816. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 48–51.
[Torquay]
May 30th [1841] [1]
My beloved friend,
Indeed you shd have heard before—long ago—for I have felt both you and your Tragedy pulling long and strong at my thoughts every day of many. But I have not been well—my old tragedy, so trite and dull, which keeps all the unities except time. [2] I was very well—considering the “I”—much better, much stronger; and ‘tomorrow’ they said ‘you shall get to the sofa as the first step to London.’ Well—and what do you think I managed to do to make myself worse again?– Took a wrong medecine—a medecine which wd have hurt nobody in the house except me, had anybody else mistaken and taken it. But I took it,—and it was too much for a system weakened to an extraordinary degree of sensitiveness. I was made unwell—thrown into a state of excitement—& the whole resulted in an attack of hemorrhage from the chest far worse than any I have had through the winter. Well—I wrote to you when I was better again—but the exhaustion & above all the disappointment about the London journey were in the letter. It was a moaning letter—you might have heard it moan in your hand. And so I did justice to you and to my own philosophy, and wdnt send it—waited till I had the heart to write something more serenely. It was not the illness itself– The sword which pierces only the body and nothing beyond, [3] pains little. But I fancied an invisible Hand ‘pushing me from my stool’ [4] —quenching the only earthly light left to burn for me, .. the hope of being at home. One disappointment seemed the seed of another—for a perpetual generation.
It was wrong to write so, and wd have been more wrong to have sent the letter. I shd have learnt in my darkness to count the stars of God’s mercies better. Would that we acted as rightly as we suffer.—— And the end is, that I am well again—that is, for me—and have my physician’s permission to try the sofa tomorrow, with his opinion that at the end of June, shd no further evil occur, the journey will be feasible. My heart is lighter again,—and leaps up directly to speak to you. [5]
I enclose a subject which has struck me, [6] and clung to me of many which struck me, almost alone. I have taken up many & thrown them down as objectionable from some point of view or other. In this there appears to me great tragic capability—a strong struggle of heart. I wished much to consult Bentivoglio who is the authority [7] —but here I cant—and shd you think it worth while to think more of it, some other friend may do for you in this respect what I wd gladly do if my situation in the bookless wilderness wd let me. If however you fail with others, I will try again. I shall be in London in June– But you may not require much more—even in the case of yr adoption of the subject.
And after all the other subject you once mentioned to me may be preferable—or yet another subject. I beseech you to try mine by your own judgment, without a reference to me: and if I did not believe you wd do so freely my tongue shd have been tied. [8] It is not used to suggest subjects for the stage,—it has as little experience as intuitive wisdom about such things,—and “no one has taught this parrot its ‘How d’ye do’[”].
As to all the dreams you dream, with an angel of perfect kindness lighting the vision, about my power of combining with Mr Horne in the production of a real actable tragedy, .. well, my only comment is “you dream”. Dearest dearest Miss Mitford! You praise me with your love!——
No—neither my power nor my wish touch that point. What Mr Horne and I are engaging ourselves in, is a mere Lyrical Drama; & the title of it, is to be “Psyche Apocalyptic”!—the subject, as is obvious, balancing itself between the high fantastical [9] & the high philosophical—the hero neither a Manfred nor a Faust [10] (we shall keep clear of either) but pretty nearly as mad to vulgar eyes, and suffering persecution from the hauntings of his own soul,—the Psyche—seen in vision, and heard in solitude or crowds. Ah—you shake your head!– I feel it,—as the Olympians did a Jove-shaking—I feel it all this distance off. But we are to have real situations, I mean tangible—men and women talking loud out to one another—& only Psyche is purely psychical. There will be joy and grief—a child and a bridal—we are not quite in the clouds—we keep one foot on the ground.
The mystery is, how I shd have the vanity to consent to a combination with Mr Horne,—whose genius I take high measure of. And besides—there does seem to me an objection to such combinations in general, even with more balanced powers—and to this moment I am not sure how I shall succeed in working by allotment, after the necessary fashion.
The truth is, that Mr Horne long & long ago, more than a year ago said in one of his kind letters that ‘he shd like to write a Lyrical Drama with me.’ I answered more laughingly than I cd now .. joke to joke, as it seemed to me—it was very ingenious in him to want to set up a show, with a dwarf and giant together—some nonsense of that sort—not all nonsense either. Then he was serious and pressed his wish upon it. And I was made serious—and we talked or rather wrote it over—& it was agreed to be done some time—sometime when he & I became acquainted face to face.
A pause came—when this spring Mr Horne (half out of kindness, and the wish to amuse my mind, and perhaps whole) proposed that we shd begin at once—desiring me to consider for a subject. My thoughts grew fantastical, and hummed down upon Psyche—and I was surprised at his accepting the suggestion eagerly,—as a difficult subject but still feasible, and a very fine one. We were agreed in a minute. And now he is arranging the sketch I sent him, into acts (oh we call them ‘acts’ I assure you) and dividing the labour between us. You see the weak sides of Mr Horne and myself bend the same way—to the mystic. That is why we agreed,—and the only excuse for such a partnership.
Have I told you enough? or too much? You are tired of me surely. And now keep the secret—will you?– There was none to you from the first—only I had not breath for a long story: and the simple fact “I am going to write a drama with Mr Horne” might, I thought, sweep you away in a whirlwind with the overwhelming sense of my vanity.
How is dear Dr Mitford? How are you? You were not well, when you wrote. You sit up too late—you do everything too much, even to loving .. no, not loving, .. thinking well of .. me!–
God bless and keep you.
The picture—ah the poor picture!– I will tell you of that another day. Papa said it was’nt like!!– [11] I and the grand Sultan are not people to have our likeness taken. [12]
Your faithful & affectionate
EBB.
Not a line of the dramatic poem is written. Nothing but the plan. We daudle and dream. Mr Horne declared I was asleep & dreaming—and now he has gone down to Wolverhampton on government business [13] about pots & pans & pits, not poetry but pottery–
Flush sends his love–
Do you know Mrs Sigourney—the American poetess? [14] I had a very flattering letter from her just before she sailed, saying that she had tried long & vainly for my direction–
Is the Mr Edward Quillinan who married Mr Wordsworth’s daughter, the ‘Love & War’ Quillinan. [15]
Do write when you have time to throw away– Nobody picks it up so gladly as I—because––no room for reasons. [16]
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 222–225.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by the references to Miss Mitford’s tragedy and EBB’s portrait.
2. The three unities—of time, place and action—were held, particularly by Corneille and other French writers, to be essential to the construction of tragic drama. This theory was an expansion of Aristotle’s dictum, in his Poetics, that unity of action was an absolute dramatic law.
3. Cf. Luke, 2:35.
4. Cf. Macbeth, III, 2, 48 and III, 4, 81.
5. Cf. Wordsworth’s poem beginning “My heart leaps up when I behold” (1807).
6. For Miss Mitford’s proposed tragedy (see letter 797, note 7).
7. Guido Cardinal Bentivoglio (1579–1644) was the author of Della Guerre di Fiandra, translated into English in 1654 as The Compleat History of the Warrs of Flanders, by Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth (1596–1661).
8. Whatever EBB’s suggestion may have been, letter 819 indicates that Miss Mitford did not accept it.
9. Twelfth Night, I, 1, 15.
10. The protagonists in Byron’s Manfred (1817) and Goethe’s Faust (1808) both make pacts with the Devil in return for temporal power.
11. Matilda Carter’s oil painting (see letter 805).
12. Describing a ball given by the Turkish Ambassador in Vienna and the Austrians (1838), Mrs. Trollope wrote: “The next object that attracted notice was a full-length portrait of the Sultan Mahmoud; as the taking such a portrait at all, has been considered till very lately to be a sort of trifling with such august features too familiar to be permitted” (II, 230).
13. As a member of a Royal Commission (see letter 803, note 3).
14. Lydia Howard Sigourney (née Huntley, 1791–1865) was the author of Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse (1815) and Letters to Mothers (1838). She contributed to The Ladies’ Companion and was editor (1839–40) of The Religious Souvenir.
15. EBB had mentioned Quillinan’s earlier work, The Conspirators, in letter 797. Love and War had just been announced. He had married Dorothy (“Dora”) Wordsworth on 11 May 1841, despite her father’s objections.
16. The concluding three sentences are squeezed in the top margin of the first page.
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