1850. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 93–97.
[London]
February 26. 1845.
Ever dearest friend I thought it would be so– The roads, for the rest, are too bad—and Monday will be the best day for both of us. I am better a good deal, & shall hope to be tolerably vocal by the time you come, and Monday comes. ‘Benedetto sia’ &c. [1] But I need not bless it. It will bless me.
Yes—of course I have your list– [2] And now tell me, was Soulie’s ‘Confession Generale’ never finished? Did it stop short for ever at the second volume with you as with me? [3] Because it is interesting—and I am suspended in the air in the case of an interesting book that wont end: it[’]s a cruel punishment which Dante should have put into Hell, instead of this side the gate of it .. “that day they read no more.” [4] Perhaps he meant to hint it so—& that the thought of the unfinished book tormented the damned lovers as one of the forms of their damnation. I shall write a note about it on the margin of my Dante, (& as good a one too as many by the commentators, ..) & promote my theory so. [5]
But poor, poor Mr Hunter—you must’nt be too severe on him. If I had not been vexed I would’nt have mentioned him at all,—I would’nt for the world, mention him to Papa,—but one’s temper will bubble over sometimes when it has boiled too long. And really it is hard, to hear him talk, & to read him when he writes. But it is’nt what you say—oh no—he is not jealous of me—of me! It is a sort of masculine rampancy which wd have a woman under the feet of a man that he might stroke her there like a hound. He says, my dearest Miss Mitford, as coolly as possible upon every possible opportunity .. “Before you were spoilt” by so & so!——not in joke—not a bit. He thrusts all sorts of red hot scorns at me .. and when I try to get rid of the subject of literature altogether, I am sure to have it doubled into a ball of conversation & thrown back upon me, full of little pins about female writers & so on. <And then, everyone who praises me, he anathematizes.> [6] For instance, in the New Monthly Magazine of last month, in a paper ‘on Puppies’ written by I dont know whom, the phrase occurred .... “We half adore Miss Barrett; &, like herself, can admire George Sand”. [7] Well—Arabel took up this magazine, & in a sisterly fit of boasting, put it into his hand when he was sitting here by me—. “Ah!” he said—“it’s just so! just as I thought. An honorable thing this is, to be sure, to have one’s name bandied about in connection with an abandoned woman, by all the rakes in London!”– Did you ever hear a more gracious interpretation or more comfortable commentary? I laugh when I can,—& sometimes have half a mind to cry—because though you attribute to me my beloved friend, qualities which are the mere accidents of a dream of the affections, yet I do believe that you are right in thinking that I am not pedantic & spoilt by any little praise permitted to me. How could I be, with such a safe dead weight to pull me back .. which I feel most after a moment of elation? You might as well open the window for a bird with a broken wing, as expect me to fly away from a sense of the position which becomes me. You praise me for being cheerful—& so I am, I thank God, in a very good measure—but then, there are seasons of effort & of reaction,—& also, much of the possibility of being cheerful comes from the faculty of throwing oneself beyond oneself, and living as we can do, for hours together, in art & fiction & poetry. For the rest, there is at my side a vacancy & a silence which strike on me sometimes as freshly as ever, and sometimes as despairingly. Ah—when questions like that League question [8] –––but I have no right to sadden you. You are so kind to me my dear dearest friend—so kind—so full of sympathy—and then, when you think me bright, how often it is that I am basking in your sunshine. I sit close to you, and afterwards “I smell of Anacreon.” [9]
But for dear Mr Hunter, you are not to infer any disparagement of him from what I said. He is just a man & has a man’s instincts. With the most indubitable degree of regard for me, he has his own ideal of a woman, & would set me straight whenever (which is every moment) I dont lie level to it. As to sympathy, we must not talk of it in such a state of things!—sympathy is a word out of place. But do not say anything of all this when you come, to anyone here—for I never complain of dear Mr Hunter, save when taken unawares in a moment of confidence like this. He has high qualities & faculties, and is not to be blamed for his man-nature. Be sure that it is natural to men to have such views, whether they develop them or not. I assure you he quite detests America ever since they began to praise me there. The fever, in its external form, began with my prose papers in the Athenæum, & has been at its height since the poems. [10]
Do you know the ‘Napoleon et Marie Louise’ of M. de Meneval, the secretary of the emperor? [11] The three little volumes have interest in them—and if you require (which you dont I hope) any further impulse towards hating the Austrian, you will find it there. Such a woman!—— If she had been a better daughter than a wife, she wd have still betrayed a duty, .. but wd have held on to the sympathies of Humanity by a holy tenure—but it was not that she was an obedient daughter to the sacrifice of wifely duty—it was not even that she was a weak & frightened woman—it was because she, the ex-empress of half a world,—she, the mother of a king,—she the wife of a selfcrowned hero & man of genius .. coveted the Duchessdom of Parma!! Oh—so pitiable—so vile! so wretched!—— Well might Napoleon shrink from speaking of her .. & from analyzing the motives of her conduct!—— His silence, as Meneval describes it, strikes me as very affecting– [12]
And I have subscribed to Rolandi, & am rioting in the catalogue, which seems to me so much fuller than any I have had access to yet. I begin with the Vigie de Koat Ven, the two latter volumes of which I never before could procure. [13] And tell me—have you read the two last volumes of La ‘Confession Generale’ (Soulié[’]s)—because they send me from two separate libraries, only two volumes—the two first. Was that work ever finished—or never? It takes a hold of interest on you, I think. In the matter of Jules Janin, I agree with you precisely. His larger works are worth little. His articles are full of life & eloquence—with the drawback of a sort of mannerism, which is effective at the beginning, but ends by wearying you,—viz, the repetition of words & parts of phrases, in order to promote the tension of a paragraph,—if I may say so. It is something like the catching of the breath in a great orator. Do you observe it? It carries you along, & adds to the fire & smoke, until you learn the trick of it—& then it fails with you at once.
I am very, very much better. I am coming into blow, I think, for Monday. May God bless you, dearest friend! I hope Jane is better. If your Flush keeps Valentine’s day, he is more of a Pusseyite than mine, .. who scorns the cats.
Poor Sydney Smith– Poor Yorick! [14] He jested with the melancholy of death,—and said that he had lost flesh enough to make a respectable curate of,—& that he remained very thin, considering he was stall-fed. If you laugh at that, it is his epitaph, you laugh.
Your ever affectionate
EBB.
I return Mr Horne’s letter. What a curious fancy, this book for the child of six years old!– It looks like the act of a family man in posse [15] at least—most paternal, certainly. Does not Kate think so? Well! if he marries her, it will be an excellent door of entrance into domestic life, and a crisis (one would hope) to the succession of tender passions.
I do not know Charlotte Smith’s books for children. [16] I read myself Mrs Barbauld’s
‘Come hither, Charles—
Come to Mama—’ [17]
oh! how I remember it, book & all! and Miss Edgeworth’s Frank & Rosamond. [18] They were my own classics, & those of my brothers & sisters.
Did you ever meet with the great little mistakes of Mary Howitt’s, called her books for children, which are in fact novels for children? [19] Strange mistakes for a woman, who, when she writes in verse, does it with so much simplicity & sweetness. But she cant write prose. She cant. What children’s books you would write—you, yourself! only it wd be so hard to spare you for such work. And do you know Miss Martineau’s delightful ‘playfellow’—? [20] I have just, by the way, had a note from her—and she is at Birmingham with her eldest brother at present, with the intention of returning to the Lakes. [21] There is nothing of particular interest in the letter,—except that she is quite well, “trudging in the snow,” & recovered from the effect of “that terrible mistake of her brother Greenhow”.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 84–88.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum.
1. “Benedetto sia’l giorno, e’l mese e il anno.” “Blessed be the day, and the month and the year” (Petrarch, “Sonnet 47”).
2. Perhaps a bookseller’s list, or a list Miss Mitford had prepared from a bookseller’s list, of French works they were reading during this period.
3. EBB had previously mentioned Soulié’s novel in letters 1774 and 1797.
4. Cf. Inferno, v, 138.
5. An examination of EBB’s copy of Dante (see Reconstruction, A752; now at ABL) shows no evidence that EBB made such an annotation.
6. EBB inserted this as an afterthought between the lines.
7. Cf. “We half adore Miss Barrett, and (like herself) do not wholly contemn George Sand,” in a satirical article titled “A Discourse of Puppies” in The New Monthly Magazine, June 1845, p. 70.
9. We have been unable to identify the source of this quotation.
10. Poems (1844) and “Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets,” an essay that formed a series of four articles in The Athenæum, February–March 1842, as well as “The Book of the Poets,” a review and essay that was published as a series of five articles, June–August 1842.
11. Napoléon et Marie Louise; souvenirs historiques (1844–45) by Claude François de Méneval (1778–1850) is one of the notable memoirs dealing with the career of Napoleon.
12. Nothing in Méneval’s Memoirs seems to confirm EBB’s comment about Napoleon’s silence regarding Marie Louise. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, she and her son were awarded the duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla in accordance with the Treaty of Fontainebleau (1814).
13. La Vigie de Koat-Ven (1833) was published in four volumes.
14. Hamlet, V, 1, 184. Sydney Smith had died on 23 February 1845.
15. “In power.” Writing from Germany on 10 February 1845 (MS at Huntington), Horne had asked the publisher, Joseph Cundall, to forward a letter to Miss Mitford with a copy of A Story Book of Country Scenes (1845), by Mrs. Harriet Myrtle, pseudonym of Mary Gillies and R.H. Horne. It was the first volume of a projected series known as “The Myrtle Story Books.” The authorship of this work is generally attributed to Lydia Falconer Miller (1811?–1876) who became the principal contributor to the series.
16. Charlotte Smith (1749–1806), poetess and novelist. Horne wrote to Joseph Cundall (8 March 1845, ms at Huntington) that Miss Mitford “is greatly pleased with our little book. She says ‘It reminds me of the books of my childhood—Miss Barbauld’s, and poor Charlotte Smith’s. Yet the children now-a-days walk so fast that perhaps it is fitter for 4 or 5 years old than 6. But it is an excellent first book.’”
17. Cf. the first two lines of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children, From Two to Three Years Old (1787).
18. “Frank” and “Rosamond” were works in Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons (1801); they were both followed by sequels in 1822 and 1821 respectively.
19. Undoubtedly a reference to Mary Howitt’s series of thirteen “Tales for the People and Their Children,” two of which were actually written by William Howitt; they were published between 1840 and 1845 by Thomas Tegg.
20. The Playfellow: A Series of Tales (1841) consisted of four stories in separate volumes: The Settlers at Home; The Prince and the Peasant; Feats on the Fiord; and The Crofton Boys. A reprint was issued in January 1845. EBB presented Feats on the Fiord to her young cousin, “Lizzie” Barrett; this copy is now at the Bodleian Library (see Reconstruction, C627).
21. Actually her third brother, Robert Martineau (see letter 1848).
___________________
