—try to forgive me! I send back Moly, [10] .. which I forgot before,—& Orion’s manuscript: and I will send on, through Mr Hunter who knows her address, your note to Miss Pyer. Do write when you can. Oh, I miss your letters so much—and yet have no right at all, I feel, to dun you for them! By the way I had the other day from Ambleside, one of the kindest of letters possible, from Mr Serjeant Talfourd. He is staying at Rotha cottage with his family, to be near Wordsworth during the vacation. Tennyson had not after all the scarlet-fever,—it was only some sort of fever, .. from which he has recovered, I understood. Yes!—would, that I could hope ever to know him!–
Sette has not been well, .. has indeed been confined to his bed for several days, & feverish, from some biliary derangement—but he is better, I thank God–
Mrs Jameson spoke once to Mr Kenyon about coming to see me:—but I can write no more!
Ever your own affecte
EBB.
Have you heard from a Dr Shelton Mackenzie of Oxford who is about to publish a dictionary of ‘Living Authors’? Do you know anything of him?
Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 448–451.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum, Folger Shakespeare Library, and Wellesley College.
1. i.e., the note from Horne who was then travelling in Germany (see letter 1706).
2. Drachenfels, or “Dragon’s Rock,” on the Rhine near Bonn, is the legendary site where Siegfried slew the dragon.
3. Unidentified. Horne’s biographers differ as to whom he was travelling with in Germany. In Always Morning (1960), p. 86, Cyril Pearl names Abraham Hayward (1801–84) as Horne’s travelling companion; however, he would have been two years older than Horne, not ten years younger. Ann Blainey, in The Farthing Poet (1968), p. 148, states that Horne was accompanied by Leonhard Schmitz.
4. The Loves of the Poets by Anna Brownell Jameson was published in 1829.
5. “By profession.”
6. Cf. Acts 10:9–16. Peter, not Cornelius, had a vision of a sheet let down from heaven in which there were all types of birds and beasts.
7. Two pages of the third sheet have been excised and have not been located.
8. La Vieille Fille (1836).
10. EBB is returning the essay that Miss Mitford sent to her earlier (see letter 1707).
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