SD1218. James Ferrier to Editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 317.

14 Carlton Street

Thursday evening [ca. November 1844]

My dear Sir

Miss B may to a certain extent make a tolerable, but certainly not a complete defence of herself on the ground of the cases you have pointed out– The first instance may be construed “I of brute becoming human, you of human becoming gods.” In that there is no great violence done to ordinary language. And the antithesis being established it gains force by being reiterated in the same language in the second instance, & indeed these terms could not well have been changed. Miss Barretts context I think affords her no such justification. But the point admits of controversy, & I shall be satisfied to rest my assault against her, in the norma loquendi[.]

Innovation I admit could have been a much better word than anomaly–

You are right in your dates about Milton & Mallebranche & I also was perfectly well acquainted with them—but begging your pardon the point has nothing to do with dates at all—at least it is sufficient for my purpose if Mallebranche died before Miss B. wrote her verse about Milton. What I wrote was probably not very much to the point—but it meant this: Miss B undertook to characterize Milton, & in doing so she told us that God was his “sole vision”—but, said I, Mallebranche had long before her time said that all human vision was mediated through the divine Ideas which were the proximate ef[f]ect of perception & that therefore if that theory be true Miltons mode of vision is not sufficiently discrim[in]ated from the vision of common men–

Yours affly

J F Ferrier

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: National Library of Scotland.

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