5876. Robert Bulwer Lytton to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 179–180.
[Watford]
Monday. Evening.— [11 March 1867] [1]
O et patronus et dulce decus meum!– [2] I think that I shall not profit by all your kind intentions à mon sujet [3] on Wednesday Evening– But I have six months before me (six months—and a world was made in six days!) so that I am hopeful that before ‘I go hence and am no more seen’ [4] I shall be honoured by the acquaintance of Mr. Matthew Arnold–
I am not, however, equally hopeful of ever being able to make him know—or care to know—how great & strong & long a wish that honour will realise in part, nor how much I admire him, and hope in him, and believe in him.
You yourself—my best my greatest & my dearest teacher—I think you will never know, more than the absentee landlord of a depreciated property—how large a part of my life & love is in your possession– But if you shd see Mr Matthew Arnold next Wednesday, I wish you would tell him—not how much I admire him as a poet .... but how much I hope from him as a man and how many enthusiastic fellow exiles share the interest with which I have watched and applauded his combat with the Goliaths of Philistia. [5]
When I read some months ago his admirable article in the Cornhill on ‘My Countrymen’ [6] I was greatly ‘moved in spirit’ to write him a long letter which I had not the temerity to send, in grateful recognition of the courage & felicity with which he has uttered what I, and many others whose ‘heart burned within us’ [7] have long felt on the subject of that excellent paper. But ever since then I have been propagating copies of it: and two years ago I wrote some lame lines—which I cannot now accurately remember, but which I transcribe from memory & send you [8] ‘with all their imperfections on their head’, [9] because, bad as they are, they bear testimony to what you know I have always thought of the genius of the Author of Empedocles & Mycerinus. [10]
I write this, because I fear I shall not be able to get to yr house before the end of the week—being one of a family of mourners [11] who meet daily to ‘hear each other groan’– [12] But I am very anxious not to leave England without making my dear wife better known to you—not only because she reveres you—as I do—but also because I know—that if you knew her better you wd not grudge her a place in your affections—and that is a privilege which I should be very proud of her owing—in some way—to your
Affectionate &
Grateful
R. Lytton.
Address: Robert Browning Esqre / 19 Warwick. Crescent. / Upper Westbourne Terrace / W. / London.
Publication: BBIS-10, pp. 223–224.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. This letter is postmarked 13 March 1867, a Wednesday.
2. Cf. Horace, Odes I, 1, 2: “O et praesidium et dulce decus meum” (“my protection, my fame and my joy”), trans. Niall Rudd.
3. “On my account.”
4. Cf: Psalm 39:13.
5. In his essay “Heinrich Heine” (Essays in Criticism, 1865, pp. 151–186), Arnold refers to England as “Philistia” and “the head-quarters of Goliath,” and he defines a Philistine as “a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light” (pp. 157–159).
6. “My Countrymen” appeared in The Cornhill Magazine of February 1866, pp. 153–172, at the beginning of which, Arnold writes of The Saturday Review’s article concerning his “unjust estimate … I form of my countrymen, and about the indecency of talking of ‘British Philistines’” (p. 153).
7. Cf. Luke 24:32.
8. These lines are no longer with the letter.
9. Cf. Hamlet, I, 5, 79. In this and subsequent quotations from and allusions to Shakespeare’s works, the line numbers correspond to those in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).
10. Title of a poem that appeared in The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849). Empedocles on Etna was published in 1852.
11. Lytton was staying at Grove Mill House, Watford, Hertfordshire, the Villiers’s country house. Elizabeth Villiers (née Wood, 1839–67), wife of Lytton’s brother-in-law, Ernest Villiers (1838–1921), died on 16 February, from complications of child birth.
12. Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), line 24.
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