3890. Robert Bulwer Lytton to EBB & RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 91–94.
The Hague.
16 Oct. 1856
My very very dear Friends,
The Advent of your letter was indeed a joyous event! I lose not a moment in letting you know how thankful I am for it. Your silence needed not excuse; I am to[o] sad a sinner myself in that way to exact excuses from others. Nevertheless I will say that it was inexpressibly delightful to me to hear from you, and the thought that I had lost my old place in your affection would have been a lasting & lifelong regret to me. For as year by year life becomes more lonely & strange, and as year by year new trials temptations losses and defeats reveal all of weakness & unworth of which the untried heart was too unconscious I cling the more desperately & needily to the consoling belief in the affection of those I esteem, just as my claims on that affection become less & less apparent to myself & needing more & more assurance from them.
I have been laid up for somewhat more than a month by this dislocated arm of wh Chapman spoke to you .. the consequence of a fall from my horse .. & am only now able to put pen to paper again. I doubt if I shall ever quite recover the free use of the arm, the muscles have been so torn, but thank God I can write—well enough—as you see, and as I am not pugnacious I daresay I shant want to defend myself vi et armis. [1]
Oh how happy your letter has made me dear Mrs Browning! I gave such a shout when I saw Robert’s hand-writing that my servant must have thought me gone mad.
I am strangely anxious to see your Poem. [2] From what I have heard of it I expect from its publication a new Era in English Poetry. Forster in his last letter written long ago, & full of praises of you & Robert, spoke to me of it, as certain of great & unusual success—had he been lucky enough to see it?
Forster never writes to me now– I suppose his new-conjugal duties keep him too closely employed.
Did you see anything of the Storys? I hear he has published his poems [3] —& is staying with Lady Donoughmore [4] in Ireland—so she writes me at least.
I wrote to my Father to tell him you were in town, but cd not give him your address. I am so sorry he missed you. Dear Isa Blagdon [sic] wrote to me from Florence that you had been in the Isle of White, & I supposed, staying with Tennyson. I have had a sad shock lately—the sudden death of one of my very few french friends—Chassareau the Artist. [5] His death was attended with circumstances peculiarly painful to me. He was a cultivated & interesting person, an intimate friend of Stendhal’s, Victor Hugo, & Alfred de Müssey [6] —& used to interest me much with his annecdotes [sic] about them. He was also a believer in the “Spirits” & told me that in one séance at wh he was present “Satan or the Spirit of Pride” as he signed his name, had introduced himself to the Medium, and on being asked to draw his Portrait, executed in a very masterly way a sketch of a very hideous figure—the head bowed in close inspection over a human heart wh he was squeezing & crushing in his hand. Poor fellow! he has lifted the great ‘blanket o’ the dark’ [7] & knows it all now, I suppose!
You will think this letter as dislocated as my arm—and indeed of the many things I wish to say I know not what to say here– Longinus’ old simile of the full bottle with the narrow neck is just my case. [8]
I send you, since you dont relinquish your wish to see it, the 2 first books of my poem, about wh I am still in great doubt: but it wants yet 8 or 10 books toward completion, & I think no reader can fairly judge of it yet. You see, I am but rhyming one of Stendhal’s stories– [9]
Dear Mrs Browning, how grieved I am to hear of this continued coughing. For heaven’s sake make all haste back to Italy. Perhaps I shall be able to follow you there in January. I am hoping this.
Never was so vast & luminous an intellect so fraily embodied, & your friends surely need not the anxieties of this knowledge to think of <you> with constant devotion.
<M>y dear Browning how kind, not to forget <you>r book [10] which I have been sadly missing.
The book mentioned in Chapman’s letter was Mrs B’s poems [11] not Mr B’s: and I fully understood & rejoiced in your affectionate intention to let those two precious volumes be a gift. I have read the 1st vol: [12] over & over again during my confinement to the house, & with encreasing admiration. In my opinion you are the greatest metaphysical & catholic poet, except Shakespeare, that has yet existed in Europe.
Love to Penini.
Ever & ever fondly & entirely
Your friend
R. B. Lytton.
Pray my dear Browning remember me with affection to your Father & Sister–
Address, on integral page: Affranchie / Robert Browning Esq / 151 Rue de Grenelle / Faubourg St Germain / Paris.
Publication: BBIS-10, pp. 125–128.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. “By force and arms.”
2. Aurora Leigh.
3. William Wetmore Story’s Poems (Boston, 1856).
4. Thomasina Jocelyn Hely-Hutchinson (née Steele, 1819–90), Countess of Donoughmore, wife of Richard John Hely-Hutchinson (1823–66), 4th Earl of Donoughmore, of Knocklofty, co. Tipperary. She is listed in the Brownings’ address book of this period (AB-3) at 4 Rue Montaigne, Paris. We have been unable to confirm Story’s stay with the Donoughmores. There is some evidence, however, that he was acquainted with them (see The Journal of John Wodehouse, First Earl of Kimberley, for 1862–1903, ed. Angus Hawkins and John Powell, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 71–72).
5. Théodore Chassériau (1819–56), French painter born near Samaná, Dominican Republic, of a French father and a Creole mother, died in Paris at 2 Rue Fléchier on 8 October 1856. We have been unable to determine cause of death or the attendant “circumstances peculiarly painful” to Lytton.
6. Sic, for Alfred de Musset (1810–57).
7. Cf. Macbeth, I, 5, 53.
8. Doubtless, Lytton refers to Cassius Longinus (ca. 213–273), who was widely but erroneously thought to have been the author of On the Sublime, the true author of which is unknown. We have been unable to trace the “simile” in that work. However, cf. As You Like It, III, 2, 198–201: “I would thou couldst / stammer, that thou mightst pour this conceal’d man / out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of a narrow- / mouth’d bottle, either too much at once, or none at all.”
9. “The Abbess” (see letter 3799, note 7) takes its subject from Stendhal’s “L’Abbesse de Castro,” one of his Chroniques Italiennes (1839).
10. Men and Women. We have been unable to trace a presentation copy to Lytton.
11. EBB’s Poems (1856).
12. In letter 3639, RB indicated that Lytton, among others, had seen Men and Women in proof; evidently he had been sent volume one only.
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