1895. EBB to Henry Fothergill Chorley
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 177–179.
50 Wimpole Street
April 28 1845.
Dear Mr Chorley,
My brother will have pleasure in accepting your kind invitation for tuesday—although he will bring you no learned ear, & is quite innocent of the violin. If you heard one in this house, it did not belong to an inhabitant but to a visitor. As to George, he is just a lawyer; with more professional ardour than briefs unhappily, .. but I suppose they never come in the first years. He might as well expect to have grey hairs.
For Miss Martineau .. is it not true that she has admitted her wreck[-] story to have no proof? [1] Surely she has. Surely she said that the evidence was incapable, at this point of time, of justification to the exoteric—& that the question had sunk now to one of character—to which her opponent answered that it had always been one of character. And you must admit that the direct & unmitigated manner of depreciating the reputation, not merely of Jane Arrowsmith, but of Mrs Wynyard, .. a personal friend of Miss Martineau’s to whom she professes great obligations, .. could not be otherwise than exasperating to a woman of her generous temper, .. & this, just in the crisis of her gratitude for her restoration to life & enjoyment, by the means (as she considers it) of this friend. Not that I feel at all convinced of her having been cured by mesmerism– I have told her openly that I doubt it a little,—& she is not angry with me for saying so. Also, the wreck-story,——and (as you suggest) the three new cases of clairvoyance, .. why one cannot, you know, give one’s specific convictions to general sweeping testimonies, with a mist all round them! Still, I do lean to believing this class of mysteries——and I see nothing more incredible in the apocalypse of the wreck & other marvels of clairvoyance, than in that singular adaptation of another person’s senses, which is a common phenomenon of the simple forms of mesmerism. If it is credible that a person in a mesmeric sleep can taste the sourness of the vinegar on another person’s palate, I am ready to go the whole length of the transmigration of senses. But after all, … except from hearing so much, .. I am as ignorant as you are, in my own experience. One of my sisters was thrown into a sort of swoon & could not open her eyelids, though she heard what passed, once, or twice, or thrice,—& she might have been a prophetess by this time, perhaps, if, .. partly from her own feeling on the subject, .. & partly from mine,—she had not determined never to try the experiment again. It is hideous & detestable to my imagination, .. as I confessed to you—it makes my blood run backwards: if I were you, I would not (with the nervous weakness you speak of) throw myself into the way of it—I really would not. Think of a female friend of mine begging me to give her a lock of my hair, .. or rather begging my sister to “get it for her” [2] .., that she might send it to a celebrated prophet of mesmerism in Paris, to have an oracle concerning me!! Did you ever, since the days of the witches, hear a more ghastly proposition? It shook me so with horror, I had scarcely voice to say ‘no’—though I did say it very emphatically at last, I assure you. A lock of my hair for a Parisian prophet? Why if I had yielded, I should have felt the steps of pale spirits treading as thick as snow all over my sofa & bed, by day & night, & pulling a corresponding lock of hair on my head at awful intervals—I, who was born with a double set of nerves, which are always out of order! the most excitable person in the world, & nearly the most superstitious!– I should have been scarcely sane at the end of a fortnight, I believe of myself. Do you remember the little spirit in gold shoebuckles, who was a familiar of Heinrich Stilling’s? [3] Well—I shd have had a French one to match the German, .. with Balzac’s superfine boot polish in place of the buckles, .. as surely as I lie here a mortal woman!–
I congratulate you (amid all cares & anxieties), upon the view of Naples in the distance [4] —but chiefly on your own happy & just estimate of your selected position in life. It does appear to me wonderfully & mournfully wrong, when men of letters, as it is too much the fashion for them to do, take to dishonouring their profession by fruitless bewailings & gnashings of teeth, [5] —when, all the time, it must be their own fault if it is not the noblest in the world. Miss Mitford treats me as a blind witness in this case,—because I have seen nothing of the literary world, or any other sort of world, & yet cry against her “pen & ink’[’] [6] cry. It is the cry I least like to hear from her lips, of all others—it is unworthy of them altogether. On the lips of a woman of letters, it sounds like jealousy—(which it cannot be with her!) as on the lips of a woman of the world, like ingratitude. Madme Girardin’s ‘Ecole des journalistes’ deserved Jules Janin’s reproof of it; [7] & there is something noble & touching in that feeling of brotherhood among men of letters, which he invokes. I am so glad to hear you say that I am right—glad for your sake & glad for mine. In fact, there is something which is attractive to me, .. & which has been attractive ever since I was as high as this table, .. even in the old worn type of Grub Street authors & garret poets. [8] Men & women of letters are the first in the whole world to me, & I would rather be the least among them, than “dwell in the courts of princes.” [9]
Forgive me for writing so fast & far—just as if you had nothing to do but to read me. Oh, for patience for the novel!–
I am faithfully yours
Elizabeth B Barrett.
Publication: LEBB, I, 257–260 (in part).
Manuscript: Salisbury House.
1. In The Athenæum for 29 March 1845 (no. 909, p. 310), Miss Martineau stated that “the matter in question now is, not the fact of the clairvoyance,—which it is, in the nature of things, impossible to establish at this distance of time, when the principal witness recedes from her original testimony. The question has been made one of character.”
2. i.e., Mary Minto; see letters 1441 and 1457.
3. As previously noted (letter 874), the reference is to Jung-Stilling’s Theory of Pneumatology which discusses apparitions, stating that the spirits of the departed appear in the form most vividly remembered, and recalls one “spirit having appeared, on whom the little brass shoe-buckles were perfectly cognizable” (ch. 4).
4. Perhaps a reference to Chorley travelling to Italy in the autumn of 1845, as indicated in a letter EBB wrote to him on 8 November 1845 thanking him for Pomfret and for a letter from Italy.
5. Cf. Matthew 8:12.
6. I Henry VI, V, 3, 66.
8. i.e., hack writers.
9. We have been unable to identify the source of this quotation.
___________________
