4778. Vernon Lushington to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 219–224.
4 Paper Buildings, Temple,
9 Nov. 1860.
Dear Mrs. Browning,
This is a strange hand-writing to you. But I [1] have to forward for your husband’s kind consideration the enclosed letter, [2] & I have to say how I gave his message to Mr. Carlyle; & besides this I have such kind thoughts towards you & yours, & such pleasant recollections of our visit, that I must write, & I know you will take it kindly.
Last Saturday night I made my way to Chelsea, to the little house in Cheyne Row, where the Great Man lives so quietly. I found him & Mrs. Carlyle at tea, & with them—Mr. Ruskin. Ruskin had come for an evening’s chat too, for he reverences Carlyle much & more & more, & had brought with him Swiss photographs & sketches. I very soon delivered my message,—how I had been to Italy & seen the Brownings, & how Robert Browning had sent home his affectionate remembrances. They were kindly received, you may be sure, & Carlyle went on to speak to Ruskin & me of your husband in the most friendly terms; & to Ruskin he said, “If you write to the Brownings, tell Browning that I have long thought of writing to him, that I wd now, if this coil of work were off my mind, that I hope to live to do so yet”– Then we talked of other things, or rather he talked, on & on, & I think more impressively & delightfully even than usual. Sure enough he damned all the world up in heaps more than once, as if the great day of wrath was coming & deserved to come:—but I have long made up my mind to bear all this & let it go by, & secretly smile as well as laugh out loud at his story of the overseer of Chelsea, himself a carpenter, coming & telling Carlyle ten years ago that “the last honest carpenter in Chelsea had died that day.” I believe there are some honest carpenters left yet, even in Chelsea perhaps: I hope & trust & think even I see the young generation struggling forward for better things. Do not you?
You may like to hear something of what Carlyle said. I told him of our seeing Mr. Landor; whereupon he recounted us with his usual faithful seeing detail, a visit he made years ago to Landor at Bath. “I found him sitting in his room reading, the walls & even the doors covered with his Italian pictures. Perhaps he was not particularly inclined towards me, yet he welcomed me as a brother of the craft. We talked much, & it was to me a dignified academical afternoon. When 10 o’clock came, the old gentleman took out his watch, & said, “This is my hour: I shall be glad to see you, Sir, at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning for breakfast.[”] Next morning I came, & after breakfast the omnibus was to call for me to take me to the train– For some reason it did not appear, & the time drew on,—at last Landor, though he was proud as a duke or an emperor, seized my bag, & was for carrying it himself to the station. I shall never forget him: the old man felt that I was his guest, & he wd carry my bag, therefore; tho’ if a king had asked him to carry his—! Happily just then the vehicle appeared”—— Then he spoke of Landor, as one who had begun life with high aims, a great scholar, thinking to conquer the world, & behold he has conquered nothing. Yet more than other literary men he has had a feeling for things & men that had the stamp of worth. He was proud indeed, devilish proud, that was his great fault: on the whole it does not do for a man to be proud; a man must humble himself altogether & think that he is indeed nothing– But Landor was a very ill-used man– Well, Ruskin presently observed how sad the latter days of most great men were, Scott, Turner &c. This set Carlyle upon Voltaire & Goethe. Voltaire had many pretty innocent ways in his old age. When the French people discovered that he had really been a friend to them, fighting with his pen agt their enemies, & gathered round his carriage that night, with an explosion of human enthusiasm rarely witnessed[,] crying Vive this, & Vive that the other of his works, Voltaire got home tired, sat down to a dictionary he was at work upon, [3] did a little of that, then went to bed to sleep. He had a servant Barbara, [4] “Barbon” who cared for him & governed him entirely. Every morning she wd bring him a cup of coffee, & the old man wd sometimes say, “Barbon, thou must make me another cup: thou knowest thou wilt not have many more cups to make for me.” One day he had on his table some liquor, & the fancy entered his head to mix that with the coffee, & so make a tertium quid better than either,—wh. he accordingly did. It proved dreadful, & in short Barbon had to be summoned. He told her what he had done & the consequences. Barbon said “Well, for a wise man, thou art certainly the greatest fool in the world.” To wh. the old man replied submissively “C’est vrai, Barbon, c’est vrai”! [5] —— Then Goethe. Carlyle sd, he had begun life with many admirations, & heroes, & they had changed, some of them becoming even avoidable; but his feeling for Goethe had kept steady hold on him. He was the one great literary man in the two last centuries; for he had a gospel, the divine wonder & beauty of this world now in these costermonger days, as in the days of Moses & other heroic times. “Read him, he sd to Ruskin, & judge for yourself if he is not as Carlyle says, or something quite different.” He was a man doubtless with a skin on him, & perhaps if I had seen him in the flesh I shd not altogether have agreed with him, but speak as he might, even quite differently from his message, yet I had received that message, I had got it from him, & I cd then see it for myself. In his letters to me I always felt a mild grave wisdom speaking to me. Goethe’s self-mastery in his age has always seemed so very admirable. He had one great trouble, his only son [6] was a drunkard. Often he & his mother, that “distracted angel” wd be in high humour with one another, & when they were in the high key, a crowd wd sometimes gather under the window in the street. Goethe saw all this, lived next to it for 17 years; yet he never spoke of it to any one, even to his nearest kin, but once only. The mother came to him & said very seriously, her eyes seriously fixed on him, “I wish for—thousand thalers. Auguste must go to Italy.” “No, sd Goethe quietly, No I will not give the thalers.” She looked at him again, he looked at her, & she said “But he must go”– Goethe then seeing it was a must, sd, “He shall have the thalers”. The son went to Rome & died very shortly. Goethe received the letter announcing his death, as he was at his desk working; he read it, put it down, by his side, went on with his work:—next day he broke a bloodvessel;—he never really recovered.
—Goethe improved in his art, as he grew old, his “Westandoschicher Divan” [7] (or some such name, I don’t know German) is full of beautiful clever thoughts—one of the most beautiful things he ever wrote– The conversation then took another turn; & Carlyle told among other things, how he was nearly drowned as a boy: he had been reading Virgil, especially a line in wh. the phrase occurs “superante salo”: as he was struggling in the water, the words came back to him, he saw “superante salo” [8] printed in letters of fire, nothing but “superante salo, superante salo”—[“]then a man got hold of me by the hair, a phenomenon that gave me great pleasure”– He also described seeing Hare the murderer in an inn at Dumfries: [9] he had been detected by a passenger in the coach: there he sat in the bar, the people howling at him outside, waiting to tear him in pieces—he sat silent, looking very anxious. He was afterwards smuggled off to the gaol for safety.
—All this & much more said, Carlyle sat down on the rug & lighted his pipe in his usual style in the red coals, & sat smoking, letting the smoke drift up the chimney. But he first told the story of a quaker who had heard Wordsworth talk for a long while, saying at last “Excellent, friend William, but now suppose we keep silence for five minutes”!– With this I leave Carlyle, only adding that he seemed very well, that he had been a long spell in Scotland, especially with his friend Sir John Sinclair, [10] —& that Frederic is getting on but slowly. Mrs Carlyle seemed well too for her, she had been all the summer alone in town. I asked her how faring, She said “Enduring”–
Ruskin was kind enough to drive me home a good part of my way, & we talked much about himself & his doings (I led the way). He seemed in sad mood. His work he said, had almost come to nought. “I took up architecture, & they have destroyed all the noble buildings in Europe, destroyed them, they wd have done much better to have levelled them to the ground, we might have picked up a few genuine fragments, now there is nothing. Then for Turner, all his works are perishing, oil & drawings, they will vanish utterly. Now I have taken up political economy, & all the economists are furious with me. All my life I have been making enemies, architects, academicians, & now political economists. You can hardly think how lonely I feel: I have my parents, true; they are excellent people, & I love them dearly, but they do not understand me. Then for a long time I believed what was told me in theological matters: but I have since had to examine for myself, & I now feel how rotten the ground is everywhere beneath us; it is very sad. Natural history is my great comfort & delight now, I go to the British Museum every day & work at birds & beasts.”—I (VL) did all I cd to encourage him, told him how many felt very very grateful to him. I for one, urged him to keep to Art, where almost all recognised his power.—Yet he seemed very sad.
I have retailed you, dear Mrs Browning this conversation, for I knew it wd interest you, and I know you will not let it go farther. Ruskin may trust you, & I need hardly say that I wd not go within a thousand miles of doing him any injury.
Now for other things to fill up the sheet. From Siena Rossetti & I went to St. Gemeniano, [11] then to Pisa, Lucca & Leghorn. Then we took boat & had a splendid moonlight trip to Genoa, & again another splendid moonlight to Marseilles, then home up the Rhone Valley by rail to Paris & home. I will not give you traveller’s experiences, but this only. Our three days at Siena stand out three golden days to us very memorable, very delightful: & we do not intend to forget the kindness of your hous[e]hold & the Storys. I felt amongst you, (but that I was not very well) as happy as some worthy Athenian cobbler, when Socrates came in for a “crack” with him at his stall. [12] Most sincerely I hope all is going well with you, that you are well, & the boy quite quite well[,] growing in stature & good favour. [13] I had some thought of sending him Heller’s “Wanderstunden No 2”: [14] that is the piece I mentioned to Mr. Browning as a great favourite with me, but I have not done so.
I congratulate you most heartily on the grand success of your Vittore Emmanuele, & the thriving hopes of Italy. I wish I cd share in your enthusiasm, but whether it is from ignorance of Italy, or distrust of all politics from home experience, I cannot as I wd– I am however right glad of the expulsion of the Bourbon & wish Pope wd follow. I am tired of a Pope; & the world is too.
I must conclude this with telling you that this has been a very very sad day for me & mine. The news came by today’s mail that my elder brother died of fever in India on the 25th Sept. [15] almost, when I was so happy with you. The first of our ten,—we are 10 brothers & sisters—is now taken from us, & we all feel it very much. My brother’s life was far away, & in some respects he was himself different from us, yet he was very dear to us. I had to write to you, so I have written, & I cd not help telling you this sad story of mine.
With many kind regards to Mr. Browning,
I am, truly yours
Vernon Lushington.
Address: Mrs Browning, / Casa Guidi / Florence.
Publication: George S. Hellman, “Some Unpublished Papers of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 132 (March 1916), 534–538.
Manuscript: Scripps College.
1. Vernon Lushington (1832–1912). See letter 4747, note 2.
2. Letter not identified.
3. Dictionnaire philosophique, published in London, 1764.
4. Voltaire’s “fat Swiss servant” at his Ferney estate near Geneva; “she was the comedian of the group, the comic servant out of a French farce, the licensed jester in an otherwise solemn establishment. Voltaire was delighted with her, appreciated her humour and called her his Bonne-Baba” (Sir Frederick Treves, The Lake of Geneva, 1922, p. 329).
5. “It is true, Barbon, it is true!”
6. Julius August Walther von Goethe (1789–1830), only child of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Christiane Vulpius (1765–1816) to reach adulthood.
7. West-Östlicher Divan (1819), a book of short lyrics, inspired by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez.
8. “Overwhelming surge” (Æneid, I, 537, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough).
9. William Hare (b. 1792 or 1804) and his accomplice, William Burke (1792–1829), were infamous for a series of murders they committed in Edinburgh over a ten-month period beginning in late 1827. “The victims were invited to the lodging house [where the murderers resided] with a promise of accommodation, made drunk, and suffocated by a method which left no marks on the victim” (ODNB). The corpses were then sold to a local surgeon. Following the murder of a woman on 31 October 1828, an investigation led to the arrest of Hare and Burke in November. Hare gave evidence against Burke and was ultimately released. The latter was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging. Sentence was carried out on 28 January 1829.
10. Sic, for Sir George Sinclair; see letter 4724, note 4.
11. Sic, for San Gimignano, a Tuscan hill town 19 miles N.W. of Siena. According to Murray’s A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1861), “one of the most remarkable features in this strange, primitive, and little-altered mediæval town is the number of lofty square towers in so small a space” (p. 337).
12. Presumably, Lushington refers to Simon, an Athenian shoemaker, who “according to a late tradition,” was “a friend of Socrates, who used to visit him in his workshop and discuss philosophical questions with him” (The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1957, p. 840).
13. Cf. Luke 2:52.
14. “Wanderstunden” (or “Promenades d’un Solitaire”), op. 80, no. 2 in D flat, by Stephen Heller (1813–88).
15. Stephen Lushington (1822–1860), of Bengal, eldest son of Stephen Lushington (1782–1873) and his wife, Sarah Grace (née Carr, 1794–1837). He was a magistrate and deputy collector of Dacca.
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