3799. Robert Bulwer Lytton to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 237–241.
Hague.
Thursday Evg [12 June 1856] [1]
In no wise, my dearest friend, have I attributed your silence to any change in those friendly feelings on your part, in which I shall never relinquish my belief without losing therewith much of my self esteem. I am more proud of having obtained your friendship than of any thing else which I owe to myself or to fortune; and more anxious to retain it than any other possession. It is the grand Cordon, and enobles the owner.
How cordial, & thorough is my affection—my veneration for you, O et præsidium et dulce decus meum! [2] .. But I wont speak of what gains nothing by expression, and needs it not, as I hope.
I should have written to you sooner, and have reproached myself for not so doing– But my employment for the last week or so, has thrown me back with all my correspondence, and I recommence its duties by thanking you for your letter.
It is a Review upon Lever’s books long promised and tardily performed, (as I must own) which has of late absorbed the greater part of my leisure hours. He writes to ask “What of the Review?” My conscience pricks me; and so a week’s hurry has to make up for a month’s delay. [3] It had not indeed gone as “alms for oblivion” into that wallet of Time’s; [4] but was neglected at Paris, like many other duties.
How glad I am that Mrs Browning is so near the end of a Poem which is to be a very great event for me when publisht!
I own to the strongest possible curiosity about that Poem– .. a tale of Today in blank verse, in which the great Social Sphynx [5] is to be answered broadly on some point, as I trust!
How will that be?
Both of the supreme genius & the full success of any thing she writes there can be no doubtful anticipation–
But the fashion and form of it I am most curious to see.
How does So[r]dello advance? [6] You say not a word of him. But I like to hope that he has not been lain aside.
Now of my own doings—“for myself”—as you say, I should have had more to tell you, were it not for many interruptions: Amongst others—the necessity of preparing for an examination consequent on my Attachéship, and which I am a little indignant at. Still I have done something. I have conceived a longish poem. Eight Books I fear it will take to get to an end. The first I have finished 130 stanzas! Story Midiæval. Scene Italy. Reflections & allusions Modern. [7] How it will succeed I cant forsee. It is very unlike anything I have yet done– But I feel hopeful about it. I send you, by the way of poetry, some Verses which, when I wrote them, seemed to me to suggest something new as to metre. But I suspect, after all, that I have been harping on old strings. Such as they are, here they are! [8]
I am still in Story’s debt, as to letters. And have much shame in remembering it. Oh for the wings of a dove [9] to flee away and be at rest! When I have sufficiently convinced my friends of my extreme incompetence in this precious profession of Twad[d]le, and live, with a tortoise, and some old Italian thief as grey as a badger—in a little villa some where near the Appenines [sic], where now and then you’ll come and see me, I shall then be the most constant and gar[r]ulous of correspondents. Wait and see!
Pray ask Mrs B. to retail me some of Story’s Spirit-News, when she writes.
I told my chef here [10] that I had shaken hands with a ghost, and he has had a mean opinion of me ever since. Of my chef, by the way, I cant speak, witht telling you how amiable, how hospitable, kind and considerate he is—and a good lover of Italy, hearty in hate of the Austrian as could be wished. Certainly, a pleasant change from the Phar[a]oh at Paris, [11] who is all for the Bricks-without-straw [12] way of business.
From Miss Blagden, I heard after her arrival at Florence; She was then with Mde Tassinari, now I suppose in her own Villa. I write to her this week.
A dozen or more good and dear women must have gone to the making of that one little body. I know of none so essentially loveable, and absolutely to be loved, thro’ & thro’. I have only a corner left in which to send my love to Penini; my prayers for a letter to Mrs Browning, and to you all, the assurance of my most hearty & affect. love.
Entirely yours
R B Lytton.
Pray, pray remember me cordially to your Sister and your Father—also remember, when you see him, to yr Friend– When is the Review to be out? [13] I look in vain.
What is Leighton doing?
Address, on cover sheet: Affranchie / Robert. Browning Esqr / 3. Rue du Colisée / Paris.
Publication: BBIS-10, pp. 121–123.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
Enclosure:
By the grey sand-hills, oer the cold sea-shore; where, dumbly peering,
Pass the pale-sail’d ships, scornfully, silently wheeling, and veering
Swift of sight again; while the wind searches what it finds never,
Oer the sand-reaches, bays, billows, blown beaches—homeless forever!
And, in a vision of the bare heaven, seen and soon lost again,
Over the rolling foam, out in the mid-seas, round by the coast again,
Hovers the sea-gull, poised in the wind above; oer the bleak surges,
In the green briny gleam, briefly reveal’d and gone; fleet, as emerges
Out of the tumult in some brain where Memory labours, and fretfully
Moans all the night long, a wild-winged Hope, soon fleeting regretfully:
There walk the lost Gods o’ dark Scandinavia, morning and even;
Faint, pale Divinities, realmless and sorrowful; exil’d from Heaven;
Burthen’d with memories of old Theogonies; each ruin’d Monarchy
Roaming amazèd by seas oblivious of ancient feälty.
Never again at the tables of Odin, in their lost Banquet-Hall,
Shall they from golden cups drink, hearing golden harps, harping high festival;
Never praise bright-hair’d Freya in Vingolf for her lost loveliness;
Never, with Ægir, sail round cold, moonlit, isles of green wilderness.
There, on the lone wind, thro’ the long twilight, when day is waning,
Many a hopeless voice near the night is heard, coldly complaining.
There, in the glimmering darkness, when winds are dropt, and not a seaman sings
From cape or foreland, pause, and pass silently, forms of discrownèd Kings,
With sweepy, floating, folds of dim garments; wandering in wonder
Of their own aspect; trooping towards midnight; feeling for thunder.
Here, in the afternoon, while, in her father’s boat heavily laden,
Mending the torn nets, sings up the bleak bay, the fisher-maiden,
I, too, forelornely [sic] wandering, wandering, see, with the mind’s eye,
Shadows beside me (—hearing the wave moan, hearing the wind sigh)–
Shadows and images; balefully beautiful, of days departed:
Sounds of faint footsteps, gleams of pale foreheads, make me sad hearted;—
Sad for the lost, irretrievable sweetness of former hours;
Sad with delirious, dessolate [sic] odours from faded flowers;
Sad for the beautiful gold hair, the exquisite, exquisite graces
Of a divine face, hopelessly unlike all other faces.
Oer the gray sandhills, where I sit sullenly, full of black fancies,
’Nipt by the sea-wind, drencht with the sea-salt, little dwarf pansies
Flower, and freshly tremble and twinkle,—sweet sisterhoods;—
Lone, and how lovely, with their frail green stems, and dark purple hoods!
Here, even here in the midst of monotonous, fixt, dessolation [sic],
Nature has touches of tenderness, beauties of young variation;—
Where, O my heart, in thy ruin’d and dessolate, dessolate places,
Springs there a flow[e]ret, or gleams there the green of a single oasis?..
Hidden, it may be perchance, and I know it not,—hidden yet inviolate,
Pushes the germ of an unconscious rapture in me, like the violet
Which, on the bosom of March, the snows cover, and keep till the coming
Of April;—the first bee shall find, when he wanders, and welcome it, humming.
Teach me; thou North, where the winds lie in ambush; the rains, and fowl weather
Are stored in the house of the storms, and the snowflakes are garner’d together;
Where man’s stern, dominate, sovereign, intelligence holds in allegiance
Whatever blue Sirius beholds on this earth-ball;—all seas and all regions,
The iron in the hill’s heart, the spirit in the loadstone, the ice in the poles,
All powers, all dominions; ships; merchandize; armaments; beasts; human souls.
Teach me thy secrets. Teach, to refrain, to restrain, to be still;—
Teach me unspoken, steadfast, endurance; the silence of Will.
Robt Lytton
The Hague.
12/June/56
1. Date provided by Lytton at end of his enclosed poem.
2. “O my bulwark and my glory dearly cherished” (Horace, Odes, I, 1, 2, trans. C.E. Bennett).
3. We have been unable to trace a review by Lytton of Lever’s work published around this time. One did appear, years later, in the April 1862 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (pp. 452–472).
4. Cf. Troilus and Cressida, III, 3, 145–146.
5. Cf. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Book 1, chap. 2 (“The Sphinx”): “How true for example, is that other old Fable of the Sphinx, who sat by the wayside, propounding her riddle to the passengers, which if they could not answer she destroyed them! Such a Sphinx is this Life of ours, to all men and societies of men.” EBB uses the same image in Aurora Leigh, IV, 1184–85: “This social Sphinx, / Who sits between the sepulchres and stews” (see Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds, Athens, Ohio, 1992, p. 626).
6. i.e., RB’s revision; see letter 3705, note 20.
7. Lytton was working on a long poem “The Abbess” during 1856. However, it was eventually abandoned because of the discouraging comments he received from John Forster and the Brownings, as well as his own negative assessment. See Lytton’s letter to his father, 15 December 1856 (ms with Cobbold) and also his letter to the Brownings, 26 December 1856 (ms at ABL).
8. These lines (see enclosure) were eventually published as “The North Sea” in The Wanderer, a volume of poems published under the pseudonym “Owen Meredith” in 1859.
9. Cf. Psalm 55:6.
10. Sir Ralph Abercromby (1803–68), later 2nd Baron Dunfermline, only son of James Abercromby, 1st Baron Dunfermline (1776–1858) and his wife, Mary Anne (née Leigh). Abercromby served as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the Netherlands from 1851 to 1858. Previously, he held the same post at the court of Turin (1840–51).
11. Lytton alludes to Henry Richard Charles Wellesley (1804–84), 2nd Baron Cowley, later (1857) 1st Earl Cowley. He was ambassador to France from 1852 to 1867.
12. Cf. Exodus 5:15–18. Lytton implies Wellesley was something of a slave-driver.
13. A reference to Joseph Milsand and his review of Men and Women, which was published in Revue Contemporaine et Athenæum Français, September 1856 (pp. 511–546).
___________________
