A detailed, fond, and friendly letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Ruskin, which opens with Browning’s sympathy for Ruskin’s low mood (“the sadness of that letter struck me like the languor after victory”), and her own deep “metaphysical” contemplation of the corporeal and the eternal (“I am what many people call a “mystic””). The latter part of the letter meanders pleasantly between light summaries of recent travels and events (“We have been very happy & found rooms swimming all day in sunshine”; “I was able to go out on Christmas morning […] and hear the silver trumpets in St Peters”; “We talk of seeing Naples before we turn home to our Florence”); how their son, Pen (nine) is getting on with his studies, and reading the Count of Monte Cristo; and her unrivalled love for Italy (“I never feel at home anywhere else”).
The main meat of the letter, however, is in her empathising with the “sadness” of Ruskin’s previous letter (“this evil will pass like other evils”); in her well-wishings to him for the New Year (“I wish you from my heart a good, clear, noble year, with plenty of work, and God consciously over all to give you satisfaction”); as well as deeper, spiritual contemplation of the worthiness of doing things in this world, and their repercussions in the eternal (worth quoting, at some length):
“What would this life be, dear Mr Ruskin, if it had not eternal relations?! For my part, if I did not believe so, I should lay my head down & die. Nothing would be worth doing, certainly. But I am what many people call a “mystic” & what I myself call a “realist” because I consider that every step of the foot or stroke of the pen has some real connection with & result in the hereafter. “This life’s a dream, a fleeting show”? “No indeed” […] I don’t think that nothing is worth doing, but that everything is worth doing… everything good of course … & that everything which does good for a moment does good for ever, in art as well as in morals.”
She adds, “It is fatal, dear Mr Ruskin, to write letters on New Year’s day – one can’t help moralising, - one falls on the metaphysical vein unaware.”
She concludes, “I must leave a little space for Robert”. In which space, Browning adds a paragraph of his own, mentioning Aurora Leigh: “we […] have just sent off a corrected ‘Aurora Leigh’; which is the better for a deal of pains, we hope - & my wife deserves.” He also adds his own well wishes for the year (“dear Ruskin […] only the best wishes for this & all other years: go on again like the noble & dear man you are to us all, and especially to us two out of them all”); and mentions how glad he is when he sees Ruskin’s work in print (“Whenever I chance on an extract, a report, it lights up the dull newspaper stuff wrapt round it and makes me glad at heart & clearer in head.”)
Folds, with some light wear along the centre folds, otherwise near fine.
Ruskin wrote to EBB on 24 October 1858 in deepest gloom, ‘not by way of a letter, but just that you may know that there is something the matter with me, and that it isn’t that I don’t think of you nor love you’. Perhaps at something of a loss, she sent the present letter in response; on 15 January 1858, Ruskin replied with another despondent letter, in which he expresses a growing alienation from the British public, picturing himself as ‘always howling and bawling the right road to a generation of drunken cabmen, their heads up through the trap-door of a hansom, faces all over mud—no right road to be gone upon at all—nothing but a drunken effort at turning, ending in ditch’.
The Brownings met Ruskin in 1852 during their second visit to England after their marriage; Elizabeth Barrett Browning described the meeting in a letter to Mary Russell Mitford “I like Mr. Ruskin much, and so does Robert. Very gentle, yet earnest – refined and truthful. I like him very much. We count him among the valuable acquaintances made this year in England”.
Published: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1897, vol. 2, pp.299-302.
Provenance: Sotheby’s, 17 December 1979, lot 142.
