4968. Robert Bulwer Lytton to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 235–238.
Vienna.
24 Sep. 1861.
My very dear Friend,
Your letter heaps upon my head coals of fire. [1] You shd have heard from me much sooner, but for a period of positive nomadism—adverse to any sort of use of pen & paper– First, I have been dwelling among packing cases, hay, straw, & discomfort—leaving my old house, and, what is worse painting, papering, and carpeting a new one– No sooner in it than, seized by rheumatism—the natural consequence of damp walls—from which I have been flying;—and, thus, only last night returned to Vienna, from a visit to some friends at a pretty Country House near Ischl, in a lovely country of scattered lakes & mountains,—worthy to be seen by you—and oh how I shd like to see them with you! Fancy my delight at finding a letter from you awaiting me! [2] Fancying you wd be probably leaving the sea about this time, and, as probably, soon after in England, I have sent Dr Donne to Montagu Sq with directions (in case of Forster’s absence) [3] that he shall be there kept till you call or send for him.
All you tell me about dear Pen interests me deeply and your plan appears to me in all respects admirable. I have remarked in him all the qualities which justify your conviction, (and I entirely share that conviction) that he is likely to like school & get on well there– But I am rejoiced to think you have no thought of trying this yet– The first experience of school life is always a rough one, any how– You dont tell me whether you are doing anything– Inwardly & consciously or unconsciously I doubt not you are doing much—& it hangs on my heart uneasily that you shd at all think it needful to write to me so often. My letters need not any sort of answer but just that sort of assurance, wh in the absence of any sign to the contrary I shall continue to take for granted—that they do not come unpleasantly to you—and I hope therefore that you will not on any acct think of me as among those correspondents who ‘must be answered’–
Yes—I know Mottley pretty well already, and like him Extremely. I look forward with the greatest pleasure to his arrival here. ‘Tis an ill wind that blows no man good’: [4] and if this miserable & most unworthy strife in America, is at all the cause of his coming, it leaves me at least one thing to be thankful for–
I am greatly concerned by what you tell me of Story– To think of this hard grained vulgar vicious Yankee Life—the worst results of the worst vices of it—invading at last even that serene marble world of his—the Almighty Dollar, a stronger God after all than Jupiter Olympus—far off too, in Rome, hidden one would have thought, safe as of old from the omnivorous propensity of time! I think of your ‘Contemporary’ complaining of the Poet as a ‘chief Inquisitor’ [5] Yes Indeed! At least; such a Poet as holds fast, & puts forth clearly God’s commission upon Earth is a Judge who never lacks an Executioner to carry out his sentence in the long run—and here, assuredly that grand “Curse” has fallen in the midst of us at last! Uttered so hard upon the time, does it not sound (like much else that I remember) like a strange inspiration?
And I see no end, neither, of what is beginning—no end at least by the sword– Mrs Stowe’s letter appears to me to beg the question—if not to misrepresent it– Slavery—yes! that is no doubt the cause of all—before God—but not I take it the cause—except quite contingently,—before the unionist– [6] Here, things are in no cheerful state—drifting fast it wd appear into general break-up—and I keep turning in my mind those two lines of Schiller– ‘Against Stupidity the Gods themselves fight in vain’– [7] What use in all the occulists & aurists put together when folks have eyes & see not—ears & will not hear? [8]
I have taken up painting again—already daubing down trees, rocks, & waters, in damp places—and if I can find an available garret this winter, I shall probably spend much time in doing abominations in oil paint– It is a hungering with me just now for any sort of new form—if not of expression, at least of sensations–
Tannhaüser has been a most unexpected (and, to me, yet unintelligible) success of a certain kind—the mercantile kind that is—having nearly completed already two editions of a thousand each, and a voracious public evincing, as I learn, Oliver propensities in the way of ‘asking for more.’ [9] The Times condescended to vouchsafe a Review [10] —all flaming Eulogy—and this sold off one edition in 2 days! I attribute all this partly to the poem being run out into a mould wh the Public (wh in certain states of its in[n]ate stupidity, is more tolerant of imitative plausibility than intrusive originality) happens to be persuaded is more or less good, because it is more or less Tennysonian; but much more to Fane’s presence in England, who I suspect must have been pushing the book, or getting it pushed– Any how I am taken by surprise–
I send this to Paris; I suppose if it misses you there it will follow you to London.
God bless & be with you my dear Browning–
Your ever loving friend
Rt Lytton.
Publication: BBIS-10, pp. 188–191.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Cf. Proverbs 25:22 and Romans 12:20.
3. The Forsters lived at 46 Montagu Square.
4. English proverb.
5. RB, “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” line 39.
6. In a letter to Lord Shaftesbury that was printed in The Times of 9 September 1861, Harriet Beecher Stowe explained “to our friends in England what we, the Christian men and women of America, understand by this war. … We consider that this war is a great anti-slavery war, not in form, but in fact; not in proclamation, but in the intense conviction and purpose of each of the contending parties, and still more in the inevitable overruling indications of Divine Providence. The distinct issue made in President Lincoln’s election was ‘no more slave territory.’ This was confessed both by North and South, and, whatever the North understood by it, the South certainly considered it as equivalent to the destruction of slavery” (p. 11).
7. Cf. Friedrich von Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), III, 6, 28: “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.”
8. Cf. Ezekiel 12:2.
9. At the end of chapter two in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), the title character asks for more gruel: “Please, sir, I want some more.”
10. In The Times of 2 August 1861, the reviewer of Tannhäuser noticed several echoes of Tennyson’s poetry in the work but felt it stood well on its own: “Full of beauty of thought, melody of language, and sudden pictures that rise like visions before the reader,—it is full also of noble purpose and distinct morality” (p. 6).
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