3721. John Ruskin to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 90–91.
[London]
[ca. 25 January 1856] [1]
Dear Browning.
There is one thing which will surprise you—& at first painfully because you will think it wrong, in the book I have just sent you, [2] —namely that I have not spoken of your poems in it—when you know that I admire them. I mean to speak of some in the next volume, (out in about eight weeks I hope)—in this I was literally afraid of telling any more truth—the mob do so entirely hate every form of truth & reality that it is a mere question how far you can go without being stoned [3] —and I did not choose to make you incur the risk of what I am likely to get for my Raphael work in this volume– [4] Not only this but I don’t know even yet what to think or say about you, what I am going to say will be about your wonderful understanding of painting & mediaevalism, unique among poets, and some reference to St Praxeds under coloured stones. [5] But for general witness to your standing among poets I am quite—as yet—incapable–
—It is perhaps especially unlucky that I—who am on the whole better able to understand your artistic handling than most men—am yet so much out of the way of real “men & women”—that just as in an assembly room I am always doing awkward things and not understanding what people say to me till five minutes after they have bid me final goodnight, so all your drama—obscure to most from their want of sympathy & passion, is obscure to me from my want of wit. I have I suppose—about as strong reasoning and about as feeble uptaking power, as ever man had; if it were not for consciousness of this deficiency I should scold you as violently as I could for not speaking plainer.
This letter will I trust convince you of the truth of the assertion in my last—of my excessive dislike of modesty. Writing so coolly as if it were a matter of so mighty importance what I said of your book.
Excuse this scrawl—for I have only been four hours out of bed & am still weak—but the sore throat & feverishness quite beaten. With all best regards to Mrs Browning
Affectionately Yours,
J Ruskin
Over
—By the bye—seriously—will you tell me what “Onion stone” [6] is and what is the Latin or Italian term which I suppose you translate because I must put a note to it in quoting.
Do you mean anybody in particular by the lost leader? [7] & how was Shakespeare of us, [8] in that sense– Shakespeare was a monstrous Tory–
Address: Affranchie / Robert Browning Esq / 3. Rue du Colysée / Paris.
Publication: DeLaura, p. 329.
Manuscript: University of Texas.
1. Dating suggested by RB’s reference to this letter in letter 3726.
3. Cf. John 8:57–59.
4. In chapter four (“Of the False Ideal:—First, Religious”) in Modern Painters, Vol. III (1856), Ruskin criticizes Raphael’s “Madonna of the Chair” as “one form of the sacrifice of expression to technical merit” (p. 52). His cartoon “Christ’s Charge to Peter” also elicits Ruskin’s displeasure (see letter 3732, note 7).
5. Ruskin fulfills this promise in Modern Painters, Vol. IV, published in April 1856. After quoting 44 lines of RB’s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” (Poems, 1849; as “The Tomb at St. Praxed’s” in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845), he writes: “I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the ‘Stones of Venice’ put into as many lines, Browning’s being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people’s patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin’s talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinal” (pp. 378–379).
6. Cf. “The Tomb at St. Praxed’s,” line 31. As RB explains in letter 3726, the term itself is his translation of the Italian word “cipollino” (literally “small onion”), designating an inferior kind of marble.
7. William Wordsworth; see the last paragraph in letter 3726.
8. Cf. RB, “The Lost Leader” (1845), line 13.
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