2206. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 60–64.
[London]
[11 February 1846] [1]
Ever dearest Miss Mitford, kindest friend .. my gratitude limps after your goodness but gets up to it to thank you for it warmly & earnestly after all! To come all that distance to see me! why if Mr Chorley was disappointed with Mr Buckingham, [2] & Mr Buckingham with Mr Chorley, .. what repayment could you have for the long journey & the cold, in my dulness here? Only the comfort is that a generous affection pays itself—& so I beg yours to pay itself in “fine gold” [3] —for I have nothing .. I am poor! I can just love you & thank you, .. only thank .. which is no more than a necessity.
In a day or two I will send you a letter of Miss Martineau, which I lent to Mr Kenyon & shall choose you to see besides, because it is full of interest & beauty to my mind & will strike you I think. [4] In the meantime I take to talking of yours .. which is your letter (to praise it to the height) & which amused me exceedingly in the account of your social failure, & how the two metals would’nt fuse for all your ‘absolu.’ [5] And I think, as you say, that my sympathy would have gone with the “pride” .. and I do quite understand that your Mr Chorley moreover is somewhat of a trial notwithstanding his excellences .. that he approaches to the genus ‘White cat’ or even ‘The Beast,’ [6] whom it was necessary to fall in love with at the end, but who was repulsive at the beginning, let them catch their mice with ever so divine a grace & roar ever so like a sucking dove. [7] That he is admirable essentially, I have no manner of doubt– Not only you say so, but other of my friends .. who have no tenderness for the finery .. & who shrink from the waistcoats & the effeminacy—but the truth is, that he is very highly esteemed on grounds of morals & intellect by men who exceed him in power & are without his weaknesses .. & so, altogether, that we should all admire him, is as clear to me as the sun [8] .. & a good deal clearer today .. oh miserable gray sky! Also, I have received letters from him .. full of good sense & fine sense, & free from affectation to the last line of them—and I like him .. seen so in the letters .. & am prepared to hold him in high esteem & regard even, whenever the time comes for personal knowledge. Still .. I understand how those faults must strike—strike a manly man– [9] I, who am a woman only, cannot endure that class of faults—so we will not talk of them any more. Tell Mr Buckingham, instead, of the goodness & earnestness– He is a man of letters, not a man of genius– He can write agreeable books, .. but of great conceptions he is not capable, I always think, & it seems to me an injustice to expect great things from him .. you know I never read the comedy. [10] Good, kind, true, earnest, largehearted, full of cultivation .. surely these qualities make a man!– You will read what Miss Martineau says of him in her letter. [11]
Here has been winter for two or three days, & I do trust it has not affected Mr Buckingham more than must be perhaps. I feel languid & low .. just as you would with the thermometer at 99—the life seems to ebb from me as the quicksilver falls—I grow weak, nervous, & lose what Emerson calls my ‘undersoul’ [12] .. but keep up nonetheless.
It is good news that you should be interested in poor Madme Laffarge. [13] What if she should be an innocent woman?—the blood runs backward to think of it. And can you believe it possible that a woman born to a boudoir life like that woman, caring for the pretty nullities of the world with a child’s insouciance, with her hands soft & fragrant from “almond paste” the mention of which struck me so at the darkest of the history, should plunge them up to the wrists in all that blood & vileness .. & for what object? where is the object?
‘Le Meunier d’Angibault’ [14] .. some name like that, I fancy: and I told you of the work, which is very inferior, if my opinion is worth anything. Do you not remember my telling you?– Well, then—nobody can say what more is written & may be read. Tiresome, it is!– Suppose you appeal to Rolandi’s generosity, .. chivalry rather, .. & ask him to send you ‘a list of new books’. They are constantly writing in that France—constantly—and Sue has probably done something if the rest are dumb. [15]
Do you know what Mr Kenyon said when I told him of your Paris plan– First he shook his head incredulously—& then … “You are nearer to Italy than she is to Paris,” said he. [16] Observe what sceptics we are in this London, & how we think that you grow in Berkshire with the oaks & are as little likely to flit. When you turned back from Devonshire, you killed your reputation as a traveller .. so you must make a new one for May, & take the Lovejoys & Buckinghams for patron saints—. I shall be sorry if you do not go—you ought to go.
Madme Laffarge’s case does not, I admit, fulfil your conditions of the mariage de convenance—there was no ‘esteem’—no personal knowledge whatever. Still, if you retreat no further than to ‘esteem’, I differ with you by the width of the whole world. Esteem & affection are conditions of friendship—but place mar[r]iage with its full significance, in the conditions of friendship .. & the position becomes hideous, revolting—poor Madme Laffarge could scarcely have been better off, if she had ‘esteemed’ to the uttermost. Oh surely you see! At any moment of my past life I would have deliberately preferred a leap down a precipice to a marriage with the best & greatest of mankind whom I did not love in the sense of love. Marriage in the abstract, has always seemed to me the most profoundly indecent of all ideas—& I never could make out how women, mothers & daughters, could talk of it as of setting up in trade, .. as of a thing to be done. That life may go on smoothly upon a marriage of convenience, simply proves to my mind that there is a defect in the sensibility & the delicacy, & an incapacity for the higher happiness of God’s sanctifying. Now think & see if this is not near the truth. I have always been called romantic for this way of seeing, but never repented that it was my way, nor shall.
Miss Thomson, Miss Bayley’s niece, is taken in a charm at Paris, (she writes to her aunt & Mr Kenyon), & considers that “life is brighter there & the details of life more joyous”. Their conventions are simpler—the social rind is thinner––they are less occupied with relative dignities & the like. Throw your “county families” into a cauldron & stir them up into bouillon for the people, & England would be better for it I fancy. Will you be the Medea? [17]
May God bless you, dearest friend!
I am your affectionate & grateful
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 158–161 (as [?10] [February 1846]).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by EBB’s mention of “a letter of Miss Martineau, which I lent to Mr Kenyon” (see letter 2204).
2. Miss Mitford’s young friend who was under the care of George May for consumption, and for whom she was making enquiries concerning travel to a warmer climate. Beyond this and the occasional references in the correspondence of the next few months, we know little of him other than that he finally settled on sailing to Cadiz aboard the Rambler on 7 May 1846 (as indicated in a letter from Miss Mitford to Octavian Blewitt, 25 April 1846, MS at Berkshire County Library, Reading).
3. Job 28:17.
5. “Power.”
6. In The Beauty and the Beast, an ugly beast eventually becomes the object of love; and in Mme. d’Aulnoy’s La Chatte Blanche, a white cat finally proves to be a rich and beautiful queen.
7. Cf. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I, 2, 83.
8. EBB doubtless had knowledge of Chorley from Kenyon, as well as Horne, and certainly from RB, e.g., see the latter’s comments in letter 2171.
9. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue, line 167.
10. i.e., Old Love and New Fortune. Miss Mitford had wanted EBB to read it (see letter 1634, note 3), but EBB would not ask Chorley to send it (see letter 1817).
11. In the postscript to 2203.
12. EBB is alluding to “The Over-Soul,” in Emerson’s 1841 volume of Essays. She referred to his essays in letters 934 and 970.
13. Just a few weeks earlier EBB had encouraged Miss Mitford to read the Memoires of Marie Lafarge. As previously noted (in letter 2189, note 7), based upon circumstantial evidence, she had been found guilty of poisoning her husband shortly after their marriage in 1839.
14. EBB had mentioned Sand’s 1844 novel in letter 2076 (see note 6).
15. The only new work by Sue to appear in 1846 was Mémoires d’un valet de chambre which began to appear in serial form in June 1846. Sue’s 1839 novel, Comédies sociales et scènes dialogues, with the addition of “Monsieur Crinet,” was reprinted in 1846.
16. Kenyon was correct; Miss Mitford never made the trip to Paris, and EBB was in Italy six months later.
17. In order to restore Jason’s father, Æson, to the glory of his youth, Medea removed his blood and replaced it with a concoction which she had prepared. Later, she tricked the daughters of Pelias by boiling a cut-up old ram and transforming it into a young lamb, making them believe that they could restore their father’s youth in the same manner (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII, 251–349). EBB used this image in Aurora Leigh, VII, 902.
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