SD1552.1. Mary Russell Mitford to Digby Starkey
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 18.
[Swallowfield]
[Postmark: 25 February 1852]
You will spoil me, dear Mr. Starkey, by over-kindness, which from such a person as you is very dangerous. I can hardly tell you how much I was made ashamed by your letter; the estimate of those poor poets is a poem in itself—all the more a poem because of its truth. It is a compliment to my own critical vanity to say how nearly we agree in our estimate, differing only so far as any two outspoken and independent minds unbiassed by clique or coterie would be sure to differ, as much as two leaves upon the same oak-tree. I have been called to the examination of our recent great poets, or rather to my own impression of them, by the receipt of the sheets of a poem—not yet published—called “Verdicts.” It arrived without preface, title-page, or written note, or anything to give token of the author, and it is only by an advertisement in a paper sent to me to-day for another purpose that I find it to be published by Effingham Wilson. It is very powerful, knocking down false reputations, Keble, Pollok, Kirke White, Robert Montgomery (by the way, Mrs. Hoare tells me the aforesaid Robert proposed to and was refused by poor Mrs. James Gray), separating the man Southey from the author and the poet Wordsworth from the man.
It is the first time I ever saw the truth told in print of Wordsworth, whom I never saw in his own mountains, but whom I sat next at dinner one year in London four days running, to the great endangerment of my admiration, for a man so wrapt up in the double worship of his own poetry and of mere rank and riches in others I never did see. It is not of that that the poet of “Verdicts” talks, but of his general coldness to others; we neither of us bring the slightest accusation against him in point of conduct, but the thing was disenchanting, nevertheless. There are a good many points in which he and I should disagree, and his over-estimate of my poor books is something to wonder at in so acute a person. But still it is a very powerful and shining poem, and would have been sure to make a sensation, if the author had had a little more sense of sound. It is written in the Bath Guide jingle, which, if it do not run trippingly over the tongue, is worse than nothing. None but a contemporary of Moore can tell how much his fine feeling of rhythm, the flow and sweetness of his verse, aided his reputation. People were helped to the words by the sound, and so remembered them; it was like an air in music.
And so, dear Mr. Starkey, you have written a tragedy! and upon the most delightful of all subjects, the Spaniards and the Moors. I remember seeing a great conjunction of fine actors, Young, Charles Kemble, Macready, and Miss O’Neill in a drama called the “Apostate,” by Mr. Shiel. Of course such a cast would have ensured success under any circumstances; but I always thought the happy selection of place, and time, and races did more for it still. I would never recommend any friend to write for the stage, because it nearly killed me with its unspeakable worries and anxieties, and I am certainly ten years older for having so written; but of all forms of poetry it is the one I prefer, and I would always advise the writing with a view to the production of the piece upon the boards, because it avoids the danger of interminable dialogues of coldness and of languor. I remember a dear friend of mine (Mr. Monck, member for Reading, a first-rate scholar, and a man of great general taste) confessing to me that he read himself to sleep four nights in one week over the “Fall of Jerusalem” of our mutual friend Mr. Milman. Write for the stage, but don’t bring the play out, that is my advice. If you wish to know my reasons, you may find some of them in the fact that one of my tragedies had seven last acts, and that two others fought each other during a whole season at Covent Garden Theatre, Mr. Macready insisting upon producing one, Charles Kemble equally bent upon the other—neither of them even pretending to any superiority of either play, but because one, a man of fifty, would play the young man’s part, and the other insisted that none but himself should have anything like a telling part at all. Both were read in the green-room, both advertised, and just think of the poor author in the country all the time, while the money was earnestly wanted, and the non-production fell upon her like a sin!
Some day you must let me see your tragedy. I am very sure that it is the finest form of poetry, that which unites passion and action, which talks, and lives, and moves.
Yes, it was Beranger. I have a great love of French literature, and a great habit of throwing myself into it for months together, and the lyrics of Victor Hugo (not his dramas or novels), and the chansons of the great old man (of which I do not mean the chansons griroises, for which he is now probably infinitely grieved) always seem to me the verdant spots of French poetry. I forgot to tell Emily Jephson that Mr[s]. Browning says M. de Cormenin (you know the brilliant political writer) was Louis Napoleon’s adviser in the confiscation of the Orleans property.
I shall have tired you to death with this long scrawl, dear Mr. Starkey, all unworthy as I am to be the faintest shadow of Miss Edgeworth. But my rheumatism is to blame. I have been afraid of the wind to-day, and my correspondents have suffered.
Text: L’Estrange (1), II, 175–179.
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