5536. RB to John Ruskin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 211–212.
19 Warwick Crescent,
Upper Westbourne Terr. W.
Jan. 30th ’65.
My dear Ruskin,
I got a letter from the lady the other day [1] —there was no need to trouble you on the subject, or doubt my ready assent to her request. I will go to you, indeed, though you doubt it,—will do so at an early day, and apprise you properly, for few things will delight me so much. I have always remembered the sadness in which you were and will long be, and your Mother’s too. [2] Give her my love, as if it did not go to her at a letter’s end—her kindness and other kindness from your house, beside your own, came to me once on a time when I could string such pearls on a necklace and see them work, and to double advantage so. I have the shawl your mother netted with her own hands, and mean it, if God please, for my son’s wife one day. [3]
You are wrong, however, to be angry with my poem; [4] nor do you state the facts of it my way. I don’t expose jugglery, but anatomize the mood of the juggler,—all morbidness of the soul is worth the soul’s study; and the particular sword which “loveth and maketh a lie” [5] is of wide ramification. What I present, thus anatomized, would have its use even were there a veritable “mediumship” of which this of mine were but the simulacrum. But I meant, beside this, to please myself (and I hope, God) by telling the truth about a miscreant [6] —whom, by one of the directest interventions of God’s finger I seem ever to have recognised, this poem has already been the means of properly punishing: I know what I say.
I don’t catch the parallel in the other case of the “dejection”—what does that simulate? or in what need exposure? Then, to me there is no “nastiness” in it at all,—the external circumstance, which seems to arrest your eye, being—when viewed from a higher point, just the consummate contrivance of utmost “niceness”—if men were born “scatophagi,” [7] and the repellent properties were found all the same, then—“nastiness,” if you like: as it is, that quality saves them from abomination, and is precious.
Let me purify your mind by returning to you and what you assure me of, and what I believe—believe me in turn yours ever affectionately
and gratefully,
Robert Browning.
Publication: Cook, pp. xxxviii–xxxix.
Source: Transcript at Bodleian Library.
2. John Ruskin’s father, John James Ruskin (1785–1864) died on March 3rd.
3. In letter 3895, EBB describes it as a “netted scarf.”
4. “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’.”
5. Revelation 22:15, “For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.”
6. Daniel Dunglas Home.
7. “Dung-eaters.”
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