SD2238. Jessie White Mario to Editor of The Evening Post
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 341–352.
Washington
4 February 1859
I have seen the letter from Mr. and Mrs. Browning published in your paper. I am not aware that any American paper has ever stated that I was “recommended by them to lecture on Orsini and Italian politics.” My letters of recommendation to America were from Professor and Mrs. Nichol, Mrs. Mary Howitt, J. D. Morell, M.A., Kossuth, Mazzini, etc. etc. Mr. and Mrs. Browning have long been (and judging from their last letters to me still are) my intimate personal friends, but Mrs. Browning’s opinions on Louis Napoleon, whom she calls in Aurora Leigh “no despot, though thrice absolute,” suffice to prove that we differ entirely in our political views.
At the time of Orsini’s execution, Mrs. Browning pleaded earnestly with me to make a public declaration of my hatred of political assassination. I replied by asking her whether she thought the murderer of Rome, the author of the 2,652 murders on the Boulevards of Paris, on the second of December, 1851; or the man who, having spent his life in telling and fighting for his country, risked that life, and lost it in his attempt to lay Rome’s assassin low, the greater murderer of the two? And here the matter ended.
I have never lectured on Orsini in America, though in my lecture [in Clinton Hall] I expressed my surprise that those who blame him applaud the perjured tyrant who has waded through the blood of two nations to a throne. I have also affirmed that any attempt made by Piedmont, or any other power, at the instigation of Louis Napoleon, to change the condition of Italy will result, perhaps, in a change of tyrants; will, perhaps, lessen Austria’s power to increase French sway in the Peninsula, but will never lessen Italian suffering nor advance Italian independence. Many of my best friends hold a contrary opinion; I respect theirs, but I retain my own, founded as it is on the experience of the past. Time will prove which is right.
I have never spoken on Mr. or Mrs. Browning in connection with politics. In my lecture on “Illustrious Italian Women,” I referred to the latter as the “greatest poetess that has yet arisen in the world; one of the noblest women; one of the most devoted wives and mothers that any age has seen.” If any American papers have spoken in any other sense, they have done so on their own responsibility.
Text: The Evening Post [New York], 7 February 1859.
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