710. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 192–196.
[Torquay]
Saturday. [?14] [September 1839] [1]
My beloved friend,
I am afraid you have been cruelly buffeted by the Finden party when you were least able to bear it. [2] Tiresome people! If their book is the worse for it, just will be the retribution. Could you not have assumed some dignity of office & insisted upon artists being artists & yourself being editor? But after all, dignity is a troublesome thing either to set up or to keep up,—& far better is it, than that you shd be troubled when you are not well, for the bodies fond of “looking at pictures” to shut their eyes upon this volume of Tableaux (I mean literally the tableaux––the prose letter-press being safe) or content themselves with the vision of the golden mute lady upon the back, for the space of one twelvemonth.
As to my poems, depend upon it the prefatory little boy [3] will be found wandering somewhere to the end of all things, with a brown rosary tied round his neck. If he escapes hanging by it, it will be by miracle, & certainly not by virtue of the clearness of my manuscript.
Are you laughing at me, dearest Miss Mitford? or did you glorify my manuscript in a vision?
“Magnified from sight to dream.” [4]
(may they print aright that one line at least, in the way of illustration!) for I remember moralizing over heaps of blots, & thinking––“Well, I am too tired to write all this over again,—& I can make everything straight in the proof”—little knowing what futurity was about to overwhelm me. And be it known to you that if you smile superior it is not only in your capacity of a “veteran author”. All veteran authors do not attain to such high philosophy. There is Mr Boyd for instance whose whole existence is absorbed for the nonce in a question of errata, & who under my circumstances wd hang himself in a brown rosary without pause, .. or put an end to himself by some more classical death without waiting to consider how Plato reasoned, before hand. Dont translate this into grave earnest dearest Miss Mitford! It is true only of Mr Boyd. But you & I may both wish Messrs Finden joy of my poems if they are printed as some proofs were, of my “beautiful clear manuscripts” of the Seraphim!! [5] In that case too, I shall be less understandible than usual—which will be wonderful.
All which nonsense I am very little in a mood to write so gaily, though you may fancy so. Poor Dr Barry my able & most kind physician who for above a year has attended me almost every day—and at my best estate never left me longer than a day,—is seriously ill with rheumatic & nervous fever, has been confined to his bed for ten days & was yesterday in much danger. The crisis & danger are now said to be past—but I still feel anxious & saddened—& not the less so of course, from hearing of the continued solicitude he is expressing about me,—begging me to call in another physician .. which I cant & wont do. May God grant that the improvement in his state may be lasting! He has one dear little girl scarcely past her babyhood,—and his wife is about to become a mother again: and from his talents & rising reputation, & undeviating attention & kindness towards his patients, his loss wd be greatly felt in this place, in a professional point of view as in many others. May God spare him to his family & friends! I am very anxious.
Has Mr Talfourd written for you? [6] I hope so. Mr Shepherd did not send me his poem, nor have I read it [7] —but I shall try to do so, since your opinion of it is so high. My acquaintance is confined to Lady Mary & her daughter—& even in this case seems to have come to an end—and Mr Shepherd I never saw in my life. It was when they were staying at Malvern & we were residing at Hope End, that I had my only intercourse with Lady Mary,—but two years afterwards Miss Shepherd visited the former place with the Chief Baron of Scotland, [8] & then she came over & spent a week with me—& we parted as friends. I never was so near loving anybody very much whom I did not love very much! She might be .. or at least have been .. anything! Rapid intelligence & fancy—strong natural sensibility .. rendered peculiar .. at once interesting & repulsive to me .. by the very naivetè of worldliness. To explain what I mean, I need only tell you that she used words of this sort in talking to me––“I cannot be distinguished by either great beauty, great genius, or high rank. Nothing is left to me but to be faultless in high breeding—an elegante par excellence.” [9] Words to that effect––I am not accurate as to syllables. And in order to compass an object so inglorious, i.e. this distinction par Almacks—she spoke openly of the necessity she was under of sacrificing friendships to surtouts,—& how friends in vulgar waistcoats & questionable situations never cd be visible objects to her eyes, however dear to her heart. It is all vulgar—vulgar—vulgar!—more vulgar than any waistcoat or locality—the vulgarity on all sides of us every day in one form or another! But her openness in telling it, & the kind of principle upon which she based the profession struck & amused me,—& contrasted so blackly & whitely with much besides which I observed & estimated & admired in her, that I cd have wept real tears & loved her through them all, to hear those shackles rattle “abhorred music” [10] as she cast them off. Her conversational powers were very nearly brilliant—but brilliant for society. “I can do two things well”, she said once to me—“dance & speak French”! and ‘well’ meant “to perfection’[’] in that sentence. And yet she was not a young lady’s lady—by no means frivolous—by no means superficial. There was the peculiarity. She was a philosopher in triviality. Capable too of intense feeling—. I have seen her cheeks grow pale & her lips tremble with the strength of it.
Well! she was very affectionate to me: at least very kind & cordial: but our faults were not of the same kind, & some unfitness was felt I dare say on each side. When my Prometheus came out, I directed the publisher to send a copy to Lady Mary as from the author—which remains unacknowledged: and when we went to London & had ascertained that she knew of our being there, I did not like to be the first to break the silence & renew the acquaintance. I dont know much about etiquettes– Perhaps I shd have sent a card. But under the silence & the circumstances, & the remembrance of dear Miss Shepherd’s old theories, I did not like to do it. Suppose I had been convicted of a vulgar waistcoat? What wd have become of me? And certainly I felt by no means strong in Almacks & the Marchioness of Londonderry!—— [11]
Was not Pedro (the first part) reviewed in the Athenæum? [12] Is it in the dramatic form?
I have not heard from Miss Anderdon. Will you call her attention to a notice of her poem on the last page of the last number of the New Monthly Magazine? [13]
Do let your next account of yourself be a better one. I am anxious about you my beloved friend. For my own part I have not been very well for some days—suffering from oppression on the chest & old symptoms consequent upon the changeable moist heavy state of the atmosphere. The fearful winter is at hand again!—— On the first of October we remove, or intend doing so now, to a new house, 1 Beacon Terrace,—which is promised to be a warmer residence than our present one.
Whether Mr Horne is married or single I cannot, cannot tell you. [14] Dont make me responsible in a note. But dearest Miss Mitford, I quite agree with you that the ‘Death of Marlowe’ [15] over again, wd not, with all its genius & power, do for your annual. I am sorry you did not make a point of seeing his contribution. He wrote to me to tell me that he had completed it,—& to ask besides I believe whether its title “A German trilogy” sounded in my ears very affected, or was likely to do so in the ears of your readers [16] —in which same letter, came a request that I wd send him by return of post a short poem for insertion in the last Monthly Chronicle he having agreed to edit it for a month. I was very unwell when I received this letter,—confined to my bed & incapable of writing a short poem for the nonce, as I shd have liked to do. The shortest ready made ones I had access to were anything but short—yet rather than appear insensible to his much courtesy by my much crossness, I sent him two, together with applause (as far as I knew how) of the sound of the “German trilogy.” I have not heard from him since; nor did the Monthly Chronicle contain either of my poems. By the way, one of them, called “The Madrigal of flowers” & occasioned by a dead flower being sent to me from Wimpole St, has a stanza in its middle consecrated to you & yours––flowers, I mean—not Dr Mitford. [17]
Give my love to him my dearest Miss Mitford—& my sisters’ to yourself. Believe how very
truly you are loved by your
Elizabeth B Barrett.
Mr Landor has most kindly sent me his two last dramas. They are Landor’s—& cd be none other’s– But they are not an achievement for Landor. [18]
My sister—Henrietta has made the acquaintance of the Miss Goldings, neighbours of yours, [19] & nightingales, I understand. They have left Torquay! Are they your acquaintances or your friends? I wd rather have heard them talk of you—than sing!
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 149–153 (as [September 1839]).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by SD1042, which deals with some of the same subjects.
2. Apparently a reference to some arguments over editorial policy, involving the Finden brothers, responsible for the engravings, Charles Tilt, the publisher, and Miss Mitford, the editor.
3. The subject of EBB’s second contribution, “The Dream.”
4. Verse 3, line 4 of “The Dream.”
5. A wry allusion to misprints occasioned by EBB’s rather small handwriting.
6. Talfourd did not contribute to this issue of Findens’ Tableaux.
7. Henry J. Shepherd, the husband of EBB’s acquaintance of Hope End days, Lady Mary Shepherd, had published in 1838 Pedro of Castile.
8. Sir Samuel Shepherd (1760–1840), Member of Parliament 1813–19; Attorney-General 1817; Lord Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer in Scotland 1819–30, was Henry Shepherd’s father.
9. “Pre-eminent lady of style.”
10. We have not located the source of this quotation.
11. Almack’s Assembly Rooms, in King Street, St. James’s, had been opened in 1765 by William Almack, a Scotsman, and soon became the Mecca of London society. The Rooms were ruled by the Patronesses, who alone distributed tickets of admission; as denial of entry was a fate almost worse than death, this power made them undisputed arbiters of fashion and manners. Lady Jersey was the most notable of the Patronesses, but Frances Anne Emily, Lady Londonderry (née Vane-Tempest, 1800–65), wife of the 3rd Marquis of Londonderry, had considerable influence also.
12. A review in The Athenæum (no. 536, 3 February 1838, pp. 88–89) conceded the poem some merit, but felt that the subject “required a sustaining power beyond that possessed by Mr. Shepherd.”
13. The September issue (p. 144) said of Costanza of Mistra “This ‘Tale of Modern Greece,’ is pleasingly written, and with a feeling and fancy that evince the gratification its author must have derived from the composition … its story being one of strict truth, connected with the Greek struggle for independence, and one which will amply repay perusal, without reference to the poetical merits of which it is made the medium.”
14. Horne was single at this time; he did not marry until 1847.
15. Horne’s The Death of Marlowe had appeared in The Monthly Repository, August 1837. It was published in book form that same year.
16. When printed in Findens’ Tableaux, Horne’s poem was entitled “The Fetches.”
17. The poem was not published until its inclusion in Poems (1844), when it bore the title “A Flower in a Letter.” Verse XI reads:
By Loddon’s stream the flowers are fair
That meet one gifted lady’s care
With prodigal rewarding:
(For Beauty is too used to run
To Mitford’s bower—to want the sun
To light her through the garden.)
18. Andrea of Hungary and Giovanna of Naples (1839). The book, inscribed by Landor, formed lot 847 of Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1388).
19. Possibly the family of Edward Golding, of Sonning, some 4 miles N.E. of Reading.
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