811. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 41–42.
[Torquay]
May 1. 1841
My beloved friend,
Your verses are your own in all ways,—appropriate & graceful—& my sole regret with any cousinship to the subject is, that I stand confessed as being useless to you except in will & desire. [1] Yet—if you can disentangle my meaning—I didnt desire to be of this precise kind of utility to you—feeling your sufficiency to yourself, & my own personal awkwardness in strutting about with a reputation on, not made for me. The last decision is quite right—and the verses prove it so, without other logic. May I ask how they prosper? Be sure of the secresy.
Dearest Miss Mitford! The lithograph is out of the question. [2] I have not friends enough who care enough for me! Ah—you dont know what a life I have led—what a solitude it has been—to count beyond my immediate family. A few country neighbours, seen at long intervals for an hour, talked to with one half one’s mind, or a quarter of it—that has been the degree & sort of society by which the solitude was chequered. I make guesses at the world—sometimes wrong, sometimes a little right—and if at all the last,—‘ah Signorina’, as my Italian master once said to me .. “indovina benessimo [sic]” [3] —it is the bare faculty of guessing.
So that I have not you see,—could’nt have by a possibility,—a crowd of friends to catch at lithographs of my picture.
To you—certainly—to you it shall be lent at any time & for any time—but you must come to Wimpole Street & see whether it is like. My sisters & my two brothers here, say “yes, very”—and I myself am so far satisfied as to think it a quiet unpretending picture, with the right degree of simplicity in the dress & gesture, to accord with the pale worn cheek. But Papa—what will Papa say?– He will see it on wednesday morning. How disappointed I shall be, if he shakes his head & wonders who it can be. [4]
Dearest friend, wont all this sunshine which I see on the walls & the floor, revive & exhilarate the dear object of your anxious watching? I fancy & hope it will & must. Give him my love & the wishes which belong to its sincerity. There shall be some more cream soon—but I am half fearful of its passing under so much sunshine. The unseasonable heat cant last long, & then—
I meant to have told you long ago, rather to have whispered to you as a secret, something of a poetical lyrical-dramatic plan of Mr Horne’s & mine—but the paper when I write to you seems to shrivel up under my fingers & leave no room for such things to be written about. Well—another day, I must mean with a result–
Not that I have heard from Mr Horne for weeks & weeks—so that he may be exhaled, plan & all—& my front plan, is about your tragedy.—— [5]
Perhaps tomorrow, certainly the first day without an east wind, I am to try a removal to the sofa!—the first footstep to London.
God bless you—dear & kind! Tell me how Ben is– [6] Think of Flush being lost & cried [over] yesterday, & found in a wood at eleven oclock at night! They did not tell me of it—until concealment was impossible—and his return happened just afterwards. I could not help a few tears for his sake—& yours. Naughty Flush. But nobody cd scold him—& his ecstasy on finding us again was an indescribable thing.
Yr EBB
Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / Near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 220–222.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum.
1. Miss Mitford had apparently asked EBB for suggestions for reworking a poem, perhaps “On the Portrait of the Countess of Burlington,” printed in The Athenæum of 24 July 1841 (no. 717, p. 556).
2. The inference is that Miss Mitford had suggested that lithograph copies be made of Matilda Carter’s portrait of EBB.
3. “Excellent prophet.”
4. Despite the approval of the family members present in Torquay (Henrietta, Arabel, Charles John and Octavius), those in Wimpole Street were dissatisfied with the likeness (see letters 816 and 819).
6. Miss Mitford had told a correspondent that Ben Kirby, her manservant, had been “very ill indeed” (L’Estrange (2), III, 116).
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