Autograph letter signed (‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’) to John Ruskin, 43 Bocca di Leone, Rome, 1 January 1859, with a postscript signed (‘RB’) by Robert Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Autograph letter signed (‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’) to John Ruskin, 43 Bocca di Leone, Rome, 1 January 1859, with a postscript signed (‘RB’) by Robert Browning
8 pages, 170 x 107mm, on two bifolia, 14-line postscript by Robert Browning. Provenance: Sotheby's, 17 December 1979, lot 142.

‘What would this life be, dear Mr Ruskin, if it had not eternal relations? […] I am what many people call a “mystic”’ : a letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning on her spiritualist beliefs and love for Italy, offering New Year cheer to a despondent John Ruskin, with a postscript by Robert Browning. EBB was affected by Ruskin’s letter, whose sadness ‘struck me like the languor after victory, for you who have fought many good fights and never for a moment seemed to despond before, write this word’. This evil will pass, she assures him, wishing Ruskin a ‘good clear noble year’. For her part, if she did not believe in an eternal life, she would lay down and die. ‘Nothing would be worth doing, certainly’; while others might call her a ‘mystic’, she calls herself a ‘“realist”, because I consider that every step of the foot or stroke of the pen here has some real connection with and 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 – and that everything that does good for a moment does good for ever, in art as well in morals. Not that I look for arbitrary punishment or reward […] but that I believe in a perpetual sequence, according to God’s will, and in what has been called a “correspondence” between the natural world and the spiritual’. Chiding herself for moralising, she turns to describe the Brownings’ recent time in sunny Rome, where she was able to venture out on Christmas morning ‘and hear the silver trumpets in St. Peter’s’ and describes her pleasure in hearing what Ruskin has been doing in England ‘in matters of art’; she thinks they will return at some point, but not this year, for they only really feel at home in Italy now, ‘a horrible want of patriotism’. Sending news of Pen Browning, now nine years old, she lauds his musical faculty and notes with some wonder that he is currently reading aloud to her from an Italian translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. Robert Browning follows his wife’s letter exhorting Ruskin to ‘go on again like the noble and dear man you are to us all, and especially to us two out of them’ and informing him that they have sent off the corrected proofs for Aurora Leigh, ‘which is the better for a great deal of pains, we hope, and my wife deserves’.

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’.

Published: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1897, vol. 2, pp.299-302.