SD1454.1. Mary Russell Mitford to Agnes Jennings
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 16.
Three Mile Cross,
Nov. 9, 1850.
Your two delightful letters, my very dear Mrs. Jennings, deserve a better return than they are likely to get at this moment. Nevertheless, I cannot put off writing any longer. When the days get a little longer—that is to say, early in the new year—I shall do by you what I used to do by Elizabeth Barrett—take a return ticket to go up for the day to Portland Place, arriving about three o’clock, or two perhaps, and returning by the half-past seven o’clock train. Then we can have a grand discussion upon a Welsh cottage. You and Mr. Jennings are the temptations; the distance, and absence of books, the objections. But we must meet and have a long talk. Are there dry winter walks? that is a great point. I live entirely, I may say, on boiled sole, boiled whiting, and fruit; fish of any other sort I could not touch. And fruit—strawberries, for instance, currants, grapes—must be come-at-able, in large quantities and for a long time. We have now out-of-door grapes hung up to last until March. This, dear friend, is a point of health with me. I never can eat meat or butter, or milk or eggs, or poultry. Is there good brown bread? All these questions we can discuss, and I mention them now that you may ask. But I dread the want of books; I have the habit of running over almost every book of any note that is published; and a book club always has seemed to me a sort of mental imprisonment—a shutting into one little room, and being kept on water gruel. Then I have five thousand or six thousand volumes to move, as well as furniture. About neighbours I do not care. Mr. Jennings and you, and one clever man, would do. I rather dislike neighbours—don’t you? Do you remember what Horace Walpole says of the country?—“Questions grow there, and the Christian commodity neighbours.” That has always seemed to me among the raciest of his racy bits. You and Mr. Jennings are the temptation. And then, this cottage is likely to fall about my ears; yet I cling to it—to the green lanes—which you have not seen—to the commons, the copses, the old trees—every bit of the old country. It is only a person brought up in the midst of woods and fields, in one country place, who can understand that strong local attachment. But we must talk over the matter; most assuredly nothing but illness shall prevent my having the great pleasure of going to see you in London. You must thank for me your pleasant friend. I am ashamed not to recollect him; but that Manor House has had so many guests, that one gets confounded amongst them. Was he a visitor of Sir William Pym?
Just now, I have been much interested by a painting that has been going on in the corner of our village street—the inside of an old wheelwright’s shop—a large barn-like place, open to the roof, full of detail, with the light admitted through the half of hatch doors, and spreading upwards. It is a fine subject, and finely treated. The artist is one, not yet much known, of the name of Pasmore. But I judge by this he will make a name for interiors. It is capitally peopled, too—with children, picking up chips and watching an old man sharpening a saw, and peeping in through windows, stretching up to look through them. I hear it has pleased Henry Phillips, the bass singer, to make one of his pleasant musical entertainments out of my book—for the libretto is as much his as the music—and accordingly he is coming to sing and recite “Our Village,” and I am going to hear him. Have you read “Alton Locke”? I have not; nor, although he is almost a neighbour, do I know Mr. Kingsley. His other work, “The Saint’s Tragedy,” was full of power, but painful, disagreeable, and inconclusive; and I think it likely, from all that I hear, that this is the same; although my friend Mr. Pearson, the vicar of Sonning, said to me yesterday that there was in it a startling amount of world-wide truth.
Yours ever most faithfully,
M.R.M.
Text: L’Estrange (2), III, 220–222.
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