SD1487. Mary Russell Mitford to Charles Boner
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 268 (in part).
Three Mile Cross
July 20, 1851.
I do not know, dear Mr. Boner, whether, when I last wrote.
… as Mrs. Browning has advanced as far as Paris towards London, I wait to know whether she really does mean to come to England this year before making up my mind to take the journey without the chance of seeing her. Unless she comes, I don’t think I shall get to London. …
Mrs. Browning sent me her book. It is a dull tirade on Italian politics. When I say dull and yet vigorously written, that sounds like a contradiction, but it is not so. The subject, which is not largely though forcibly treated, is so unreal that it excites no sympathy, for it seems to me out of the question that a people without recent poetry, without living literature, without even an attempt at eloquence,—whose last great writer was Alfieri, whose sculpture has dwindled into wood-carving, whose pictorial art into mosaic copies, who have not even produced one man of mark in this general tossing up of nations, should be ripe for freedom and self-government. Year by year they seem to me dwindling. Even music, which held by them longest, is now dying away. They have still singers, but they have no composers. Italy is an extinct volcano. The very smoke is gone, and it seems to me wrong as well as foolish to try to provoke a struggle, which can only end in the reaction always so fatal to progress and rational liberty. Don’t you agree with me? There are one or two tolerable passages, but the metre is harsh and unattractive, and the triple rhyme of Dante quite unsuited to English verse; and the only result of the book will be a bill at Chapman and Hall’s, and a total exclusion from Italy for the writer in case she wants to return thither. It will make no hit here. …
Text: Memoirs and Letters of Charles Boner, ed. R.M. Kettle (London, 1871), I, 210–212.
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