Correspondence

3933.  Robert Bulwer Lytton to EBB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 146–148.

My dear Mrs Browning–

I write, .. (tho’ in such ill health, that I much fear I shall not be able to get thro’ a letter .. not a long one such as I wd wish to write you ..) to thank you most warmly for your noble gift of “Aurora Leigh.” [1] Oh, how much I prize your book given me by you, .. and so my book, in that sense! .. and how much I hope to make it mine, too, in another sense, by the complete reception & realization of its manifold beauty & incomparable wisdom!

I write now only to thank you for it, not ultimately for what is in it, nor to say all I think & feel about that .. for this must wait till I have read & reread it as I mean to do, and till I am better able to speak of it fully. But I wish to let you know that it has reached me, .. both my hands & heart .. and that as your gift, alone, it is most precious to me.

I recd it by the Bag [2] a day or two ago, and I commenced its perusal on the evening of its arrival. Fragments of it had already reached me .. and the framework of the Incidents .. which I am sorry for .. thro’ that Review in the D. News wh you will, of course, have seen, already, and wh I hope will have pleased you. [3]

I cd not refrain from that sort of general over running of the work, “preluding those melodious bursts” [4] wh one is always tempted to, on first acquaintance with any book with wh one hopes to form a life-long friendship. There is a sort of physical foolish pleasure in this, like that which prompts the first confused embrace we give a friend, before we can sit down & talk calmly with him.

But now I am at the end of the fourth book in my first reading—a careful one wh I make pencil in hand, & marking by the way as I read on– It wd be obviously presum[p]tuous & premature to attempt any deliberate judgement as yet, of such a work as this. And indeed to judge wisely of this Titanic Poem demands no partial wisdom & thought on the part of the Critic; more than ever have I felt, in reading it, the force of Fichte’s opinion on books & critics. [5]

But I have read nevertheless enough, & reflectively enough, let me say, … despite indeed such physical debility & pain, as to make me a slow reader and shallow thinker … enough in all ways to feel that there is in this Poem, the perfectly successful expression of a whole civilization .. that it is not only the solitary Epic of this age, but also a noble Epic, .. I almost think not inferior to those of Milton & Dante .. I trust too and with great confidence that generations to come will think the same of it– In some respects you are here to my thinking, superior even to those greatest Singers, by just so much as this age is superior to theirs, for like them you have taken the whole Age on your shoulders, this age of complicated sorrows, & scattered knowledge .. and yet you stand erect & full height under the weight of it, Atlantean indeed! Whereas most other poets who, as yet have felt the age upon them, have uttered but broken wailings .. from gigantic throats & breasts indeed .. but still breasts crusht under the mountains, of giants writhing, & fallen, under these stupendous weights of human suffering they had piled up high indeed, but yet failed to find heaven with.

Heine & Hugo for instance Gegas [sic] & Enceladus, [6] mere wailings of encumbered power! Ten[n]yson is too far out of the struggle to be jarred by it.

Well, I am only at the 4th Book. And to attempt fully to express the confused admiration & delight I feel thus far, wd perhaps deprive my praise of all value in your estimation, by seeming to place it beyond the influence of deliberate judgement.

I shall write again. I have written more than I thought I cd

But it seems to me that there is many a singer might burn his books, now that you have spoken out thus completely, as the Wizards did when they heard the Apostle. [7] I [8] feel so, at least.

God bless you & your noble work in His behalf here. I wish you and dear Browning, all happiness here, & beyond. Most fervently,

Your aff friend

Robt Lytton

Address: Affranchie / Mrs Browning / Casa Guidi / Florence / Italie.

Publication: BBIS-10, pp. 128–130.

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. We have been unable to trace this presentation copy.

2. i.e., the diplomatic pouch.

3. In the unsigned review of Aurora Leigh that appeared in The Daily News of 26 November 1856, the reviewer commented: “One main beauty of the work consists in the manner in which it explains itself, in the marvellous fulness of vitality in the principal characters, in the astonishing power of subtle mental analysis, in the art which fuses incidents almost abruptly startling into a faultless unity” (p. 2). For the full text of this review, see pp. 289–294.

4. Cf. Tennyson, “A Dream of Fair Women” (1842), line 6.

5. Expressed in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s, Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten (Berlin, 1806). In lecture 10 (“Of the Scholar as Author”), Fichte ridicules the book trade, especially book reviewing, by describing a typical literary journal editor who veils his “poverty of ideas” by pretending to “pass judgment on the authors whom he quoted,—a shallow pretence to the thinker who looked below the surface. For either the book is—as most books are at present—a bad book … and is a nullity, and consequently the judgment upon it is a nullity also;—or, the book is a true literary work … and then it is the result of an entire powerful life devoted to art and science, and so would require another life as powerful as the first to be employed in its judgment. On such a work it is not exactly possible to pass a final judgment in a couple of sheets, within a quarter or half year after its appearance” (On the Nature of the Scholar, trans. William Smith, 1845, p. 214).

6. Giants in Greek mythology. Gyges or Gyes was one of the Hecatoncheires (hundred-handed), who helped overthrow the Titans. They later guarded the gates of Tartarus. Enceladus, one of the Giants who challenged the gods, was wounded by Athena in battle and subsequently imprisoned under Mt. Etna.

7. See Acts 19:19.

8. Underscored twice.

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