4103. EBB to James Jackson Jarves
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 226–227.
Casa Guidi
[5] December [1857] [1]
It is very pleasant dear Mr Jarves, to be able to tell you how much struck & interested I have been by your book– [2] Let me say it at once, leaving my husband to give his own impressions. For my part, with some drawbacks, (there are certain things in the book I could wish away) my sympathies have gone with you, & glowed as they went. The spirit of progress is in the book, and, yes, with a large Christian-heartiness making it everywhere beautiful. Also, it is a suggestive book– I like it much. My ‘drawbacks’ refer to certain coarsenesses here & there, .. & some thing in the earlier pages [3] —but chiefly to a somewhat flippant way of representing doctrines of the churches .. (the Trinity for instance) [4] which seems to me to represent ill the real spirit of reverence which is in you. Also, I object much to seeing Christ’s name in the category with Shakespeare’s or even Swedenborg’s. [5] It jars me–
Yet I sympathize with you deeply almost everywhere– I breathe free in the book, and feel in my face the freshness & promise of the future, as I read it–
I enclose to you a little strip which Mrs Jameson sent in to me with the book when she had read it, [6] because I am sure you will like to know an impression on such a mind, so spontaneously expressed.
Wishing you the full enjoyment of the highest things to which you look, let me remain
Your affectionate friend
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Docket, in unidentified hand: 5/57.
Publication: Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (New Haven, Connecticut, 1951), p. 161 (in part).
Manuscript: Yale University.
1. Day and year provided by docket.
3. Presumably, EBB refers to a passage in chapter 1 of Why and What Am I?, in which Jarves recalls a conversation he heard in the womb: his father swears when he learns of the unwanted pregnancy and suggests vigorous exercise (in the hope of inducing a miscarriage), to which his wife reluctantly consents (see pp. 13–15). One of the “coarsenesses” EBB has in mind could be Jarves’s delight in kicking against his mother’s womb (see pp. 12–13).
4. In satirizing the confusion and absurdities propagated by Christian missionaries among the Polynesians, Jarves writes that the former preferred “the desert side of life to its amenities; worshipping the Jehovah of Moses,—a harsh, retributive, cruel being, softened only through the sufferings of the innocent and pure Jesus, who was equally God and his son, and yet neither were able to give salvation, except through the capricious intervention of a third god, called the Holy Ghost, and these three were one god” (Why and What Am I?, p. 159).
5. “Mind and heart attract their correlatives throughout the wide universe, recognizing each truth and passion kindred to its nature as its own, whether spoken by Socrates, Christ, Shakspeare, or Swedenborg” (Why and What Am I?, p. 283).
6. Jarves published the contents of Mrs. Jameson’s “little strip,” along with EBB’s letter, in a preface to The Art-Idea: Part Second of Confessions of an Inquirer (New York, 1864, pp. ix–x): “There is so much in this strange book which pleases me, and in which I sympathize, that I must thank you particularly for lending it to me” (p. x).
___________________
