SD1459. Charles Eliot Norton to Norton Family
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 306–307 (in part).
[Florence]
Sunday afternoon. Nov 24th [–28] 1850.
My dearest Friends
The last two days, since I sent my letter to you, have passed very much as the preceding ones which I described in it …
I have met Mr Browning once or twice since the eveg I spent at his house, but I have not been there again. I shall go soon. …
[27 November 1850]
To-night I am going to see the Brownings. I have received to-day the trunk which I expected from Leghorn, and it contained among other things, a copy of In Memoriam & of Carlyle’s pamphlets which Mr Kenyon entrusted me with for them. …
Thursday forenoon. [28 November 1850]
I returned from the Brownings about ten, and then instead of writing to you I sat down before my fire to look over Mazzini’s last publication, “Foi et Avenir,” which Mr Browning had lent me. …
I had a most pleasant evening with the Brownings. They were alone, and it gave a charming opportunity for seeing them. They had been much interested by a visit from a grandson of Goethe’s a young man of twenty five or six. They spoke of him as very simple & very German in his style,—and one would imagine that his character was wonderfully Teutonic for four or five years ago he published a poem and a latin treatise in three volumes on Man and Elementary Nature! Mrs Browning said that he did not seem to resemble very much his grandfather, and told me of a remark he made, “that he felt that he was not an artist, for he was conscious of moral preferences.” This is certainly an advance on Goethe. I said that I did not think that he took the right view of an artist, and Mrs. Browning agreed with me very earnestly,—one could not doubt from her poems that she would do so. — We talked much about Italy, and about modern Italian literature which Browning spoke of as in quite as low a state as her art,—and about the Catholic religion, and the increasing protestantism and infidelity in Italy, and the low character of the generality of the priests. Browning told me a story to illustrate the operation of the religion on the lower classes, which had come under his own knowledge and which if it were not true, would be considered an exaggerated satire.
Some time during the last year a family were living in the upper story of the house of which they occupy a part, and took a poor Italian woman for a servant. She had not been with them very long when they suspected her honesty and upon watching her they detected her in stealing. She had, as they discovered, taken many articles and some fifty dollars in money, and in order to avert the punishment in purgatory which her thefts might bring upon her, she had stolen candles which she daily burned before a shrine of the Virgin. She had also confessed, the priest had not told her to make restitution, but to say certain Ave Marias & perform certain penances. — She was brought by her master before the proper judicial tribunal (& this illustrates the justice here), her thefts were proved although she horribly perjured herself, and she was ordered to give up the money which had been found in her possession, but she was discharged without punishment,—the judge refused to put her into prison because it would be expensive to keep her there! She restored those of the stolen goods & property which had been found in her possession, of course not that which she had secreted, and with the proceeds of this last she set up a small shop in the city which Browning said he could show me any day. This is worse than the state of things among the Hindus,—and that woman is encouraged in wickedness by the religion and the justice of the country. Ex uno disce omnia.” …
Publication: Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston, 1913), 1, 75–77.
Manuscript: Harvard University.
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