Correspondence

4305.  EBB & RB to John Ruskin

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 2–5.

Jany 1– 1859.

My dear Mr Ruskin There is an impulse upon me to write to you—and as it ought to have come long ago, I yield to it, & am glad that it comes on this first day of a new year to inaugurate the time. It may be a good omen for me—who knows?

We received your letter at Florence & very much did it touch me [1] .. us, I should say: & then I would have written, if you had’nt bade us wait for another letter .. which has not come to this day. Shall I say one thing?– The sadness of that letter struck me like the languor after victory—for you who have fought many good fights [2] & never for a moment seemed to despond before write this word & this. After treading the world down in various senses, you are tired. It is natural perhaps—but this evil will pass like other evils—and I wish you from my heart a good clear noble year, with plenty of work, and God consciously over all to give you satisfaction. What would this life be, dear Mr Ruskin, if it had not eternal relations?– For my part, if I did not believe so, I should lay my head down & die. Nothing would be worth doing, certainly. But I am what many people call a “mystic” & what I myself call a “realist” .. because I consider that every step of the foot or stroke of the pen here has some real connection with & result in the hereafter–

“This life’s a dream, a fleeting show”–? [3] .. No indeed. That is’nt my “doxy”– I dont think that nothing is worth doing, but that everything is worth doing .. everything good of course ..: & that everything which does good for a moment does good for ever,—in art as well as in morals. Not that I look for arbitrary punishment or reward (the last least, certainly .. I would no more impute merit to the human than your Spurgeon would) but that I believe in a perpetual sequence according to God’s will, & in what has been called a ‘correspondence’ between the natural world & the spiritual. [4]

Here I stop myself with a strong rein. It is fatal, dear Mr Ruskin, to write letters on New Year’s day: one cant help moralizing,—one falls on the metaphysical vein unaware–

Forgive me–

We are in Rome you see. We have been very happy & found rooms swimming all day in sunshine when there is any sun, & yet not ruinously dear– I was able to go out on Christmas morning (a wonderful event for me) and hear the silver trumpets in St Peters. Well—it was very fine. I never once thought of the Scarlet Lady [5] nor of the Mortara case [6] nor anything to spoil the pleasure– Yes, & I enjoyed it both æsthetically & devotionally, putting my own words to the music– Was it wise, or wrong?–

But we have had & are having some cold, some tramontana, & I have kept house ever since. Only, in Rome, there’s always hope of a good, warm scirocco. We talk of seeing Naples before we turn home to our Florence, to keep feast for Dante. [7]

It is delightful to hear of all you are permitted to do for England meanwhile in matters of Art, [8] —& one of these days we shall go north to take a few happy hours of personal advantage out of it all. Not this year however, I think. We have done duty to the north too lately. Now it seems to me we have the right (of virtue—in spite of what I said on another page [9] .. or rather because I said it, in good human inconsistency) the right to have & hold our Italy in undisturbed possession. I never feel at home anywhere else .. or to live rightly anywhere else at all. It’s a horrible want of patriotism, of course .. only if I were upon trial, I might say in a low voice a few things to soften the judgement against me on account of that sin– Ah, we missed you at Havre! If you had come, it would have been something pleasant to remember that detestable place by, besides the saltwater which profited one’s health a little– We were in Paris too some six weeks in all, (besides eight weeks at Havre!)—& Paris has a certain charm for me always. If we had seen you in Paris! But no. You must have floated past us, close, close—yet we missed you.

A good happy new year we wish to Mr & Mrs Ruskin as to yourself—and dear Mr Ruskin, to your mother I shall say that my child is developping in a way to make me very contented & thankful. Yes, I thank God for him more & more—& she can understand that, I know. His musical faculty is a decided thing, & he plays on the piano quite remarkably for his age (through his father’s instruction) while I am writing this. He is reading aloud to me an Italian translation of ‘Monte Cristo,’ & with a dramatic intelligence which would strike you——as it does perhaps that I should select such a book for a child of nine years old to read at all. It’s rather young to be acclimated to French novels, is it not?– But the difficulty of getting Italian books is great—& there’s a good deal in the early part of Monte Cristo, the prison part, very attractive. His voice was full of sobs when poor Dantes was consigned to the Château d’If– “Do you mean to say, mama, that that boy is to stay there all his life.” He made me tell him, .. “to make him happy,” as he said–

For the rest, he reads French & German—and we shall have to begin Latin in another year, I suppose. Do you advise that, you, Mr Ruskin?– He has not given up the drawing neither—— Ah but there is a weight beyond the post .. whatever your goodness may bear .. and I must leave a little space for Robert.

May God bless you, my dear friend– Dare I say it?—it came.

Affectionately yours always

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

I am to say something, dear Ruskin—it shall be only the best of wishes for this & all other years: go on again like the noble & dear man you are to us all, and especially to us two out of them all. Whenever I chance on an extract, a report, it lights up the dull newspaper stuff wrapt round it and makes me glad at heart & clearer in head. We, for our part, have just sent off a corrected “Aurora Leigh,” [11] .. which is the better for a deal of pains, we hope—& my wife deserves. There will be a portrait from a photograph done at Hâvre without retouching [12] —good, I think. Truest love to you and yours—your Father and Mother. Do help us by a word every now & then.

Affectionately yours,

RB.

Publication: LEBB, II, 299–302.

Source: Transcript in editors’ file.

1. Letter 4261, dated 24 October 1858.

2. Cf. II Timothy 4:7.

3. EBB may have in mind a song by Thomas Moore, “This World is All a Fleeting Show” (1816), and a play by the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), La vida es sueño (“Life is a dream”), (1636).

4. A Swedenborgian concept; see letter 3195, note 10.

5. Often referred to as the “whore of Babylon” (based on Revelation 17:1 and 5), she is depicted as “arrayed in purple and scarlet colour” (Revelation 17:4). In the tradition of English Protestant iconography and poetry (e.g., The Faerie Queene, I, ii, 13, 2), the “Scarlet Lady” represents the Roman Catholic Church.

6. On 23 June 1858, Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Italian Jewish boy who had in infancy been baptized by a nurse, was seized by the Papal military. Once the story became public, the French and English governments appealed to the Vatican, but the Pope refused to intervene, “meanwhile indicating the direction of his sympathies by making Mortara his ward” (EB). We have been unable to corroborate EBB’s assertion that Napoleon III wrote to the Pope concerning the Mortara case. However, according to David I. Kertzer, “News of the seizure of the Jewish child from Bologna, and of the boy’s captivity in Rome, enraged him [i.e., Napoleon III]. It was especially galling because the Pope’s ability to hold the child in Rome depended on the protection offered by French soldiers. … It was the Mortara affair that drove the Emperor over the brink, turning him against the pontifical state. Not only did it confirm his own belief in the anachronism of papal rule, but it weakened the French public’s enthusiasm for the temporal power of the pope, giving him a freer hand to act” (The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 1997, p. 87).

7. An item in The Athenæum of 6 November 1858 reported that a festival had been proposed to honor Dante: “The German Schiller-fest, to be celebrated in 1859, has awakened a project, at Venice, to celebrate next year, at Florence, a Dante festival. Literary and musical contributions (many of them from the poets and musical composers of Italy) are being collected for a work … the proceeds of which are to be made over to the Committee for the erection, at Florence, of a monument to Dante” (no. 1619, p. 589). Sometime in the following months, however, the date of the festival was moved to 1865, largely owing to the efforts of Henry Clark Barlow (1806–76), a Dante scholar, who pointed out that the year 1859 was relatively unimportant in the poet’s life, whereas 1865 was the sixth centenary of his birth (see Barlow’s letter to The Athenæum, 25 December 1858, no. 1626, p. 837).

8. In particular, his work on the J.M.W. Turner drawings and sketches for the National Gallery (see letter 4261, note 2).

9. Presumably, EBB refers to the third paragraph of this letter.

10. Date provided by RB’s reference to “a corrected ‘Aurora Leigh’.” In letter 4308 EBB indicates that the corrections were sent “two days since.”

11. For Aurora Leigh, 4th ed., rev., which was published 1 June 1859. These corrections covered the first seven books (see letter 4315). Corrections for books eight and nine were sent on 14 January (see letter 4321). All of these corrections were made in an unbound copy (later rebound) of the first edition (see Reconstruction, D62).

12. Taken by the Macaire brothers on 18 September 1858; see letter 4243. William Michael Rossetti was overseeing the engraving of the photograph for the volume’s frontispiece (see letter 4267). It is reproduced facing p. 113.

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