1880. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 148–152.
50 Wimpole Street.
April 5. 1845.
Ever dearest Miss Mitford, violets & a letter with another stronger perfume, reproach me for the silence of several days. But I was interrupted on saturday just as I was on the verge of beginning to write to you,—“Thanks for the violets!” And now my first word must be .. Mr Hunter. Dear Mr Hunter, who has so much true, (exaggerated in its terms sometimes) cordial regard for me!– Ah—I have been giving you a wrong impression in my crossnesses about him, to lead you to say what you do!– That sentence in your letter, about “sweetening the air,” stabbed me through the conscience & scratched my heart as it passed. Because, with all the angles of the casket, it does hold gold—. [1] Indeed it has been suggested to me that half the acidities arise from the cream of his affection for me turning sour in a thunderstorm of jealousy, .. not of me .. but of others in relation to me!—& that he likes me to have no friend, no praiser, except himself. Which is disagreeable all the same,—but pardonable, for the sake of the regard wrapt deep in the motive of it. And in fact, it is a matter of frequent jest with me to him, put sometimes a little bitterly, .. what devilish things such an archangel as I am, can do & submit to——. He sets me up like a ninepin, just, as it appears, to roll me down cleverly, I say—but he does set me up—yes—and celestializes me most marvellously,—I cant be praised more (at moments) by anybody in the world. And thus, altogether, it was wrong of me; & unjustified by all our intimacy, to grumble to you & be vexed aloud, & suffer you to see the shaded side of the man,—& he such a true long tried friend! Do, my dearest, dearest Miss Mitford, try to forget what I said!– Put it out of your head as unworthy of me!– Forget it altogether. Poor Mr Hunter is irritable, as persons of great sensibility under adverse circumstances, are apt to be. For the rest he has good & great qualities,—& I feel now that I have sinned far more against him, than he ever did against me. [2]
But if you leave the love out of Albert Savarus, [3] you kill the book—you might as well propose leaving the soul out of yourself. Well—perhaps I am to blame. But I have a certain pleasure in the love-story-form of romance,—& whether in life or imaginative literature, persistance in love has a strange (?) charm for me. Consider! Albert’s persistance .. endurance .. determinate purpose .. (what shall I call it?) was by no means weakness in him, but strength. If he had despaired, it wd have been weakness, I grant. To abandon one’s whole soul & life to the ravage of a passion, whether of impossible love or desponding grief, has always appeared to me a mark of intellectual & moral feebleness. But where love is an object of possible, .. promised attainment, the reasonable hope justifies the energetic endeavour, &, in my mind, glorifies it. So I entreat you to forgive Balzac.
And I think that I too shd like him to pronounce my funeral oration,——to a certain extent—for some things, he would not say—could not. For the bare honour of it, there wd be a thrilling down my shroud.
I perfectly understood about the play of Madme Girardin, that you did not commend it—only it was worse even than I had expected, with all my preparation. As bad in fact, as possible. It struck me as a sort of falling back in a fainting fit of the newly vivified French language,—the language, the whole rhythm of the thing, was so pale & cold,—we cant call it classical, or even Gallically classical. And then, thoughts, construction, character!—was it worth Jules Janin’s writing of? but for the ‘tête blonde’! [4] His letter, I admired much, & had full pleasure in, (be sure), & thanked you inwardly for mentioning.
That Balzac cares little for anything but art, I, too, shd imagine of him. Eugene Sue wishes to do good,—but I doubt his being strong on his principles,—as one says of babies, about their legs, .. when they are just beginning to walk. A most singular book of Eugene Sue’s called ‘Le Bananier’, [5] I have read lately, the whole front of which is directed against slave-emancipation & the part which England has played in it,—the latter, most absurdly strained from the actual motives. The scene is laid in a sugar plantation in the West Indies, & the book, from its very imbecility, is worth your looking into– Very weak it is, to be sure,—& outrageously absurd—and you will see at once that a philanthropist & liberal who advocates the slave-trade, can scarcely be thorough & consistently cordial in free opinions. Call it a philanthropic veneering: the wood does not go through.
Ah, my dearest, dearest friend! I had a letter the other day from a Mrs Taylor, who is the wife of the Anti Corn Law Taylor, & who wrote to me for autographs & other contributions to the Bazaar. [6] I sent her a guinea,—but was forced to submit to her whether I could, consistently with my refusal to the Leeds’ Committee, & without offence to it personally, give my name in an autograph, now. In reply, she agrees that I cannot,—but reproves me so honestly besides for the previous refusal, that my heart has begun to ache again as it did in the first days. How wrong it was! how wrong I feel it was!– It will be a remorse to me for life. Horace talks of “expelling nature with a fork,” [7] —but to expel Duty with a silver fork, is a deed beyond criticism.
You misunderstood me about Tait. I did not mean to doubt his having invited you to the new Tales. [8] I was well aware that you were the very first person likely to be invited—& (taking the invitation for granted) I was beseeching you to help to do his work for him,—because no hand in the kingdom CD do it so availingly as your own. Of course the ‘booksellers plague & pester you’. It is a social duty with them. They are your Eumenides, [9] & I will not help you to fly from them. Plagued & pestered you ought to be, as a matter of morals & politics at once.
For Mr Horne’s storybook, [10] I like some of the stories & think it a pretty book. A few children of six years old might be too old for it,—but, in general, I do not quarrel with the fitnesses. Because you know one or two forward children, you must not measure all the children of the world by their stature,—& I (on the other hand) will find you children of seven or eight, .. especially among boys, .. who will thank you heartily for letting them read our friend’s story-book. In other respects, .. I agree with you that there is nothing at all new in it—nothing. I remember a little book which was a favorite in our nursery, called “A visit to a farm-house,” [11] with precisely the same characteristics, & a better & more interesting general construction. There are a few touches more of poetry in this book,—owing to Mr Horne, of course,—but the defect is the absolute want of reference to Deity, as creator, which the child looks for, .. which the first instinct of the child moves out to meet. Not that I advocate the teaching of theological systems to children of that early age; but that if the sense of beauty is to be educated, the sense of God shd be educated also. Tell me if you think with me. Did you ever hear a child say .. “Who made this, Mama?” Did you ever hear of a child who did not say it,—however untrained.? The instinct is within us. Or call it a logic.
I had a strip of note from Mr Horne the other day,—saying nothing at all but that he shd be in England some time in April, he thought. Why what a crowd I shall have to see! I tremble through & through to think of it .. when Flush & I are thinking together.
And when shall I see you? March gone—& no you! April come, & no you! I am listening for you.
And you must wonder why I send you no oysters all this while. So do I wonder—I talk & I talk—but, from the frost, or some mystery unexplored, there has been a famine of oysters in the land. No possibility of getting them good for any price, I hear, until now when there seems a hope––. I shall remind Wilson today.
Dearest friend, you were right in your argument of consolation about my book. The relaxation in sale was only temporary; & everything goes on excellently at present. When Mr Kenyon was at Moxon’s the other day, they gave him good news,—they wd soon be out of the edition, they said,—& some bookseller’s messenger met him in the shop by a happy coincidence, .. (sent for twentyfive copies at once, ..) to confirm the announcement. Dear Mr Kenyon was as pleased to tell me as I could be to hear him—& really, to do myself justice, the sense of his goodness was the uppermost of the pleasure I felt. [12]
No more for today! but
Your ever attached
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 95–99.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum.
1. Cf. The Merchant of Venice, II, 7, 1–79.
2. Cf. King Lear, III, 2, 59–60.
3. Balzac’s novel first appeared in 1842 in the Furne edition of Scènes de la vie privée.
4. “Blonde head.” Taken to be an allusion to the character Blondin (“fair-haired”) in L’École des journalistes, who is described as a “collaborateur—L’air évaporé, tournure d’un dandy qui n’est jamais allé à Londres.” See letter 1865, note 3.
5. This book was written by Frédéric Soulié, not Eugène Sue, and was published in 1843.
7. Cf. Horace, Epistles, I, 10, 24, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough.
8. EBB had also been invited to contribute to The Edinburgh Tales (see letter 1871).
9. i.e., avenging furies.
10. A Story Book of Country Scenes. See letter 1850, notes 15 and 16.
11. A Visit to a Farm-house (1804) by S.W.
12. EBB had previously mentioned the possibility of her Poems (1844) going into a second edition; see letter 1826.
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