So I thank you much, much, for the book. It has interested me, dear Miss Mulock, as a book should, and I am delighted to recognise everywhere undeniable talent and faculty, combined with high and pure aspiration. A clever book, a graceful book, and with the moral grace besides—thank you. Many must have thanked you as well as myself.
At the same time, precisely because I feel particularly obliged to you, I mean to tell you the truth. Your hero is heroic from his own point of view—accepting his own view of the situation, which I, for one, cannot accept, do you know, for I am of opinion that both you and he are rather conventional on the subject of his marriage. I don't in the least understand, at this moment, why he should not have married in the first volume; no, not in the least. It was a matter of income, he would tell me, and of keeping two establishments; and I would answer that it ought rather to have been a matter of faith in God and in the value of God's gifts, the greatest of which is love. I am romantic about love—oh, much more than you are, though older than you. A man's life does not develop rightly without it, and what is called an 'improvident marriage' often appears to me a noble, righteous, and prudent act. Your Ninian was a man before he was a brother. I hold that he had no right to sacrifice a great spiritual good of his own to the worldly good of his family, however he made it out. He should have said: 'God gives me this gift, He will find me energy to work for it and suffer for it. We will all live together, struggle together if it is necessary, a little more poorly, a little more laboriously, but keeping true to the best aims of life, all of us.'
That's what my Ninian would have said. I don't like to see noble Ninians crushed flat under family Juggernauts, from whatever heroic motives—not I. Do you forgive me for being so candid?
I must tell you that Mrs. Jameson, who is staying in this house, read your book in England and mentioned it to me as a good book, 'very gracefully written,' before I read it, quite irrespectively, too, of my dedication, which was absent from the copy she saw at Brighton. It was mentioned as one of the novels which had pleased her most lately.
I shall like to show you my child, as you like children, and as I am vain—oh, past endurance vain, about him. You won't understand a word he says, though, for he speaks three languages at once, and most of the syllables of each wrong side foremost.
No, don't call me a Bonapartist. I am not a Bonapartist indeed. But I am a Democrat and singularly (in these days) consequent about universal suffrage. Also, facts in England have been much mis-stated; but there's no room for politics to-day.
When I thank you, remember that my husband thanks you. We both hope to see you before this month shall be quite at an end, and then you will know me better, I hope; and though I shall lose a great deal by your knowing me, of course, yet you won't, after that, make such mistakes as you 'confess' in this note which I have just read over again. Did I think you 'sentimental'? Won't you rather think me sentimental to-day? Through it all,
Your affectionate
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.