3726. RB to John Ruskin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 101–106.
Paris, Rue du Colisée 3.
Feb. 1. ’56.
My dear Ruskin,
I was reading your book when your letter followed it: had got to, or near, page 96. What with my delight at all that, and the new touch of the spur which the letter gave me, with its kindness and care about me,—I don’t know that I ever resisted so urgent an impulse to write at once. I would go on, however, and did. Really there is very much to be grateful for. You know it, I am sure. I pretend only to having surveyed the ground and mean to make it my own by enough reading. I am confident, for one thing, that I follow your lead to that page—96. with just a continual internal glad cry of assent & thanks: In the main & in the detail, all shines out clear & right. After that, the illumination seems to proceed differently,—not so much like a furrow of gunpowder running off into unbroken fire, but an arrangement of rockets of various sorts & sizes which I see you stoop over and put the fusee to—some explode, some catch at the rim and one is certain of them,—and if some few hang fire, seemingly—they may no less go off of themselves when one least expects it. Of course, it all comes of the requirements of the particular ground, in either case: and I witness to a great and noble lighting-up on the whole—if there is a reserve of flashes for a finale, I shall not wonder. The obstinately black case is “Scott”: [1] & I despair of him the more that he does fizz ineffectually, & keep on at that,—so, when is the ball ever to go up? In the “fine description” [2] for instance, page 280, “que vois-je?” [3] —as they used to ask in classic rhyme: when you give the preference to color over form in poetic artistry, I demur,—for the first thing,—in cases like this; because you can, as you say & do, spread the colors in “a rainbow band” [4] on the very page of your book, or give them to so many butterfly-wings, or bits of earth & ore,—or innumerable other things in nature—whereas had Scott given the forms of those particular things, they would have just been of use there & nowhere else: turn to your admirable “St George” & the hills to the right [5] & describe these last by the colors only—& hear Shelley try the other way with the forms–
Those famous Euganean hills which wear—
As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour-piles—
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles. [6]
There they are, you see. Next, do you call these colors definite—you who properly call his “ridgy” & “massy” [7] &c. vague? [8] The secret seems in this,—that all colors are perfect in our conception, and anybody may delight you, whose conception is intense, by striking you “a chord” of purple, gold, pale-grey & so on: [9] but forms address no such conception, and must strike you by their relation to something, not in their own virtue—what show does the “band”—“it’s round, square, peaked, flat”—make on the page—or out of it? Certainly you may color away, in patches or at hap-hazard, & so well enough with little expenditure of power,—not so, the other way. Then,—in artistry, Scott’s trick is so poor—you put “green” for his “verdant,” “pure black” for his “sable” & so on: [10] “sable,” for instance, I consider bad in the three instances of its occurrence here & next page—it comes too freshly from the little creature’s back, bringing fitch & all into the turret, strath & yew-tree: [11] it goes perfectly with a beard “sable-silvered” [12] —admirably with a cloud—“sable with silver lining” [13] passably with a large yew-tree roof, as Wordsworth makes it, [14] —but I feel the texture too much in a sable “turret.” Then you say he “only hints at form” in the “ridgy”, “massy” & so on: what do you make of that last choice sample at the description of the Firth,—rolling with its isles floating on its bosom, like emeralds chased in gold [15] —which certainly do float there like the islands in a rolling stream– Further,—I see in this passage everywhere attempts to do the very thing you say the moderns do, and Scott will not: I should say, pitiably cannot: could “feebler poets use any expression about the temper” [16] of natural objects more evident, and feeble too, than “lustre proud”—the Castle “holds its state” “each top the rays kissed”, the “gallant Firth”, [17] & so on? Lastly, you know what you say very energetically & observably about modern poets being “without God in the world” [18] “an inherent & continual habit of thought which Scott shares with the moderns in general, being the instinctive sense of the divine presence, not formed into distinct belief: it creates no perfect form, does not apprehend distinctly any Divine being or operation, but only an animation (slightly credited) in the objects of nature—this feeling (you sum up) is quite universal with us.” [19] Now, here I will take a liberty you would give me more difficultly elsewhere. I look at this as requiring answer, if answer be to give,—and, for one, & as poor an one as you please, speak for myself out of the “universally habituated.” Of all my things, the single chance I have had of speaking in my own person—not dramatically—has been in a few words in the course of “Sordello”—a poem never forgotten, for a good reason, but printed sixteen years ago: here it is,—I am rolling its clots out into one flat [20] —so I at once ask myself—knowing what my faith was, & immeasurably deeplier is—“Did I then, if I needed to notice a natural object, really with[h]old my tributary two-mites tho’ they do but make a farthing?” [21] —I dip for & find these passages—now; do read them. “By this, the hermit-bee has stopped
His day’s toil at Goito: the new-cropped
Dead vine-leaf answers, now ’tis eve, he bit—
Twirled so, and filed all day: the mansion’s fit
God counselled for: as easy guess the word
That passed betwixt them, and become the Third
To (God and) the soft, small, unfrightened bee, as tax
Him with one fault.” page 242.
(Alberic Romano was) “tied to a wild horse & trailed
To death thro’ raunce and bramble-bush: I take
God’s part and testify that, mid the brake
Wild o’er his castle on Zenoni’s knoll,
You hear its one tower left, a belfry, toll:
Cherups the contumacious grasshopper,
Rustles the lizard and the cushats chirre
Above the ravage. 248–[249].
Lo, on a heathy, brown and nameless hill
By sparkling Asolo, in mist and chill,
Morning just up, higher and higher runs
A child barefoot and rosy. See! the sun’s
On the square castle’s inner-court’s green wall
Like the chine of some fossil animal
Half-turned to earth and flowers: and thro’ the haze
(Save where some slender patches of grey maize
Are to be overleaped) that boy has crossed
The whole hill-side of dew and powder-frost
Matting the balm and mountain camomile:
Up and up goes he, singing all the while
Some unintelligible words to beat
The lark, God’s poet—swooning at his feet,
So worsted is he at the “few fine locks
“Stained like pale honey oozed from top most rocks
“Sunblanched the live-long summer” … all that’s left
Of the Goito lay! ([251–]252.) [22]
Now, I think you will not object to me the poor quality of my verse any more than you would deny a man’s Christianity because he prayed in broken English: I know & can mend the bad English poetry here—but I am free of your graver reproach, I hope. This is certainly the first time in my whole life that I ever quoted a line of my own—but you write to me in the fullness of the days and I want to stand no worse with you than must be. And so I come to your judgment on my poetry. You know whether I should be proud or no to be recognized by you, as you propose: also, despite your entire goodness and sympathy, whether I suppose you will say one word that you do not think. I can only speak to that goodness and bid you try and know me before you make up your mind: I aim widely and want more than a glance to take in all I endeavor at, hit or miss. With your letter came one from Carlyle– I hide his gold words as if I had stolen them, as I partly have,—but he looks to what suits his own sight in what I show. So God makes him, you & me.
See what I have written, for the few words that were needed—or the many words and books that otherwise were needed!! Too much & too little! I will write again, if you <can> bear with me, and try and put down some of the thoughts & feelings such work as yours strikes out of me. Now—I have to answer you that onion-stone [23] is the grey cipollino [24] —good for pillars and the like, bad for finer work, thro’ its being laid coat upon coat, onion-wise,—don’t I explain by translating the word, and do you like it a whit more? Don’t tell that I thought of—who else but Wordsworth? [25] Shakespeare was of us—not for us, like Him of the Defensio, [26] nor abreast of our political sympathies like the other two: [27] I wish he had been more than of us. There is for me—& for you .. oh, how utterly wrong you are in supposing that you want imagination! I will recur to that whenever I hesitate to think you can be wrong in a lesser matter. All this while, not a word about your illness—your fever and sore throat: while the pen was in my hand I did actually only see the soul of you, bright and better than ever, and the flesh was out of my thoughts—for the few minutes, do believe, and no more! It was painfully kind of you to write that first note just after leaving your bed—and we thought of you anxiously, you are also to believe: care for yourself for ourselves. If you please to let us know—if but by a word or two—how you are, it will be a great comfort. We shall look steadily to the delight of seeing you, face to face, in the summer. My wife is better, writing hard at the table here; and I will have no fear that you disesteem her writing—of which I have priveleged to see somewhat a week or two since—beautiful, I dare say. [28] I please myself by thinking that I shall see the effect of your book on many new minds, French and English: I begin by lending it—when I do lend it—to one of the noblest of minds & men, Milsand. [29] Good bye meanwhile dear Ruskin—remember us kindly, if you please, to your Mother, and take my wife’s truest thanks and regard with those of yours ever affectionately,
Robert Browning.
Address, on integral page: Angleterre. / John Ruskin Esq Junr / Denmark Hill, Camberwell, / near London.
Publication: BBIS-17 (includes facsimile).
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. In chapter 16 (“Of Modern Landscape”) in Modern Painters, Vol. III (1856), Ruskin quotes a number of passages from Sir Walter Scott’s poetry, particularly Marmion (Edinburgh and London, 1808), to support his theories of landscape painting.
2. Of Edinburgh. Ruskin gives “celebrated description” in Modern Painters, III, 280. The passage under discussion is from Marmion, IV, 30, 5–28.
3. “What do I see?”
4. Referring to Scott’s use of colour in the “celebrated description,” Ruskin wrote: “But the colours are all definite; note the rainbow band of them—gloomy or dusky red, sable (pure black), amethyst (pure purple), green, and gold—a noble chord throughout” (Modern Painters, III, 280).
5. RB refers to Ruskin’s drawing, “St. George of the Seaweed” in Modern Painters (III, between pp. 322 and 323), which depicts San Giorgio in Alga, an island in the Venetian Lagoon, at sunset with the Euganean Hills to the right.
6. Cf. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo (1824), lines 77–79.
7. Marmion, IV, 30, 16–17.
8. “I do not like to spoil a fine passage by italicizing it; but observe, the only hints at form, given throughout, are in the somewhat vague words, ‘ridgy,’ ‘massy,’ ‘close,’ and ‘high’” (Modern Painters, III, 280).
9. After quoting from Scott’s Rokeby (Edinburgh and London, 1813), III, 8, 5–30, Ruskin writes: “Note, first, what an exquisite chord of colour is given in the succession of this passage. It begins with purple and blue; then passes to gold … then to pale grey” (Modern Painters, III, 281).
10. See note 4 above.
11. The “three instances” that RB cites occur in the following lines quoted by Ruskin in Modern Painters (III, 280 and 281): “That graced the sable strath with green” (The Lady of the Lake, Edinburgh and London, 1810, III, 19, 9); “That round her sable turrets flow” (Marmion, IV, 30, 9); and “The hazel rude, and sable yew” (Rokeby, III, 8, 24).
12. Cf. Hamlet, I, 2, 241.
13. Cf. Milton, Comus (1637), lines 221–222.
14. Wordsworth, “Yew-Trees” (1815), line 23: “Perennially—beneath whose sable roof.”
15. Cf. Marmion, IV, 30, 9–28.
16. Cf. Modern Painters, III, 279.
17. These phrases occur in Marmion, IV, 30, 11–26.
18. Ephesians 2:12. Ruskin quotes this passage earlier in chapter 16: “There never yet was a generation of men (savage or civilized) who, taken as a body, so wofully fulfilled the words, ‘having no hope, and without God in the world,’ as the present civilized European race” (Modern Painters, III, 258).
19. Cf. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III, 275.
20. RB was working on a revision of Sordello (1840), a project he had announced to J.T. Fields in letter 3618.
21. Cf. Mark 12:42.
22. Cf. Sordello (1840), VI, 619–626, 778–785, 849–866. RB’s page references correspond to the first edition. The passages here reflect some of the changes RB would include in the revised version of the poem as published in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (3 vols., 1863).
23. “The Tomb at St. Praxed’s” (1845), line 31.
24. Literally, “small onion.”
25. As the subject of “The Lost Leader” (1845).
26. i.e., John Milton, who wrote a number of tracts with the word “Defensio” in the title. RB is probably thinking of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Contra Claudii Anonymi, alias Salmasii, Defensionem Regiam (1651), better known as Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. A copy of this book (published in 1652) formed lot 920 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1621).
27. Burns and Shelley; cf. “The Lost Leader,” lines 13–14. “Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, / Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!”
28. RB had read the first two books of Aurora Leigh; see the second paragraph in letter 3716 and the last paragraph in letter 3724.
29. Milsand would later publish a review of all five volumes of Modern Painters in Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 July 1860, entitled “John Ruskin. Nouvelles théories de l’art en Angleterre.”
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