3397. Robert Bulwer Lytton to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 194–197.
Florence
April 22d 1854.
My dear Mrs Browning–
Never was letter more warmly welcom’d than that long and pleasant one which this morning’s Post has just brought me from you & Browning: and see! I lose no time in telling you so. You must not suppose my dear Mrs Browning, (nor Browning either) that your silence caused me for one moment any other feeling but anxiety on your account: and the Post here is so irregular that I greatly feared my former letter might not have reached you, in which case you would have held me in your debt, so I wrote only that you might not think your kind letters had remained so long unanswered.
How glad I should be to hear that that great gorgeous Rome had usurpt in your heart no kind memory of Florence, did you not tell me at the same time of so many disasters that have cast upon the Vatican, Capitol, and all those great sights a baleful light!
I am indeed greatly concerned to receive such comfortless news of our poor friends: And pray tell them when you see them how kindly they are thought of here: Your silence indeed caused me some foreboding of these sad accounts which Browning’s letter brings of the Stories. I am glad they think of Switzerland: the very place for them! My heart beats more boldly when I remember its mountains: there is a breeze in the very thought of them.
I think you are quite right about Rome; I, too, was greatly disappointed with the place, but the love of it crept on me day by day as I lingered there. I thought that if I lived there long I should grow at last to be like one of those illustrious pieces of brick work, and gather about my mind a sort of moral moss.
I observed too that all “the oldest inhabitants,” among the English there at least, had this peculiarity. There was something antique in the creak of their boots:—if you spoke to them they sent you an answer from a great way off among the catacombs: they set more store by a bronze thumb-ring of Heliogabalus [1] than they did by the ultimatum of the Two Powers. [2]
What I missed at first was some Vestige of the old Republic .. what one means when one says “Rome”: all the ruins, too, seemed small, as tho’ they had dwindled away to keep pace with the growth of the moral decrepitude there. The Baths of Caracal[l]a, and those other great relics, had about them, to my mind, more of a Brobdignag Brick-Kiln than of the old Thermae; [3] and the most perfect & hugest of the ruins—the Colosseum, was after all, only a wild-beast show!
Of society at Rome I saw nothing: I only went to one party when I was there, and perhaps that is the reason why I grew to like the place so much & leave it with regret.
Of Mrs Crowe, the story, as I have heard it, is: that she appeared in the streets of London, in a state of absolute nakedness, terribly set off by a fan which she held in one hand, and a cardcase in the other. [4] The eccentric career of the poor authoress was arrested, as it seems, in the middle of May Fair by certain materialists in the Police Force and on being by them led captive in her “unadorned loveliness” [5] she informed the upbraiding magistrate before whom they brought her, that this singularity of costume had been adopted in consequence of certain distinct assurances received from “the Spirits” that the arrangement of the Fan and the Cardcase, (in conjunction, I believe; with certain mystic rights [sic] to be performed previous to that abandonment of the trammels of civilization, involved in this experiment) would, if faithfully carried out, result, in complete invisibility. On the strength of these assurances, and, I suppose, like Lady Godiva, sacrificing he<rself> to a principle, in the cause of humanity, she had risen above all considerations of petticoats and prejudice, when that God from the Machine [6] A25, [7] descended with plenary power, and terminated the Drama, in sight of a much-admiring audience.
Mrs Crowe, I understand, attributed the failure of the experiment, to a mistake in the arrangement of the Fan and the Card-case: the Fan, which was in her right, ought, she said, [“]to have been held [in] the left hand, and vice versa” with the Cardcase: in consequence of this slight but deplorable over sight she expressed her intention of repeating the experiment on the following day: but (heu, quæ tanta insania duxit!) [8] The world, deciding that a lady who had gone so far out of her clothes must be a long way out of her mind, postponed the experiment sine die, and put the naked enquiry into Brid[e]well. [9] So triumphed Prejudice and A25.! I know nothing more. We must take no auguries as the crow flies: if those facts which multiply so quick and thick as nearly to exceed all scope of recognition, be really true of course they will survive A25 and “temporary insanity,” and all the laughter in May Fair.
Of myself, I can tell you very little: knowing not more: when my plans are clear to my own comprehension you shall hear them: and before then we shall meet I heartily hope. I had meant to have written to Browning, by this Post. But I see that I shall not have time to do more than send him thro’ you, my cordial love, and warmest thanks for his kind & valued letter. I pray you to say for me, to the Stories when you see them, any thing that will remind them how affectionately and faithfully I am their friend, and how I long for happier news of them:
My poor dog is dead: and I am companionless. Poisoned, I think he was.
I send to Penny innumerable loves: and to you, the back numbers of the Exr: [10] and when you have time I hope you will write to yr friend
R B L
How glad I am to hear that Miss Blagden is coming to Florence: but she has made no sign as yet.
I sent B’s letter to Philipson. [11]
Address, on integral page: Franco Distino / Madame / Madame Browning / 43 Via Bocca di Leone / 2 [sic, for 3] po. / Roma.
Publication: BBIS-10, pp. 68–72 (as 22 March 1854).
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Also known as Elagabalus (ca. 203–222), Roman emperor (218–222), though he reigned as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. He took the name Elagabalus from that of a Syrian sun god whom he elevated above all other gods in Rome. He was notorious for public displays of transvestism and homosexuality, as well as for awarding important offices to his male lovers.
3. Murray’s A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1853) describes the Baths of Caracalla as “the most perfect of all the Roman thermæ. They occupy an area not less than a mile in circuit. … They were begun by Caracalla about A.D. 212; the porticoes were added by Elagabalus; and Alexander Severus completed the whole design” (part II, p. 67). Brobdingnag, the second country Gulliver visits in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), is inhabited by giants.
4. This incident took place in Edinburgh, not London; see letter 3355, note 7.
5. Cf. James Thomson, “Autumn” (The Seasons, 1730), lines 206–208: “… for loveliness / needs not the foreign aid of ornament, / But is when unadorn’d, adorn’d the most.”
6. A literal translation of “deus ex machina.”
7. An arbitrary badge number of a London metropolitan police constable.
8. “Alas, to what wild frenzy leads!” Cf. “O miseri, quae tanta insania, cives?” “My poor countrymen, what monstrous madness is this?” (Virgil, Aeneid, II, 42, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough).
9. Catherine Crowe evidently spent time at Hanwell Asylum (see letter 3355, note 7), but there is no support for Lytton’s remark concerning Bridewell. It was the name of a prison and orphanage in New Bridge Street, originally built as a palace on the Fleet River for Henry VIII. In 1553 Edward VI gave it to the city “for the reception of vagrants and homeless children and for the punishment of petty offenders and disorderly women” (The London Encyclopædia, ed. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, 1983, p. 86). The prison closed in 1855 and was demolished some eight years later.
10. The Examiner.
11. Abramo Philipson; see letter 2751, note 8.
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